Things sometimes appear in social media seemingly out of nowhere, though one suspects they surface as “click-bait” created to generate readers’ reactions. That’s what I thought on Sunday when my X.com feed resurfaced a talk by National Public Radio chief executive Katherine Maher (her talk is linked below). The video initially appeared last April, amidst Maher’s cashiering of editor Uri Berliner for calling out NPR’s leftwing editorial bias. The video wasn’t even new back then; it was already about two years old, likely resurrected to explain how Maher sees “truth.”

Rewatching that video, I was struck by something: I never knew Pontius Pilate was a blonde American woman!

In Sunday’s Gospel for the Solemnity of Christ the King, Jesus and Pilate first exchange words about Christ’s alleged “kingship.” It’s clear “king” has an equivocal meaning in the Gospel. For Jesus, kingship involves the dominion of truth and grace (see Preface for Christ the King); for Pilate, it’s about whether this Nazarene might lead an anti-Roman insurrection to reverse the conquest results of 63 B.C. One can almost hear him saying, “and we’re not going back! We’re not going back!”

Kingship, however, is not the only equivocal term in this Gospel. So, too, is “truth.” Jesus deliberately casts Himself as having come into the world “to bear witness to the truth” (Jn 18:37). Indeed, Jesus is not One who merely testifies to “truth” as some abstract proposition, some desiccated dogma. Previously in John’s Gospel (14:6), Jesus made clear He is the Truth,” the path to God.

The Gospel for Christ the King omits Pilate’s cynical response. Faced with Jesus’ claim to bear witness to Truth, Pilate dismisses Him: “Truth! What is that?” (John 18:38)

Truth as correspondence with reality still has some claim on Pilate. John notes the procurator went out to say he found no charges against Jesus. But he’s not so seized of truth as to be ruled by it. He first tries to cut a bargain with the crowd: “You want this guy as my Passover amnesty to you?” When he sees he’s getting nowhere, he tries to assuage their bloodlust by having Jesus scourged. When the sight of the bloodied pulp of “the Man” has the opposite-than-intended effect, Pilate gives up, washes his hands, and declares himself instead of Jesus innocent. If that were true, he wouldn’t be mentioned by name every Sunday around the world two millennia later.

But if Pilate’s relationship to “truth” was utilitarian and transactional, so is Ms. Katherine Maher’s. She tries in the modern, therapeutic voice to make her transactionalism sound reasonable, but it’s as utilitarian as Pilate’s.

The former Wikipedia boss says what she learned there was not to search for “the truth” but the best you can get at the moment. While she pays lip service to trying at least to approximate truth, she immediately falls into a full Pontius-Pilate-mode “what really is truth” mindset. The search for “truth,” Maher opines, diverts us from action. In best American pragmatist fashion she says there’s no need to sweat so much intellectual cogitation when there are so many important things to do. That your action plan might be driven by false assumptions or criteria — well, one man’s false assumptions and criteria are another woman’s “best available” pointers of the moment. Let’s just forego the assumptions and pick something right now to do. 

Maher follows through on her intellectual superficiality dressed up as deep thought. She adds that particularly on controverted things like “politics and religion” disagreements likely run deep, perhaps even insurmountably deep. So let’s just paper them over (or put them behind a Rawlsian “veil of ignorance,” as N.Y. Times essayist Daniel Chandler counseled that same day; see here). Then the other shoe drops: The “glorious” annals of human history are glorious because “we acknowledge there are many different truths… the truth exists for you and maybe for the person sitting next to you. This may not be the same truth.” In other words, “truth” has no intrinsic relationship between the thing and reality. As Maher suggests a little later on, they’re all just social constructs. Indeed, the anti-metaphysics of our time thrives on the intellectual rot that the idea of “reality,” of a “nature,” of some objective norm independent of the subjective thinker, is illusory and an imposition on the “autonomy” of “human agency” to create the world constantly ex nihilo. Maher writes it off to when people “merge” “facts” with “beliefs” — the latter being, for her and those of her intellectual persuasion, what once upon a time were understood to be first principles, indisputable axioms, or “self-evident truths.” That illegitimate merger, for Maher, produces the violation of the first principle of non-contradiction, leading to her conclusion: “we all have different truths.”

John should be grateful Pilate was much more succinct, much less verbose: “What is truth?” And let’s get this over by noontime because I have something important to do.

Maher, of course, talks about the “pursuit of truth.” That’s always the default position of exponents of the dictatorship of relativism. They “pursue” truth. The problem is they really don’t want to outrun their fugitive because, like the dog in pursuit of a car, then wouldn’t know what to do with the truth when they catch it.

Maher’s video probably cropped up again because MAGA Republicans are looking at places where Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy can make some easy government waste/inefficiency cuts and NPR looks promising. But, providentially, perhaps the reappearance of that video on the Sunday of Christ the King was not mere coincidence. Nor was Chandler’s piece extolling John Rawls as somebody who gives us a public philosophy to do things while keeping messy stuff like religion and values off the public square, eluding “truth” through substitution of procedure. These simply remind us of enemies who won’t let truth be truth.

Pilate may have died 20 centuries ago, but his voice is still heard in the halls of the Praetorium.

(A link to NPR chief Maher’s talk is here.)