The Thirty-Eight ‘Firsts’: On Forwarded Outrage, the Ninth Commandment, and the Christian Discipline of the Share Button
By: Thomas Lee Abshier, ND
Date: May 22, 2026
Fellowship Discussion Essay | May 22, 2026
Occasion. A friend named Mark Smith forwarded to his Facebook circle a list of thirty-eight items styled as “President Obama’s impressive accomplishments.” The list itself is attributed to Tom Ririe and has been in circulation, in some form, for more than a decade — copy-pasted, lightly edited, refreshed for a new audience every election cycle. Mark added item thirty-eight himself. The list opens with a sarcastic frame (“Quit trashing Obama’s accomplishments”) and closes with a sarcastic frame (“such an accomplished individual … in the eyes of the ignorant”). The thirty-eight items in between describe Obama variously as a stoner, a foreign-aid fraud, a Social-Security-number imposter, a violator of multiple laws, a tyrant who terminated American space-flight, a man who cancelled the National Day of Prayer, and an ex-president who tried to impeach his successor. The whole document is offered as a single piece of mockery: here is what your opponents call accomplishment.
This essay is not a fact-check of the list. It is a fellowship-discussion essay about what happens to Christian witness when forwarded outrage is treated as legitimate political speech, and about what the Ninth Commandment actually requires of those of us — and I include myself, plainly — who pass things along because they confirm what we already believe.
I. What is right about the underlying frustration
The list does not arise from nowhere. It arises from a real and not-illegitimate well of conservative Christian grievance about the Obama presidency, and any fellowship essay that wants to be heard by people who share that grievance has to begin by saying so. I share substantial parts of it myself.
There is a real argument that the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate was a constitutional and prudential overreach. There is a real argument that the executive-action route on immigration policy (the DACA pathway in particular) circumvented Congress and weakened the separation of powers. There is a real argument that the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was premature in a way that embarrassed both the Nobel Committee and its recipient — a fact Obama himself acknowledged in his acceptance address. There is a real argument that the administration’s posture toward American manufacturing, coal communities, and religious-liberty plaintiffs was hostile in ways those communities are entitled to name. There is a real argument that the broader cultural moment of those eight years included a significant erosion of the public role of Christianity in American life, and that the administration accelerated rather than slowed that erosion. None of those arguments depends on the list. All of them can be made carefully, in the daylight, with primary sources, and they have been made carefully by serious conservative thinkers — Yuval Levin, Ross Douthat, Robert George, Rod Dreher, R. R. Reno. The fellowship can read those writers and engage them. We can disagree with our brothers and sisters on the political left and do so honestly.
What the list does is something else. The list is not a careful argument. It is the form of an argument used to deliver an emotion — contempt — wrapped in a parody of accomplishment. The opening sarcasm names what is actually being transmitted: quit trashing Obama’s accomplishments. That is not how someone who has accomplishments to defend would speak. It is how someone speaks when they want the reader to feel that the opposition is contemptible. The list is the vehicle; the contempt is the cargo.
This distinction matters because the legitimate critique is poisoned by the vehicle. Mark’s actual conservative neighbors — the ones who hold genuine, defensible objections to the Obama policy record — find that the moment they speak, they are mistaken for the people who forwarded the list. And the moment they are mistaken for the people who forwarded the list, the careful argument is over. The list trains the political opposition to dismiss everyone who criticizes Obama as a person who believes the items on the list. It then trains the political ally to repeat the items on the list as though they were equivalent to the careful argument. Both effects are losses for the conservative Christian witness, and both effects are produced by the act of forwarding.
II. A taxonomy of the thirty-eight items
I am not going to walk the list item by item. The point of this essay is not to be a fact-checker. But I do want to sort the thirty-eight items into kinds, because the kinds tell us what is happening underneath.
Kind 1: Outright falsehoods and conspiracy theories. Items 1 through 3 fall here. Obama is described as the first president photographed smoking marijuana (no such photograph from his presidency exists; he wrote in Dreams from My Father about teenage drug use, which is a different matter); the first president to apply for college aid as a foreign student and then deny he was a foreigner (no documentary evidence has ever surfaced of any such application, and the claim originated as a satirical hoax published by a website that retracted it); the first president to hold a Social Security number from a state where he had never lived (the Social Security Administration has publicly explained that mid-1970s number assignment was based on the regional processing center receiving the application, not the applicant’s state of residence, and Obama’s number was issued in 1977 while he was living in Hawaii). These are not policy critiques. They are claims of fact, and the claims are false. They are repeated because they fit a story, not because they are true. Item 15 — that Obama “cancelled the National Day of Prayer” and declared America “no longer a Christian nation” — belongs to the same kind. Obama issued a National Day of Prayer proclamation every year of his presidency; he declined to host the public White House service that the Bush administration had hosted, which is a different and much smaller thing. The “no longer a Christian nation” quote, from a 2006 speech, said in full: Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers. That is a descriptive statement about American religious pluralism, not a renunciation of the country’s Christian heritage. To excise the word just and report the rest as Obama denying America is Christian is to bear false witness in the literal sense — to report what was not said as though it had been said.
Kind 2: Partisan framing of ordinary or contested presidential actions. Items 4 through 13 and many of the later items fall here. The credit-rating downgrade of 2011 happened under Obama; Standard & Poor’s explicitly cited Republican-led debt-ceiling brinksmanship as a factor in the downgrade, which complicates the “first president to preside over” framing considerably. War Powers Act violations are alleged against every president since Nixon, including Reagan in Grenada and Clinton in the Balkans. Required purchase of a product (item 7) is a real complaint about the ACA’s individual mandate but is not without precedent — Social Security contributions, military draft registration, and mandatory automobile insurance in most states are all legally compelled transactions, and the constitutionality of the ACA mandate was tested and resolved at the Supreme Court. The “first to tell a CEO to resign” framing of the Chrysler bailout (item 13) ignores that the Chrysler CEO was negotiating in real time over federal bailout terms — a transaction, not an ambush. None of these is unanswerable. Each could be a real argument. But each is presented as a unique moral first, and that framing is false even where the underlying complaint has substance.
Kind 3: Personal-conduct grievances. Items 26, 30, 31, 32, 33 — golf rounds, vacations, personal trainers, dog trainers. Eisenhower played roughly eight hundred rounds of golf in eight years. Wilson and Trump golfed prodigiously. Every modern presidential family has had personnel, transportation, security, and recreation costs that ran to taxpayer expense, because the office and the family are inseparable for security reasons. To list these as moral firsts is not analysis; it is class-grievance theater. The reader is supposed to feel that the Obama family lived above the people, and the items are dressed up as accountability when their function is resentment. Whatever one thinks of the Obama family’s personal style, calling these items “firsts” is straightforwardly false.
Kind 4: Distorted-quote items. Item 34 — that Obama said the Islamic call to prayer is “the most beautiful sound on earth” — comes from a 2007 New York Times interview in which Obama, reminiscing about growing up partly in Indonesia, said the Arabic call to prayer was “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.” A childhood memory of an evocative sound becomes, in the forwarded list, evidence of crypto-Islamic loyalty. The quote is real; the framing inverts its meaning. Item 36 and 37 — that Obama told the military to pay for their own war insurance and then called them unpatriotic for objecting — describe a Congressional Budget Office proposal that Obama did not endorse, and a White House response that did not occur. These are not exaggerations of true things. They are reports of events that did not happen.
Kind 5: Genuine policy critiques mislabeled as moral monstrosities. The pieces of legitimate conservative argument — that the administration overstepped on coal regulation, on immigration enforcement, on executive action, on inspector-general independence — are scattered through the list, but each is dressed as a unique evil rather than a contested policy choice. The reader who agrees with the conservative position on coal regulation is invited to feel that the disagreement is not a policy difference but a moral abomination. This is the rhetorical move at the heart of the list, and it is the one most corrosive to honest political life.
Kind 6: The added item, number 38. Mark added this himself: First ex President who was involved in trying to impeach His successor President Donald Trump! The factual claim is empty — ex-presidents have no role in impeachment, which is a House process — and the historical claim that no ex-president has ever criticized a successor is preposterous. Theodore Roosevelt ran against his own successor in 1912. John Quincy Adams returned to the House as a constant adversary of every president who followed him. Jimmy Carter has been a persistent critic of every Republican administration since his defeat. Obama, in fact, refrained from public criticism of Trump for longer than most modern ex-presidents have refrained from criticism of their successors. The item is invented. It was invented by Mark, in good faith presumably, and added to a list of inventions, because the inventional logic of the list invites continued invention. Each forwarder is given permission, by the form, to add their own.
III. Why the list works: the Schiff Syndrome in operation
The Christos Theological Grammar (v1.4, Part I, §2) names a mechanism that the fellowship has been studying since the What Is Truth essay last year. Susan called it the Schiff Syndrome — the question of how intelligent and basically decent people come to believe and repeat things that are false. The Grammar’s diagnosis is fourfold:
- Uncertainty creates discomfort — the mind cannot tolerate ambiguity.
- Pattern completion is automatic — we fill gaps unconsciously.
- Coherence trumps accuracy — we prefer stories that fit over facts that don’t.
- Identity precedes evidence — we reason from who we are, not from what we see.
The thirty-eight firsts are a perfect specimen. The reader already holds a story about Obama: that he was a foreign-influenced, anti-American, anti-Christian president who damaged the country. That story may be partly defensible on policy grounds; that is not the issue. The issue is what happens when the story is already in place and a list arrives that fits it. Pattern completion takes over. Each item is processed not against external sources but against the internal story. The items that fit are nodded at. The items that are obviously absurd (the dog trainer at $102,000, the personal trainer flown in weekly) are not absurd to the reader, because they fit the vibe of the story. The dog trainer line, by the way, originates in a misreading of a salary line item for a military aide whose responsibilities included the family pet; the actual figure was much smaller and the role was much larger. But the figure does not need to be true to function. It needs only to fit.
The Grammar’s social-economy diagnosis applies equally:
- Status from being distinctive, not correct. The reader who forwards the list signals tribal membership. The reward is fellow-conservatives nodding; the cost of being wrong is borne by no one, because no one in the reader’s circle is going to fact-check the items.
- “Secret knowledge” as social currency. The list claims to expose what the mainstream has hidden. The reader is flattered as one of the few who can see.
- Rejection becomes evidence of suppression. When a fact-checker rates the list false, the rating itself becomes proof that the fact-checker is part of the problem. The list is therefore unfalsifiable in form, exactly as the redemption-movement essay last week described an unfalsifiable conspiracy doctrine.
- The cost of being wrong is replaced by the reward of being contrarian. The forwarder is admired by his circle for forwarding. Whether the items are true does not enter the social transaction.
These are not partisan observations. They apply to the equivalent lists about Trump that circulate in left-leaning Christian circles, to the equivalent lists about Biden that circulate elsewhere, to the equivalent lists about every president of the last fifty years. The mechanism is the same. The fellowship has to learn to see it independent of which side it currently flatters.
IV. The Ninth Commandment is not a partisan amendment
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour (Exodus 20:16).
The commandment does not contain an exception for political opponents. It does not contain an exception for a president whose policies one opposes. It does not contain an exception for items that one believes to be probably true but has not verified. The Hebrew construction reaches further than perjury in a formal court; it reaches every report we make of another person to a third party. Thou shalt not raise a false report: put not thine hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness. Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil; neither shalt thou speak in a cause to decline after many to wrest judgment (Exodus 23:1-2). The very phrase the King James translators use — raise a false report — addresses the act of repeating and amplifying. The forwarder is not the originator of the report, but the forwarder raises the report; he gives it new life, new readers, new credibility. The commandment is not silent about that.
The proverbs make the standard tighter, not looser:
He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him (Proverbs 18:13). The forwarder who has not checked the items has answered before hearing.
He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh and searcheth him (Proverbs 18:17). The list, read alone, seems just. The Christian’s obligation is to be the neighbor who searches.
A false witness shall not be unpunished, and he that speaketh lies shall not escape (Proverbs 19:5).
A man that beareth false witness against his neighbour is a maul, and a sword, and a sharp arrow (Proverbs 25:18).
The neighbor in view is whoever is being spoken of. Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) settled the question of who counts as a neighbor: anyone, including the one we are inclined to despise, including the one from the wrong nation, including the political opponent. Obama is our neighbor in the precise theological sense that Christ established. The Christian who would not stand in a courtroom and swear to the truth of items 1, 2, 3, 15, 26, 28, 34, 36, 37 has no warrant to forward those items on Facebook. The medium does not absolve the witness. The casual tone does not absolve the witness. The fact that everyone is doing it does not absolve the witness — thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.
V. Truth is not a partisan resource — it is ontology
Here the Christos framework descends to its load-bearing level. Truth is not a debating tool. Truth is not a strategic asset deployed when convenient and set aside when inconvenient. Truth is the structure of reality itself.
The Conscious Point Physics work the Hyperphysics Institute has been doing for the last several years argues, with mathematical rigor we have begun to publish in peer-reviewed venues, that reality is constituted by conscious points sustained in being by God’s mind. In him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28) is not a metaphor; it is an ontological description. The physical world is real because God holds it in being as a consistent, definite structure. Truth, then, is the alignment of what we say with that structure. A true claim corresponds to what is. A false claim describes what is not. The false claim does not merely fail; it creates, in the mind of the speaker and the mind of the hearer, a mental model that diverges from reality. That divergence is not neutral. The model occupies attention. The model shapes subsequent inference. The model travels — in the case of a Facebook share, to several hundred more minds — and the divergence is multiplied.
This is what the Bible has always called bearing false witness. The framework of conscious-point physics names the same offense in ontological terms: the construction and propagation of a reality-map that is misaligned with the actual structure of being. That is what every false item on the list is. That is what the list as a whole is.
For a community whose whole project is the manifestation of Kingdom culture — which is to say, the cultivation of patterns of life in which the structure of being is honored and worked with rather than contradicted and resisted — the discipline of truth is not a side virtue. It is constitutive. The Kingdom of God is at hand (Mark 1:15) is not just an announcement of arrival; it is an announcement of a regime in which the Word is the foundation. In the beginning was the Word (John 1:1). To traffic in falsehood for political reward is to repudiate the foundation while claiming to build on it.
There is no Kingdom shortcut around an accurate description. The Christian who lies for Christ’s sake does not lie for Christ’s sake. The Christian who repeats what he has not verified, against a neighbor he has been instructed to love, has chosen a tribe over a Lord.
VI. The spirit of the content
I want to be specific about what is being transmitted under cover of the items. The list is not primarily about Obama. It is about marking a boundary between us and the ignorant. Read the closing line again: I feel much better now. I had been under the impression he hadn’t been doing ANYTHING … Such an accomplished individual … in the eyes of the ignorant! The mockery is the point. The items are the pretext. The function of the document, socially, is to invite the reader to laugh at people who voted for Obama, who admire him, who think he was a competent president. The laughter is the reward for the share.
Christ was specific about this posture. Whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council; but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire (Matthew 5:22). Raca — empty-headed. Thou fool — morally vacant. The list calls Obama supporters the ignorant. That is precisely the register Christ forbade. The forbidding is not weaker because the target is a political opponent rather than a member of one’s church; if anything, the political-opponent case is harder, which is why Christ extends the command across that boundary as well: Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you (Matthew 5:44).
I am not saying the forwarder hates anyone. I am saying that the vehicle he passed along carries hatred whether or not he personally bears any, and that the act of passing along amplifies what the vehicle carries. A Christian cannot remain neutral to the content he transmits. The signal he amplifies is, in part, his signal.
This is also a Christian-witness problem of a specific kind. The political and cultural fight the church is in right now is, in part, a fight about whether Christianity is a thinking faith — whether Christian conviction can be held by people who reason carefully, source claims, distinguish levels of evidence, and refuse to traffic in nonsense. Every viral forwarded list of the present kind is, in that fight, a defeat. The skeptical neighbor who reads Mark’s post is given evidence — false evidence, but evidence — that conservative Christianity is a tribe held together by shared willingness to repeat things that are not true. The witness the church is trying to make against secular materialism, against the new pagan cosmology, against the ascendant ideologies of self, is undermined every time a Christian shares a list he has not bothered to verify. The shared list says, to the unbelieving reader, you do not need to take us seriously. And the unbelieving reader, having been told, doesn’t.
VII. The discipline of the share button
The practical implication is concrete and discipline-shaped. Before a Christian forwards a political claim — about anyone, of any party — the standards that apply are not in dispute. They are scriptural and they are old:
Verify. Prove all things; hold fast that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). The triangulation method the Grammar lays out (multiple independent sources, predictive power, cross-examination, character of witnesses, coherence with established knowledge, testimony of the Spirit) is the practical form of that command. Use it.
Consider the source. A list with no author named, no source citations, no date of composition, and no specific events tied to specific places fails on the most basic triangulation step. Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God (1 John 4:1). The principle extends to the testing of every secondary witness — every list, every meme, every chain text.
Apply the standard symmetrically. The standard that applies to political claims about an opponent is the same standard that applies to political claims about an ally. The Christian who would dismiss as nonsense an analogous list about Trump must dismiss as nonsense an analogous list about Obama. A just weight and balance are the LORD’S (Proverbs 16:11). Asymmetric standards are forbidden weights. The Lord notices the scales.
When in doubt, do not share. In the multitude of words there wanteth not sin (Proverbs 10:19). The default disposition of the share button should be off. The burden of justification is on the forwarder, not on the reader. Let your communication be Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil (Matthew 5:37).
When you have shared what was not true, retract. I have done this myself, more than once, on this very kind of material. The retraction is brief, public, and unequivocal: I shared this; I have since learned it is not accurate; I am taking it down and I am sorry. The retraction recovers the integrity of the Christian witness. The silence, after one has been corrected, hardens the posture. Hardening is a worse sin than the original error.
VIII. Closing pastoral note — to Mark, and to Tom Ririe, and to me
This essay is not written to mock Mark Smith. Mark forwarded what reached him, and what reached him has been circulating for over a decade and has reached, by now, probably hundreds of thousands of Christians who have done exactly what he did with it. He is in a very large company, and many in that company are sincere disciples whose political frustration is legitimate and whose share-button discipline simply has not been taught.
It has not been taught because the church has been slow to recognize, until very recently, that the social-media share is a form of speech under the Ninth Commandment. The forwarded text is testimony. The retweet is testimony. The screenshot passed in a group chat is testimony. The standard that applies to a pulpit applies, in attenuated form, to each of these. The fellowship is one of the places where that standard can be learned, by the slow work of essays like this one and by the slower work of friends correcting friends gently, in private, without contempt of their own.
To Tom Ririe, whose original list this is — I do not know you. I assume you wrote what you wrote because something real in the Obama presidency angered you, and that not every angered conservative reaction to that presidency was wrong. I would say to you what I have to say to myself: anger is not a substitute for accuracy, and the Christian writer is held to a higher witness-standard than the cable-news commentator, the meme-maker, or the partisan operator. If God will hold us accountable for every idle word (Matthew 12:36), the words we write down and circulate are not idle; they are testimony. The list as it stands cannot survive that test. Some of its items are simply false. Almost all of its items conflate policy disagreement with moral monstrosity. Its closing line names the people it differs from as the ignorant, which is the precise epithet Christ forbade. Whatever it accomplishes in conservative comment threads, in the books that will be opened it accomplishes nothing for the Kingdom. It hurts the witness it purports to defend.
To Mark — keep posting. Keep arguing for what you believe is true and good for the country. Argue against Obama’s record; argue against any record you wish; conservative Christian voices are needed in the public square and you have the courage to be one of them. But verify before you forward. Apply to claims that flatter your politics the same skepticism you apply to claims that challenge them. When you make the conservative case, make it on what is true. The conservative case can be made on what is true. It does not need the thirty-eight firsts. The thirty-eight firsts are a millstone tied around the neck of the case you actually want to make.
To me, and to the fellowship — we are not exempt from any of this. The same essay can be written about lists we have nodded at, shared, or composed ourselves. The point is not that one side is honest and the other is not. The point is that the Kingdom is built on truth or it is not the Kingdom, and that we, who claim to be building Kingdom culture, are accountable for every report we raise.
These are the things that ye shall do; Speak ye every man the truth to his neighbour; execute the judgment of truth and peace in your gates: And let none of you imagine evil in your hearts against his neighbour; and love no false oath: for all these are things that I hate, saith the LORD.
— Zechariah 8:16-17
Word count: ~4,000.
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