In 2016, the Oxford Dictionaries people chose the term “post-truth” as their “word of the year.” Questions about truth and even doubts about there being such a thing pervade society. A number of things have brought us to this place, not least of which is the ubiquitous presence in our lives of social and news media.

Our days are saturated with information, whether about people we know on Facebook or about the president of the United States on the evening news. Some of this news (and in certain settings, much of it) is either fake or “enhanced” news. Fake news reports something that is not true and has not happened as though it is true and has happened. Enhanced news presents something that has happened but does so in a way that is intended to move the reader or listener in a certain direction.

News corporations pride themselves on their fair and accurate reporting. Yet they frequently allow or even direct reporters to introduce emotionally ladened words into a story, reflecting at best the news staffs’ biases and at worst exposing a calculated attempt to shape listener’s views and influence their actions. That is enhanced news.

We cannot trust what we hear and see. Online sites employ tools to covertly influence our thinking. Some are relatively straightforward: paying people to submit likes or to become followers. Others are more sophisticated, like stuffing online polls, forcing site owners to take down stories, crashing entire sites, and more.

A study from Carnegie Mellon found that something like 45% of tweets on the coronavirus originated from bots – automated computer programs – instead of people. Furthermore, 80% of the most retweeted posts on Twitter (now X) came from bots. The “likes” that boost a post and give it visibility often come from bots created by people who are trying to game the system.

In this environment, who can we trust? I say, “In this environment,” but fake and enhanced news is not new; it has been around forever. It’s just the form it takes that is new.

The difference between real news and fake news is that real news reports something that has already happened, while fake (or enhanced) news is intended to bring about something the reporter hopes will happen. That distinction has ramifications beyond the evening news. It can teach us something important about religion.

One of the big words of the Christian faith is “gospel,” which means something like “good news.” The word has an important place in the Old Testament and is central in the New. The gospel is to the Bible what the core is to an apple. It is to the church what the constitution is to the country. The gospel is not fake news; not enhanced news; it is good news.

That means the gospel is news about something that has happened. One scholar suggests translating the word as “newsflash.” Someone else thought “breaking news” might be better. Both have their problems, but they do capture something fundamental about the word: it is a report about something that has already happened.

Christians who fail to grasp this end up following the example of the news corporations mentioned above rather than that of Jesus and the apostles. They come to think of the gospel as an instrument to make something happen rather than an announcement about what has already happened.

Rather than sharing the remarkable news that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,” they make a pitch. It goes like this: “You can go to heaven when you die if you are ready to make a decision.” That decision, which usually includes “repentance toward God and … faith in our Lord Jesus Christ,” is not wrong; it is right. But the decision is a response to the good news, not the news itself.

When we present the pitch as if it were the good news, our hearers will lack an adequate understanding of the faith. If they trust in anything, it is liable to be their decision rather than God’s world-saving intervention. And that is simply not enough to sustain them in the faith.