What’s The Difference Between Spin and Deception?

When Christian businesses, churches, schools, and non-profits present themselves to the public, they’re free to spin their news, but not to deceive people.

“Spinning their news” means trying to see the silver lining of a bad year, drawing attention to your success, looking for unusual benefits to setbacks, placing failures in a broader context, and acknowledging the spiritual glories that come from enduring hardships with humility.

Likewise, putting your best foot forward is not necessarily deceptive. Tidying up before company comes over is simply polite–and this is true whether “company” means friends you’ve invited for dinner, potential investors, prospective parents, customers, and so forth.

Deception is different, though.

Deception isn’t the attempt to create a good impression. It’s the attempt to create a false impression.

Sometimes deception involves telling lies outright, but not always, and this is one of the reasons there can be a blurry line between spin and deception.

Deception might involve gerrymandering the truth to such a point that people can’t tell what has actually happened. Spin acknowledges what has happened, deception denies it. Spin looks for the silver lining, deception refuses to acknowledge the rain cloud.

Spin is chiefly concerned with perspective. Deception aims to loophole the public with verbal technicalities, and create plausible deniability.

Deception carefully chooses ambiguous words and phrases that are not technically false in isolation, but—when taken together in their context—create a false image. Deception is inconclusive while claiming finality, vague while claiming clarity.

The deceiver refuses responsibility for the false image he creates. The deceiver says, “People form their own impressions,” and does not attempt to clarify confusion.

At times, the line between spin and deception can be quite thin. The most effective instances of deception are close enough to spin that nobody on the inside feels morally obligated to put their foot down and demand the truth be told. They hear the deception, cringe, and say, “I guess that is true, kind of, if you disregard a great many inconvenient and unacknowledged facts…” and move on, repeating platitudes about “choosing your battles carefully.”

Of course, we live in a time wherein most people quickly despair of making careful distinctions. Unless the options are binary and obvious, we throw up our hands and say, “How can anyone possibly tell these things apart? Whose to say, really?”

But it’s a Christian duty to make careful distinctions, to “search out a matter,” as Solomon says.

My exhortation here is not that every Christian must publicly decry every possible case of deception.

Rather, Christians must be on guard of those who “practice deception” (Prov 12:20), people who are highly skilled at deceiving others because they’ve done it so often.

Don’t do business with practiced deceivers.