Truth is an act of charity not a weapon, says Ruth Okediji, recipient of Deseret News Civic Charity Award

Truth has the power to both divide and heal, according to Ruth Okediji — the difference is in how it is spoken, whether it’s wielded against another person or offered with charity and grace.

“There’s a difference between the truth that we speak as a weapon to destroy and a truth that we speak as an act of recognition,” said Okediji, a leading intellectual property law scholar and professor at Harvard Law School.

Okediji is the recipient of this year’s Deseret News Civic Charity award, which honors public figures whose faith is shaping civic life and strengthens democracy.

A devout Christian, Okediji is known for being open about her faith within Harvard Law School, where few faculty members identify as people of faith. “I am fully an academic and I am fully a person of faith,” Okediji said at Brigham Young University in 2024. “I am never less of one or the other.”

The Civic Charity award was launched last year as part of the publication’s 175th anniversary. Arthur Brooks, a Harvard Business School professor who is also Catholic, received the inaugural award.

Telling the truth is a moral and a civic responsibility, Okediji said in her address at the award gala on Thursday night. And if done right, it can heal a fractured nation.

“I would charge you tonight that one of the most fundamental responsibilities that we bear, particularly as people of faith, is that we must steward this capacity, this God-given capacity for truth receiving and truth telling,” she said.

Academic and person of faith

Okediji is a leading scholar of international intellectual-property law with a particular interest in the relationship between IP systems and economic and human development. She’s also a co-director of the Berkman Klein Center, a research center at Harvard that studies how the internet and digital technologies are changing society.

A champion of innovation and intellectual property law for the common good, she spearheaded Nigeria’s delegation that has made accessible copyrighted books to blind and visually impaired readers across the globe.

Okediji was 7 years old when she came to New York from Nigeria. Growing up in a family of parents who were both Christians and academics, she became drawn to integrating the two parts of her identity in her own life and work. She graduated from the University of Jos in Nigeria with a law degree and went on to a master’s and a doctorate in law at Harvard University.

On Harvard’s secular campus, Okediji has embraced her faith in academic life. She is the founder and faculty director of the Program on Biblical Law and Christian Legal Studies. In 2023, she helped create Faith & Veritas, a university-wide gathering of Harvard Christians, which convened earlier this year. More recently, she’s spoken about artificial intelligence and how its use could sustain human flourishing.

She’s drawn on her faith to minister to students. Okediji advised those who wondered whether their faith could coexist with their scholarship and has prayed in the classroom before class.

“Christianity has come out of the closet” since Okediji’s arrival, said Tom Griffith, a retired federal judge, who cited reflections about Okediji by Harvard scholars like Mary Ann Glendon, Jack Goldsmith and Josh McDaniel.

There is a “spiritual renaissance” underway at Harvard University and Okediji is helping give it a voice.

Truth-tellers and truth-hearers

In a time of civic division and fragmented trust, there is little agreement about what is wrong and why, even though technology and data seemingly offer more sophisticated ways to diagnose social ills.

“We are fast becoming, and may already have become, a society in which it’s easier to avoid truth than to embrace it,” said Okediji, addressing a room of scholars and religious leaders, including Elder Clark G. Gilbert and Elder Quentin L Cook of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

She shared a parable about a man who comes to the biblical city of Sodom, preaching against violence and indifference to the city ravaged by corruption and sin. The story was often shared by Elie Wiesel, a Romanian American Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor. When people stopped listening, the man continued but no longer with the goal to change Sodom, but out of commitment to the truth.

Speaking the truth could heal the nation in distress, Okediji said in her speech.

She talked about three aspects of truth.

“First, it’s important to just restate … that there is such a thing as truth,” she said. “There is a reality about who we are as people and what is happening in the world around us, and those realities invite us to study them, to examine them, to talk about them, to engage with them, and to co-discern about what the best path is forward.”

Truth is “objectively measured” and “subjectively experienced.” It relies on facts, but also judgment and a moral compass, she said. Truth is deeply interwoven with what it means to be human and what loving someone looks like. “(Lies) diminish our capacity to know and to learn from one another,” she said. Love demands truth-telling, Okediji noted, and “a capacity to be honest with one another.”

Lastly, truth is a “responsibility that every generation must steward for the next.”

Okediji drew on two flawed manifestations of truth — “false comfort” and “honest cruelty.”

“False comfort” stems from cowardice and avoids difficult truths. “Honest cruelty” turns one’s vulnerabilities into weapons. In both cases, neither truly sees the person in front of them, Okediji said.

“What truth does, and what our command to be truth-tellers compels us to do, is to look directly at what we see, to look with the judgment and the humility and the grace that says — these facts will not become a weapon. These facts will be combined with charity so that we can actually resolve a problem.”

Truth-telling can be costly, but it can ultimately transform both a truth-teller and truth-receiver for the better.

“Truth says someone has seen us and dares to love us in our imperfection,” Okediji said. “It is a discipline that we owe to our soul.”

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