The Day Everyone Became an Expert

There used to be a man named Walter Cronkite who read the news. He didn't tell you what to think about it. He didn't editorialize, nor did didn't react. He gathered the facts, reported them clearly, and trusted the people on the other side of the broadcast to arrive at their own conclusions. It seems almost quaint now, the idea that someone in a position of influence would simply tell you what happened and stop there.

That era is gone and its departure has cost us more than we tend to acknowledge.

We live in a world that has elevated personal opinion to the level of universal truth. It is not a small shift. Cultural relativism has moved from the fringes of academic theory into the operating system of everyday life, and the consequences are everywhere. There are seemingly no absolutes. No single source of truth. No agreed-upon standard by which competing claims can be evaluated. Only what a person personally believes at this particular moment, increasingly that belief is treated as beyond challenge, because to challenge it is to challenge the person.

This is not a neutral development, it is a crisis.

Traffic laws are a small but telling example. There was a time when running a stop sign carried consequences. Now the person who actually stops at one risks being honked at by the driver behind them who has decided the sign is optional. No one likes being told what to do. The discomfort of external standards has been replaced by the comfort of personal discretion and we have quietly agreed, as a society, to call that progress.

What makes this particularly challenging for a disciple is that the Bible is no longer a broadly accepted starting point for truth. It once functioned, at least in the cultural background, as a shared reference point as a document with weight, with history, with authority that even non-believers recognized as serious. Today it is increasingly viewed as one ancient text among many, carrying no more inherent authority than any other collection of stories from a distant time.

Honest navigation requires honest charts, and the chart has changed. The harbor pilot who entered these waters thirty years ago is sailing a different course today. What has not changed is the truth itself. The standard has not shifted because the opinion climate has shifted. The Bible does not become less true when it becomes less popular. God does not become less sovereign when the cultural consensus decides He is optional. The follower of Christ is not called to maintain a truth that is subject to public approval he is called to align his life with a truth that exists entirely independent of what any given moment thinks about it.

That is the challenge, it is also the freedom. When your guide is the truth rather than the prevailing opinion, you are not required to update your convictions every time the cultural weather changes. You are not obligated to poll the room before deciding what you believe. You are not anxious about what the influencer with the most followers thinks about the matter. You have a source that does not require trending to remain authoritative.

The day everyone became an expert is also the day the disciple's calling became clearer. Not easier, but clearer. In a world drowning in opinion, the person who has a fixed point of reference stands out. Not because they are loud or argumentative, but because they are settled in a way that most people are quietly desperate to find.

That settledness is not arrogance it is followership. And followership, as we will explore in the articles ahead, is the most countercultural thing a person can practice in a world that has decided everyone should be leading.