Editor's Note: This seven-part series explores the "veneer" of each channel of culture. It is inspired by the latest Q book by Jason Locy and TIm Willard: Veneer: Living Deeply in a Surface Society. If these ideas resonate with you, consider picking up a copy and diving deeper into this conversation.

"Seniors will have to find $12,500 for health care because Republicans voted to end Medicare."

"We’ve lost 26 million jobs … since (Obama’s) been president."

"One. That's the number of new drilling permits under the Obama administration since they came into office."

"A U.S. Government Accountability Office report says Planned Parenthood Federation of America cannot find some $1.3 billion given to it by the federal government from 2002 through 2008."

"Any child born prematurely, according to the president, in his own words, can be killed."

These were five recent statements scoring a “Pants on fire!” rating at PolitiFacts.com, the Pulitzer Prize-winning website of the St. Petersburg Times. The Times writers and editorial staff fact-check statements made by politicians and rate them on a Truth-O-Meter scale that goes from “True” to “Pants on fire!” If it scores “Pants on fire!” then “[the] statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim.”

Political statements that score a “Pants on fire!” rating are not, however, the worst abuses of political language. Far worse, I submit, is "truthiness." Stephen Colbert introduced the word “truthiness” during the premier episode of The Colbert Report, and it went on to become the "Word of the Year" according to both the American Dialect Society (in 2005) and Merriam-Webster (the dictionary people, in 2006).

“Truthiness,” according to Stephen Colbert, is “truth that comes from the gut, not books.” According to the American Dialect Society, it is “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.”

American politics is filled with truthiness. It is only human (given our brokenness) that we prefer what we wish to be true, rather than what we know to be true. And so we indulge in television talk show pundits who affirm what we wish, we vote for the politicians who promise us we’ll get what we wish for, and we punish the pundits and the politicians who do the much harder work of trying to tell us what is true.

Pants-on-fire lying in politics is a bad thing. But truthiness is worse. It is worse because it is less obvious, more insiduous, and because we can more easily allow ourselves and our favorite pundits and politicians to get away with it. But truthiness is politics with a veneer.

Tim Willard and Jason Locy in their book Veneer: Living Deeply in a Surface Society describes our society as one in which all of us to some extent “mimic the world of celebrity, buy in to the promise of consumption, and place our trust in the hope of progress.” This is no less true in the sphere of politics than in the sphere of pop culture. And it has been so since at least the presidential race between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960 – during which the “people of America were watching politics change as on-camera presence became just as important as policy” in the televised debate between the presidential hopefuls.

For a politician without veneer, Willard and Locy point us to the Old Testament’s King David – by a long shot not a perfect man or a perfect politician:

David’s life intrigues and confuses us. We know his baggage: adulterer, conspirator, and murderer. And we know his fame: giant killer, poet, great strategist, and king. But we don’t understand how someone with such a colorful and even wild past — how a king could dance in front of the masses the way he did — can still be called a man after God’s own heart.

David’s secret is that he was a man and a king without veneer. A king would could dance before the Lord with all his might and yet could conspire in murder for the sake of adultery — ultimately a man who was open to God’s rebuke and repentantly sought to adjust his ways to God’s ways, a man who cared more about God’s heart than about anyone else’s opinion.

I wonder what an American politics without veneer would look like? A politics in which truth mattered more than truthiness to us as citizens, in which seeking the heart of God mattered more to our politicians than their standing in the polls, and in which those of us who profess to be Christians were noted for doing what is fair and just to our neighbors, for being compassionate and loyal in our love, and for not taking ourselves too seriously, but instead taking God very seriously, indeed?

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Where have you witnessed "truthiness" in politics? What other elements of government do you think constitute "veneer?"

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