Truth or Perception?

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, welcome to The Table podcast. My name is Bill Hendricks. I'm the executive director for Christian Leadership at the Hendricks Center. And on The Table podcast, we discussed issues of God and culture. I want to begin with a question today, whom do you trust? Whom do you trust? The Gallup organization essentially asked that question in its annual confidence in institution survey in which respondents rank how much confidence they have in a wide range of institutions. Let me just mention a few, and you can ask, whom do you trust and how much, the church or organized religion, the military, the Supreme Court, newspapers, congress, television news, the presidency, the police, large technology companies, news on the internet, there's others mentioned, but the question again, whom do you trust that you'd likely say, "Well, people that I believe are telling me the truth," but how do you know what is true? 

That's becoming harder and harder to discern in our culture, but of course, having a basis for truth and knowledge is foundational to social and personal wellbeing, and that's why we've asked Bonnie Kristian to join us today. Bonnie is a journalist whose work has been published by the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, Politico and other outlets, and her column, The Lesser Kingdom, appears regularly in print and online at Christianity today. I've particularly invited Bonnie to be our guest because she's the author of an outstanding book that's extremely well written called Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community. She's a graduate of Bethel Seminary, lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and her twin sons. Bonnie, welcome to The Table podcast. 

Bonnie Kristian: 

Thank you so much for having me. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, we're delighted to have you here. In light of this question, who do you trust and the kind of work that you do, please don't take this as too cynical, but how in the world did a nice person like you end up as a political journalist? 

Bonnie Kristian: 

Well, I knew from quite early on that I wanted to write for a living, and I realized at a young age that fiction was not my forte. And so from there, I started becoming interested in news, in politics and spent a few years in Washington DC after I finished college working at some political non-profits, but I realized that I wanted to write about ideas and that I came to think that I needed another degree to do that the way I wanted to. And so that was when I decided to go to seminary and started building up a freelance portfolio in journalism while I was there, and then I've been doing it full-time ever since. 

Bill Hendricks: 

I'm curious, in seminary, did you have any particular, I don't know that they call them a majors, but concentrations or specific focus that you seem to zoom in on? 

Bonnie Kristian: 

Yeah. So my degree was in Master of Arts in Christian Thought, which I think they've actually changed the program a little bit since I left. So if you look it up now, it might not be the same. But what attracted me to it was it was essentially a theological studies degree but very outward facing. So a lot of the classes would be like Christianity and something and science or social issues or culture, looking at how our faith interacts with the world. And I thought that was quite well suited for what I was interested in writing about. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Absolutely. So in your book Untrustworthy, you began early on with a statement that we have what you described as a knowledge crisis and you then put a more technical term on it, an epistemic crisis, which brings us to the word epistemology. Now, we have a lot of theologically trained people that listen to The Table podcast, but frankly, we also have a lot who are not trained and the word epistemology already starts to cause their eyes glaze over. Tell us about what you mean by a knowledge crisis and epistemology crisis. What does it get to? 

Bonnie Kristian: 

Yeah. So epistemology is, it's a branch of philosophy, it's concerned with the study of knowledge itself. So it's asking questions like what is knowledge? What is truth? How do we acquire knowledge? How do we distinguish between a situation where we think we have knowledge and we actually don't, and a situation where we really do have knowledge? And I think it's perfectly fine and normal that most people haven't heard of that, thinking a lot of situations you wouldn't have to really think about epistemology. It could be sort of just an academic thing that you find out about in college at most. Our situation though, I think, is a little bit different because we have so rapidly and massively increased the amount of information, and a lot of that contains really significant truth claims that we encounter on a daily basis. First, with the rise of 24 hour cable news in the '90s and then soon after the internet and social media as we know it now, and now it's on our phones. 

So it's with us constantly in the way that in 1998 you maybe watched cable news, but you couldn't take your television with you and look at it in line at the grocery store. There's a constant sea and an issue of quantity that is quite new. And so, we're flooding ourselves with information and truth claims constantly. And we didn't really, I think, prepare ourselves for that, and now it seems pretty clear that we've gotten ourselves in trouble. And so, epistemology I think becomes important for us to think about in a way that it wouldn't normally be where we need to be a little bit more deliberate in how we're approaching the process of gaining knowledge and the process of parsing what is truthful and untruthful. And so, the knowledge crisis, or you could say epistemic crisis is what's happened in the absence of that preparation and the absence of that being deliberate. 

And it's that sense, I think, that probably everyone listening is familiar with of uncertainty and of confusion and feeling like we're in this very overwhelming information environment. We don't always know how to decide what is true, and frequently there's relational element of it as well where we're having conversations with loved ones that are not just about policy disagreements because we've always had political disagreements like that, but where you're talking to someone who you thought believed quite similarly to you, perhaps, especially if we're talking about fellow Christians and it's like you're talking past each othert, you're not even looking at the same reality. And I think that experience of being so unmoored and uncertain is very much the knowledge crisis that I have in mind. 

Bill Hendricks: 

And you mentioned the relational dimension of that. So I think what I hear you describing is the classic, the family gets together for Thanksgiving dinner, and next thing you know we've got a pitched battle of sides about a political issue often with generational overtones. And each side is absolutely passionately convinced that the facts that they are purporting from their side are the real truth, and the other side has been deceived and this is terrible, and how could you think that way, and it boils down. 

Bonnie Kristian: 

Yeah. And like I said, there's always been disagreements within families about politics. So the mere fact that the argument isn't new, but I think that sense of, we can't even agree on the basic starting facts, we're probably immersed in totally different media environments such that what the other person is saying just seems totally out of touch with reality and it's become such a larger part of our lives, it's harder to set it aside now and say like, "Well, let's just focus on other things. Let's just have our nice dinner." Because again, everybody can pull out the phone and say like, "No, no, I have it right here, I'm going to prove it to you." And so, those changes in technology and in the way that we've apportioned our attention and the voices that we've given so much more authority in our heads that has really created a substantively different situation than we had 20, 30, 40 years ago. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Does part of this crisis also mean that we, at some point, begin to even lose our belief that maybe there is such a thing as truth? I certainly don't want to get into any of the specific divides, but let's just keep it at this. We've now had two presidential elections in the United States in which two people who, according to the electors, they lost the election, "But no, we didn't really lose the election, it was stolen from us." Just those claims alone at least begin to raise some doubts in plenty of people's minds, even people to think, "No, you did lose." But I do wonder, you know what mean, maybe there's something here, there's some smoke, maybe there is some fire. I mean, does that itself begin to cause this malaise of skepticism? 

Bonnie Kristian: 

Yeah. I mean, think that's a big part of it and that the reaction to it depends perhaps significantly on the person. So I think there are some people who faced with that kind of debate and uncertainty some people will just double down on whatever just they want to be true essentially. They'll say, "I'm looking at this. I see people presenting an argument for one side, some people presenting an argument for the other. There's no way for me to really verify which one of these is right. I'm just going to go with the one that I want to be." And it's a very easy to do that and to find a wealth of a parent confirmation for that. 

And then I think some other people maybe who don't have quite such a taste for political debates will just throw up their hands and say, "You know what? I don't know. I can't know. I don't know, maybe there is no truth." And the challenge I would argue is to be able to not go into that apathy or into that very cynical tribalism to still be looking for the actual truth. That is a very hard thing to do. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, I think the sentence in your book that said, "Okay, I got to have Bonnie on The Table podcast," you asked the question, "If truth exists as Christianity affirms it does, can humans access it rightly?" It's extremely important question because it's one thing to talk about our reports on the news true, or is this publication true or is this scientific report giving me accurate information? But we, as Christians, at least Bible believing Christians, we also believe that God has revealed himself through His word. Is that true? And can we be certain that there is such a category as truth? And so, this is a modern day problem that has long-term implications. Welcome your thoughts on that. 

Bonnie Kristian: 

Yeah. I mean, obviously, as you said, is this news report true, is not the same question as is scripture true. To some degree, we're talking about different kinds of truth, but they're not totally disconnected. And I think if we're very confused, we have a confused habit of mind, if you will, I think, in these political and public spaces, that's not going to stay isolated there, that confusion is going to affect how we think about other things. And likewise, the inverse should be true as well, that if we are immersed in theological truth and developing a real feel for truth, an analogy I like to use is the way you can just feel the difference between cotton and polyester. You might not be able to always articulate it very clearly, isn't of pre rational but you have a feel for that that at least points you in the right direction that if you're in a good space with that on this more theological side of things, that hopefully that would lead you to having a feel for truth in those more political and public spaces as well. 

And that's not a sure thing, it's not like a mechanistic process where if you're a Christian, your political beliefs are always right. I mean, they would be nice if that were the case, but just the sheer political disagreement among Christians shows that's not the case. But there is certainly a relationship there, and I think permitting yourself to fall into habits and mindsets of confused or even corrupt thinking in one area will eventually affect the other and vice versa. 

Bill Hendricks: 

I'm curious whether you've thought about where this human desire for truth really comes from, and maybe another way to ask question is, it seems like we have a real propensity anymore to mistrust things, where does that propensity to mistrust come from or is it the opposite? Humans always got to put their trust in something, it may be in something that's false, but they've got to trust something, it's just inherent in our nature. What drives that? 

Bonnie Kristian: 

Yeah. I do think that just as a matter of practicality, we do have to trust a lot. We have to assume that we can acquire real knowledge, we have to trust expertise that we have no way to evaluate. Like I just had a plumber in my house this week, you might actually be able to hear some of the banging, there's some repairs ongoing as I'm recording here. I have no knowledge of plumbing, I have to take others on their word and trust that. So we have to live with a certain amount of trust to function. I think the rising skepticism and distrust, and you mentioned all those institutions at the beginning, and if you track polling on that over time, it's the trust is just going down in pretty much every category. And the few categories that haven't seen a market drop in trust in the past few decades were already pretty low to begin with, so it's not like they're doing much better, they're maybe just already at their floor. 

Bill Hendricks: 

They didn't have far to fall. 

Bonnie Kristian: 

Yeah, exactly. I think there's not a single reason for that decline in trust, but now that it is ongoing, it's sort of a snowball effect and one affecting the other where we have this sense of feeling like very isolated individuals in this very uncertain and chaotic society. And once some trust begins seeping in one place, I think it starts to affect others until you... I've observed plenty of conversations in social media, people just will say, "Well, you can't trust anything." And once you get to that sort of universal place of distrust in those public spaces, it's hard to get out of that. I think it's misleading because it feels like it doesn't have the immediate consequences of being distrustful in those more practical senses. 

Like if I decide I don't trust any plumbers, pretty soon I don't have a functional toilet. So I have to make up my mind and get myself together on that and decide I'm going to trust someone. If I decide I don't trust anyone in the media, for example, I can still go on reading the news, the news that I don't trust and go on arguing about it on the internet and go on having political discord in my life. And there's not that immediate concrete backlash, but I think it's misleading if we imagine that living that way has no effect on us. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, I know that politics is your particular beat, the political area. Is it possible that the more cynicism creeps in as to whether the sources can be trusted, that you end up with these two polar extremes fighting it out on your side, but they're actually quite small? And in fact the middle finally just says, "You know what, I don't have time, I don't have energy, I don't have the emotional bandwidth to get involved in any of that, I just literally tune out politics in general." And so you've got a very uninformed electorate when you do have an electorate and that doesn't even count the people that say, "I'm not even voting because I don't think any of it matters or makes a difference." And now you've got another crisis in the political area, which is just people that aren't involved and maybe the majority. 

Bonnie Kristian: 

Yeah. So there's a sense in which I want to say that a certain degree of uninvolvement is appropriate. I mean, we have a representative system for a reason. The average person is supposed to be able to delegate their political engagement to elected officials, to journalists, to people who choose to engage in politics full-time and to develop real expertise and do it for them while they get on with their own lives, more important things that they have to attend to. And so, that I think is not a bad thing. The problem is when you have less of that deliberate delegation and more of, as you described, just a burnt out apathy, and especially when the full-time voices who are left, as you say, are at the extremes and not really representing as they're supposed to, the great bulk of people who are busy with other things. 

And that I think is a closer picture to where we are right now especially on social media, the way it works is the more extreme voices are more exciting, they're more likely to induce fear or anger or in some cases joy in their readers, and so they tend to get more attention. And that also creates among that more engaged group of people are really distorted like view of where the average American is. And this is something that I have to pay a lot of attention to myself or I will end up thinking that my neighbor down the street is paying as close attention to the things that I'm paying attention to and has such strong opinions as I do when the reality is they don't. And that's okay, but it's very easy, I think, if you're in that small more engaged minority to have a perspective that in some ways is even more distorted than among those very apathetic people who have just given up. 

Bill Hendricks: 

In your book, you talk about the political implications of this knowledge crisis, the social implications. I was particularly fascinated with your conversation at length about the faith implications. In other words, how does a knowledge crisis affect the way that Christians think about God and think about their Lord Jesus? It also, how does it affect their way that they see and interact with other people, particularly people that they may not disagree with? Enlarge on, this really is a crisis of how we live as Christians in the world. 

Bonnie Kristian: 

Yeah. So I think you sort of gestured in a couple directions that it has implications for our faith. One on the more theological side of things is that scripture draws very clear connections between faith and love and truth. And a lot of times, we tend to speak about these things as somewhat separate things in different categories. Love perhaps is more emotional, truth as more logical, but that's not how the New Testament and especially Jesus in the Gospel of John and then later the First Epistle of John talk about this. And in fact the way that these passages speak of it is they link the two. Jesus says in John 14 and 18 in particular, he talks about how his opponents, his critics at the time are unable to love him because they don't know God and therefore can't recognize God's truth. 

He says, "My language isn't clear to you, you can't understand what I say because you belong to your father of the devil and there is no truth in him." And so, these kind of passages, I think they prevent us from saying it's not a big deal. If I'm spending my days immersed in political or untruth, be that watching cable news or on social media, whatever your media of choice, it's okay if I'm immersed in untruth there, I'm still a loving Christian, I'm still growing in my faith because that connection does matter. And if we are spending so much time in untruth, it is going to make it difficult for us to love God and vice versa. There's also, in many cases, a much more immediately visible and practical effect of this knowledge crisis for Christians that it's popping up and causing division in congregations and it's becoming an issue of discipleship. 

Something that I heard over and over again as I was researching this book from pastors especially was it was almost a verbatim quote to the extent that it was seemed strange. You would think it was coordinated except that it came unprompted from so many different quarters, was pastors saying, "I get an hour or two with people every week and their social media or television or whatever media of choice gets them for 10, 15, 20 hours and there's no way I can compete with them." And it's true that a lot of churches are politically homogenous. So in that case, they're going to just have, perhaps, the conflict between what is being taught at church and the small amount of time devoted to that and then the engine of anger and fear and conflict that the political media tends to generate. 

But in churches where you have also political differences within the congregation and those 15, 20 hours are being spent in very different places. Then you have the added complication of that intense disagreement within the congregation. I mean, it's a huge challenge for pastors right now and something that, I think, even when I was in seminary a few years ago, we were not talking about this. So let alone people who received their pastoral training earlier. If it's not in the congregation already, it's probably coming and I think it's something that has blindsided some pastors is this major new issue of discipleship. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, you're absolutely correct, and you actually mentioned a Lifeway poll that had been done that said that half of all Protestant pastors say they frequently hear church members repeating conspiracy theories that they've heard for why something's happening in the country. 

Bonnie Kristian: 

Yep. It's very widespread. 

Bill Hendricks: 

And one of the nastiest outcrops of this that divorce between love and truth as it were that you mentioned, is the disunity that has resulted. And what is so striking to me when I looked through the New Testament, certainly all through Jesus teachings and the gospels, and then you get to the epistles and particularly the sections of the epistles that are the implications of the truth, the doctrines that are given. Over and over and over and over, there's this appeal to unity and to having like-mindedness in Christ and to being of one mind and to referring one another before yourselves and being humble with each other and being kind to one another and forgiving one another as Christ is for forgiven you and Jesus going so far as to say, "If you don't forgive your brother, then I'm not going to forgive you." 

And yet you see the exact opposite in so many situations between Christians who disfriend each other, disfellowship from one another, leave churches over, something that is not anywhere near a core doctrine. And to me, it feels like there's got to be even a larger sort of spirit of darkness involved here. It's a very pernicious thing, but it seems to be widespread and growing. But again, we get back to this question that you raised in the book of how do we know and how do we think about knowing is I think what you're also asking is that we, first of all, and I welcome your input on this, how do we go about thinking about knowing, I guess is the question. Where do we start? 

Bonnie Kristian: 

Well, so where I landed on this in the book because it's a difficult question, especially if you're not in an academic context and trying to parse different claims in real-time and they're coming at you almost faster it seems than as possible through your newsfeed. The answer that I landed on in Untrustworthy was to look at intellectual virtues. So not offering any sort of single rule because there's just too many scenarios. I can't possibly say, "Here's how you can decide whether something you encounter is true or not." But to instead say, "All right, we can't lay down a single rule like that, we can't individually make our information environment less chaotic. They're not going to figure out some perfect way to better moderate social media, they're not going to figure out some new law that's going to fix this for us. But what we can affect is what kind of people are we as we're coming into this space, and again, developing that feel for truth and that looks like developing intellectual virtues". 

And in the field of epistemology, these days, it tends to be not really so focused in this area, but several centuries ago, the older tradition of epistemology was very much concerned with virtue. And so, there's a long history of this, of thinking about, what does it mean to be intellectually virtuous? And the three virtues that I talk about in the book are studiousness, intellectual honesty, and wisdom. And in that order, they're very much concerned with the process of finding, of gaining knowledge, of parsing purported facts and truths. 

And then what we do with that knowledge once acquired, how we use it and to what ends do we use it. And unfortunately, we can't simply decide to be virtuous, that would be very nice if we could, but what we can do is to build habits that create spaces for virtue to develop in us. And so, that more than trying to give, I guess, really specific guidance is about making individual discreet decisions about truth, I think, is something that we can begin to do. And that is something that anyone can do even if you don't have that sort of academic background in epistemology. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, yes, Philippians 4 talks about what sort of things are true whatsoever, things are pure, whatsoever things are righteous, etc. Let your mind dwell on these things, which gets back to, if I can use the term, some basic spiritual disciplines, it sounds like you're suggesting where what I hear you saying is that in coming to the whole task of thinking in our culture and living in our culture, we've got to bring a mind that's prepared, a mind that's formed, if you will, to even think well, and that that only comes again through our time with Christ and in His Word and letting the truths of the scripture at least wash over us first and by the Holy Spirit's grace begin to penetrate our hearts and our minds so that we bring a tool, if you will, an organ to the task that's even ready to do what's being asked to do. Is that what I hear you saying? 

Bonnie Kristian: 

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's the foundation of it. And then a lot of the practical habits, some are more explicitly in that spiritual formation place and some, I think, are very mundane, and even things like how we arrange our homes, are you putting your TV at the center of your most favored gathering place, your living room? Is your phone the first thing you picking that up, the first thing you do in the morning, is the first thing you lay eyes on? And so, it's very much concerned with how we're spending our time and how we're spending our attention. 

And to go back to that comment that I hear from pastors so often, are you giving Facebook or Instagram or whatever it is that you prefer 20 hours a week and giving church life and time with God one to two hours a week? Because that will have its effects, certainly most of us, at least, are not going to have the ability to spend 40+ hours a week in church or studying scripture. Some people get to do that, but most of us don't. But that kind of gross imbalance is going to have an effect on our lives and have an effect on our thinking and have an effect on our faith. And I think just plunging into this new technological era and figuring everything would be all right, that was a mistake. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, I want all of our listeners to know that what Bonnie is suggesting here is something Bonnie practices herself. In your book, you talk about yourself as a writer and that as you were writing your book on Untrustworthy, you found a prayer by Thomas Aquinas that you said, "First of all, I love it because it was clearly written by a writer for a writer," but you love it because you have spent each morning before you begin your work praying through that prayer as a way of framing the day and getting your mind prepared to do that work of writing. Tell us a little bit more about that or tell the listeners a little bit more about that. I just thought, what a wonderful habit. So simple but very practical and very powerful in a daily drip of that and more than just a drip, that's a communication between you and the Lord there. Talk about that. 

Bonnie Kristian: 

Yeah. So it's called a Prayer before Study, and it's a pretty short prayer, maybe 15 lines where Aquinas is asking God for things like, "Give me a sharp sense of understanding or attentive memory, the talent of being exact in my explanations and the ability to express myself with thoroughness and charm." And also very much acknowledging his own ignorance and his own proneness to error and asking God to alleviate that and to be with him in that. And so, I don't pray it every morning now. I did while I was working on the book, and I still do it pretty frequently, especially days when I'm going to be writing. But my idea with praying it every morning was essentially a hope that it would form in me the virtues that it was modeling and it always wasn't fully there for it every morning. 

There were times where it was like, "All right, this is part of the routine, so I'm going to do it," without necessarily really feeling it. But then perhaps is when it does feel like the most discipline in the more negative sense is when that sort of practice is most important because it's those days when doing without that framing, that communication with God at the beginning, when that becomes the riskiest, I guess if you will, it's then I think when more likely to go awry, to forget our own ignorance and our own tendency toward error if we don't start with that reminder. So that was the attraction of it for me, and some days, the difficulty of it for me. But it's a beautiful prayer and something that I strongly recommend to everyone. 

Bill Hendricks: 

Well, germane to the subject we're talking about today, which is knowledge and knowing, one of the things I love most about that prayer, there's an inherent sort of humility that Aquinas brings to his work, and his work of course was very much thinking kinds of work. 

And when we talk about knowing and how do we know if nothing else the virtue of intellectual humility compels us to always hold lightly whatever we think we want to become certain about or something can even be, "Oh no, I'm certain that's true," but can't always be certain that our understanding of that truth is complete and adequate, or whether we'll always quite see it in quite the same way. And so, I'm not just talking about understandings of theological truths, I'm talking about even what we're finding today and trying to live life. We have opinions, we have things that we actually get facts and we base our conclusions on those facts, but even there, we sort of hold that slightly open handedly because we don't have all the facts, and tomorrow there may be additional facts that come on the table that we have to adjust how we think about things. 

This to me, was one of the most interesting things has been about the pandemic is I think most people certainly who've been educated and rational would subscribe to the idea, "Well, we do need to trust the science," but it was like a whammy because as the sciences, we know it, and then with more research, you begin to find out some additional things about the science. Then people say, "Well, they keep changing the science." Well, not changing the science, science is an iterative process, but there's an intellectual humility that we have to hold those things with. 

Bonnie Kristian: 

Yeah, and it's tough to do. I think it's very easy to fall into an extreme of either there isn't objective truth there, there's no ultimate reality that we can seek to know, or if you want to say, "Yes, very much that objective truth does exist, that reality does exist to lose that humility and follow it up with, and I know it. And that's to acknowledge that the truth does exist, but I may not have a full grasp on it yet." That is a hard balance to maintain. And I think that that's true in most cases. Obviously, we all think that everything we think is right if we didn't think that would change our minds, but to recognize the likelihood that, "Everything that I believe right now is true." That's probably not the case, there's probably some wrong things in there. And as you said, to hold things lightly and be willing to be demonstrated wrong, be willing to change our minds, that is a hard willingness to maintain. 

Bill Hendricks: 

But isn't that a lot of sanctification? I mean, we got to remember, we are turning around from having been rebels against God toward following His son. That doesn't happen overnight. And in the process of making that turn, we find out that there's still a lot in us that's kind of in rebellion, which by the nature of the case means we've been wrong. 

And so, we as Christians of all people, it seems to me, should have some facility at saying, "You know what, I realize I'm wrong and I need to change that." In the minutes we have left, if I may ask you, since switch from political journalists to mother, you've got twin boys as I understand it, and I guess in light of those who are listening who are parents, would love your wisdom and anything you're learning. As you help your sons growing up, thinking about, how do they come to know what is true? And as a parent, how do you help them in that exploration and discovery? 

Bonnie Kristian: 

Yeah, so our three, so- 

Bill Hendricks: 

Yeah, a little young. 

Bonnie Kristian: 

Little young for some of the biggest challenges. I mean, think on the discipleship side of things, you don't need a lot of innovation. Like we've been doing this for 2000 years and a lot of the old things work well. On the tech side of things and the encountering of truth in many ways, quite new media environment. There, I think there's a real sense in which parents of my generation, parents who have children now, parents who have grown up, if not quite as digital natives, certainly as early arrivals, I feel like I have an advantage over my parents' generation because when I was a teenager going through AOL free trial CDs and then calling up and canceling and then starting a new one, because my mom would not pay for the monthly thing after the free trial ended, our parents back then that the internet was new, they couldn't know what the real risks would be. 

And so, the concern back then was very much about physical abduction like you're going to get lured to the Walmart parking lot and they're going to kidnap you. And not that that's never happened, but I think, at this point, having experienced it myself, it's much easier for me to say, "No. The chief problem is that the risks we're dealing with here, a lot of them are about attention and just the way that our brains work and the ability to sit down and read a book without switching to a screen after every section or every chapter." And that wasn't possible for parents to know 20 years ago, but we know it now, in many cases, via unfortunate personal experience and own struggles with getting our habits under control and trying to build some intellectual virtues. 

And so like I said, my kids are three, a lot of those choices I haven't had to concretely make yet because for now we can just put the phone out of reach. But looking ahead, I do at least feel better equipped to say, "I know what the dangers are here, and can hopefully at least put that unfortunately hard one knowledge to better use so that perhaps their brains will not end up as broken as ours are." 

Bill Hendricks: 

Okay. Well, Bonnie Kristian, thank you very, very much for being on The Table podcast today. This has been very insightful. I know we've only scratched the surface on the topic that you raised in your book Untrustworthy, but thank you for spending these times with us. 

Bonnie Kristian: 

Yeah, thank you again for having me. 

Bill Hendricks: 

You're more than welcome. And I want to thank you as listeners for being with us today to hear about this crisis of knowledge and all the insights that Bonnie's given us on that. Encourage you to join us again next time on The Table podcast. Be sure and subscribe in your favorite subscription service, and I will see you again on the table where we discuss issues of God and culture. Have a good day.