By Adrian Pyle, Director of Chaplaincy and Connections
Some lies work not because they are plausible, but because they are told so well that they draw us in. They are delivered with warmth or confidence or just enough detail (or some combination of the three) to feel lived-in. We lean forward. We want them to be true. And before we realise it, we’re nodding along.
That’s why a story told by English comedian Bob Mortimer on the panel show ‘Would I Lie to You’, where participants try to decide whether the stories they hear are true or not, continues to have such a long afterlife. In the story, Mortimer recalls visiting the late musician, Chris Rea. After a long recording session, Rea kindly ran him a bath and, without much explanation, cracked a raw egg into the water. Mortimer goes on to claim that the experience was so oddly restorative that he has cracked an egg into his bath ever since.
With Rea’s recent death, the clip has resurfaced again, partly in tribute and partly because the story remains irresistible in its sheer oddness.
What made it work as a story wasn’t the claim itself. It was the way it was told. The opposing team didn’t want to believe it. You can see that plainly in the video. They were sceptical, incredulous, resistant. And yet, as Mortimer layered detail upon detail – the tone of voice, the bodily memory, the gentle lack of defensiveness – they found themselves cornered. They voted it as true not because they were convinced, but because they couldn’t dislodge the possibility that it might be. When it was finally revealed as a lie, their reaction wasn’t relief. It was disbelief. They knew it couldn’t be true and yet they had believed it anyway.
This kind of dynamic matters well beyond a comedic panel show.
We live in a time saturated with stories told with similar confidence and compression – stories about religion, politics, identity and belonging that are delivered so cleanly they leave no room for complexity. Once told often enough, and well enough, they begin to feel incontestable. Doubt is framed as naivety. Nuance as weakness. And whole communities are reduced to something that can fit into a sentence.
Part of my work with schools involves reflecting on the Characteristics of the Uniting Church, not as settled requirements but as live, unfinished practices. One of them, the characteristic concerned with faith development and the encouragement of wellbeing through worship, witness and service, is where these questions surface most sharply. It is often the place where people are trying to work out how to distinguish truth from distortion when religion itself is so frequently invoked as explanation, justification or blame.
That work is seldom tidy. It involves sitting with the discomfort that stories can be both compelling and misleading; that people can act from faith in ways that harm, and from faith in ways that heal; and that neither outcome can be understood without attending to context, history, power and interpretation. It asks us to slow down rather than rush to a verdict, and to notice how easily confidence masquerades as truth.
The danger of a well-told lie is not simply that it deceives. It is that it crowds out better stories – slower ones, harder ones, stories that resist being weaponised. Stories that insist that human beings, and the traditions they inhabit, are more layered than we would sometimes like.
Cracked eggs can be rinsed away. But the stories we soak in linger. And unless we learn to listen more carefully – not only to what is said, but to how and why – we may find ourselves believing things we never intended to believe at all.
