The subtitle gives you a pretty clear idea of what this book’s all about—but it’s easy to miss the point. The book’s not about the crisis of social media, politics, and Christian community, but the knowledge crisis that grounds all these problems. This is a book on Christian epistemology. What is epistemology, you ask?

Doing epistemology feels a bit like looking at a mirror instead of the reflection in it. (12)

Bonnie Kristian knows how to make difficult topics understandable. She’s been published in the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, NBC, and the list goes on. As the current deputy editor at Christianity Today, she lives at the intersection of public life and the Christian world.

The world is in epistemic crisis. We don’t know how to know what we know any more. We’re flooded with more information than we’re made to handle so we mishandle it. After diagnosing the problem with clarity and wit, Kristian argues for a “commonsense humility,” a recognition that we don’t have the right perspective on every issue. In the face of a couple thousand years of church history, the odds are pretty slim that any of us have it right anyway.

Is it really likely that I—Bonnie Kristian, resident of Pennsylvania in the Year of Our Lord, 2022, unable to read Scripture in its original languages, still inadequately informed of church history, on Twitter too much, not 100 percent certain I could steer clear of well-intended heresy if I tried to explain the interrelation of the Trinity off the top of my head, loitering in the mushy middle in my theology of the sacraments (or maybe they’re merely ordinances?)—finally drew together all the threads of truth every saint before and around me failed to connect? C’mon. (157)

Kristian’s honesty is refreshing. This is valuable reading for anyone who’s ever been tempted to go to war on social media!

Kristian, Bonnie. Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community. Brazos, 2022.