Today as I read my twitter feed I noticed a post by Andy Stanley that stated “In __ We Trust U.S. House of Representatives is filling in the blank tonight. Keep your fingers… Ooops, no crosses!” The tweet also contained a link to this article, which further explained the issue at hand.
When I saw the tweet my initial thought was one of shock and indignation that our nation’s motto might suddenly be changed, tonight! However, when I clicked on the link and read the article myself I realized they aren’t voting to change the motto, but rather they are voting to reaffirm it. The Senate made a similar decision in 2006.
Andy Stanley’s tweet was worded in such a way that it caused me and probably other followers to believe that the government is again ‘attacking Christians’ or trying to ‘remove God’ from our nation’s history. Yet, the article he posted made it incredibly clear that point of this vote tonight is to reaffirm the importance of our nation’s motto and our commitment to it.
Other articles also affirm that the vote is being led by Republicans who are looking to preserve the motto, not replace it.
In a statement Congressman J. Randy Forbes stated that the U.S. House of Representatives is seeking to “reaffirm our national motto and directly confront a disturbing trend of inaccuracies and omissions, misunderstandings of church and state, rogue court challenges, and efforts to remove God from the public domain by unelected bureaucrats”
My point is that someone with as much influence as Andy Stanley should know better than to misrepresent an issue, especially when he his linking you to a site that completely contradicts his insinuating remarks.
As communicators we need to recognize that we live in an instant information age and what we say needs to be accurate because the opportunity for public backlash is greater than it has ever been before.