There’s a moment when you realize the problem isn’t that people believe the wrong things. It’s that they’ve stopped caring which things are true.
I’ve been watching that happen across my country for a while now. Both sides. Every tribe. Same reason, though they’d never admit it — and honestly may not even see it. When you believe you’re fighting for survival, true and false become luxuries nobody can afford. That goes for the openly secular and the openly devout alike. Maybe especially the devout. Jesus had a word for people who traded His truth for something more comfortable.
It wasn’t a gentle word.
I couldn’t find the right words for any of this myself. To be honest, this whole piece started as a bit of a “Wow, gee-whiz… Tolkien!” moment when I saw a favorite story pop up in a papal encyclical. But as I kept reading, it deepened into a jaw-dropping realization when I got to the part where someone named Hannah Arendt was mentioned. Someone that actually lived through this and nailed the mechanics of it perfectly.
That’s when it stopped being an academic exercise. It turned into this heavy, uncomfortable thing that I keep wrestling with in my own life and my own circles… and I realized maybe it’s finally time to let it see the light of day.
I don’t write about politics. Not usually. Not because I don’t have views but because the pulpit isn’t mine and the last thing the internet needs is another opinion. But this isn’t really about politics. It’s about something underneath politics, the ground that has to hold for any of it to matter. And I keep coming back to it. Pull the thread out of one piece, it shows up in the next.
Pope Leo XIV, the new one, the American. He’s already causing a stir in some circles just by being who he is. First American pope in the history of the Church, which depending on who you ask is either long overdue or deeply unsettling. But then somebody pasted a paragraph from his first encyclical and I couldn’t get past the first sentence without stopping. I remember sitting there with my glasses off, squinting at the blue light of the screen, wondering how we got here.
Magnifica Humanitas. Beautiful title! It reads less like a doctrinal statement and more like a man who’s been paying attention to the world for a long time and wanted to say so out loud. We’re akin in that.
It was Tolkien that caught my eye first. A pope citing The Lord of the Rings — that alone was enough to make me keep reading. The quote Leo XIV reached for was Gandalf, from late in the story, steady and unglamorous:
“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.” 1
But to understand why that remedy matters, you have to go back earlier in the story to see how Tolkien wrote the disease. A little context for those who haven’t made the journey through Middle-earth: Saruman was once a wizard of great power sent to oppose evil — think mentor, guardian, force for good. By this point he’s traded all of that for survival and influence, and what he has left is his voice. When he speaks, Gimli growls: “The words of this wizard stand on their heads. In the language of Orthanc help means ruin, and saving means slaying.”
Saruman doesn’t convince people of the wrong thing. He dissolves the difference between things until nobody can tell which way is up.
But the deeper I went into the encyclical, the more I found. And then I hit Hannah Arendt, and that’s where I stopped.
Not a Church Father. Not Aquinas. Hannah Arendt. Jewish philosopher, German refugee, political theorist, dead since 1975. A woman who in 1933 was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for researching antisemitism, which is to say, she wasn’t theorizing about totalitarianism from a safe distance. She was paying attention before most people knew there was anything to pay attention to.
Arendt’s argument, the one the pope wanted, came from The Origins of Totalitarianism, written in 1951. She said the ideal subjects of a totalitarian regime aren’t the true believers. Not the fanatics. Something quieter. People who’ve lost the ability to tell fact from fiction. People for whom the question of what’s actually true has just… stopped mattering.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” 2
To be honest, I’m not entirely convinced we are sliding into true totalitarianism. That may be too dramatic. But the undercurrent Arendt was describing — the erosion of the true/false distinction — feels real regardless of where it ends.
I’m not sure I’d thought about it that way before. We Cold War kids grew up worried about propaganda. About lies being believed. Arendt is pointing at something earlier in the chain, the moment when a people stops caring whether something is true, when useful quietly beats real, when effective quietly beats honest.
I look at my own screen, my own kitchen table, and I see the machinery working. I hear people parroting loaded, weaponized language they didn’t invent, trading critical thinking for tribal talking points. And if I am being completely honest, I’ve been just as guilty of beating the drum. I catch myself slipping because I want the leaders I root for to be right. I want a standard of holiness and truth, but the moment someone on the “other side” stumbles, it is so easy to forget compassion. It is so easy to look at public figures grossly displaying their flaws as badges for their tribe and let contempt win, instead of seeing them through the eyes of Christ.
Although it seems completely impossible to change the world, it is even more difficult to change the world inside of me. To borrow a phrase from a favorite songwriter, that kind of internal transformation is beyond our reach. Only Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has the power to break through our biases, our anger, and our self-righteousness to change who we are from the inside out.
We have allowed our world to become so thoroughly, structurally politicized that human decency has been outsourced to a ballot box. Good and evil are defined entirely by who you vote for. The “team jersey” has changed everyday life into a minefield. I have a friend who simply cannot disengage from a stark, black-and-white view of the world… a ‘you’re either with me or you’re against me’ judgment delivered with all the weight of heaven, even though they don’t even believe in God. We can’t even talk about the weather anymore without running into a loyalty test. It’s exhausting.
You haven’t lost an argument at that point. You’ve lost the ground arguments stand on. It makes me want to log off the computer and go look out the window at the birds.
What Arendt analyzed as political theory and Tolkien captured as myth are the exact same thing. Leo XIV calls it a road that “leads slowly but inexorably toward totalitarianism.”
Slowly.
That word does some work.
This was my first encyclical. I didn’t know what I was walking into. It’s a strange gathering of voices to find in one place — a German philosopher, an Oxford don, and a Pope from Ohio.
I want to be clear about something. I didn’t need a pope, a philosopher, or a novelist to tell me that truth matters. Jesus does that. Has always done that. The bar was already set — and if I’m being honest, I clear it a lot less often than I’d like to think. What Arendt and Tolkien and Leo XIV gave me was something different, the sight of the same truth showing up in human experience, across traditions, across centuries, in forms I wasn’t expecting.
Arendt saw it coming from a long way off. Tolkien wrote it as myth. Leo XIV named it in an encyclical. But none of them get to the bottom of it.
Jesus didn’t say he valued truth. He said he was it.
Footnotes:
- .J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 50th Anniversary Edition, New York 2004, p. 879. ↩︎
- H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, III, New York 1962, p. 474. ↩︎
Further Reading:
- Magnifica Humanitas, Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV (15 May 2026)
- The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt (1951)
Credits:
- Featured Image: Photo by Lena Bauermeister on Unsplash
Powerful! The truth matters. Always. I plan to keep searching for it with Jesus as my guide.