Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor

When we teach the Ten Commandments to small children in Sunday school we often simply one of them to say, instead, “Do not lie” or “Thou shalt not lie.”

But that’s not what the commandment says at all. It says do not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Lying — deliberately attempting to deceive or to mislead others — is also, usually,* a Bad Thing. But this is not what the commandment is about.

“Bearing false witness against your neighbor” is not about attempting to deceive. It is about attempting to harm your neighbor.

The false witness — the “lies” — that J.D. Vance and Donald Trump are spreading against thousands of their neighbors in Springfield, Ohio, and against millions of their neighbors all across the country are not instruments of deception. They are instruments of harm. They are invitations to do harm and to participate in doing harm.

The over-the-top absurdity of their false claims would be a liability if deception were their aim. Bizarre, falsifiable claims that can be — and have been — quickly debunked would be ridiculous failures as lies. But these are not lies — they are false witness borne against their neighbors. Lies need to be convincing — they need to seem plausible, persuasive, credible, and logical. But false witness designed and intended to harm does not need to be any of those. It only needs to be against they neighbor.

That is why Trump and Vance’s bearing of false witness has been effective:

“Bomb threats reported at City Hall, multiple other buildings in Springfield, Ohio.”

The threat was sent via email “to multiple agencies and media outlets,” the office said.

Explosive-detecting K-9s helped police clear multiple facilities listed in the threat, including two elementary schools, City Hall and a few driver’s license bureaus, Springfield Police Chief Allison Elliott told reporters. The county court facilities were also cleared “out of an abundance of caution,” she said.

“Haitian families in Ohio under attack as racist claims spread”

The morning after former President Donald Trump repeated racist claims about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, some Haitian families are keeping their children home from school for their safety, according to an area activist. Those who allowed their children did so, but with heavy hearts.

“She [my niece] was scared, but I told her to go, that God would protect,” said one Haitian resident, who asked that she not be identified publicly for fear of reprisal.

“We’re all victims this morning,” said the woman, who moved to Springfield six years ago. “They’re attacking us in every way.”

Aside from the anxiety caused by Tuesday night’s debate, the woman also said her cars have been vandalized twice in the middle of the night. She woke up one morning to broken windows and another to acid thrown on the vehicle. She’s added cameras to her driveway and tried to report the incidents to the police to no avail.

Trump and Vance are calling for pogroms against their neighbors. And those calls are being acted on — not because anyone has been deceived by their lies, but because some have accepted their invitation to participate in harming their neighbors.

Fortunately, not everyone is a soulless bastard like J.D. Vance and Donald Trump or like the MAGA irregulars accepting their incitement to do harm. This, also, is a headline from the local news in Ohio, “Springfield’s Haitian population evolving from strangers to neighbors.”

So, then, who is our neighbor?

The answer to that question, as always, is that you never want to be the person asking that question. The person asking that question is always, always, always the Bad Guy in the story.

* I once spent a week as a substitute teacher at my private fundamentalist alma mater, Timothy Christian School. Mostly, I just had to run the projector for the movies she’d ordered for the class, but I also had to guide them through an assigned open-book test on the Ten Commandments. That test treated “Thou shalt not bear false witness against they neighbor” as simply “Thou shalt not lie.”

The movie, however, was The Hiding Place — the very well done Billy Graham Films adaptation of Corrie ten Boom’s Holocaust memoir. The ten Booms were devout Dutch Calvinists and righteous gentiles who hid, and helped rescue, their Jewish neighbors in occupied Amsterdam. The movie shows them lying. A lot. Forging papers, deceiving soldiers, doing whatever they needed to protect and rescue those in peril. Devout, pious, saintly Casper ten Boom weaponizes the deference granted to his religious respectability to convince the Nazis that someone like him would never lie to them even as he is lying to them.

So I stopped the projector, turned on the lights, and invited the students to revisit that part of their Ten Commandments test. This is why I was not invited back as a substitute teacher at my alma mater.