American politics has a reality problem. Engaged citizens are increasingly believing facts that aren’t even remotely true — and that’s without considering the ominous potential of AI generation. In one astonishing recent example, nearly one-quarter of Americans (24%) believe the April 25 assassination attempt against President Donald Trump and other administration officials was “staged,” and less than half (45%) believe it was real, while another third (32%) are unsure.

The notion that an assassination attempt on the president was staged is, by definition, a conspiracy theory. And this theory has absolutely no evidence to support its fantastic claim. On the contrary, the alleged perpetrator had an extensive history of left-wing political involvement and even produced a “manifesto” of sorts, in which he declared, “What my representatives do reflects on me. And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”

Despite an utter lack of evidence, within 24 hours of the incident, X users had published at least 359,000 posts with the word “staged,” generating more than 80 million views. First, this suggests that many people decided to believe a conspiracy theory before seeing any evidence to support it. Second, the widespread dissemination of such utter nonsense created a perverse confirmation bias, sowing doubt in the minds of many Americans before any evidence was available.

Yet the attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was not the first occasion to generate such ludicrous conspiracy theories. For both previous assassination attempts on Donald Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign, News Guard found that the “staged” conspiracy theory circulated on social media within minutes of the incident. (This is the same News Guard investigated by House Republicans for a perceived left-wing bias in its rating of news organizations — no MAGA stalwart.)

Those previous conspiracy theories had similar persuasive power. According to their recent poll, 24% of Americans believe the Butler, Pa. assassination attempt was staged, compared to 47% who believe it was real and 29% who are unsure. Similarly, 16% of Americans believe the Trump International Golf Club assassination attempt was staged, compared to 48% who believe it was real and 36% who are unsure. In total, the poll found, “only 38 percent of Americans believe that all three assassination attempts were authentic.”

This is mind-boggling skepticism. A major presidential candidate survived two assassination attempts and a third as president, every media outlet across the spectrum reported the incidents with due seriousness, and less than 40% of Americans believe that all three incidents were real. This not only reveals the cratering trust Americans have in media, government, and any “official” narrative, but it also suggests that many Americans (fortunately, not a majority) are instead allowing their opinions to be formed by ungrounded conspiracy theories flying around social media. A sizable third group seems torn between what is, in their minds, two equally untrustworthy options.

How could such ludicrous conspiracy theories go mainstream so quickly? At least part of the answer appears to be that partisanship is a powerful hallucinogen. The poll found that 34% of Democrats believed the April 25 assassination was staged, compared to 13% of Republicans — a nearly three-to-one difference. But that explanation cannot support all the data on its own.

Undergirding the tendency to indulge and cling to absurdly false beliefs is the spiritual reality of unbelief. Scripture presents unbelief not as the mere absence of faith, but as a power that actively resists God and rejects truth. In Romans, Paul describes how men “by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” As a result, “they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Romans 1:18, 21).

Even Paul’s former unbelief had turned him into “a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent” of the truth (1 Timothy 1:13). “This state of unbelief produces an actual active resistance to the truth within us,” the late pastor Martin Lloyd-Jones said of this text. “Unbelief is not a matter of intellect. It’s a matter of condition. It’s a matter of status. It means, my friend, that you’re in the grip of the devil and that you are not allowed to see things as they are.”

Other biblical authors confirm this view of unbelief. The author of Hebrews warns that “an evil, unbelieving heart” leads a person to “be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:12-13). Luke associates the unbelief of Jews in Ephesus with their stubbornness, which turned into active resistance to the truth of the gospel (Acts 19:9). Jesus himself taught that “the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (John 3:19).

Of course, biblical authors are speaking of unbelief toward the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ, not whether someone tried and failed to kill a president. But all truth is God’s truth, and the Christian gospel is specifically rooted in historical truth. As American culture increasingly becomes post-Christian, it is no surprise that confusion about — and even denial of — other historical truths result.

Sadly, our culture’s rejection of truth stretches far beyond the facts of attempted assassinations and even helps to cause them. National Review’s Noah Rothman points out that the last shooter’s manifesto showed a profound rejection of truth, in his casually assigning crimes to the president that have not held up under legal scrutiny.

“The notion that the president is a ‘pedophile’ is a faith-based assertion predicated on the presumption that Trump just had to have a more sordid relationship with Jeffrey Epstein than all publicly available evidence indicates,” Rothman writes. “ABC News agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle a defamation claim after anchor George Stephanopoulos falsely claimed that a civil court had found the president liable for rape when the jury in that case concluded the opposite.” Most absurdly, “The accusations of treason, we must assume, stem from the left’s attachment to the assertion that Trump colluded with Moscow to get himself installed in the presidency, the extensive and unproductive investigations into those allegations apparently notwithstanding.”

The same disregard for truth appears in the current congressional debate over a reconciliation funding bill. Democrats claim that Republicans want to spend $1 billion in taxpayer dollars for the construction of Trump’s White House ballroom. In reality, the $1 billion is for the Secret Service to protect all presidents. Some $220 million would go to the ballroom, but only for security upgrades, since the ballroom already secured complete private funding.

This week, a New York Times column uttered salacious accusations on scant evidence that Israel committed sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners as a matter of “organized state policy.” Israel is now suing the paper for the libelous claim, which hit the press only days before an extensive report was released describing the well-documented sexual crimes committed by Hamas on and after October 7. Hamas’s crimes were a matter of organized policy, but the world’s many Jew-haters will likely choose to believe the first accusation and not the second.

Another recent example concerns the Southern Poverty Law Center, which hawked its reputation as the civil rights group that took down the Klan to smear mainstream conservative organizations with its infamous hate map, which put those organizations in harm’s way. Recently, a federal grand jury indicted the SPLC for lying to banks and donors to bankroll the very hate groups it claimed to fight. Mainstream media coverage still tried to present the SPLC as the victim.

Politics is rife with such false claims. Abortion activists claim that chemical abortion pills are safe for women to take without an in-person consultation, but an in-person appointment is necessary to screen for conditions that could make the pill life-threatening — as many emergency room visits prove. Transgender activists claim that men who feel like women and vice versa can change their bodies to match their desires, but no biological data supports the conclusion that such biological coding is possible.

These falsehoods gain the most purchase on the Left, but figures on the Right are equally susceptible to believing and promoting conspiracy theories based on what they want to be true, rather than what is actually true. One thinks of Candace Owens’ conspiracy theories about the Charlie Kirk assassination or the Pizzagate hoax. A (now-withdrawn) candidate in the South Carolina Republican primary for U.S. Senate alleged that “Israel picks Lindsey Graham’s staff.”

Even President Trump is not immune to proclaiming what he wants to be true, instead of what is true. On May 1, out of political necessity, he informed Congress that the Iran war was “terminated.” Two days later, it broke out into open fighting again.

Partisan politics often works like a modern idol, which demonstrates its mastery of people by compelling them to affirm things that are false, forcing them to either surrender their conscience to a known lie, or sinking them into such confusion that they do not know what is true. Such falsehoods are usually evident to all, and they shame those who espouse them.

The only surefire antidote to such shameful falsehood is to embrace the truth. That truth begins by affirming the Triune God as Creator and Lord and his plan of salvation in Jesus Christ. But this foundation of ultimate truth provides a firm foundation from which Christians can reason to truth beyond the Bible’s core teachings — even to the historical facts which are now matters of political debate. Indeed, this Christian worldview provided the foundation for modern science and provides the only credible foundation for fact-based journalism.

In a world full of unbelief, Christians are people of truth — or at least we should be. Affirming a lie is, ultimately, a rejection of the God of truth, and it pays homage to the evil power behind unbelief, which opposes God. When partisanship demands we prove our allegiance by embracing a lie, let us side with the truth, over against the claims of any men. “If you abide in my word,” said Jesus, “you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31-32).