I’m Jason Smith. By profession, I work in marketing and historical research. By inclination, I’m a skeptic with a historian’s allergy to convenient stories.
Most of my professional life is spent with primary sources — land records, aerial imagery, archival documents — evaluating claims that either hold up under scrutiny or don’t. That habit of mind doesn’t clock out when the subject changes. It’s the same approach I bring to religious history, political mythology, and the philosophical arguments that underwrite a lot of public certainty.
I didn’t arrive at skepticism through abstraction. I was raised Pentecostal, spent years inside its theology and assumptions, and left not because doubt crept in, but because certainty was so relentlessly rewarded even when the evidence for it was thin or nonexistent. That experience shaped both what I write about and the standard I hold it to.
Truth In Evidence exists because influential claims often travel further than the evidence behind them. Religious assertions, political narratives, historical myths — repeated with confidence long after their foundations eroded, or were never there. This site examines those claims: what exactly is being asserted, what the evidence actually shows, how the idea developed historically, and what gets ignored in the telling.
Christianity and its modern political expressions are a central focus. So is history when it gets selectively remembered, and politics when rhetoric has lapped reality by several lengths. The underlying questions — about God, moral authority, and the justification of power — run through most of what I write.
The standard here is simple: if an argument is defensible, it survives inspection. If it isn’t, reverence and repetition don’t change that. Faith, tradition, and sincerity explain why people believe things. They don’t make those things true.
