Evangelicals are in an identity crisis. By and large, American evangelical church goers remain socially and economically conservative. As such, they represent the single largest obstacle to the ethical and political aims of the progressive left. Evangelicalism’s intellectual and organizational leaders, meanwhile, more often reflect the progressive values, ideals, and presuppositions characteristic of their academic pedigrees. This strained fault line ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention Obergefell, Bostock, Dobbs, COVID, contested elections, and political violence. We are still trying to find our footing after this cultural upheaval. As always, we who would presume to teach have diagnoses and prescriptions for the way forward. God help us.

At such a time, editors Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. Bock recruited a couple dozen evangelical professors to exhort people in the pews to steer clear of conspiracy theories and dissenting opinions. Some of them are old friends and professors from my own graduate education. I feel an affection and appreciation toward them. Nevertheless, apart from a lot of general purpose 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 conservative Christians, skepticism towards authority is the wise and necessary epistemic stance in an information environment that is overwhelmingly dominated by a single political and ideological faction. Our recent history cries out not for less but more critically engaged citizens who will carefully examine, publicly question, and hold accountable their leaders. That is good citizenship in the kingdom of God, and in our democratic republic. On matters of consequence, average Christians should be emboldened to respectfully question authority and demolish arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the citizen, and against the cross.

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 making hay 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 transgender transitions without parental consent in school clubs, secret transition closets, and internal documents. On the COVID front, the “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 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, 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” 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 media narratives and government pronouncements that have been shown to be false in the twenty-tweens. The untrustworthiness is the problem: from Mayorkas’ “Baghdad Bob” assurances that the border is secure, 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 people and wreaked destruction on our cities (more, even, than the May 31st or January 6th Capitol riots), to the inverted reporting on Jussie Smollett vis-à-vis Nicholas Sandmann. These 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 wing 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.

Now, 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. Conspiracy theories are legion, varying wildly in plausibility and partisan adherence. Even more, contested claims and dissenting opinions are an inescapable part of the human condition. So how can we sift the wheat from the chaff if we aren’t going to ignore the issues of the day entirely.

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, contrariness, 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.'” In my own efforts to understand the times, and in my brushes with conspiracists, it’s Fox Mulder, not Oprah Winfrey, that is the avatar: “the truth is out there“.

Other character flaws that might motivate a persecution complex, us versus them animus, “

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 who appraised the evidence differently than he 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, to consider the likelihood that different people can evaluate evidence in good faith and come to a contrary 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 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.

Faulting him for unchecked 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 was the realization that he needed to confirm what were inferences from a fact pattern. This is precisely what human trafficking organizations and ministries do.

I remember well when I first read Kevin Bales’ Disposable People. I was shocked at his thesis, that slavery, in the sense of coerced labor, is now more prevalent around the world than it has ever been. Welch’s misdirected compulsion to do something is a moral conviction championed by I do not know the extent of sex trafficking. Christians are at the vanguard of tackling what of human trafficking, which is often sex trafficking. Nazarene Compassionate Ministries, The Faith Alliance Against Slavery (FAAST) and Trafficking is the coalition . The National Human Trafficking Hotline receives over 50,000 “signals” a year. In my community Rebuilding Hope! Sexual Assault Center for Pierce County – Sex Trafficking & Exploitation Program (STEP) and Scarlet Road, Global Center for Women and Justice, Human Trafficking Institute. Polaris Project

The imputation of motives reaches its apex in an unrestrained chapter bringing critical theory to the fray.

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

Evangelicals are in an identity crisis. By and large, American evangelical church goers remain socially and economically conservative. As such, they represent the single largest obstacle to the ethical and political aims of the progressive left. Evangelicalism’s intellectual and organizational leaders, meanwhile, more often reflect the progressive values, ideals, and presuppositions characteristic of their academic pedigrees. This strained fault line ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention Obergefell, Bostock, Dobbs, COVID, contested elections, and political violence. We are still trying to find our footing after this cultural upheaval. As always, we who would presume to teach have diagnoses and prescriptions for the way forward. God help us.

At such a time, editors Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. Bock recruited a couple dozen evangelical professors to exhort people in the pews to steer clear of conspiracy theories and dissenting opinions. Some of them are old friends and professors from my own graduate education. I feel an affection and appreciation toward them. Nevertheless, apart from a lot of general purpose 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 conservative Christians, skepticism towards authority is the wise and necessary epistemic stance in an information environment that is overwhelmingly dominated by a single political and ideological faction. Our recent history cries out not for less but more critically engaged citizens who will carefully examine, publicly question, and hold accountable their leaders. That is good citizenship in the kingdom of God, and in our democratic republic. On matters of consequence, average Christians should be emboldened to respectfully question authority and demolish arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the citizen, and against the cross.

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 making hay 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 transgender transitions without parental consent in school clubs, secret transition closets, and internal documents. On the COVID front, the “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 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, 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” 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 media narratives and government pronouncements that have been shown to be false in the twenty-tweens. The untrustworthiness is the problem: from Mayorkas’ “Baghdad Bob” assurances that the border is secure, 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 people and wreaked destruction on our cities (more, even, than the May 31st or January 6th Capitol riots), to the inverted reporting on Jussie Smollett vis-à-vis Nicholas Sandmann. These 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 wing 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.

Now, 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. Conspiracy theories are legion, varying wildly in plausibility and partisan adherence. Even more, contested claims and dissenting opinions are an inescapable part of the human condition. So how can we sift the wheat from the chaff if we aren’t going to ignore the issues of the day entirely.

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, contrariness, 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.'” In my own efforts to understand the times, and in my brushes with conspiracists, it’s Fox Mulder, not Oprah Winfrey, that is the avatar: “the truth is out there“.

Other character flaws that might motivate a persecution complex, us versus them animus, “

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 who appraised the evidence differently than he 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, to consider the likelihood that different people can evaluate evidence in good faith and come to a contrary conclusion.

Austin, Michael W.; Bock, Gregory L.. QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 354). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

Indeed, 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 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.

Faulting him for unchecked 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 was the realization that he needed to confirm what were inferences from a fact pattern. This is precisely what human trafficking organizations and ministries do.

I remember well when I first read Kevin Bales’ Disposable People. I was shocked at his thesis, that slavery, in the sense of coerced labor, is now more prevalent around the world than it has ever been. Welch’s misdirected compulsion to do something is a moral conviction championed by I do not know the extent of sex trafficking. Christians are at the vanguard of tackling what of human trafficking, which is often sex trafficking. Nazarene Compassionate Ministries, The Faith Alliance Against Slavery (FAAST) and Trafficking is the coalition . The National Human Trafficking Hotline receives over 50,000 “signals” a year. In my community Rebuilding Hope! Sexual Assault Center for Pierce County – Sex Trafficking & Exploitation Program (STEP) and Scarlet Road, Global Center for Women and Justice, Human Trafficking Institute. Polaris Project

The imputation of motives reaches its apex in an unrestrained chapter bringing critical theory to the fray.

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

Evangelicals are in an identity crisis. By and large, American evangelical church goers remain socially and economically conservative. As such, they represent the single largest obstacle to the ethical and political aims of the progressive left. Evangelicalism’s intellectual and organizational leaders, meanwhile, more often reflect the progressive values, ideals, and presuppositions characteristic of their academic pedigrees. This strained fault line ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention Obergefell, Bostock, Dobbs, COVID, contested elections, and political violence. We are still trying to find our footing after this cultural upheaval. As always, we who would presume to teach have diagnoses and prescriptions for the way forward. God help us.

At such a time, editors Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. Bock recruited a couple dozen evangelical professors to exhort people in the pews to steer clear of conspiracy theories and dissenting opinions. Some of them are old friends and professors from my own graduate education. I feel an affection and appreciation toward them. Nevertheless, apart from a lot of general purpose 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 conservative Christians, skepticism towards authority is the wise and necessary epistemic stance in an information environment that is overwhelmingly dominated by a single political and ideological faction. Our recent history cries out not for less but more critically engaged citizens who will carefully examine, publicly question, and hold accountable their leaders. That is good citizenship in the kingdom of God, and in our democratic republic. On matters of consequence, average Christians should be emboldened to respectfully question authority and demolish arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the citizen, and against the cross.

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 making hay 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 transgender transitions without parental consent in school clubs, secret transition closets, and internal documents. On the COVID front, the “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 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, 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” 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 media narratives and government pronouncements that have been shown to be false in the twenty-tweens. The untrustworthiness is the problem: from Mayorkas’ “Baghdad Bob” assurances that the border is secure, 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 people and wreaked destruction on our cities (more, even, than the May 31st or January 6th Capitol riots), to the inverted reporting on Jussie Smollett vis-à-vis Nicholas Sandmann. These 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 wing 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.

Now, 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. Conspiracy theories are legion, varying wildly in plausibility and partisan adherence. Even more, contested claims and dissenting opinions are an inescapable part of the human condition. So how can we sift the wheat from the chaff if we aren’t going to ignore the issues of the day entirely.

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, contrariness, 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.'” In my own efforts to understand the times, and in my brushes with conspiracists, it’s Fox Mulder, not Oprah Winfrey, that is the avatar: “the truth is out there“.

Other character flaws that might motivate a persecution complex, us versus them animus, “

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 who appraised the evidence differently than he 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. At least

Austin, Michael W.; Bock, Gregory L.. QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 354). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

Indeed, 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 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.

Faulting him for unchecked 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 was the realization that he needed to confirm what were inferences from a fact pattern. This is precisely what human trafficking organizations and ministries do.

I remember well when I first read Kevin Bales’ Disposable People. I was shocked at his thesis, that slavery, in the sense of coerced labor, is now more prevalent around the world than it has ever been. Welch’s misdirected compulsion to do something is a moral conviction championed by I do not know the extent of sex trafficking. Christians are at the vanguard of tackling what of human trafficking, which is often sex trafficking. Nazarene Compassionate Ministries, The Faith Alliance Against Slavery (FAAST) and Trafficking is the coalition . The National Human Trafficking Hotline receives over 50,000 “signals” a year. In my community Rebuilding Hope! Sexual Assault Center for Pierce County – Sex Trafficking & Exploitation Program (STEP) and Scarlet Road, Global Center for Women and Justice, Human Trafficking Institute. Polaris Project

The imputation of motives reaches its apex in an unrestrained chapter bringing critical theory to the fray.

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

Evangelicals are in an identity crisis. By and large, American evangelical church goers remain socially and economically conservative. As such, they represent the single largest obstacle to the ethical and political aims of the progressive left. Evangelicalism’s intellectual and organizational leaders, meanwhile, more often reflect the progressive values, ideals, and presuppositions characteristic of their academic pedigrees. This strained fault line ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention Obergefell, Bostock, Dobbs, COVID, contested elections, and political violence. We are still trying to find our footing after this cultural upheaval. As always, we who would presume to teach have diagnoses and prescriptions for the way forward. God help us.

At such a time, editors Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. Bock recruited a couple dozen evangelical professors to exhort people in the pews to steer clear of conspiracy theories and dissenting opinions. Some of them are old friends and professors from my own graduate education. I feel an affection and appreciation toward them. Nevertheless, apart from a lot of general purpose 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 conservative Christians, skepticism towards authority is the wise and necessary epistemic stance in an information environment that is overwhelmingly dominated by a single political and ideological faction. Our recent history cries out not for less but more critically engaged citizens who will carefully examine, publicly question, and hold accountable their leaders. That is good citizenship in the kingdom of God, and in our democratic republic. On matters of consequence, average Christians should be emboldened to respectfully question authority and demolish arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the citizen, and against the cross.

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 making hay 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 transgender transitions without parental consent in school clubs, secret transition closets, and internal documents. On the COVID front, the “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 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, 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” 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 media narratives and government pronouncements that have been shown to be false in the twenty-tweens. The untrustworthiness is the problem: from Mayorkas’ “Baghdad Bob” assurances that the border is secure, 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 people and wreaked destruction on our cities (more, even, than the May 31st or January 6th Capitol riots), to the inverted reporting on Jussie Smollett vis-à-vis Nicholas Sandmann. These 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 wing news sites willed the truth out with dogged investigating. Smart phones, hidden cameras, FOIA requests, primary sources, automated internet archives, embedded reporting, new platforms, 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.

Now, 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. Conspiracy theories are legion, varying wildly in plausibility and partisan adherence. Even more, contested claims and dissenting opinions are an inescapable part of the human condition. So how can we sift the wheat from the chaff if we aren’t going to ignore the issues of the day entirely.

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, contrariness, 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.'” In my own efforts to understand the times, and in my brushes with conspiracists, it’s Fox Mulder, not Oprah Winfrey, that is the avatar: “the truth is out there“.

Other character flaws that might motivate a persecution complex, us versus them animus, “

Bradley Baurain’s chapter, “Parenting Teenagers in Gullible Times”, airs out his embarrassment and frustration with “conservative White evangelicals” who questioned and disagreed with the official line on COVID and 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.”

Austin, Michael W.; Bock, Gregory L.. QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 353). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

Austin, Michael W.; Bock, Gregory L.. QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 354). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

Indeed, 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 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.

Faulting him for unchecked 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 was the realization that he needed to confirm what were inferences from a fact pattern. This is precisely what human trafficking organizations and ministries do.

I remember well when I first read Kevin Bales’ Disposable People. I was shocked at his thesis, that slavery, in the sense of coerced labor, is now more prevalent around the world than it has ever been. Welch’s misdirected compulsion to do something is a moral conviction championed by I do not know the extent of sex trafficking. Christians are at the vanguard of tackling what of human trafficking, which is often sex trafficking. Nazarene Compassionate Ministries, The Faith Alliance Against Slavery (FAAST) and Trafficking is the coalition . The National Human Trafficking Hotline receives over 50,000 “signals” a year. In my community Rebuilding Hope! Sexual Assault Center for Pierce County – Sex Trafficking & Exploitation Program (STEP) and Scarlet Road, Global Center for Women and Justice, Human Trafficking Institute. Polaris Project

The imputation of motives reaches its apex in an unrestrained chapter bringing critical theory to the fray.

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

Evangelicals are in an identity crisis. By and large, American evangelical church goers remain socially and economically conservative. As such, they represent the single largest obstacle to the ethical and political aims of the progressive left. Evangelicalism’s intellectual and organizational leaders, meanwhile, more often reflect the progressive values, ideals, and presuppositions characteristic of their academic pedigrees. This strained fault line ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention Obergefell, Bostock, Dobbs, COVID, contested elections, and political violence. We are still trying to find our footing after this cultural upheaval. As always, we who would presume to teach have diagnoses and prescriptions for the way forward. God help us.

At such a time, editors Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. Bock recruited a couple dozen evangelical professors to exhort people in the pews to steer clear of conspiracy theories and dissenting opinions. Some of them are old friends and professors from my own graduate education. I feel an affection and appreciation toward them. Nevertheless, apart from a lot of general purpose 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 conservative Christians, skepticism towards authority is the wise and necessary epistemic stance in an information environment that is overwhelmingly dominated by a single political and ideological faction. Our recent history cries out not for less but more critically engaged citizens who will carefully examine, publicly question, and hold accountable their leaders. That is good citizenship in the kingdom of God, and in our democratic republic. On matters of consequence, average Christians should be emboldened to respectfully question authority and demolish arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the citizen, and against the cross.

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 making hay 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 transgender transitions without parental consent in school clubs, secret transition closets, and internal documents. On the COVID front, the “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 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, 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” 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 media narratives and government pronouncements that have been shown to be false in the twenty-tweens. The untrustworthiness is the problem: from Mayorkas’ “Baghdad Bob” assurances that the border is secure, 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 people and wreaked destruction on our cities (more, even, than the May 31st or January 6th Capitol riots), to the inverted reporting on Jussie Smollett vis-à-vis Nicholas Sandmann. These 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 wing news sites willed the truth out with dogged investigating. Smart phones, hidden cameras, FOIA requests, primary sources, automated internet archives, embedded reporting, new platforms, 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.

Now, 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. Conspiracy theories are legion, varying wildly in plausibility and partisan adherence. Even more, contested claims and dissenting opinions are an inescapable part of the human condition. So how can we sift the wheat from the chaff if we aren’t going to ignore the issues of the day entirely.

Why Do People Question Authority and Fall for Conspiracy Theories?

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross is most exasperating when it imputes motives to those who entertain conspiracy theories and contrary thought. In one uncharitable passage, 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.” To top it off, Johnson also 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.'” In my own efforts to understand the times, and in my brushes with conspiracists, it’s Fox Mulder, not Oprah Winfrey, that is the avatar: “the truth is out there“.

Other character flaws that might motivate a persecution complex, us versus them animus, “

Because of their questioning of COVID officialdom, Bradley Baurain says “gullibility, to put it mildly, appears to be the status quo among many Christians”.

Austin, Michael W.; Bock, Gregory L.. QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 354). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

Indeed, 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 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.

Faulting him for unchecked 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 was the realization that he needed to confirm what were inferences from a fact pattern. This is precisely what human trafficking organizations and ministries do.

I remember well when I first read Kevin Bales’ Disposable People. I was shocked at his thesis, that slavery, in the sense of coerced labor, is now more prevalent around the world than it has ever been. Welch’s misdirected compulsion to do something is a moral conviction championed by I do not know the extent of sex trafficking. Christians are at the vanguard of tackling what of human trafficking, which is often sex trafficking. Nazarene Compassionate Ministries, The Faith Alliance Against Slavery (FAAST) and Trafficking is the coalition . The National Human Trafficking Hotline receives over 50,000 “signals” a year. In my community Rebuilding Hope! Sexual Assault Center for Pierce County – Sex Trafficking & Exploitation Program (STEP) and Scarlet Road, Global Center for Women and Justice, Human Trafficking Institute. Polaris Project

The imputation of motives reaches its apex in an unrestrained chapter bringing critical theory to the fray.

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

Evangelicals are in an identity crisis. By and large, American evangelical church goers remain socially and economically conservative. As such, they represent the single largest obstacle to the ethical and political aims of the progressive left. Evangelicalism’s intellectual and organizational leaders, meanwhile, more often reflect the progressive values, ideals, and presuppositions characteristic of their academic pedigrees. This strained fault line ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention Obergefell, Bostock, Dobbs, COVID, contested elections, and political violence. We are still trying to find our footing after this cultural upheaval. As always, we who would presume to teach have diagnoses and prescriptions for the way forward. God help us.

At such a time, editors Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. Bock recruited a couple dozen evangelical professors to exhort people in the pews to steer clear of conspiracy theories and dissenting opinions. Some of them are old friends and professors from my own graduate education. I feel an affection and appreciation toward them. Nevertheless, apart from a lot of general purpose 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 conservative Christians, skepticism towards authority is the wise and necessary epistemic stance in an information environment that is overwhelmingly dominated by a single political and ideological faction. Our recent history cries out not for less but more critically engaged citizens who will carefully examine, publicly question, and hold accountable their leaders. That is good citizenship in the kingdom of God, and in our democratic republic. On matters of consequence, average Christians should be emboldened to respectfully question authority and demolish arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the citizen, and against the cross.

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 making hay 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 transgender transitions without parental consent in school clubs, secret transition closets, and internal documents. On the COVID front, the “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 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, 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” 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 media narratives and government pronouncements that have been shown to be false in the twenty-tweens. The untrustworthiness is the problem: from Mayorkas’ “Baghdad Bob” assurances that the border is secure, 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 people and wreaked destruction on our cities (more, even, than the May 31st or January 6th Capitol riots), to the inverted reporting on Jussie Smollett vis-à-vis Nicholas Sandmann. These 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 wing news sites willed the truth out with dogged investigating. Smart phones, hidden cameras, FOIA requests, primary sources, automated internet archives, embedded reporting, new platforms, 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.

Now, 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. Conspiracy theories are legion, varying wildly in plausibility and partisan adherence. Even more, contested claims and dissenting opinions are an inescapable part of the human condition. So how can we sift the wheat from the chaff if we aren’t going to ignore the issues of the day entirely.

Why Do People Question Authority and Fall for Conspiracy Theories?

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross is most exasperating when it imputes motives to those who entertain conspiracy theories and contrary thought. In one uncharitable passage, 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.” To top it off, Johnson also 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.'” In my own efforts to understand the times, and in my brushes with conspiracists, it’s Fox Mulder, not Oprah Winfrey, that is the avatar: “the truth is out there“.

Other character flaws that might motivate a persecution complex, us versus them animus,

Indeed, 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 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.

Faulting him for unchecked 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 was the realization that he needed to confirm what were inferences from a fact pattern. This is precisely what human trafficking organizations and ministries do.

I remember well when I first read Kevin Bales’ Disposable People. I was shocked at his thesis, that slavery, in the sense of coerced labor, is now more prevalent around the world than it has ever been. Welch’s misdirected compulsion to do something is a moral conviction championed by I do not know the extent of sex trafficking. Christians are at the vanguard of tackling what of human trafficking, which is often sex trafficking. Nazarene Compassionate Ministries, The Faith Alliance Against Slavery (FAAST) and Trafficking is the coalition . The National Human Trafficking Hotline receives over 50,000 “signals” a year. In my community Rebuilding Hope! Sexual Assault Center for Pierce County – Sex Trafficking & Exploitation Program (STEP) and Scarlet Road, Global Center for Women and Justice, Human Trafficking Institute. Polaris Project

The imputation of motives reaches its apex in an unrestrained chapter bringing critical theory to the fray.

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.

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

Evangelicals are in an identity crisis. By and large, American evangelical church goers remain socially and economically conservative. As such, they represent the single largest obstacle to the ethical and political aims of the progressive left. Evangelicalism’s intellectual and organizational leaders, meanwhile, more often reflect the progressive values, ideals, and presuppositions characteristic of their academic pedigrees. This strained fault line ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention Obergefell, Bostock, Dobbs, COVID, contested elections, and political violence. We are still trying to find our footing after this cultural upheaval. As always, we who would presume to teach have diagnoses and prescriptions for the way forward. God help us.

At such a time, editors Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. Bock recruited a couple dozen evangelical professors to exhort people in the pews to steer clear of conspiracy theories and dissenting opinions. Some of them are old friends and professors from my own graduate education. I feel an affection and appreciation toward them. Nevertheless, apart from a lot of general purpose 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 conservative Christians, skepticism towards authority is the wise and necessary epistemic stance in an information environment that is overwhelmingly dominated by a single political and ideological faction. Our recent history cries out not for less but more critically engaged citizens who will carefully examine, publicly question, and hold accountable their leaders. That is good citizenship in the kingdom of God, and in our democratic republic. On matters of consequence, average Christians should be emboldened to respectfully question authority and demolish arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the citizen, and against the cross.

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 making hay 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 transgender transitions without parental consent in school clubs, secret transition closets, and internal documents. On the COVID front, the “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 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, 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” 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 media narratives and government pronouncements that have been shown to be false in the twenty-tweens. The untrustworthiness is the problem: from Mayorkas’ “Baghdad Bob” assurances that the border is secure, 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 people and wreaked destruction on our cities (more, even, than the May 31st or January 6th Capitol riots), to the inverted reporting on Jussie Smollett vis-à-vis Nicholas Sandmann. These 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 wing news sites willed the truth out with dogged investigating. Smart phones, hidden cameras, FOIA requests, primary sources, automated internet archives, embedded reporting, new platforms, 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.

Now, 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. Conspiracy theories are legion, varying wildly in plausibility and partisan adherence. Even more, contested claims and dissenting opinions are an inescapable part of the human condition. So how can we sift the wheat from the chaff if we aren’t going to ignore the issues of the day entirely.

Why Do People Question Authority and Fall for Conspiracy Theories?

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross is most exasperating when it imputes motives to those who entertain conspiracy theories and contrary thought. In one uncharitable passage, 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.” To top it off, Johnson also 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.'” In my own efforts to understand the times, and in my brushes with conspiracists, it’s Fox Mulder, not Oprah Winfrey, that is the avatar: “the truth is out there“.

Other character flaws that might motivate a persecution complex, us versus them animus,

Indeed, 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 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.

Faulting him for unchecked 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 was the realization that he needed to confirm what were inferences from a fact pattern. This is precisely what human trafficking organizations and ministries do.

I remember well when I first read Kevin Bales’ Disposable People. I was shocked at his thesis, that slavery, in the sense of coerced labor, is now more prevalent around the world than it has ever been. Welch’s misdirected compulsion to do something is a moral conviction championed by I do not know the extent of sex trafficking. Christians are at the vanguard of tackling what of human trafficking, which is often sex trafficking. Nazarene Compassionate Ministries, The Faith Alliance Against Slavery (FAAST) and Trafficking is the coalition . The National Human Trafficking Hotline receives over 50,000 “signals” a year. In my community Rebuilding Hope! Sexual Assault Center for Pierce County – Sex Trafficking & Exploitation Program (STEP) and Scarlet Road, Global Center for Women and Justice, Human Trafficking Institute. Polaris Project

The imputation of motives reaches its apex in an unrestrained chapter bringing critical theory to the fray.

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.

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

Evangelicals are in an identity crisis. By and large, American evangelical church goers remain socially and economically conservative. As such, they represent the single largest obstacle to the ethical and political aims of the progressive left. Evangelicalism’s intellectual and organizational leaders, meanwhile, more often reflect the progressive values, ideals, and presuppositions characteristic of their academic pedigrees. This strained fault line ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention Obergefell, Bostock, Dobbs, COVID, contested elections, and political violence. We are still trying to find our footing after this cultural upheaval. As always, we who would presume to teach have diagnoses and prescriptions for the way forward. God help us.

At such a time, editors Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. Bock recruited a couple dozen evangelical professors to exhort people in the pews to steer clear of conspiracy theories and dissenting opinions. Some of them are old friends and professors from my own graduate education. I feel an affection and appreciation toward them. Nevertheless, apart from a lot of general purpose 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 conservative Christians, skepticism towards authority is the wise and necessary epistemic stance in an information environment that is overwhelmingly dominated by a single political and ideological faction. Our recent history cries out not for less but more critically engaged citizens who will carefully examine, publicly question, and hold accountable their leaders. That is good citizenship in the kingdom of God, and in our democratic republic. On matters of consequence, average Christians should be emboldened to respectfully question authority and demolish arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the citizen, and against the cross.

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 making hay 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 transgender transitions without parental consent in school clubs, secret transition closets, and internal documents. On the COVID front, the “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 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, 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” 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 media narratives and government pronouncements that have been shown to be false in the twenty-tweens. The untrustworthiness is the problem: from Mayorkas’ “Baghdad Bob” assurances that the border is secure, 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 people and wreaked destruction on our cities (more, even, than the May 31st or January 6th Capitol riots), to the inverted reporting on Jussie Smollett vis-à-vis Nicholas Sandmann. These 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 wing news sites willed the truth out with dogged investigating. Smart phones, hidden cameras, FOIA requests, primary sources, automated internet archives, embedded reporting, new platforms, 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.

Now, 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. Conspiracy theories are legion, varying wildly in plausibility and partisan adherence. Even more, contested claims and dissenting opinions are an inescapable part of the human condition. So how can we sift the wheat from the chaff if we aren’t going to ignore the issues of the day entirely.

Why Do People Question Authority and Fall for Conspiracy Theories?

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross is most exasperating when it imputes motives to those who entertain conspiracy theories and contrary thought. In one uncharitable passage, 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.” To top it off, Johnson also 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.'” In my own efforts to understand the times, and in my brushes with conspiracists, it’s Fox Mulder, not Oprah Winfrey, that is the avatar: “the truth is out there“.

Other character flaws that might motivate a persecution complex, us versus them animus,

Indeed, 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 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.

Faulting him for unchecked 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 was the realization that he needed to confirm what were inferences from a fact pattern. This is precisely what human trafficking organizations and ministries do.

I remember well when I first read Kevin Bales’ Disposable People. I was shocked at his thesis, that slavery, in the sense of coerced labor, is now more prevalent around the world than it has ever been. Welch’s misdirected compulsion to do something is a moral conviction championed by I do not know the extent of sex trafficking. Christians are at the vanguard of tackling what of human trafficking, which is often sex trafficking. Nazarene Compassionate Ministries, The Faith Alliance Against Slavery (FAAST) and Trafficking is the coalition . The National Human Trafficking Hotline receives over 50,000 “signals” a year. In my community Rebuilding Hope! Sexual Assault Center for Pierce County – Sex Trafficking & Exploitation Program (STEP) and Scarlet Road, Global Center for Women and Justice, Human Trafficking Institute. Polaris Project

The imputation of motives reaches its apex in an unrestrained chapter bringing critical theory to the fray.

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.

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

Evangelicals are in an identity crisis. By and large, American evangelical church goers remain socially and economically conservative. As such, they represent the single largest obstacle to the ethical and political aims of the progressive left. Evangelicalism’s intellectual and organizational leaders, meanwhile, more often reflect the progressive values, ideals, and presuppositions characteristic of their academic pedigrees. This long trembling fault line ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention Obergefell, Bostock, Dobbs, COVID, contested elections, and political violence. We are still trying to find our footing after this cultural and ethical upheaval. As always, we who would presume to teach have diagnoses and prescriptions for the way forward. God help us.

At such a time, editors Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. Bock recruited a couple dozen evangelical professors to exhort people in the pews to steer clear of conspiracy theories and dissenting opinions. Some of them are old friends and professors from my own graduate education. I feel an affection and appreciation toward them. Nevertheless, apart from a lot of general purpose and commendable 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 conservative Christians, skepticism towards authority is the wise and necessary epistemic stance in an information environment that is overwhelmingly dominated by a single political and ideological faction. Our recent history cries out not for less but more critically engaged citizens who will carefully examine, publicly question, and hold accountable their leaders. That is good citizenship in a democratic republic. On matters of consequence, average Christians especially should be emboldened to respectfully question authority and demolish arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the citizen, and against the cross.

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 making hay 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 transgender transitions without parental consent in school clubs, secret transition closets, and internal documents. On the COVID front, the “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 WHO meta-analysis of randomly controlled trials, which stated: “there is no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing influenza transmission”, only a “mechanistic plausibility”. Mirroring the elusive and indecipherable QAnon utterances, Jeffrey Epstein’s sex ring for the 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, 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” 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 media narratives and government pronouncements that have been shown to be false in the twenty-tweens. The untrustworthiness is the problem: from Mayorkas’ “Baghdad Bob” assurances that the border is secure, 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 people and wreaked destruction on our cities (more, even, than the May 31st or January 6th Capitol riots), to the inverted reporting on Jussie Smollett vis-à-vis Nicholas Sandmann. These 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 wing news sites willed the truth out with dogged investigating. Smart phones, hidden cameras, FOIA requests, primary sources, automated internet archives, embedded reporting, new platforms, 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.

Now, 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. Conspiracy theories are legion, varying wildly in plausibility and partisan adherence. Even more, contested claims and dissenting opinions are an inescapable part of the human condition. So how can we sift the wheat from the chaff if we aren’t going to ignore the issues of the day entirely.

Why Do People Question Authority and Fall for Conspiracy Theories?

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross is most exasperating when it imputes motives to those who entertain conspiracy theories and contrary thought. In one uncharitable passage, 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.” To top it off, Johnson also 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.'” In my own efforts to understand the times, and in my brushes with conspiracists, it’s Fox Mulder, not Oprah Winfrey, that is the avatar: “the truth is out there“.

Other character flaws that might motivate a persecution complex, us versus them animus,

Indeed, 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 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.

Faulting him for unchecked 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 was the realization that he needed to confirm what were inferences from a fact pattern. This is precisely what human trafficking organizations and ministries do.

I remember well when I first read Kevin Bales’ Disposable People. I was shocked at his thesis, that slavery, in the sense of coerced labor, is now more prevalent around the world than it has ever been. Welch’s misdirected compulsion to do something is a moral conviction championed by I do not know the extent of sex trafficking. Christians are at the vanguard of tackling what of human trafficking, which is often sex trafficking. Nazarene Compassionate Ministries, The Faith Alliance Against Slavery (FAAST) and Trafficking is the coalition . The National Human Trafficking Hotline receives over 50,000 “signals” a year. In my community Rebuilding Hope! Sexual Assault Center for Pierce County – Sex Trafficking & Exploitation Program (STEP) and Scarlet Road, Global Center for Women and Justice, Human Trafficking Institute. Polaris Project

The imputation of motives reaches its apex in an unrestrained chapter bringing critical theory to the fray.

Trust and The Challenge of the Information Age

Rachel I. Wightman rightly notes that to be a savvy filter of information in the Information Age.

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

Evangelicals are in an identity crisis. By and large, American evangelical church goers remain socially and economically conservative. As such, they represent the single largest obstacle to the ethical and political aims of the progressive left. Evangelicalism’s intellectual and organizational leaders, meanwhile, more often reflect the progressive values, ideals, and presuppositions characteristic of their academic pedigrees. This long trembling fault line ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention Obergefell, Bostock, Dobbs, COVID, contested elections, and political violence. We are still trying to find our footing after this cultural and ethical upheaval. As always, we who would presume to teach have diagnoses and prescriptions for the way forward. God help us.

At such a time, editors Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. Bock recruited a couple dozen evangelical professors to exhort people in the pews to steer clear of conspiracy theories and dissenting opinions. Some of them are old friends and professors from my own graduate education. I feel an affection and appreciation toward them. Nevertheless, apart from a lot of general purpose and commendable 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 conservative Christians, skepticism towards authority is the wise and necessary epistemic stance in an information environment that is overwhelmingly dominated by a single political and ideological faction. Our recent history cries out not for less but more critically engaged citizens who will carefully examine, publicly question, and hold accountable their leaders. That is good citizenship in a democratic republic. On matters of consequence, average Christians especially should be emboldened to respectfully question authority and demolish arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the citizen, and against the cross.

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 making hay 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 to independent journalist Chris Rufo 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 transgender transitions without parental consent in school clubs, secret transition closets, and internal documents. On the COVID front, the “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 WHO meta-analysis of randomly controlled trials, which stated: “there is no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing influenza transmission”, only a “mechanistic plausibility”. Mirroring the elusive and indecipherable QAnon utterances, Jeffrey Epstein’s sex ring for the 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, 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” 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 media narratives and government pronouncements that have been shown to be false in the early twenties of the twenty-first century. From Mayorkas’ “Baghdad Bob” assurances that the border is secure, to the disingenuously named Inflation Reduction Act, to denials of giving away drug paraphernalia to “reduce harm”, to gaslighting about the “mostly peaceful protests” that maimed and killed people and wreaked destruction on our cities (more, even, than the May 31st or January 6th Capitol riots), to the inverted reporting on Jussie Smollett vis-à-vis Nicholas Sandmann, 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 wing news sites willed the truth out with dogged investigating. Smart phones, hidden cameras, FOIA requests, primary sources, automated internet archives, embedded reporting, new platforms, 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.

Now, 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. Conspiracy theories are legion, varying wildly in plausibility and partisan adherence. Even more, contested claims and dissenting opinions are an inescapable part of the human condition. So how can we sift the wheat from the chaff if we aren’t going to ignore the issues of the day entirely.

Why Do People Question Authority and Fall for Conspiracy Theories?

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross is most exasperating when it imputes motives to those who entertain conspiracy theories and contrary thought. In one uncharitable passage, 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.” To top it off, Johnson also 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.'” In my own efforts to understand the times, and in my brushes with conspiracists, it’s Fox Mulder, not Oprah Winfrey, that is the avatar: “the truth is out there“.

Other character flaws that might motivate a persecution complex, us versus them animus,

Indeed, 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 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.

Faulting him for unchecked 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 no vice.

Welch’s misdirected compulsion to do something is a moral conviction championed by I do not know the extent of sex trafficking. Christians are at the vanguard of tackling what of human trafficking, which is often sex trafficking. Nazarene Compassionate Ministries, The Faith Alliance Against Slavery (FAAST) and Trafficking is the coalition . The National Human Trafficking Hotline receives over 50,000 “signals” a year. In my community Rebuilding Hope! Sexual Assault Center for Pierce County – Sex Trafficking & Exploitation Program (STEP) and Scarlet Road, Global Center for Women and Justice, Human Trafficking Institute. Polaris Project

The imputation of motives reaches its apex in an unrestrained chapter bringing critical theory to the fray.

Trust and The Challenge of the Information Age

Rachel I. Wightman rightly notes that to be a savvy filter of information in the Information Age.

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