Russell Moore writes:

The accusation that Haitian immigrants in a small Ohio city are abducting and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs relies not on one falsehood but on a web of them. The rhetoric evokes racist tropes about “savages” who do not conform to our civilized Western world. There’s also a religious angle: the idea that Haitian refugees are voodoo occultists who might be worshipping the devil. As an evangelical Christian who actually believes in the existence of Satan, I agree that we can indeed see the work of the devil at play here, only it’s not on the menu of the Haitian families but rather in the cruelty of those willing to lie about them.

There is little ambiguity about whether Springfield, Ohio, is a hellscape of raptured pets, held at the mercy of marauding refugees. Law enforcement has told the world that there’s no evidence of this behavior, and the mayor and governor have confirmed this. But in the social-media age, none of that matters against A friend I know there knew somebody who said that she knew somebody whose cat was gutted and hanging from a tree. Other conflict entrepreneurs, when asked to provide evidence, sound like a radical deconstructionist in a 1990s faculty lounge, appealing to the “larger reality” of immigrant crime that is so true that the facts of the particular case, even if shown to be untrue, are beside the point.

If this were just about the readiness of some Americans to believe grifters who want to keep them angry and scared, we could perhaps ignore it, putting it into the category of the friend from high school whose Facebook posts claim to have “the receipts” on the alien corpses the government is hiding from us in Roswell. This falsehood, though, was given voice by a former and perhaps future president of the United States in a televised debate and afterward. And the real-world consequences are chilling. The mayor of Springfield confirmed to reporters that elementary schools were evacuated in his town this week because of threats directly tied to lies about the Haitian community there.

When we are willing to see children terrorized rather than stop telling lies about their families, we should step back, forget about our dogs and cats for a moment, and ask who abducted our consciences. That’s especially true for those of us who, like me, claim to be followers of Jesus of Nazareth, who told us that on the Day of Judgment, “people will give account for every careless word they speak” (Mt 12:36). [Continue reading…]