Trust but Verify: A case study in research integrity

I listened to a podcast recently, a conversation between George P. Wood and Ruthie Edgerly Oberg. I was well rewarded for my hour-long investment. In Wood’s Influence Podcast, he talked with Oberg about how to evaluate the reliability of reporting on historic events.

While the topic itself may or may not interest you, the podcast – “Myths of the Azusa Street Revival” – demonstrates how we can assess information we are receiving, particularly about how we verify the truthfulness of research and writing. It is a message a much larger audience needs to hear.

George P. Wood is editor of Influence Magazine. Ruthie Oberg is events speaker, archivist, and researcher at the Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center, the archives that aided me so much in my research back in the 1980s. Both the magazine and the center are part of the General Council of the Assemblies of God (USA).

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When it comes to communication, we live in the best and the worst of times.

Best of times in the sense that we have so much information at our fingertips – at the command of our voices, even. Need to confirm that so-and-so said such-and-such? You can find it right on your home computer or your phone if you dig deep enough.

Worst of times in the sense that untruths and half-truths can reach a global audience with less effort and time than vicious rumors spreading through our ancestors’ neighborhoods. For sure, disinformation is easier to disseminate than facts. Lies and half-lies spread more readily because they are often more entertaining.

And now technology is enhancing the promises and perils of truth telling. Is that image true – as in, is it really a picture or video of an event as it actually took place? In other words, can I trust what I am seeing with my own eyes? To borrow from an old commercial, only your hairdresser knows.

As my ethics prof, Dr. Daniel B. McGee, used to remind us, technology itself is amoral – meaning morally neutral, neither good nor bad in and of itself. The morality component comes through how humans use the technology. Technology can be used both for great good and great evil.

Take, for example, the invention of the camera. A Frenchman, Joseph Nicephore Niepce, is said to have invented the first photographic camera in 1816. Two hundred years later, cameras are pervasive. Whether taking still shots or moving images, cameras have infiltrated every nook and cranny of our world. They capture the profound and the absurd alike. In nations as divergent as China and the United Kingdom, cameras spy on everyone’s every move in public, and maybe even in private.

I just asked a question on google: “How many images of a child growing up today will be captured on camera?” The answer (returned in a nanosecond, by the way): “On average, by the age of 13, children have had 1,300 photos and videos of themselves posted to social media by their parents. By 18, children have created 70,000 social-media posts.”

Google sourced this quote from an article now a bit dated, written as it was in 2018 – Parents have posted 1,300 photos of their children by the time they’re 13 | MIT Technology Review. I would not be surprised to discover those numbers have seriously increased over the past 8 years, especially given what I see on some of your Facebook pages. And then there is the nefarious side of children’s photos – misuse by malevolent porn kings.

In contrast, almost no pictures of my great-grandparents exist and barely anything they said or wrote remains to be found, except perhaps a name in a family Bible. My father, who lived with an SLR camera in his hand, has left me a mountain of prints to sort through. But few photos from my childhood are among them except the obligatory Christmas family formal sent to thousands by old-fashioned bulk mailing.

Available information is not our problem. Accurate information is.

Photos or videos have never told the whole story. The best of documentaries leave much footage on the floor and still images are cropped even in the initial taking. But we used to find photos much more trustworthy than we do now with photoshopping and AI-enhancing so ubiquitous.

Sure, Forrest Gump really did meet President Lyndon Baines Johnson. You saw the footage, right? With each passing election cycle, lies and falsehoods as “proven” in photos and videos multiply like cockroaches.

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As disinformation spreads, so does cynicism. Cynicism is the dark end of skepticism. Skepticism helpfully involves raising questions, expressing doubts about and challenging stated facts and opinions. Former US President Ronald Reagan is famous for quoting, “Trust but verify.” Apparently, he took that from an old saying that rhymes in Russian: “доверяй, но проверяй” – “Doveryai, no proeryai.”

The word “trust” is key here. Whether it’s your parents checking to see if you really did fill the gas tank or an academic researcher sourcing a quote from Abraham Lincoln, a skeptic is not distrusting you – or Honest Abe – as much as wanting to get at the truth. For the skeptic, the truth really does matter.

In contrast, a cynic has given up on truth, on trust really, and thus on any real desire to confirm whether or not you bought the gas. I don’t trust you, therefore I’m not even going to bother to look.

A skeptic will work to make sure the truth comes out. A cynic doesn’t care whether the truth comes out or not – he has given up. A skeptic seeks to make the world a better place, a more trustworthy place. A cynic will destroy the world as we know it.

Oberg and Wood are skeptics, not cynics. They really do care that the truth comes out, regardless of whether that truth helps their cause or not. Don’t get me wrong, they actually do believe in their cause, and they are confident enough in that cause to trust that whatever truth comes out will forward that cause. For they are people who believe their cause is truth; thus, they are willing to trust the truth.

Their cause in this specific case? That the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles at the beginning of the last century was an amazing event that is not helped by people spreading misinformation about what really happened there.

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In 2006, the centennial year of the outbreak of the Azusa Street Revival, author Tommy Welchel published a book in which he set out to share long-secreted stories from youthful eyewitnesses of that event from 1906-1909. Those reported eyewitnesses, long gone by the centennial, had supposedly shared their stories with Welchel in the 1960s. Welchel then held onto those secrets for another 40 years before publishing them.

A second book by Welchel, released in 2013, gained much more traction than the first. Welchel’s retold stories have now gone viral with the endorsements of leading lights in Pentecostal-Charismatic circles.

As Welchel’s books gained in popularity, Oberg grew concerned that they were “beginning to shape the narratives of William Seymour and the Azusa Street Revival” and “may influence how future generations view the influential revival and its key figures.” Out of her research, Oberg presented an academic paper at the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, an organization known for its scholarly, peer-reviewed approach to academic topics in the field.

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As Pentecostals, Oberg and Wood do not doubt the miraculous or that the miraculous occurred at Azusa Street. However, they also believe that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
To do otherwise is to invite cynicism to flourish, a cynicism that will destabilize society’s already weakening trust in faith. False stories about Pentecostal experiences will inevitably discredit Pentecostalism as a movement.

As I wrote on Facebook in response to Wood’s posting of the podcast, this discussion between Wood and Oberg is the kind of material that needs to be used in college courses on critical thinking and on how to use sources and resources in preaching and writing. The podcast presents a great case study in critical thinking.

This interview puts integrity front and center. We have a huge need for stronger development of ethical thought and practice in our faith communities and in society at large. As I wrote to Wood, “Godly character can and will advance the gospel, but the lack thereof will certainly inhibit the spread of the gospel.”

In the interview, Oberg and Wood talk about how they wrestle with the integrity of writings like Welchel’s:

• Does the newly revealed information stand up to what we know of contemporaneous records?

• Are its claims in the words of these newly revealed eyewitnesses compatible with what else we know of the worldview of Azusa Street eyewitnesses? Case in point, Welchel’s book talks about eyewitnesses recording prophecies of what would come in a hundred years when what we know of Azusa Street participants is that they were expecting an immediate return of Christ. One hundred years from then was not something people at Azusa Street were concerned about.

• Can the “facts” Welchel presents be independently verified by reputable sources? A large volume of material was written down by eyewitnesses at the time or immediately after the Azusa Street revival, so there is much to compare with.

• If the new facts cannot be independently verified, are they probable, meaning are they highly likely to have happened based on what else we know of events at the time?

• And short of that, are they even plausible? Is the new data reasonable? Does it make sense from what we know of how God works in the world or how the world works?

“Truth matters,” Oberg says in the podcast. It matters because truth impacts faith. Just as great stories can inspire faith in others, so too can great stories discovered to be fabricated destroy faith in others and undermine what we believe to be true otherwise.

As Oberg adds, when we present such fabrications as fact, “we risk undermining the credibility of all truth.” Fabricated stories about faith set us up for disillusionment when the God we proport to believe in does not come through in like manner for us.

In the podcast, Wood refers to Ryan Burge, a researcher who has demonstrated that the 1990s was one of the most pivotal eras in modern Christian history. That decade witnessed a significant shift in the US population away from Christianity and toward disbelief, a trend that continues to this day. People in this nation are becoming more and more doubtful of claims of faith.

Wood notes that it doesn’t help when we make claims that are demonstrably false or historically implausible. It only adds to the trend in disbelief. In response, Wood refers to 1 John 4:1, which exhorts us not to “believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God.”

I highly recommend both the podcast interview and Oberg’s paper, especially if you want to understand the value of critical thinking. But also if you appreciate expertise. We live in an age when cynicism seeks to erase the credibility of expertise, sadly, in just about every field of learning. Wood and Oberg are good examples of how credible expertise wins over cynicism.

We live in a time when the pillars of truth and credibility are crumbling all around us. While we may think skepticism as demonstrated by Oberg and Wood only contributes to the decay, skepticism that reveals truth reverses moral decline and combats deathly cynicism.

You can listen to the Influence podcast here: Influence Magazine | Myths of the Azusa Street Revival. Ruthie Oberg’s paper can be found here: Review of Tommy Welchel’s “They Told Me Their Stories: Children and Youth of Azusa” – Ruthie Oberg. To learn more about the Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center and the resources it has available for researchers, go to this site: iFPHC.org | Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center.