Christians, Don’t Question Authority
Nathan Jacobson, A Critical Review of QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross, edited by Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. BockEvangelicals are in an identity crisis. By and large, American evangelical church goers remain morally and economically conservative. As such, they represent a base of support on the right and an obstacle to the ethical and political aims of the progressive left who rule from Times Square, Harvard Yard, Silicon Valley, Hollywood Boulevard, Wall Street, and until recently, Pennsylvania Ave. Naturally, conservatives of all stripes cast these rulers a wary eye. Evangelicalism’s intellectual and organizational leaders, meanwhile, more often reflect the values, sympathies, and presuppositions characteristic of their overwhelmingly left-wing academic milieu. This strained fault line within evangelicalism ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention the Obergefell, Bostock, and Dobbs court decisions, the COVID response, contested elections, and widespread political violence across the country in the wake of the death of George Floyd and at the Capitol on January 6th. While evangelical leaders followed most of the top down directives on these issues, resistance grew from the pew on up. We are still trying to find our footing amidst these disagreements and cultural upheaval.
At such a time as this, editors Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. Bock recruited a couple dozen evangelical professors to exhort naysayers in the pews to steer clear of conspiracy theories and dissenting opinions. Some of these contributors are old friends and professors from my own graduate education. I feel an affection and appreciation for them. Nevertheless, apart from a lot of good but generic epistemological and conversational advice, QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross (QCC) manages to learn and teach the wrong lesson from these tumultuous years. Captive to an elitist and partisan bent, the book fails to wonder why there has been such a loss of faith in authority. Worse, on the whole, the book discourages average Christians from “doing their own research” and questioning government sanctioned experts. As one who witnessed these events and unadvisedly did just that, I aver. For Christians and for conservatives, skepticism towards authority is the wise and necessary epistemic stance in a world whose god is the devil and in an information environment that is overwhelmingly dominated by an ethically dubious political and ideological faction. Repeated and unrepentant breaches of trust by our rulers demand not less but more critically engaged citizens who will carefully examine them, publicly question them, and hold them accountable. That is good citizenship in the kingdom of heaven, and in our earthly democratic republic. Though the evangelical professoriate appears to have no appetite for the “culture war” raging around them, we must at least engage in spiritual warfare. We must respectfully demolish arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the cross, against the Christian, and against the citizen. Beware those who cry peace when there is no peace.
In early 2023 when Mike Austin announced that QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross was forthcoming, I wondered which unfounded conspiracies would remain as such until publication. At the time, critics of government proclamations and policies were crowing on social media about all the supposedly tinfoil conspiracy theories that had been validated by subsequent events. Some joked that the difference between a conspiracy theory and breaking news was: “about six months”.
For example, in 2020 the public had been reassured ad nauseam by the press that Critical Race Theory and Ibrahim Kendi-style “anti-racism” were not being taught in schools, but whistle blowers and citizen reporters on social media belied their assurances with thousands of videos and screenshots of discriminatory classroom instruction and curriculum, not only in schools but at every level of society. At Disney, an insider leaked internal videos of creators boasting about how they freely inserted their “not-so-secret gay agenda” into children’s entertainment at every opportunity, just as concerned parents had noticed. Schools had been caught facilitating attempts at gender switching without parental consent in school clubs, secret transition closets, and internal documents. On the COVID front, the forbidden “lab leak theory” of sars-cov-2 origins had achieved mainstream credibility, though not a consensus, in government inquiries and the “paper of record”. Some mask and lockdown enthusiasts had already begun backpedaling. The Cochrane review had just been released, revalidating the pre-COVID World Health Organization’s guidance based on its meta-analysis of randomly controlled trials: “there is no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing influenza transmission”, only a “mechanistic plausibility”. And after an unending parade of politicians taking to social media to concede that they had COVID, it was clear that officials’ promises that the vaccines would prevent infection were false. Meanwhile, mirroring the elusive and cryptic QAnon utterances, Jeffrey Epstein’s sex ring for the rich and powerful was by then public knowledge, though most of his secrets went with him to the grave due to a timely death in jail. Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger had published the #Twitterfiles. They exposed a vast government and NGO directed censorship apparatus and validated suspicions of partisan deplatforming and shadow banning, which had been dismissed as the paranoiac fugues of a persecution complex. Two of those social media censors, Facebook’s Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Dorsey, participants in the conspiracy to contain the Hunter Biden “October Surprise”, publicly admitted it was wrong of them to censor news of the scandalous laptop under the pretense of it being Russian disinformation. That election year stopgap was the product of a well-substantiated conspiracy facilitated by the government-funded Aspen Institute; paired with a brazenly false public statement signed by 51 former intelligence officials at the behest of Biden campaign advisor Antony Blinken. Moreover, the alleged conspiracy between Donald Trump and Russia, the “nothing-burger” conspiracy theory that preoccupied left wing news for years, had emerged after extensive investigation to be in actuality a conspiracy between the Hilary Clinton campaign, the Obama administration, and government actors to handicap the new president.
I could go on and on and on. These examples are but a tiny fraction of the conspiracies proven true and media narratives and government pronouncements shown false in the twenty-tweens. Such politically expedient breaches of trust are the principal cause of widespread skepticism and conspiracism. For the most part, the truth about these stories was sussed out not thanks to government authorities and establishment news sources but in spite of them. Citizen journalists, independent videographers, government accountability think tanks, social media news hounds, and even right leaning news sites willed the truth out with dogged investigating. Smart phones, hidden cameras, FOIA requests, primary sources, automated internet archives, embedded reporting, new publications, and the hostile takeover of the world’s most influential social media platform were the tools of their trade.
None of the aforementioned object lessons above grace the pages of QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross. Rather, the teachable moments therein cut almost entirely in favor of credulity toward those in positions of power and prestige. It prompts the question, why were these instances not in the book, while less plausible conspiracies made the cut? In the book’s appendix, a glossary on careful reasoning, it defines confirmation bias as “being closed to evidence that doesn’t confirm what we already believe. Being biased is natural, and so is seeking confirmation of our biases.” Just so.
Which Conspiracies to Speak Of?
Let it be said: of course there are innumerable untrustworthy and dishonest trolls, partisans, scam artists, grifters, and conspiracists from across the political and religious spectrum who populate social media feeds, email distribution lists, and the nooks and crannies of encrypted chat rooms and uncensored comment threads. There are also many more who earnestly seek to understand the powers that be and yet fail to see through the thicket. Conspiracy theories are legion, vary wildly in credibility, and are well distributed amongst left and right. Plus, contested claims and dissenting opinions are an inescapable part of the human condition in every area of human interest. Like other truth claims, allegations of conspiracies and criticisms of movements and organized efforts must be evaluated case by case. The question is, how then can we sift the wheat from the chaff if we aren’t going to ignore the issues of the day entirely?
Many conspiracies are mentioned in passing in the pages of QCC. My notes include: QAnon, faked moon landings, a “Satanic Panic” in the 80s, Russian election interference, vaccine tracking devices, “chemtrails”, Clinton’s “vast right wing conspiracy”, 9/11 Trutherism, #Pizzagate, Antifa involvement in the January 16th riot, election rigging in 2020, and even obligatory references to flat-earthism. Jared Milson’s definition of the book’s subject is offered: “Conspiracies are actions or plans undertaken by a small group of individuals working in secret to achieve shared goals.” This definition is workable but over broad, implicating any of the tens of thousands of daily committee meetings at every corporation and organization in the country. Generally, the implicit connotation of the word is that the conspirators are up to something nefarious and probably illicit that would be embarrassing if not prosecutable if brought to light.
Of all these conspiracy theories, two areas of concern that may or may not be construed as conspiracies predominate: 1) the belief that elite Democrats traffic and sexually abuse children, a la QAnon, and 2) the belief that many official pronouncements and COVID mandates, from masks to lockdowns to vaccines, were illegitimate. If it needs to be said, I’m not keen to defend the more outlandish conspiracy theories referenced in the book, like a flat earth or faked moon landings. My concern is that Christians not be discouraged from scrutinizing the more concrete political and cultural concerns that are interwoven with these conspiracies, guilty by association. This is not a change of subject. The authors in the book move back and forth freely between ideas that are typically regarded as conspiracy theories and others that are merely anti-establishment. They are concerned that average Christians are too skeptical of the establishment. I am concerned that they are not nearly skeptical enough.
Blind in One Eye
Austin and Bock, the editors, summarize their concerns in the introduction:
As Christians, we are to love the truth and pursue wisdom. Belief in false conspiracy theories hinders this. Second, belief in these theories fosters tribalism in society and the church, while undermining civil discourse and Christian unity. Third, this trend damages our credibility as we seek to share the gospel of the kingdom of God and work on its behalf in our world. Lastly, many aspects of belief in conspiracy theories hinder us in our quest to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves.
Austin and Bock also make an important observation relevant to this critical review:
Many people equate their religious beliefs with their political beliefs and create strange combinations of the two. Often, political belief determines religious belief, on the right and on the left.
Indeed, the America church is tragically riven by the broader political and ethical disagreements in our society. The denominational schisms and fractured relationships in the church are often over the very same issues of sex, race, and law that are convulsing the political and cultural sphere. Can it be any other way? “What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” We are not angels, and our government policies are of great consequence, for good or ill. While the Bible is silent or noncommittal on many political issues, allowing for a great deal of latitude for prudence in policymaking, it is not silent on others. Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world, but it is in this world. Christianity and politics cannot be disentangled because the polis is made up of people with religious or irreligious views, and our beliefs in one area are bound to inform beliefs in others. What’s more, Christians are called to be salt and leaven within the world at large.
QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross is, for the most part, superficially non-partisan. But, to heed their cautionary note, we ought to apply their heuristic to the editors themselves. Mike Austin is an old acquaintance and Facebook friend. We regularly interact online. He has a strong political bent, as do I. He posts political complaints frequently, as do I. We share a love for Dallas Willard, served with the same ministry, and aim to be disciples of Jesus. Nevertheless, our views on many issues diverge. In following Mike, I can’t help but notice that, like a man born blind in one eye, his arrows only ever aim to his right. This blindness in one eye is evident throughout this book as well in the inclusion of some issues and examples and in the exclusion of others.
As an example of a malformed integration of politics and religion, Austin and Bock ask the reader to consider the example of failed California Republican candidate DeAnna Lorraine. She voiced her worries about “robotic nanoparticles” in vaccines, attributed mask wearing to a lack of faith in God, and charged “Marxist globalist Satanists” with trying to invert reality. It’s difficult to experience unity, the editors sigh, or to “have a rational discussion with someone who claims that wearing a mask during a global pandemic means you don’t have faith in God.”
A few years earlier, an anti-abortion activist in California also made a shocking claim. David Daleiden accused Planned Parenthood of an horrific conspiracy: secretly selling aborted baby parts for profit. He and Sandra Merritt had gone undercover to negotiate sales of these baby parts with numerous Planned Parenthood representatives and had it all on tape. As the videos went viral, the abortion brigade jumped into action. Planned Parenthood seized upon a “deceptively edited videos” narrative and the media echoed it. Then California Attorney General Kamala Harris ordered a raid on Daleiden’s home, seizing hard drives, computers, and all video footage. The District court filed an injunction to keep the damning videos from the public. As Daleidan’s petitioners to the Supreme Court outlined in 2023: “To this day, Daleiden and CMP remain prohibited from sharing their recordings with law enforcement agencies …; publishing their footage for public consumption and debate; or even describing their findings. The injunction even prohibits Daleiden from using the footage to defend himself — both in public and in court — against state criminal charges filed against him at the plaintiff’s urging.” Daleidan’s defense against the state over the legalities of his investigative methods waged on for a decade until a plea deal was reached in early 2025. Behind all the efforts to keep their deeds in the dark, the fact remains: Planned Parenthood was, and likely still is, selling aborted baby parts for profit.
This is an epic story of a conspiracy brought to light and the Goliath of the state and its media accomplices doing everything in their power to crush a David. You might think that it would be a natural case study for a book on “Christianity and Conspiracy Theories”. After all, abortion is one of the principal ethical concerns of the book’s intended audience. (Instead, the term “abortion” appears once in three hundred some pages in a dismissive quote.) But this story casts the abortion defending political left in a negative light and valorizes a truth telling everyman of Christian faith. QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross features stories of Lorraines in spades. Daleidan’s is the kind of story that is scrupulously excluded. In QCC, no left wing conspiracies enjoy more than a passing mention; no left wing orthodoxies or institutions are challenged. Conversely, no right wing sources are cited; no right wing complaints are validated. As Austin and Bock warn about their subjects, we have reason to think their proceedings are similarly shaped as much by political sympathies as religious commitments.
Caricatures of Conspiracists
In their chapter, “Christianity, Conspiracy Theories, and Intellectual Character”, Nathan King and Keith Wyma try to offer a sympathetic explanation for conspiracism. Falling under the sway of a conspiracy theory or contrary opinion may not be the result of the usual epistemic vices, they suggest, but rather of a weakness of will. That is to say, our pursuit of truth can be led astray by our passions. King and Wyma offer three caricatures of unwitting and weak-willed conspiracists. “Careless Carl” jumps to conclusions and won’t consider other possible explanations. “Bold Brandi” lacks intellectual humility. She trusts experts in some domains, but not in others. “Though she believes that COVID-19 is a real phenomenon, she is convinced that instead of wearing masks and getting vaccines, citizens should continue life as normal.” “When commenters ask why she is so confident in her medical opinions, she tweets back, ‘Because I did my own research.’” Third up is “Uneven Evan” who applies double standards, being skeptical toward some conspiracy theories but not others and casting a shrewd eye on left-wing news while swallowing right-wing news uncritically.
In a footnote, King and Wyma clarify that they are not claiming that their “illustrations are typical of all conspiracy theorists”, though they do represent real people the authors know. But why choose them as emblematic of the Christians who questioned officialdom in the raving twenties? I’d like to introduce them to No-nonsense Neil, who patiently traced ideas back to primary sources to understand them accurately, noted strengths and weaknesses, and, like the Bereans, carefully weighed today’s academic orthodoxies against timeless biblical precepts. Many experts with unimpeachable qualifications were censored and sidelined or censured and fired for their heresies. King and Wyma could have introduced us to Judicious Jay, a Stanford epidemiologist who carefully distinguished between true and false claims about lockdowns and vaccines during COVID and led an effort by hundreds of thousands to recommend a different strategy to mitigate the harms of the pandemic; for his trouble Jay was censored by Twitter at the government’s behest and treated to a “devastating takedown” by Francis Collins who sat at the pinnacle of government power. Or meet Admirable Aaron, a University of California at Irvine Director of Medical Ethics and a frontline doctor who, having survived infection, objected to coerced vaccines for himself and fellow medical practitioners; after being censured by colleagues and fired from his post, he joined a Supreme Court lawsuit to challenge government breaches of our First Amendment rights. The authors may personally know Distinguished Doug, a Christian scientist and fellow professor who had co-authored a prescient book raising the alarm about dubious evidence and the unintended consequences of lockdowns.
Is it really true that the problem with characters such as these — who withstood enormous social, financial, and political pressure — was that they were weak willed?
Not only do King and Wyma not profile respectable dissidents that complicate our cast of characters, they do not contemplate the possible passions of others. Billionaire Bill, who is a lavish benefactor of many of our news outlets and stood to gain billions more from mandatory vaccinations, is not noteworthy. CNN Cindy, brought to you by Pfizer, enjoys no scrutiny. Unchallenged too is Mainstream Mandy, who absorbs narratives from Wikipedia-approved news outlets and the curated first-page results of Google searches without second-guessing them, even when those claims don’t square with a biblical worldview. So when she runs across the annual Easter and Christmas cover articles in Time debunking the miraculous birth of Jesus and the Resurrection of Christ, she is stymied in her faith. Pastor Go-along Gary‘s lodestone is Romans 13, and he’s always deferential to governing authority. He does not question government mandates, so he parrots CDC issuances on social media, makes compliance a matter of Christian obedience, closes the church doors to the unclean, and shames those who have moral qualms about vaccines or the sexual chaos promoted at every level of government.
Surely King’s and Wyma’s caricatures apply to many, but in its selectivity, it’s weak sauce.
Hold on to the Good
Twenty-four chapters long, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross features a number of edifying chapters and themes. In addition to the recurrent theme of intellectual humility, a few authors exhort the reader to ask themselves if their online media consumption is leading them toward love of neighbor and enemy, or toward anger, despair, and hate. Gregory Bock reminds us: “Christians should be careful that their beliefs about the world don’t interfere with their ability to love others.” As a Christian, this is an essential question for self-examination. In that vein, Rick Langer‘s “Testing Teachings and Torching Teachers” is an excellent and practical guide to the principles and habits of heart we must cultivate as we engage others and judge truth claims. Reiterating 2nd Timothy, he is right that, among other obligations: “We are simply obliged, as followers of Christ, to discard habits of wrath, anger, and divisiveness, and cultivate habits of gentleness, peacemaking, and kindness.” Apart from a needless swipe at the largely vindicated Scott Atlas, Garrett J. Deweese is the contributor who most enjoins the reader to critically engage with experts and government narratives using the very epistemic virtues that are touted throughout the book. DeWeese also pinpoints what I take to be the primary fount of conspiracism: a loss of trust in establishment news and institutions. He notes: “An authoritative ‘Be quiet and listen to the experts’ falls flat in the face of mistrust of the experts.” Deweese enumerates reasons for a guarded skepticism toward the pronouncements of The Science™, from instances of falsified data to the replication crisis. Chase Andre contributes an interesting catalog of the ways in which the anonymous Q’s interpreters weaved pseudo-religious themes into their cryptic messages to incite a syncretistic cult of “God and Country” zealotry.
As I mentioned, QCC includes generous portions of salutary advice. For example, Chad Bogosian offers a nice summary of some good epistemic rules of thumb:
What counts as good evidence is sometimes debated case by case, but generally, we should seek out the best quality of evidence from each source relevant to the subject matter. On the topics of science, religion, morality, and politics, reliable and trustworthy sources might include direct evidence from original or other quality documents, knowledgeable persons who seek the truth, as well as expert testimony. Additionally, good evidence might include indirect evidence about the topic at hand: what experts have to say about the direct evidence, that politicians are often deceptive and conniving, and the fact that both experts and your intellectual peers disagree about the topic. Wishful thinking, conjecture, blind leaps, gut feelings or hunches, opinionated friends on social media, etc., are generally considered poor quality evidence.
Finally, QCC ends with an inspiring analysis by Steven L. Porter of how Jesus righteously handled the conspiracy to silence Him, then kill Him. He notes: “And yet, he never responded to any of this in a manner that was mean-spirited, unkind, or less than fully loving. Jesus was conspired against as we are, yet without sin.” We must go and do likewise.
Why Do People Question Authority and Fall for Conspiracy Theories?
As in King’s and Wyma’s chapter discussed above, QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross is most exasperating when it imputes only non-rational psychological urges and impure motives to those who entertain conspiracy theories and wrongthink. In one of many such passages, Dru Johnson supposes:
The deep satisfaction and sense of empowerment fostered by seeing through a conspiracy is, quite simply, intoxicating. It’s not difficult to understand the emotional power of believing that we’ve cracked a secret society. After all, who wants to be just another one of the sheeple? People who feel like they are losing social or political power can find themselves leaning into conspiracy mind-sets to regain a sense of control. Dementia and the loss of memory commonly fires up imagined conspiracies. In her final years of life, my mother was convinced on several conspiracies to steal her medicine or food.
Emotions, rebelliousness, powerlessness, and dementia: these are some of the reasons some second guess our authorities. Okay. Sometimes. Other times, it’s a concern for truth, justice, goodness, and harm to the victims of nefarious deeds.
Johnson makes a salient point about the challenges of living in the Information Age. “Due to the proliferation of data, algorithms, sources, and experts, we supermoderns worry most about whom we can trust to guide us through the morass of information in which we are daily mired. When you’re drowning in data, any coherent and authoritative-sounding pattern-maker can save you.” That’s right. It’s why discernment is one of the most essential disciplines and virtues in our time. Johnson regards this predicament as fertile soil for conspiracy theorists to exploit guileless people. “Conspiracy thinking injects itself into our venal lusts at this exact point. Who will guide me? The conspiracist answers: ‘I will! I, the one who knows, will peel back the corner of the tarp of history and reveal to you all its secret inner workings.'” But this predicament is also the environment in which those in power work to control the narrative with carefully worded talking points, media blitzes, “whole-of-society” machinations, dictionary redefinitions, blacklisted news sources, and censorship of dissenting viewpoints on social media. Unless one thinks those in positions of prestige are less vulnerable to venal lusts, this situation requires epistemic vigilance toward both “crazy uncles” and government czars. We ought to apply critical thinking toward conspiracies about supposed messages in The Eye of Providence pyramid on the dollar bill, and also to government guidance like the much maligned food pyramid. And this need not arise out of base urges but out of epistemic virtue.
Bradley Baurain‘s chapter, “Parenting Teenagers in Gullible Times”, airs out his feelings of embarrassment, isolation, and frustration with “conservative White evangelicals” who questioned and disagreed with the official line on COVID, who pitied him and his family for their naïveté. Baurain returns the contempt and then some. “Gullibility, to put it mildly, appears to be the status quo among many Christians”. Slipping into hyperbolic cliché he adds: “Frankly, it feels like we have slipped into another dimension filled with flat-earthers.” While lamenting that the COVID contrarians in his circle thought less of him, Baurain charges Christians in kind who appraised the evidence differently than he did as: absurd, learning-impaired, proud, foolish, backsliding, fickle, and rebellious. They are like the murderous Cain, like the adulterous wife of Hosea, like the idolatrous rebels of Jeremiah, like lost sheep and prodigals. Confessing his anger and depression, Baurain wonders if he will be able to forgive them for damaging his children’s faith. Baurain gets the solution right, that he will bear with his fellow believers, inspired by the relentless and infinite love of God. I would add that it would be exceedingly easier to do so if he could truly consider what he exhorts others to do. Consider the possibility that you could be wrong. Realize that different people can evaluate evidence in good faith and come to a different conclusion.
Sadly, not a single author in the book takes their benighted subjects or their concerns seriously. While the possibly mixed motives of those in power are rarely contemplated, as far as I can remember, none commend the dissenter’s or conspiracy theorist’s genuine truth seeking, recognize possibly noble motives, or engage with the evidence itself. It is a given that they’re wrong, perhaps even by definition, so their motives must be impure. To catalog all of the insults would go overlong. Surely by now the reader has a sense of the scorching tone of some of QCC.
The Pink and Blue Elephant in the Room
There is one issue that has done more than any other to crater the confidence that Christians and the general public have in our ruling classes. Every arm of the Biden Administration and, by and large, every major public institution — universities and elementary schools, scientific associations and medical boards, advertising conglomerates and the prestige press, the UN and NATO — has engaged in a “whole-of-society” campaign to convince the masses that males can be women and females men. They have used official statements, indoctrination in public schools, legal manipulation of Title 9, censorship, international aid, and other government funding to advance this new transgressive and transhumanist religion the world wide. Much of it has taken place behind closed doors, like forcing male inmates into women’s prisons and secret transitions in schools. Most of the agenda has been proudly advanced in the light of day and is widely known to anyone paying attention.
This ideology of subjectivism, which is often explicitly and self-consciously transgressive, is a denial of nature and nature’s God and an affront to common sense. Disorders of sexual development notwithstanding, we are all still the product of one female ova and one male sperm. The Bible narrates this created order in Genesis. Jesus reaffirms it. “Haven’t you heard, God made them male and female?” And, it was good. In the face of this radical challenge to traditional and Christian anthropology, many evangelical leaders have been silent, others circumspect. Some, like Francis Collins, have championed this sexual chaos.
QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross almost entirely ignores this cultural rift, save for one essay that excoriates Christians for failing to embrace transgenderism and other left wing ideologies. Susan Peppers-Bates argues that resistance is based not in reality, not in natural law, not in God’s revelation, not in concern for those being harmed. Rather, using an avowedly feminist lens for her critique, she diagnoses evangelical conspiracism as — surprise surprise — rooted in the tendency of American evangelicals “to reduce God to a white male idol”. Peppers-Bates argues that, unlike the Good Samaritan who tended to the traveler’s wounds, Christians and sexual realists are unloving when they deny “medical care” to trans identifying youth; that is, when they prohibit surgically mutilating and chemically castrating them in denial of their body’s design and God-given sex, leaving them with a life of ill health. It would be hard to find a more glaring example of the editors’ opening warning that political — and I’ll add identitarian and ideological — priors can distort one’s conception of Christianity. And just as the editors thought it might be difficult to have a rational discussion with Lorraine, it is difficult to reason with someone who imputes evil motives to every utterance from those who are white, male, straight, and able-bodied. This postmodern hermeneutics of suspicion has bedeviled academic discourse for decades.
The inclusion of Peppers-Bates’ essay — which pummels Evangelicals and promotes feminist theology, LGBTQI clergy, Critical Race Theory, and other hallmarks of the religious and political left — reveals that what is at stake in failing to interrogate our authorities is the radical remaking of what historically Evangelicals believed the Bible to teach. If the faithful in the pew follow these thought leaders, that is where this road leads. For those who want to allow God to define himself on his own terms, for those who believe the Bible’s incessant prohibitions against sexual immorality still hold, and for those who reject the partiality and identitarianism of critical theory, they would be fools not to treat the editors and some of the authors of this anthology with a wary eye.
If the editors and contributing authors of QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross aim to restore average Christians’ ability to trust them, I offer this advice. It will not happen until this plainly false and absurd ideology of sexual chaos is loudly repudiated. People will continue to disregard experts who in one breath insist you must call him Ma’am, or else, and in the next prescribe an experimental vaccine, or else. I do not celebrate this situation. Society desperately needs competent and trustworthy experts. Christians desperately need courageous ones too who are willing to fight this cultural and spiritual battle.
Humility for Thee
Like many authors in the book, Austin and Bock emphasize the importance of intellectual humility, an essential epistemic virtue if ever there was one. Echoing the Apostle James, Bock offers the following tip: “ask conspiracy theorists whether they think it’s possible that they’re wrong. Humble people don’t get angry very quickly because they don’t rush to judgment too quickly. They spend time examining the evidence and listening to different points of view.” Indeed.
My point of view is that the current dearth of trust in our secular and religious leaders is rational and copiously justified. Sadly, this book diminishes my trust. Intellectual humility is a requisite virtue not just for dissenters and conspiracy theorists but for university professors and government bureaucrats too. Unfortunately, the authors here have no exhortations for those in power who at the peak of hubris led an industrial sized censorship program, who dismissed non-conforming professors, and who marginalized alternative policy prescriptions, all while making many false claims and projections from which they’ve backpedaled but not repented since. Those in power, with greater responsibility by far, aren’t the concern in these pages. This is not a book for them, a book of truth to power. ‘Tis a shame. It is they who have the most power to earn our trust and to seek a renewal of our post-trust society. And the Christian professors in this book can only regain trust if they maintain fidelity to God’s word and instead of scolding their brethren in the pew speak out courageously in the face of opposition from the world.