You Can’t Handle the Truth (But You Need To)

Facing the reality we’ve spent decades trying to redefine.

Jack Nicholson’s growl in A Few Good Men—“You can’t handle the truth”—still cuts deep, because it names a human condition, not just a movie line.

Ours is a generation that can’t handle the truth. We want meaning without morality, purpose without obedience, and freedom without boundaries.

The engagement of public and private faith has been in contention for decades now. From the removal of prayer and Scripture in schools to debates about Ten Commandment monuments, the public arena has grown increasingly resistant to Christian expression and acknowledgment.

At the same time, almost everything else has been invited in.

Celebrations of other religions, drag queen story hours in public libraries, Satanic displays in state capitols, even “demon summonings” for kids in art museums—this happened in my own city (Minneapolis) at the Walker Art Museum in 2023—are welcomed as expressions of diversity.

The public square hasn’t become more neutral; it’s become more selective. And as civic contention wrestles with deep moral questions—life, marriage, justice, gender, equality—politics itself has become unmistakably theological.

Every debate now assumes an unspoken creed.

Every law reflects someone’s doctrine of sin and salvation.

Every movement carries its own liturgy and moral code—

Unless it is Christianly influenced, and then it is forced into silence!

Everyone Is a Theologian

The necessity to speak truth beyond partisan lines has never been greater. Doing this well isn’t the job of professional bible teachers; it’s the responsibility of everyone who seeks to live faithfully in a confused age.

Each of us, whether we realize it or not, is a theologian. In spite of our religious affiliations, we are all theologians. Here’s what I mean by that: we all hold ideas, questions, beliefs, and doubts about God, the universe, and one another.

We all make meaning through a frame—what scholars call a worldview.

And in a world where “truth lies in the eyes of the beholder,” we forget that those same beholden eyes often lie. Jeremiah said it best: “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9).

When we make ourselves the measure of all meaning, our perception becomes our prison.

We start believing the mirror more than the Maker.

That’s why theology matters.

We need truth that stands outside of us—something true, good, and beautiful—to anchor what’s constantly shifting within us.

The Negative World

We are living in what cultural analyst Aaron Renn calls the Negative World.

• The positive world (pre-1990s) treated Christianity as a moral good—socially respectable and publicly affirmed.

• The neutral world (roughly the 1990s–2010s) tolerated Christianity as a private preference, one voice among many.

• But the negative world, our current age, regards Christian conviction as a moral threat.

To say “I believe the Bible” no longer makes you trustworthy—it makes you suspect.The Christian ideal has shifted in the public mind from beautiful and redemptive to bigoted and restrictive.Faith is now seen not as a light that brings wisdom, but as a shadow that blocks progress.

We live in a post-Christian, post-modern moment where truth is treated as personal, self-constructed, and emotional.

People act like they want justice, joy, equality, peace and love—but these are fruits of God’s Kingdom. They root in Christ and are exercised in the world through the Spirit of God.

We want compassion without repentance, belonging without belief, mercy without morality.

This is not a rejection of theology, but a replacement of biblical theology with self-theology.

Every social movement, every hashtag, every ideological slogan is an attempt to answer ancient theological questions apart from God.

When Truth Becomes Unwanted

The problem isn’t that truth has disappeared—it’s that people no longer want it.

We’ve become like horses standing beside living water, refusing to drink.

From Genesis 3 onward, humanity’s story has been one long attempt to rewrite reality. Adam and Eve didn’t stop believing in God; they just wanted to define good and evil on their own terms.

And every age since has done the same thing, just with better branding.

We rename rebellion as freedom.

We label confusion as compassion.

We sanctify self as salvation.

But the end is always the same: destruction.

There is a way that seems right to a man,

but its end is the way to death.

Proverbs 14:12

When we deny truth, we don’t escape it—we crash into it.

When we dismantle God’s design, we don’t find liberation—we lose ourselves.

Truth doesn’t yield to majority vote or moral fatigue. It doesn’t bend under pressure or cultural mood.

The Way Forward

The world has become more theological, and honestly, individuals cannot afford to be less.

This is not a time for shallow slogans or partisan alignment. This is a time for wisdom, conviction, and grace.

It’s not a matter of do you think theologically, but what theology leads your life. The difficulty is not all roads lead to truth. Most lead to division, dissatisfaction, and destruction.

To think theologically is not to argue more, but to understand more, working to discern the spiritual beneath the social, to see the image of God beneath the ideologies of man, and to name truth as the greatest opportunity and expression one can have.

Truth is not the enemy of love; it’s the foundation for love.

To become more theological is not to grow rigid, but to return to reality engaging the world as God actually made it, and to invite others to do the same.