Donald Trump Has a Problem the Bible Saw Coming

Years ago, I worked for an organisation that decided to run one of those staff satisfaction surveys.

You know the kind. Everyone gets an anonymous questionnaire asking how they feel about their job, their workplace and, perhaps most dangerously, their managers.

The results came back.

They weren't good.

Staff morale was low, and those of us in middle management were given the job of figuring out what to do about it.

So we did what managers do.

We had meetings.

Lots of meetings.

We went through the survey results, talked about what people were unhappy about, kicked around ideas and eventually came up with a plan. I actually thought some of our suggestions were pretty good.

Then we presented them to our boss.

He listened to the first idea and explained why it wouldn't work.

Then the second.

Same problem.

The third apparently had issues too.

One by one, he poked holes in virtually everything we had come up with until there wasn't much of our plan left.

Then he told us what he thought we should do.

And, wouldn't you know it, his idea was excellent.

At least, that was the conclusion we eventually reached.

Our boss was more than a little narcissistic, and by this stage most of us had learned how these meetings worked. You could disagree with him if you wanted to. You just needed to be prepared for a very long meeting in which you would eventually discover that you agreed with him after all.

So we nodded.

"Yep, that could work."

"Good idea."

"I think the staff will respond well to that."

And off we went to implement the boss's solution to the problem of unhappy staff.

There was just one small problem.

Nobody had told him what he actually needed to hear.

Who Tells You When You're Wrong?

Do you have someone in your life who can tell you that you're wrong? I don't mean someone who disagrees with you on Facebook, or the relative who seems to regard correcting you as their spiritual gift. I mean someone you genuinely respect and listen to; someone who can sit across the table from you and say, "Dan, I think you've got this wrong," without first having to calculate what it might cost them.

I suspect that is a more important question than we realise, because the more power a person accumulates, the easier it becomes to construct a world in which they are always right.

People are remarkably good at learning what those in authority want from them. We figure out which opinions get rewarded, which criticisms provoke anger, which subjects are best avoided and which version of events the boss prefers. Eventually, nobody needs to be explicitly told to agree. Everyone simply learns how the room works.

The danger is that the person at the centre can begin to mistake agreement for confirmation. If everyone around you keeps telling you that you're right, perhaps you really are. Or perhaps you have simply made it so unpleasant to disagree with you that the people willing to do so have gradually disappeared.

You can see this happen in workplaces, churches and families. You can also see it in politics. Watch any powerful political leader for long enough and one of the most revealing things about them is the kind of people who remain in their inner circle. Do they keep people around who are willing to challenge them, question their decisions and occasionally tell them something they really don't want to hear? Or does the circle gradually fill with people who have learned that enthusiasm is rewarded and dissent is expensive?

There is a wonderfully strange story in the Old Testament about exactly this problem.

Four Hundred Prophets Said Yes

The story is found in 1 Kings 22, roughly 2,800 years ago. By this point in the biblical story, the nation that had once been united under kings like David and Solomon had split in two. The northern kingdom kept the name Israel, while the southern kingdom became known as Judah. They had separate governments, separate kings and a complicated relationship that shifted between cooperation and conflict.

At the time of this story, Ahab was king of Israel and Jehoshaphat was king of Judah, and the two happened to be on friendly terms. Ahab had his eye on a place called Ramoth-gilead, a city that Israel claimed but which was controlled by the neighbouring kingdom of Aram. He wanted it back, and while Jehoshaphat was visiting, Ahab asked whether Judah would join Israel in going to war to reclaim it.

Jehoshaphat was willing to help, but before committing troops to the fight, he wanted to know what God thought about the idea. So Ahab gathered together around four hundred prophets and asked them a straightforward question: Should we go to war against Ramoth-gilead, or should we leave it alone?

The response could hardly have been more encouraging. The prophets told Ahab to go because God would hand the city over to him. One of them, a man named Zedekiah, even made himself a pair of iron horns and used them as a prop while announcing that Ahab would gore the Arameans until they were destroyed. The other prophets agreed. Go to war. God is with you. You are going to win.

For some reason, Jehoshaphat wasn't convinced. Despite having just heard from hundreds of prophets, he asked Ahab whether there was another prophet of the Lord they could consult. As it happened, there was. His name was Micaiah, and Ahab immediately explained why he hadn't invited him in the first place.

"I hate him because he never prophesies anything good about me, but always bad."

Jehoshaphat thought that was a terrible reason to exclude him, so Ahab reluctantly sent someone to fetch Micaiah. On the way to see the king, the messenger decided to give Micaiah some helpful advice. Every other prophet had given Ahab the same favourable prediction, he explained, so it would be best if Micaiah did the same. "Let your word agree with theirs, and speak favourably."

Micaiah replied that he would say whatever God told him to say.

When he arrived, Ahab asked him exactly the same question he had asked everyone else. Should they attack Ramoth-gilead?

To everyone's surprise, Micaiah initially agreed with the other prophets. He told Ahab to attack and assured him that he would be victorious. Ahab immediately knew something was wrong. The text doesn't tell us whether Micaiah was being sarcastic, although it certainly reads that way, but whatever was happening between the two men, Ahab wasn't buying it. He demanded that Micaiah tell him the truth.

So Micaiah did.

He told Ahab that he had seen a vision of Israel scattered across the hills like sheep without a shepherd. Their master was gone, he said, and the people should simply return home in peace. Ahab immediately turned to Jehoshaphat and complained that this was precisely why he hadn't wanted Micaiah there. He had known the man would have nothing positive to say about him.

Micaiah continued. He described another vision in which God was sitting on a throne surrounded by the heavenly host, discussing how Ahab might be enticed into attacking Ramoth-gilead and meeting his death there. Eventually, according to Micaiah's vision, a spirit volunteered to deceive Ahab by becoming a lying spirit in the mouths of his prophets. The hundreds of reassuring predictions Ahab had just received, Micaiah claimed, were leading him towards disaster.

Zedekiah, the prophet who had made the iron horns, did not appreciate that assessment. He walked over and struck Micaiah across the face. Ahab then ordered Micaiah to be taken away and thrown into prison, where he was to survive on bread and water until the king returned safely from battle. Micaiah had one final thing to say as he was taken away: if Ahab came home safely, then God had never spoken through him.

Ahab went to war anyway.

He did take one interesting precaution. Before entering the battle, Ahab disguised himself, apparently hoping the enemy wouldn't realise that he was the king. It was a sensible move because the king of Aram had specifically instructed his commanders to concentrate their efforts on killing Ahab. For a while, the disguise worked.

Then an Aramean soldier drew his bow and fired an arrow without aiming at anyone in particular. Somehow, the arrow found a small gap between two sections of Ahab's armour and struck him. The wounded king remained propped up in his chariot as the battle continued, but by sunset he was dead.

The four hundred prophets had told Ahab exactly what he wanted to hear.

Micaiah had told him the one thing he didn't.

Ahab listened to the four hundred.

When Political Leaders Go to War

There is one detail in this story that makes it particularly uncomfortable to read right now.

Ahab isn't asking his prophets whether he should raise taxes, build a road or change some obscure piece of government policy. He is asking whether he should take his country to war. If he gets this decision wrong, other people will pay for it. Soldiers will fight because he tells them to fight. Families will lose sons and daughters. People living on the other side of the border, most of whom had no part in creating the conflict, may lose their homes or their lives.

That is precisely the kind of decision for which a leader needs people around them who are prepared to say things they don't want to hear.

We don't have to reach very far into history to see why. Right now, one of the most powerful countries in the world is once again deeply involved in a conflict with Iran. Military strikes have been ordered, threats have been exchanged, ships and aircraft have been moved into position, and decisions made by a relatively small number of people in secure rooms have consequences for millions of people who will never enter those rooms.

I have no idea what is said inside them. Most of us don't. Perhaps there are people around the table arguing fiercely against the president. Perhaps military commanders, intelligence officials and advisers are presenting uncomfortable evidence and having their objections taken seriously. I sincerely hope they are.

Because that is the question Ahab's story leaves hanging over every leader who has the power to send other people to war.

Who is allowed to tell you that you're wrong?

The frightening thing about Ahab isn't simply that he made a disastrous decision. Leaders have made disastrous decisions throughout history. It is that, before making it, he had somehow assembled a room in which almost everybody was telling him the same thing.

Four hundred voices said yes.

One voice said no.

And we know which one Ahab wanted to hear.

The People Who Tell Us What We Don't Want to Hear

There are a few things I want to take away from this strange story.

The first is that not everyone who affirms you is your friend, and not everyone who speaks against you is your enemy. Sometimes the person telling you that everything will be fine simply wants to keep you happy. Meanwhile, the person asking the awkward question may be taking a considerable risk because they care about what happens to you.

That means we need to pay attention to more than the advice itself. We should also pay attention to what it costs someone to give it. If agreeing with me brings approval, access or opportunity while disagreeing with me risks damaging the relationship, I should probably take the disagreement especially seriously.

Numbers can fool us too. Four hundred people believing something does not make it true, just as being the lone dissenter does not make someone a prophet. Consensus matters, particularly when it comes from people with genuine expertise, but we should be suspicious when everybody in a room reaches the same conclusion too easily. Healthy groups usually contain questions, qualifications and competing perspectives. When they don't, there may be a reason.

Power complicates this even further. The more authority you have, the less likely people are to speak freely around you. That applies to presidents and CEOs, but also to pastors, parents, teachers, managers and anyone else whose approval matters to somebody. If you have power over people, silence cannot automatically be interpreted as agreement. You may simply have made disagreement unsafe.

It is also worth noticing what we do when criticism arrives. Most of us are remarkably talented at finding reasons to dismiss information we don't like. The person is jealous. They're negative. They don't understand the situation. They've always had something against us. Occasionally those explanations will be true, but if everyone who challenges us eventually ends up in one of those categories, the common denominator might be worth examining.

Perhaps the most practical thing we can do is deliberately keep a few people close who are unimpressed by us. People who don't need our approval, don't benefit from flattering us and know us well enough to recognise when we are kidding ourselves. Then, when they tell us something we would rather not hear, resist the urge to immediately defend ourselves and ask one uncomfortable question instead:

What if they're right?

So, Who Are Your Prophets?

Ahab had plenty of prophets. What he didn't have was many people he was willing to listen to.

I think there is a difference.

Most of us can find people who will tell us what we want to hear. These days, we don't even need to know them personally. Social media algorithms quickly learn what keeps us clicking and feed us more of it. We follow commentators who see the world much as we do, subscribe to writers who reinforce our instincts and quietly unfollow the people who irritate us.

Even AI can become part of the problem. Ask the same question in slightly different ways and it is remarkably easy to steer a chatbot towards the answer you were hoping for. If we aren't careful, we can use AI less like a source of challenge and more like one of Ahab's agreeable prophets: "Tell me why I'm right. Tell me why they're wrong. Tell me why this thing I've already decided to do is actually a great idea."

The harder thing is keeping close the people who occasionally make us uncomfortable.

So, who are your prophets?

Who has permission to tell you that you're wrong? Who can question a decision you've already made, challenge an opinion you've become attached to, or point out something about yourself that everyone else is too polite to mention?

I can think of a few people in my own life. I don't always enjoy hearing what they have to say. Sometimes my first instinct is to explain why they've misunderstood me, why the situation is more complicated than they realise, or why this particular occasion is different.

But perhaps that first flash of defensiveness is sometimes a reason to listen a little more carefully.

Ahab's mistake wasn't that he sought advice. He sought plenty of it. His mistake was deciding beforehand which voices were worth hearing.

Nearly three thousand years later, we have more voices available to us than Ahab could possibly have imagined.

The question is whether we are actually listening to any that might tell us no.