Christians, Don’t Question Authority
Evangelicals are in an identity crisis. By and large, American evangelical church goers remain ethically and economically conservative. As such, they represent a base of support on the right and the last obstacle to the ethical and political aims of the progressive left who rule from Times Square, Harvard Yard, Silicon Valley, Hollywood Boulevard, and currently, 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, ideals, and presuppositions characteristic of their 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 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 after 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 generic epistemological advice, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross (QCC) mostly manages to learn and teach exactly the wrong lessons from these tumultuous years. Captive to a technocratic and partisan bent, 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 and information environment that is overwhelmingly dominated by a single 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 is averse to culture war, we must at least engage in spiritual warfare, emboldened to respectfully demolish arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the cross, against the Christian, and against the citizen.
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 tin-foil conspiracy theories that had been validated by subsequent events. Some joked that the difference between a conspiracy theory and the news was: “about six months”. For example, in 2020 the public had been reassured ad nauseam by mainstream sources 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”. Mirroring the elusive and indecipherable Q’Anon 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, Zuckerberg‘s Facebook and Dorsey‘s Twitter, 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. 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.
[The untrustworthiness is the problem: from Alejandro Mayorkas’ “Baghdad Bob” denialism about the chaotic border, to the disingenuously named Inflation Reduction Act, to denials of funding free crack pipes to “reduce harm”, to gaslighting about the “mostly peaceful protests” that maimed and killed, to the inverted reporting on Jussie Smollett vis-à-vis Nicholas Sandmann.]
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. And there are many more who earnestly seek to understand the powers that be and yet fail to comprehend. Conspiracy theories are legion, varying wildly in credibility and partisan adherence; and, 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. 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: Q’Anon (chapters 18, 21), faked moon landings, the 80’s “Satanic Panic”, Russian election interference (chapter 2), vaccine tracking devices, chemtrails, “Ukrainian meddling”, Clinton’s “vast right wing conspiracy”, 9/11 Trutherism, #Pizzagate, the January 16th riot as an Antifa action, 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.” Of course, this definition is over broad, including any of the tens of thousands of daily committee meetings at every corporation and organization in the country. Some conspiracies, it’s conceded, are real.
For example, most believe in Watergate or that the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers were orchestrated by al Qaeda, or that Dietrich Bonhoeffer conspired to take down Hitler. Each of these satisfies our definition of “conspiracy,” since a relatively small group worked in secret to bring about the events in question; and each of these beliefs is rational because it is directly supported by a body of available evidence.
Chad Bogosian
But while many conspiracies are name checked in Q’Anon, Chaos, and the Cross, most of the concern is aimed at two areas of concern in particular: 1) the belief that Democrats especially coordinate to traffic and sexually abuse children, a la QAnon, and 2) that official pronouncements and many COVID mandates, from masks to lockdowns to vaccines, were illegitimate. These two foci reflect national and global concerns at the time at which QCC was written
Like many other contributors, 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.” Of course, intellectual humility is a requisite virtue not just for conspiracists but for university professors and government bureaucrats too. But the authors have no exhortations for those in power who at the peak of hubris led the massive censorship programs, dismissed non-conforming professors, and marginalized alternative policy prescriptions all while making many false claims and projections from which they’ve backpedal since. Those in power with greater responsibility by far need not worry that they’ll be chastised in these pages. No truth to power. A message for the educated to the uneducated.
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 tumultuous 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 virtues and precepts. While Neil admittedly expanded beyond his previous specialty, others were censored and sidelined or censured and fired for their heresies in spite of unimpeachable qualifications. 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” as a “fringe epidemiologist” by Francis Collins who sat at the pinnacle of 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 the benefactor of thousands of our institutions and stood to gain billions more from mandatory vaccinations, is not noteworthy. CNN Cindy, whose primary source of advertising dollars is the pharmaceutical industry, 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. God’s creation order, male and female, must be jettisoned. It’s a spectrum, “a kaleidoscope”, says Bill Nye and our medical associations. Men menstruate and give birth, Google assures her. Who is she to question? 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.
Sadly, King’s and Wyma’s caricatures are just so much straw.
Gold and Pearls in the Heap
Twenty-four chapters long, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross features a number of edifying chapters and themes. The importance of intellectual humility is a recurrent thread, though this admonition is almost entirely directed at average Christians, never toward government bureaucrats or university professors who wield power and influence. 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 generic but 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. While you might turn out to have a true belief about something you wish for, this is likely a matter of cognitive luck, since wishful thinking doesn’t typically generate true beliefs.
Finally, QCC ends with an inspiring analysis by … of how Jesus righteously handled the conspiracy to silence Him, then kill Him.
While there is plenty to second in QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross, the main thrust of the book, that Christians should question authority less and trust government sanctioned experts more is a dumbfounding lesson to learn from the early twenties.
Why Do People Question Authority and Fall for Conspiracy Theories?
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 contrary thought. In one of many such passages, Dru Johnson supposes that it is the “deep satisfaction and sense of empowerment fostered by seeing through a conspiracy. It’s 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; Johnson even cites the prevailing postmodern mood: “my truth” over “the truth”. “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 in my own efforts to understand the times, and in my brushes with conspiracists, it’s Fox Mulder, not Oprah Winfrey, that is their avatar: “the truth is out there“.
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 compliment, “gullibility, to put it mildly, appears to be the status quo among many Christians”. Slipping into hyperbole: “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, that is, to consider the possibility that he could be wrong and the certainty 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 seriously. As far as I can remember, none commend the dissenter’s or conspiracist’s genuine truth seeking, take note of possibly noble motives, or engage with the evidence itself. It is a given that they’re wrong, perhaps even by definition, so the contrarians’ and conspiracy theorists’ motives must be impure. To catalog all of the insults would go overlong. Surely by now the reader has a sense of the tone of QCC.
Faulting him for intemperate anger, Gregory Bock recounts the sad story of Edgar Maddison Welch, “the guy who walked into a pizzeria in Washington, DC, on December 4, 2016, with a loaded AR-15 because he believed that elite Satan-worshiping Democrats held young children as sex slaves in the pizzeria’s basement.” Bock doesn’t deign to share any of the smoke that led Welch to think there was a fire at Comet Pizza. On that day, Welch seemed calm and determined en route to DC when he recorded a video for his own daughters, telling them he had a “duty to protect those who can’t protect themselves”. Upon arrival, Welch searched the pizzeria, shooting once to open a locked door, and then surrendered to police when he found no foul play. If Welch’s concerns had been validated, surely his anger would have been righteous and his cause just. His desire to protect vulnerable children from unthinkable evil is admirable. What he lacked in his vigilantism was a deference to the proper authorities. And he failed to realize that he needed to confirm what were fallible inferences from a fact pattern synthesized by internet sleuths. His friends had recommended Welch do surveillance before acting, but he failed to heed their good advice. Indeed, evidence gathering is precisely where anti-human trafficking organizations and ministries who share Welch’s righteous concern have specialized.
I remember well when I first read Kevin Bales’ Disposable People. I was shocked at his thesis, that sex trafficking and slavery, in the sense of coerced labor, is now more prevalent around the world than it has ever been. While I was horrified by the stories Bales recounts about slavery in Thailand, India, and Brazil, I was simply incredulous when he wrote that trafficking is endemic in the United States too. I couldn’t imagine then that people could get away with it here with our robust systems of law enforcement. I was naive. The problem is heart-wrenchingly real, evidenced by a steady stream of reported arrests and a wide variety of organizations addressing this scourge. Christians have been at the vanguard of tackling human trafficking, which often involves prostitution and sex trafficking. Nazarene Compassionate Ministries, International Justice Mission, Global Center for Women and Justice, and the Tim Tebow Foundation are but a few of many such organizations. In my community, Rebuilding Hope! and Scarlet Road help to provide an escape from bondage. The Faith Alliance Against Slavery leads the coalition. They collaborate with secular organizations like the Human Trafficking Institute and Polaris Project whose National Human Trafficking Hotline reports over 50,000 “signals” a year.
The imputation of wicked motives reaches its apex in an unrestrained chapter bringing critical theory to the fray.
Those White, Christian, Male, Heteronormative Conspiracists
Even with its consistent defense of reasonable faith and a passing critique of postmodernism, knowing the tilt and intellectual milieu of this book, it’s no surprise that critical theory makes an appearance to scapegoat the predominate rival and thus favorite bogeyman of the political left: the white, Christian, male, heterosexual. Susan Peppers-Bates notes an instructive and oft-told aspect of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. The hero of Jesus’ story was a member of an ethnicity and sect that were generally reviled by his Jewish audience. In addition to expanding the pharisees’ notion of “whom is our neighbor”, the parable challenges us to self-examine and ask, “Who do I regard with prejudice as a Samaritan?” Bringing Critical Theory to task, Peppers-Bates takes it that Americans, and evangelicals more specifically, are guilty of reviling “voices of women, people of color, LGBTQI, and other marginalized groups”. It’s evident that for the authors of this book, it is conspiracy theorists and Trump supporters occupy the reviled place of the Samaritan, but that thought is not entertained.
Bogeyman du jour.
Peppers-Bates expertly employs the relentless criticism of the critical theoretical mode on her subjects, seeing misogynist and white supremacist motives and undertones even where more charitable explanations are available. Christians haven’t insisted upon the role of God as father and the incarnation of Christ as a man because of fidelity to God’s self-disclosure, but rather because “God’s masculinity has become and idol”. European artists did not portray Jesus as looking like themselves, like artists from other cultures, because their models were white and the exact pigment of Jesus’ skin was and is unknown, but rather as the “logical conclusion of four centuries of conquest, enslavement, and theft of native lands”. True to form, Peppers-Bates traces past sins to the current political moment, equating churches who segregated along racial lines in the past with Christians today who exclude LGBTQI from church leadership based on the biblical prohibitions of sexual immorality.
How does Peppers-Bates connect the universal acid of critical theory to conspiracism? Following the example of Peter Wehner
Demonization of unvaccinated are scum.
As Justin Giboney points out: “Messages about the Christian sexual ethic and the sanctity of life start to disappear from our platforms. We don’t want to lose secular political allies, offend the custodians of culture, or go viral for having “regressive” views.”
Sycophants and Simps
Trust in the Information Age
In “Loving Our Online Communities” (chap. 19), Rachel I. Wightman notes the challenge of our internet age, how we can be overwhelmed by the cacophonous noice of a thousand tongues. No doubt, that to be a savvy filter of information in the Information Age. Wightman worries that the ability of users to create content without the code of ethics and editorial constraints of reporters at the New York Times generates conspiracy theories and misinformation. And because social media like Facebook’s and X’s algorithms are tailored to cater to the user’s interest, we may find ourselves in information bubbles.
the ability for people to create and share information so easily also creates spaces for conspiracy theories and misinformation or fake news to thrive. Most reputable news outlets have some sort of code of conduct or code of ethics, such as the New York Times’
Austin, Michael W.; Bock, Gregory L.. QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 296). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.
The Disinformation Governance Board
King’s and Wyma’s straw manning of Christian concerns about government positions and policy reveals a prejudice against the less educated. It is an exercise in intellectual elitism. Leave these matters of great public concern not just to the experts, but to the government aligned experts.
The politicized management of the COVID-19 pandemic stripped doctors and patients of medical choice regarding the treatment of illness, and some public health agencies prioritized race over medical necessity in dispensing vaccines and monoclonal antibodies. Doctors and medical organizations made unscientific recommendations for prevention of COVID-19, misrepresenting the utility of masking, the benefits of natural immunity, and the efficacy of novel vaccines. Similarly, despite the absence of rigorous scientific investigation and dismissal of available data, medical professionals projected an illusory scientific consensus by insisting that the science was settled regarding the need to administer “gender-affirming care” to minors experiencing gender distress.
Monica Harris for the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism
QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 291). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.
to chapters on internet discernment, and 20, no mention of narrative control at Google, Wikipedia,
The truth is, conspiracists do traffic in evidence. They scour the internet for news stories, video clips, interviews, autopsy reports, and FBI disclosures that seem to cut against the official narrative. If you’ve ever gone down the rabbit hole, you cannot but be amazed at all the disparate pieces of information they track down and weave into their conspiratorial tale. The wall of documents and red-lined connections in Charlie Day’s hilarious Pepe Silvia conspiracy rant on Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia bears a visual resemblance. Consider, for example, the curious case of Ray Epps, whom Darren J. Beattie and an army of internet sleuths have investigated at great length, suggesting a connection to the FBI.
This is no time to acquiesce. [Satirists at the Babylon Bee had a bit where they regularly paired their farcical headlines with real headlines announcing: “another prophecy fulfilled”. And social media influencers compiled lists of their .] So what examples of foolhardy conspiracism was QCC left to address?
Apart from Rachel I. Wightman, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross fails to deal squarely with the reality of conflicting expert opinion.
The Elephants Not in the Room
Unfortunately, deferring to Wikipedia, Politifact, the WHO, to experts, or even to the relevant scientific association is not a reliable solution on contested subjects. When it comes to ethical, philosophical, and historical questions, each of these institutions is beginning with different priors . Just as we must test the spirits and the prophets, we must test our experts.
For me the issue of transgenderism highlihgts the crisis of trust in our institutions as well as any other.
We know the Obama administration invested heavily in breaking the evangelical resistance to the Democrat platform, employing Michael Wear to lead the effort. We also know that a group of influential evangelical who named themselves “The Outliers”, Francis Collins, David Brooks, David French, Russel Moore, Tim Keller
In the fall of 2015, [Russell] Moore met with “The Outliers”, a group of friends and fellow high-profile believers: Tim Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City; Pete Wehner, the former head of strategic initiatives in the George W. Bush White House; Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health; and David Brooks, the New York Times columnist.
Tim Alberta, quoted at The Resistance Will Be Organized
people and wreaked destruction on our cities (more, even, than the May 31st or January 6th Capitol riots)
Stop playing for a team. Call balls and strikes. Prove to be trustworthy.
