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Politics

Truth and Trust

14 November 2025

5 min read

The ancients had the right words for Trump’s tussle with the BBC

Can the truth be concealed?

Hal St John

Hal is a theologian and writer based in London.

A composite images shows the entrance to the BBC on one side and Donald Trump on the other

BBC.

The recent controversies surrounding the BBC's leadership and the lawsuit brought by Donald Trump may appear, at first glance, to be merely another chapter in the ongoing drama of contemporary politics and media. Yet for those with eyes to see, something far older and more profound lies beneath the surface turbulence—a perennial struggle concerning the very nature of truth itself, one that reaches back to the dawn of Western thought and touches the deepest springs of our common life.

The sequence of events is itself instructive. The disturbances at the Capitol occurred on January 6, 2021. More than three years thereafter, the BBC's Panorama programme broadcast an investigation examining the relationship between Mr Trump's rhetoric—his exhortation to "fight like hell"—and the violence that ensued. The programme did not fabricate a narrative but rather sought to interpret one, attempting to hold words and their consequences together within a coherent moral framework. This work was, in its essence, what the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides termed Aletheia: truth understood as 'unconcealment', the patient labour of bringing into public view that which has been hidden or obscured.

A vocation

When the crisis deepened, the BBC's then Director of News, Deborah Turness, reaffirmed the Corporation's mission as the pursuit of truth "with no agenda". It was a well-intentioned defence, though perhaps insufficiently bold. For the BBC's founding vision was never a pursuit of neutrality as an end in itself, but rather the pursuit of truth in service of the common good—a vision given permanent expression in the inscription carved into the very walls of Broadcasting House:

"This Temple of the Arts and Muses is dedicated to Almighty God... It is their prayer that good seed sown may bring forth a good harvest... that the people, inclining their ear to whatsoever things are beautiful and honest and of good report, may tread the path of wisdom and uprightness."

This inscription is no mere ornament. It constitutes a theological statement concerning the vocation of public speech. The call to sow "good seed"—echoing Jesus’ parable of the sower in St Matthew's Gospel—the summons to attend to whatsoever things are "honest and of good report" as St Paul exhorts in his letter to the Philippians, and the call to walk "in wisdom and uprightness" from the book of Proverbs—all these speak to a moral order in which words are meant to bear fruit. Panorama's investigation may be understood as a contemporary attempt to fulfil this sacred charge: an inevitably human and imperfect effort to unconceal the connection between language and its consequences in the world.

The ancient force of oblivion

Mr Trump's response, however, embodies a different and equally ancient force: Lethe—the personification of oblivion and forgetfulness in Greek thought. His lawsuit is not simply a defence against an allegation he finds unwelcome. It represents, rather, a strategic campaign to enforce forgetfulness. What Trump has chosen to bring into the light is not his own intent or action, but rather the BBC's editorial process. By directing all attention toward the matter of editing, he seeks to bury and render forgotten the original and far more consequential question: the demonstrable connection between his words on the sixth of January and the violent response of his supporters. The strategy is to employ a minor unconcealment—the technical matter of the edit—in order to accomplish a major concealment: the causal chain linking rhetoric to riot.

This, then, is the quiet heart of the matter. The lawsuit functions as a modern political instrument deployed within an ancient philosophical conflict. It represents a deliberate choice for Lethe over Aletheia, aiming to dissolve the connection between word and reality, and to immerse the most uncomfortable truths in the waters of oblivion.

For Christians, this struggle occupies familiar ground. To stand for truth is not to claim infallibility—a pretension that belongs to God alone—but rather to participate in the slow, difficult work of revelation: to bring things into the light for the sake of healing and restoration. Whether in journalism, the Church, or the wider public square, truth remains first a vocation before it becomes a verdict.

The crisis at the BBC, therefore, is not merely about institutional governance or corporate reputation. It serves as a reminder that the pursuit of truth is always a contested act of unconcealment, perpetually threatened by the seductive pull of forgetfulness. In an age tempted by distraction and denial, even imperfect truth-telling becomes an act of faith—a wager that reality is trustworthy, that words have weight, that consequences follow causes.

A reason to persevere

This ancient struggle between unconcealment and oblivion offers perspective on our present moment. For those who hold religious faith, it recalls St John's testimony that "the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not"—a conviction that truth ultimately prevails. For those who do not share such faith, the argument stands on its own philosophical ground: that truth-telling, however costly and imperfect, serves something greater than partisan advantage or institutional survival.

The inscription at Broadcasting House speaks to both believer and non-believer alike. Its prayer for "good seed" and "good harvest", its call to attend to things beautiful, honest, and of good report, articulates a civic ideal that transcends particular creeds. It suggests that public institutions bear a responsibility—not to be infallible, but to resist the gravitational pull of forgetfulness, to maintain the connection between words and their consequences, to choose unconcealment over oblivion.

Whether one grounds this commitment in theological conviction or in secular principle, the work remains the same: the slow, difficult labour of bringing uncomfortable truths into the light, trusting that a society capable of facing reality is stronger than one that retreats into comfortable fictions. In an age tempted by distraction and denial, this may be reason enough to persevere.

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Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.