During January an average of 6.4 million people have been tuning into the fourth series of BBC’s The Traitors.
This number rose to 9.6 million for the tenth and final episode last Friday. I had not watched the first three series, so I was interested in seeing what all the fuss was about.
In many ways it is a typical reality TV show, where ordinary people have become “celebrities” for a few weeks. The series is as addictive as everyone has claimed. Once we had started watching we wanted to see how it all panned out in the end.
The contestants are either The Faithful or The Traitors. The object of the game is to survive and establish a person’s identity as one of the faithful or to fool the other contestants into believing that traitors are really part of the faithful.
In this series two traitors ended up being the winners.
The show has been criticised for its encouragement of tactical deception. Over the ten programmes it was obvious that lying and being lied to was taking its toll on the contestants. After a while it was difficult to know who was telling the truth, and who, if anybody, could be trusted.
The Traitors holds up a mirror to our society, where lies and broken promises create a climate of suspicion, ruined lives and shattered relationships.
Lying was a so big an issue in ancient society that church leaders like Augustine devoted two of his major moral works to this subject. In On Lying, Augustine tries to show what Scripture has to say about lying.
It is interesting to see what Augustine excludes from the category of lying:
“Jokes … from both the manner and the disposition of the person telling them, even when he avers things that are not true, very clearly comes from a mind that does not intend to deceive.”
Some would add that attempts to mislead other players in a game might not be seen as lying, such as pretending to pass a ball in rugby. This might also be true of a game like The Traitors, but some of the contestants seem to have begun to get a little too used to lying.
To quote Augustine again:
“There is a difference between a person who tells lies and a liar. A person who tells lies is also one who lies inadvertently, whereas a liar loves to lie and has the sort of mind that delights in lying.”
For preachers the bar for truth-telling is very high. There is an expectation that preachers will tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Once the coinage of lying is introduced into the currency of preaching, all confidence in that currency quickly disappears.
I love the story about CH Spurgeon, who on the Sunday after he had some false teeth fitted said in the pulpit, “This is the first false thing that has been in my mouth in this pulpit.”
Wise preachers aim to be a “faithful.”
How about you?
Photo by Alexander David on Unsplash