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Breaking free from disinformation and systemic oppression entails discipling a nation.
In the Philippines, my home country, fake news travels fast—not only through social media, but through word-of-mouth communication spread by “Marites,” a Tagalog word for a person who gossips.
This is a compound word from mare, meaning “godmother” as well as clusters of friends in the neighborhood, and the English word latest. In effect, it means “Mare, what’s the latest?” So gossip goes around very fast, especially in densely populated, poor urban communities.
Technology has accelerated and expanded the spread of misinformation beyond what chatty friend networks ever could. It happens in the US and the West as a whole, as well as in countries where the government influences or restricts the media.
Analysts say that part of the reason Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and his allies have returned to power is the way they have been able to massively use social media to revise narratives of our experience of authoritarianism under his father’s rule.
Christians across the world have rightly lamented the spread of fake news in their communities, the prevalence of conspiracy theories, and the skepticism toward ever being able to know the truth. Those of us in the Majority World are also sensitive to another dimension of this phenomenon: We are more likely to see the spiritual reality behind it.
We sense how the demonic could lodge and entrench itself in media technologies—our contemporary version of what Paul calls the “prince of the power of the air” in Ephesians 2:2 (ESV).
Paul’s language of “thrones or dominions or principalities or powers” in Colossians 1:16 (NKJV) suggests that the demonic manifests itself not only in personalities, ...
from Christianity Today Magazine
Umn ministry
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