Racism is alive and well in America. We know this because a high-profile black man was recently arrested in New England for breaking into his own home. He accused the police officer of racial profiling, and said he wouldn’t have been stopped if he was white. A college newspaper picked up the story the next day, and from there the incident gathered nationwide momentum until the President got involved. Two weeks later, it’s still on the news, and it has spawned a nationwide conversation about equality.

This is how we get our information! We are told a story by the news media, and we are expected to infer from that story a wide-reaching cultural truth. A black man was mistakenly arrested, so that proves that we still have some racial walls to scale in our country? It is meaningless, a logical fallacy, but our media diet is founded on such principles, and we react very strongly when we hear of things like this.

I think we so quickly accept this reasoning because we are wired this way. We have an innate need for a representative: someone to be the face of whatever movement or idea we want to uphold or condemn, someone to be punished so that we may take up his cause or blame him for all of our problems.

Then one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, “You know nothing at all! You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”

He did not say this on his own, but as high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, and not only for that nation but also for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one. So from that day on they plotted to take his life. (John 11:49-53, NIV)