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

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.

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 fault line ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention Obergefell, Bostock, and 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 as this, 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 prophecies, 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 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, 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.

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 fault line ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention Obergefell, Bostock, and 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 as this, 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 prophecies, 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 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, 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 dissident’s truth seeking, take note of 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.

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 fault line ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention Obergefell, Bostock, and 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 as this, 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 prophecies, 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 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, 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 dissident’s truth seeking, take note of 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

Not a CIA invention.

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.

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 fault line ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention Obergefell, Bostock, and 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 as this, 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 prophecies, 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 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, 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 dissident’s truth seeking, take note of 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

Not a CIA invention.

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

Those White, Christian, Male, Heteronormative Conspiracists

Even with its consistent defense of reasonable faith and a passing critique of postmodernism, knowing the tilt and intellectual milieu of this book, it’s no surprise that critical theory makes an appearance to scapegoat the predominate rival and thus favorite bogeyman of the political left: the white, Christian, male, heterosexual. Susan Peppers-Bates notes an instructive and oft-told aspect of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. The hero of Jesus’ story was a member of an ethnicity and sect that were generally reviled by his Jewish audience. In addition to expanding the pharisees’ notion of “whom is our neighbor”, the parable challenges us to self-examine and ask, “Who do I regard with prejudice as a Samaritan?” Bringing Critical Theory to task, Peppers-Bates takes it that Americans, and evangelicals more specifically, are guilty of reviling “voices of women, people of color, LGBTQI, and other marginalized groups”. It’s evident that for the authors of this book, it is conspiracy theorists and Trump supporters occupy the reviled place of the Samaritan, but that thought is not entertained.

Peppers-Bates expertly employs the relentless criticism of the critical theoretical mode on her subjects, seeing misogynist and white supremacist motives and undertones even where more charitable explanations are available. Christians haven’t insisted upon the role of God as father and the incarnation of Christ as a man because of fidelity to God’s self-disclosure, but rather because “God’s masculinity has become and idol”. European artists did not portray Jesus as looking like themselves, like artists from other cultures, because their models were white and the exact pigment of Jesus’ skin was and is unknown, but rather as the “logical conclusion of four centuries of conquest, enslavement, and theft of native lands”. True to form, Peppers-Bates traces past sins to the current political moment, equating churches who segregated along racial lines in the past with Christians today who exclude LGBTQI from church leadership based on the biblical prohibitions of sexual immorality.

How does Peppers-Bates connect the universal acid of critical theory to conspiracism? Following the example of Peter Wehner

As Justin Giboney points out: “Messages about the Christian sexual ethic and the sanctity of life start to disappear from our platforms. We don’t want to lose secular political allies, offend the custodians of culture, or go viral for having “regressive” views.”

Sycophants and Simps

Demonization of unvaccinated are scum.

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.

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 fault line ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention Obergefell, Bostock, and 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 as this, 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 prophecies, 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 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, 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.

Highpoints

Twenty-four chapters long, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross features a number of edifying chapters and recurrent threads. The importance of intellectual humility is a steady drumbeat throughout, though this admonition is almost entirely directed at average Christians, not toward government bureaucrats or university professors. A few authors exhort the reader to ask themselves if their online media consumption is leading them toward love of neighbor and enemy, or toward anger, despair, and hate. Gregory Bock reminds us: “Christians should be careful that their beliefs about the world don’t interfere with their ability to love others.” As a Christian, this is an essential question for self-examination. In that vein, Rick Langer‘s “Testing Teachings and Torching Teachers” is an excellent and practical guide to the principles and habits of heart we must cultivate as we engage others and judge truth claims. Reiterating 2nd Timothy, he is right that, among other obligations: “We are simply obliged, as followers of Christ, to discard habits of wrath, anger, and divisiveness, and cultivate habits of gentleness, peacemaking, and kindness.” Apart from a needless swipe at the largely vindicated Scott Atlas, Garrett J. Deweese is the contributor who most enjoins the reader to critically engage with experts and government narratives using the very epistemic virtues that are touted throughout the book. DeWeese also pinpoints what I take to be the primary fount of conspiracism: a loss of trust in establishment news and institutions. He notes: “An authoritative ‘Be quiet and listen to the experts’ falls flat in the face of mistrust of the experts.” Deweese enumerates reasons for a guarded skepticism toward the pronouncements of The Science™, from instances of falsified data to the replication crisis. Chase Andre contributes a catalog of the ways in which the anonymous Q and his interpreters weaved pseudo-religious themes into their cryptic messages to incite a syncretistic cult of God and Country zealotry.

As I mentioned, QCC includes generous portions of salutary advice. For example, Chad Bogosian counsels:

What counts as good evidence is sometimes debated case by case, but generally, we should seek out the best quality of evidence from each source relevant to the subject matter. On the topics of science, religion, morality, and politics, reliable and trustworthy sources might include direct evidence from original or other quality documents, knowledgeable persons who seek the truth, as well as expert testimony. Additionally, good evidence might include indirect evidence about the topic at hand: what experts have to say about the direct evidence, that politicians are often deceptive and conniving, and the fact that both experts and your intellectual peers disagree about the topic. Wishful thinking, conjecture, blind leaps, gut feelings or hunches, opinionated friends on social media, etc., are generally considered poor quality evidence. While you might turn out to have a true belief about something you wish for, this is likely a matter of cognitive luck, since wishful thinking doesn’t typically generate true beliefs.

Dru Johnson argues rightly from the biblical text that Christians are called “nd people who must be reasoned with, the Scriptures want us to consider the ethics of knowing.” But Johnson’s analysis of the text is sauce for the gander as well, as it’s clear every follower of Christ must not be “led astray” by rumors of wars or claims that Christ has returned, “look here, look there”. Each of us must evaluate the evidence for ourselves. In a great chapter on Augustine’s Two Cities Katie Schleiss also inadvertently

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 dissident’s truth seeking, take note of 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

Not a CIA invention.

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

Those White, Christian, Male, Heteronormative Conspiracists

Even with its consistent defense of reasonable faith and a passing critique of postmodernism, knowing the tilt and intellectual milieu of this book, it’s no surprise that critical theory makes an appearance to scapegoat the predominate rival and thus favorite bogeyman of the political left: the white, Christian, male, heterosexual. Susan Peppers-Bates notes an instructive and oft-told aspect of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. The hero of Jesus’ story was a member of an ethnicity and sect that were generally reviled by his Jewish audience. In addition to expanding the pharisees’ notion of “whom is our neighbor”, the parable challenges us to self-examine and ask, “Who do I regard with prejudice as a Samaritan?” Bringing Critical Theory to task, Peppers-Bates takes it that Americans, and evangelicals more specifically, are guilty of reviling “voices of women, people of color, LGBTQI, and other marginalized groups”. It’s evident that for the authors of this book, it is conspiracy theorists and Trump supporters occupy the reviled place of the Samaritan, but that thought is not entertained.

Peppers-Bates expertly employs the relentless criticism of the critical theoretical mode on her subjects, seeing misogynist and white supremacist motives and undertones even where more charitable explanations are available. Christians haven’t insisted upon the role of God as father and the incarnation of Christ as a man because of fidelity to God’s self-disclosure, but rather because “God’s masculinity has become and idol”. European artists did not portray Jesus as looking like themselves, like artists from other cultures, because their models were white and the exact pigment of Jesus’ skin was and is unknown, but rather as the “logical conclusion of four centuries of conquest, enslavement, and theft of native lands”. True to form, Peppers-Bates traces past sins to the current political moment, equating churches who segregated along racial lines in the past with Christians today who exclude LGBTQI from church leadership based on the biblical prohibitions of sexual immorality.

How does Peppers-Bates connect the universal acid of critical theory to conspiracism? Following the example of Peter Wehner

As Justin Giboney points out: “Messages about the Christian sexual ethic and the sanctity of life start to disappear from our platforms. We don’t want to lose secular political allies, offend the custodians of culture, or go viral for having “regressive” views.”

Sycophants and Simps

Demonization of unvaccinated are scum.

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.

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 fault line ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention Obergefell, Bostock, and 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 as this, 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 prophecies, 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 we had been reassured were merely 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 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, 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.

What Conspiracies?

Chad Bogosian offers Jared Milson’s workable definition of our subject: “Conspiracies are actions or plans undertaken by a small group of individuals working in secret to achieve shared goals.” (chapter 2)

Many conspiracies are mentioned in passing in these pages. From my notes, the list of conspiracy theories indicted in QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross include: QAnon (chapters 18, 21), the moon landings were fake, the 1980’s “Satanic Panic” (chapter 2), COVID vaccines contained tracking devices, contrails are chemtrails, “Ukrainian meddling”, Hilary’s “vast right wing conspiracy”, 9/11 Trutherism, #Pizzagate (chap. 20), Antifa behind January 16th the 2020 election was rigged (and 2016?), and even an obligatory reference to flat-earthism. Most of the concern is aimed at two issues in particular: Qanon and COVID.

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 35). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

For example, most believe in Watergate or that the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers were orchestrated by al Qaeda, or that Dietrich Bonhoeffer conspired to take down Hitler. Each of these satisfies our definition of “conspiracy,” since a relatively small group worked in secret to bring about the events in question; and each of these beliefs is rational because it is directly supported by a body of available evidence.

Chad Bogosian

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 31). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

Michael Austin was introdices the books with a few examples.

“What exactly is a conspiracy theory? We accept a definition given by Jared Millson: “A conspiracy theory is an explanation of some alleged fact or event in terms of the actions undertaken by a small group of individuals working in secret.”

In good chapter on anger, love, and hope He a few more examples of untoward conspiracist. “Let’s assume for the moment that some of the worst conspiracy theories are true. For example, vaccines contain tracking devices, contrails are really chemtrails, and the 2020 US presidential election was rigged. If these were true, then anger would be appropriate, right? But how angry should we get?

and.
For example, anger that springs from a belief in a conspiracy theory might prevent us from acting kindly toward government workers who enforce a vaccine mandate or a clerk at a grocery store who enforces a mask mandate.

Like many other contributors, Austin and Bock emphasize the importance of intellectual humility, an essential epistemic virtue if ever there was one. Echoing the Apostle James, Bock offers the following tip: “ask conspiracy theorists whether they think it’s possible that they’re wrong. Humble people don’t get angry very quickly because they don’t rush to judgment too quickly. They spend time examining the evidence and listening to different points of view.” Of course, intellectual humility is a requisite virtue not just for conspiracists but for university professors and government bureaucrats too. But the authors have no exhortations for those in power who at the peak of hubris led the massive censorship programs, dismissed non-conforming professors, and marginalized alternative policy prescriptions all while making many false claims and projections from which they’ve backpedal since. Those in power with greater responsibility by far need not worry that they’ll be chastised in these pages. No truth to power. A message for the educated to the uneducated.

one especially regrettable example

Who are we talking about?

Caricatures of Conspiracists

In their chapter, “Christianity, Conspiracy Theories, and Intellectual Character”, Nathan King and Keith Wyma try to offer a sympathetic explanation for conspiracism. Falling under the sway of such a theory may not be the result of the usual epistemic vices, they suggest, but rather of a weakness of will. That is to say, our pursuit of truth can be led astray by our passions. King and Wyma offer three caricatures of unwitting and weak-willed conspiracists. “Careless Carl” jumps to conclusions and won’t consider other possible explanations. “Bold Brandi” lacks intellectual humility. She trusts experts in some domains, but not in others. “Though she believes that COVID-19 is a real phenomenon, she is convinced that instead of wearing masks and getting vaccines, citizens should continue life as normal.” “When commenters ask why she is so confident in her medical opinions, she tweets back, ‘Because I did my own research.’” Third up is “Uneven Evan” who applies double standards, being skeptical toward some conspiracy theories but not others and casting a shrewd eye on left-wing news while swallowing right wing news uncritically.

In a footnote, King and Wyma clarify that they are not claiming that their “illustrations are typical of all conspiracy theorists”, though they do represent real people the authors know. But why choose them as emblematic of the Christians who questioned officialdom in the tumultuous twenties? I’d like to introduce them to No-nonsense Neil, who patiently traced ideas back to primary sources to understand them accurately, noted strengths and weaknesses, and, like the Bereans, carefully weighed today’s academic orthodoxies against timeless biblical virtues and precedents. While Neil admittedly explored beyond his specialty, others were sidelined for their heresies in spite of unimpeachable credentials. Apart from Rachel I. Wightman, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross fails to deal squarely with the reality of conflicting expert opinion. King and Wyma could have introduced us to Judicious Jay, a Stanford epidemiologist who carefully distinguished between true and false claims about lockdowns and vaccines during COVID and led an effort by hundreds of thousands to recommend a different strategy to mitigate the harms of the pandemic; for his trouble Jay was censored by Twitter at the government’s behest and treated to a “devastating takedown” as a “fringe epidemiologist” by Francis Collins at the pinnacle of power. Or meet Admirable Aaron, a University of California at Irvine Director of Medical Ethics and a frontline doctor who, having survived infection, objected to coerced vaccines for himself and fellow medical practitioners; after being censured by colleagues and fired from his post, he joined a Supreme Court lawsuit to challenge government breaches of our First Amendment rights. The authors may already know Distinguished Doug, a Christian scientist and fellow professor who had co-authored a prescient book raising the alarm about dubious evidence and the unintended consequences of lockdowns.

Is it really true that the problem with characters such as these — who withstood enormous social, peer, and political pressure, or fired, like many others — was that they were weak willed?

Not only do King and Wyma not profile responsible dissidents that complicate our cast of characters, they do not contemplate the passions of other actors. Billionaire Bill, who is the benefactor of thousands of our institutions and stood to gain billions more from mandatory vaccinations, is not noteworthy. CNN Cindy, whose primary source of advertising dollars is the pharmaceutical industry, enjoys no scrutiny. Unchallenged too is Mainstream Mandy, who absorbs narratives from Wikipedia-approved news outlets and the curated first-page results of Google searches without second-guessing them, even when those claims don’t square with a biblical worldview. God’s creation order, male and female, must be jettisoned. It’s a spectrum, “a kaleidoscope”, says Bill Nye and our medical associations. Men menstruate and give birth, Google assures her. Who is she to question? When she runs across the annual Easter and Christmas cover articles in Time debunking the miraculous birth of Jesus and the Resurrection of Christ, she is stymied in her faith. Pastor Go-along Gary is conscientious about Romans 13, always deferential to governing authority. He does not question government mandates, so he parrots CDC issuances on social media, makes compliance a matter of Christian obedience, closes the church doors to the unclean, and shames those who have moral qualms about vaccines or the sexual chaos promoted at every level of government.

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.

Highpoints

Twenty-four chapters long, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross features a number of edifying chapters and recurrent threads. The importance of intellectual humility is a steady drumbeat throughout, though this admonition is almost entirely directed at average Christians, not toward government bureaucrats or university professors. A few authors exhort the reader to ask themselves if their online media consumption is leading them toward love of neighbor and enemy, or toward anger, despair, and hate. Gregory Bock reminds us: “Christians should be careful that their beliefs about the world don’t interfere with their ability to love others.” As a Christian, this is an essential question for self-examination. In that vein, Rick Langer‘s “Testing Teachings and Torching Teachers” is an excellent and practical guide to the principles and habits of heart we must cultivate as we engage others and judge truth claims. Reiterating 2nd Timothy, he is right that, among other obligations: “We are simply obliged, as followers of Christ, to discard habits of wrath, anger, and divisiveness, and cultivate habits of gentleness, peacemaking, and kindness.” Apart from a needless swipe at the largely vindicated Scott Atlas, Garrett J. Deweese is the contributor who most enjoins the reader to critically engage with experts and government narratives using the very epistemic virtues that are touted throughout the book. DeWeese also pinpoints what I take to be the primary fount of conspiracism: a loss of trust in establishment news and institutions. He notes: “An authoritative ‘Be quiet and listen to the experts’ falls flat in the face of mistrust of the experts.” Deweese enumerates reasons for a guarded skepticism toward the pronouncements of The Science™, from instances of falsified data to the replication crisis. Chase Andre contributes a catalog of the ways in which the anonymous Q and his interpreters weaved pseudo-religious themes into their cryptic messages to incite a syncretistic cult of God and Country zealotry.

As I mentioned, QCC includes generous portions of salutary advice. For example, Chad Bogosian counsels:

What counts as good evidence is sometimes debated case by case, but generally, we should seek out the best quality of evidence from each source relevant to the subject matter. On the topics of science, religion, morality, and politics, reliable and trustworthy sources might include direct evidence from original or other quality documents, knowledgeable persons who seek the truth, as well as expert testimony. Additionally, good evidence might include indirect evidence about the topic at hand: what experts have to say about the direct evidence, that politicians are often deceptive and conniving, and the fact that both experts and your intellectual peers disagree about the topic. Wishful thinking, conjecture, blind leaps, gut feelings or hunches, opinionated friends on social media, etc., are generally considered poor quality evidence. While you might turn out to have a true belief about something you wish for, this is likely a matter of cognitive luck, since wishful thinking doesn’t typically generate true beliefs.

Dru Johnson argues rightly from the biblical text that Christians are called “nd people who must be reasoned with, the Scriptures want us to consider the ethics of knowing.” But Johnson’s analysis of the text is sauce for the gander as well, as it’s clear every follower of Christ must not be “led astray” by rumors of wars or claims that Christ has returned, “look here, look there”. Each of us must evaluate the evidence for ourselves. In a great chapter on Augustine’s Two Cities Katie Schleiss also inadvertently

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 dissident’s truth seeking, take note of 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

Not a CIA invention.

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

Those White, Christian, Male, Heteronormative Conspiracists

Even with its consistent defense of reasonable faith and a passing critique of postmodernism, knowing the tilt and intellectual milieu of this book, it’s no surprise that critical theory makes an appearance to scapegoat the predominate rival and thus favorite bogeyman of the political left: the white, Christian, male, heterosexual. Susan Peppers-Bates notes an instructive and oft-told aspect of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. The hero of Jesus’ story was a member of an ethnicity and sect that were generally reviled by his Jewish audience. In addition to expanding the pharisees’ notion of “whom is our neighbor”, the parable challenges us to self-examine and ask, “Who do I regard with prejudice as a Samaritan?” Bringing Critical Theory to task, Peppers-Bates takes it that Americans, and evangelicals more specifically, are guilty of reviling “voices of women, people of color, LGBTQI, and other marginalized groups”. It’s evident that for the authors of this book, it is conspiracy theorists and Trump supporters occupy the reviled place of the Samaritan, but that thought is not entertained.

Peppers-Bates expertly employs the relentless criticism of the critical theoretical mode on her subjects, seeing misogynist and white supremacist motives and undertones even where more charitable explanations are available. Christians haven’t insisted upon the role of God as father and the incarnation of Christ as a man because of fidelity to God’s self-disclosure, but rather because “God’s masculinity has become and idol”. European artists did not portray Jesus as looking like themselves, like artists from other cultures, because their models were white and the exact pigment of Jesus’ skin was and is unknown, but rather as the “logical conclusion of four centuries of conquest, enslavement, and theft of native lands”. True to form, Peppers-Bates traces past sins to the current political moment, equating churches who segregated along racial lines in the past with Christians today who exclude LGBTQI from church leadership based on the biblical prohibitions of sexual immorality.

How does Peppers-Bates connect the universal acid of critical theory to conspiracism? Following the example of Peter Wehner

As Justin Giboney points out: “Messages about the Christian sexual ethic and the sanctity of life start to disappear from our platforms. We don’t want to lose secular political allies, offend the custodians of culture, or go viral for having “regressive” views.”

Sycophants and Simps

Demonization of unvaccinated are scum.

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 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?

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 fault line ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention Obergefell, Bostock, and 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 as this, 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 prophecies, 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 we had been reassured were merely 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 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, 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.

What Conspiracies?

Chad Bogosian offers Jared Milson’s workable definition of our subject: “Conspiracies are actions or plans undertaken by a small group of individuals working in secret to achieve shared goals.” (chapter 2)

Many conspiracies are mentioned in passing in these pages. From my notes, the list of conspiracy theories indicted in QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross include: QAnon (chapters 18, 21), the moon landings were fake, the 1980’s “Satanic Panic” (chapter 2), COVID vaccines contained tracking devices, contrails are chemtrails, “Ukrainian meddling”, Hilary’s “vast right wing conspiracy”, 9/11 Trutherism, #Pizzagate (chap. 20), Antifa behind January 16th the 2020 election was rigged (and 2016?), and even an obligatory reference to flat-earthism. Most of the concern is aimed at two issues in particular: Qanon and COVID.

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 35). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

For example, most believe in Watergate or that the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers were orchestrated by al Qaeda, or that Dietrich Bonhoeffer conspired to take down Hitler. Each of these satisfies our definition of “conspiracy,” since a relatively small group worked in secret to bring about the events in question; and each of these beliefs is rational because it is directly supported by a body of available evidence.

Chad Bogosian

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 31). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

Michael Austin was introdices the books with a few examples.

“What exactly is a conspiracy theory? We accept a definition given by Jared Millson: “A conspiracy theory is an explanation of some alleged fact or event in terms of the actions undertaken by a small group of individuals working in secret.”

In good chapter on anger, love, and hope He a few more examples of untoward conspiracist. “Let’s assume for the moment that some of the worst conspiracy theories are true. For example, vaccines contain tracking devices, contrails are really chemtrails, and the 2020 US presidential election was rigged. If these were true, then anger would be appropriate, right? But how angry should we get?

and.
For example, anger that springs from a belief in a conspiracy theory might prevent us from acting kindly toward government workers who enforce a vaccine mandate or a clerk at a grocery store who enforces a mask mandate.

Like many other contributors, Austin and Bock emphasize the importance of intellectual humility, an essential epistemic virtue if ever there was one. Echoing the Apostle James, Bock offers the following tip: “ask conspiracy theorists whether they think it’s possible that they’re wrong. Humble people don’t get angry very quickly because they don’t rush to judgment too quickly. They spend time examining the evidence and listening to different points of view.” Of course, intellectual humility is a requisite virtue not just for conspiracists but for university professors and government bureaucrats too. But the authors have no exhortations for those in power who at the peak of hubris led the massive censorship programs, dismissed non-conforming professors, and marginalized alternative policy prescriptions all while making many false claims and projections from which they’ve backpedal since. Those in power with greater responsibility by far need not worry that they’ll be chastised in these pages. No truth to power. A message for the educated to the uneducated.

one especially regrettable example

Who are we talking about?

Caricatures of Conspiracists

In their chapter, “Christianity, Conspiracy Theories, and Intellectual Character”, Nathan King and Keith Wyma try to offer a sympathetic explanation for conspiracism. Falling under the sway of such a theory may not be the result of the usual epistemic vices, they suggest, but rather of a weakness of will. That is to say, our pursuit of truth can be led astray by our passions. King and Wyma offer three caricatures of unwitting and weak-willed conspiracists. “Careless Carl” jumps to conclusions and won’t consider other possible explanations. “Bold Brandi” lacks intellectual humility. She trusts experts in some domains, but not in others. “Though she believes that COVID-19 is a real phenomenon, she is convinced that instead of wearing masks and getting vaccines, citizens should continue life as normal.” “When commenters ask why she is so confident in her medical opinions, she tweets back, ‘Because I did my own research.’” Third up is “Uneven Evan” who applies double standards, being skeptical toward some conspiracy theories but not others and casting a shrewd eye on left-wing news while swallowing right wing news uncritically.

In a footnote, King and Wyma clarify that they are not claiming that their “illustrations are typical of all conspiracy theorists”, though they do represent real people the authors know. But why choose them as emblematic of the Christians who questioned officialdom in the tumultuous twenties? I’d like to introduce them to No-nonsense Neil, who patiently traced ideas back to primary sources to understand them accurately, noted strengths and weaknesses, and, like the Bereans, carefully weighed today’s academic orthodoxies against timeless biblical virtues and precedents. While Neil admittedly explored beyond his specialty, others were sidelined for their heresies in spite of unimpeachable credentials. Apart from Rachel I. Wightman, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross fails to deal squarely with the reality of conflicting expert opinion. King and Wyma could have introduced us to Judicious Jay, a Stanford epidemiologist who carefully distinguished between true and false claims about lockdowns and vaccines during COVID and led an effort by hundreds of thousands to recommend a different strategy to mitigate the harms of the pandemic; for his trouble Jay was censored by Twitter at the government’s behest and treated to a “devastating takedown” as a “fringe epidemiologist” by Francis Collins at the pinnacle of power. Or meet Admirable Aaron, a University of California at Irvine Director of Medical Ethics and a frontline doctor who, having survived infection, objected to coerced vaccines for himself and fellow medical practitioners; after being censured by colleagues and fired from his post, he joined a Supreme Court lawsuit to challenge government breaches of our First Amendment rights. The authors may already know Distinguished Doug, a Christian scientist and fellow professor who had co-authored a prescient book raising the alarm about dubious evidence and the unintended consequences of lockdowns.

Is it really true that the problem with characters such as these — who withstood enormous social, peer, and political pressure, or fired, like many others — was that they were weak willed?

Not only do King and Wyma not profile responsible dissidents that complicate our cast of characters, they do not contemplate the passions of other actors. Billionaire Bill, who is the benefactor of thousands of our institutions and stood to gain billions more from mandatory vaccinations, is not noteworthy. CNN Cindy, whose primary source of advertising dollars is the pharmaceutical industry, enjoys no scrutiny. Unchallenged too is Mainstream Mandy, who absorbs narratives from Wikipedia-approved news outlets and the curated first-page results of Google searches without second-guessing them, even when those claims don’t square with a biblical worldview. God’s creation order, male and female, must be jettisoned. It’s a spectrum, “a kaleidoscope”, says Bill Nye and our medical associations. Men menstruate and give birth, Google assures her. Who is she to question? When she runs across the annual Easter and Christmas cover articles in Time debunking the miraculous birth of Jesus and the Resurrection of Christ, she is stymied in her faith. Pastor Go-along Gary is conscientious about Romans 13, always deferential to governing authority. He does not question government mandates, so he parrots CDC issuances on social media, makes compliance a matter of Christian obedience, closes the church doors to the unclean, and shames those who have moral qualms about vaccines or the sexual chaos promoted at every level of government.

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.

Highpoints

Twenty-four chapters long, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross features a number of edifying chapters and recurrent threads. The importance of intellectual humility is a steady drumbeat throughout, though this admonition is almost entirely directed at average Christians, not toward government bureaucrats or university professors. A few authors exhort the reader to ask themselves if their online media consumption is leading them toward love of neighbor and enemy, or toward anger, despair, and hate. Gregory Bock reminds us: “Christians should be careful that their beliefs about the world don’t interfere with their ability to love others.” As a Christian, this is an essential question for self-examination. In that vein, Rick Langer‘s “Testing Teachings and Torching Teachers” is an excellent and practical guide to the principles and habits of heart we must cultivate as we engage others and judge truth claims. Reiterating 2nd Timothy, he is right that, among other obligations: “We are simply obliged, as followers of Christ, to discard habits of wrath, anger, and divisiveness, and cultivate habits of gentleness, peacemaking, and kindness.” Apart from a needless swipe at the largely vindicated Scott Atlas, Garrett J. Deweese is the contributor who most enjoins the reader to critically engage with experts and government narratives using the very epistemic virtues that are touted throughout the book. DeWeese also pinpoints what I take to be the primary fount of conspiracism: a loss of trust in establishment news and institutions. He notes: “An authoritative ‘Be quiet and listen to the experts’ falls flat in the face of mistrust of the experts.” Deweese enumerates reasons for a guarded skepticism toward the pronouncements of The Science™, from instances of falsified data to the replication crisis. Chase Andre contributes a catalog of the ways in which the anonymous Q and his interpreters weaved pseudo-religious themes into their cryptic messages to incite a syncretistic cult of God and Country zealotry.

As I mentioned, QCC includes generous portions of salutary advice. For example, Chad Bogosian counsels:

What counts as good evidence is sometimes debated case by case, but generally, we should seek out the best quality of evidence from each source relevant to the subject matter. On the topics of science, religion, morality, and politics, reliable and trustworthy sources might include direct evidence from original or other quality documents, knowledgeable persons who seek the truth, as well as expert testimony. Additionally, good evidence might include indirect evidence about the topic at hand: what experts have to say about the direct evidence, that politicians are often deceptive and conniving, and the fact that both experts and your intellectual peers disagree about the topic. Wishful thinking, conjecture, blind leaps, gut feelings or hunches, opinionated friends on social media, etc., are generally considered poor quality evidence. While you might turn out to have a true belief about something you wish for, this is likely a matter of cognitive luck, since wishful thinking doesn’t typically generate true beliefs.

Dru Johnson argues rightly from the biblical text that Christians are called “nd people who must be reasoned with, the Scriptures want us to consider the ethics of knowing.” But Johnson’s analysis of the text is sauce for the gander as well, as it’s clear every follower of Christ must not be “led astray” by rumors of wars or claims that Christ has returned, “look here, look there”. Each of us must evaluate the evidence for ourselves. In a great chapter on Augustine’s Two Cities Katie Schleiss also inadvertently

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 dissident’s truth seeking, take note of 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

Not a CIA invention.

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

Those White, Christian, Male, Heteronormative Conspiracists

Even with its consistent defense of reasonable faith and a passing critique of postmodernism, knowing the tilt and intellectual milieu of this book, it’s no surprise that critical theory makes an appearance to scapegoat the predominate rival and thus favorite bogeyman of the political left: the white, Christian, male, heterosexual. Susan Peppers-Bates notes an instructive and oft-told aspect of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. The hero of Jesus’ story was a member of an ethnicity and sect that were generally reviled by his Jewish audience. In addition to expanding the pharisees’ notion of “whom is our neighbor”, the parable challenges us to self-examine and ask, “Who do I regard with prejudice as a Samaritan?” Bringing Critical Theory to task, Peppers-Bates takes it that Americans, and evangelicals more specifically, are guilty of reviling “voices of women, people of color, LGBTQI, and other marginalized groups”. It’s evident that for the authors of this book, it is conspiracy theorists and Trump supporters occupy the reviled place of the Samaritan, but that thought is not entertained.

Peppers-Bates expertly employs the relentless criticism of the critical theoretical mode on her subjects, seeing misogynist and white supremacist motives and undertones even where more charitable explanations are available. Christians haven’t insisted upon the role of God as father and the incarnation of Christ as a man because of fidelity to God’s self-disclosure, but rather because “God’s masculinity has become and idol”. European artists did not portray Jesus as looking like themselves, like artists from other cultures, because their models were white and the exact pigment of Jesus’ skin was and is unknown, but rather as the “logical conclusion of four centuries of conquest, enslavement, and theft of native lands”. True to form, Peppers-Bates traces past sins to the current political moment, equating churches who segregated along racial lines in the past with Christians today who exclude LGBTQI from church leadership based on the biblical prohibitions of sexual immorality.

How does Peppers-Bates connect the universal acid of critical theory to conspiracism? Following the example of Peter Wehner

As Justin Giboney points out: “Messages about the Christian sexual ethic and the sanctity of life start to disappear from our platforms. We don’t want to lose secular political allies, offend the custodians of culture, or go viral for having “regressive” views.”

Sycophants and Simps

Demonization of unvaccinated are scum.

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 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?

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 fault line ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention Obergefell, Bostock, and 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 as this, 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 prophecies, 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 we had been reassured were merely 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 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, 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.

What Conspiracies?

Chad Bogosian offers Jared Milson’s workable definition of our subject: “Conspiracies are actions or plans undertaken by a small group of individuals working in secret to achieve shared goals.” (chapter 2)

Many conspiracies are mentioned in passing in these pages. From my notes, the list of conspiracy theories indicted in QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross include: QAnon (chapters 18, 21), the moon landings were fake, the 1980’s “Satanic Panic” (chapter 2), COVID vaccines contained tracking devices, contrails are chemtrails, “Ukrainian meddling”, Hilary’s “vast right wing conspiracy”, 9/11 Trutherism, #Pizzagate (chap. 20), Antifa behind January 16th the 2020 election was rigged (and 2016?), and even an obligatory reference to flat-earthism. Most of the concern is aimed at two issues in particular: Qanon and COVID.

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 35). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

For example, most believe in Watergate or that the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers were orchestrated by al Qaeda, or that Dietrich Bonhoeffer conspired to take down Hitler. Each of these satisfies our definition of “conspiracy,” since a relatively small group worked in secret to bring about the events in question; and each of these beliefs is rational because it is directly supported by a body of available evidence.

Chad Bogosian

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 31). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

Michael Austin was introdices the books with a few examples.

“What exactly is a conspiracy theory? We accept a definition given by Jared Millson: “A conspiracy theory is an explanation of some alleged fact or event in terms of the actions undertaken by a small group of individuals working in secret.”

In good chapter on anger, love, and hope He a few more examples of untoward conspiracist. “Let’s assume for the moment that some of the worst conspiracy theories are true. For example, vaccines contain tracking devices, contrails are really chemtrails, and the 2020 US presidential election was rigged. If these were true, then anger would be appropriate, right? But how angry should we get?

and.
For example, anger that springs from a belief in a conspiracy theory might prevent us from acting kindly toward government workers who enforce a vaccine mandate or a clerk at a grocery store who enforces a mask mandate.

Like many other contributors, Austin and Bock emphasize the importance of intellectual humility, an essential epistemic virtue if ever there was one. Echoing the Apostle James, Bock offers the following tip: “ask conspiracy theorists whether they think it’s possible that they’re wrong. Humble people don’t get angry very quickly because they don’t rush to judgment too quickly. They spend time examining the evidence and listening to different points of view.” Of course, intellectual humility is a requisite virtue not just for conspiracists but for university professors and government bureaucrats too. But the authors have no exhortations for those in power who at the peak of hubris led the massive censorship programs, dismissed non-conforming professors, and marginalized alternative policy prescriptions all while making many false claims and projections from which they’ve backpedal since. Those in power with greater responsibility by far need not worry that they’ll be chastised in these pages. No truth to power. A message for the educated to the uneducated.

one especially regrettable example

Who are we talking about?

Caricatures of Conspiracists

In their chapter, “Christianity, Conspiracy Theories, and Intellectual Character”, Nathan King and Keith Wyma try to offer a sympathetic explanation for conspiracism. Falling under the sway of such a theory may not be the result of the usual epistemic vices, they suggest, but rather of a weakness of will. That is to say, our pursuit of truth can be led astray by our passions. King and Wyma offer three caricatures of unwitting and weak-willed conspiracists. “Careless Carl” jumps to conclusions and won’t consider other possible explanations. “Bold Brandi” lacks intellectual humility. She trusts experts in some domains, but not in others. “Though she believes that COVID-19 is a real phenomenon, she is convinced that instead of wearing masks and getting vaccines, citizens should continue life as normal.” “When commenters ask why she is so confident in her medical opinions, she tweets back, ‘Because I did my own research.’” Third up is “Uneven Evan” who applies double standards, being skeptical toward some conspiracy theories but not others and casting a shrewd eye on left-wing news while swallowing right wing news uncritically.

In a footnote, King and Wyma clarify that they are not claiming that their “illustrations are typical of all conspiracy theorists”, though they do represent real people the authors know. But why choose them as emblematic of the Christians who questioned officialdom in the tumultuous twenties? I’d like to introduce them to No-nonsense Neil, who patiently traced ideas back to primary sources to understand them accurately, noted strengths and weaknesses, and, like the Bereans, carefully weighed today’s academic orthodoxies against timeless biblical virtues and precedents. While Neil admittedly explored beyond his specialty, others were sidelined for their heresies in spite of unimpeachable credentials. Apart from Rachel I. Wightman, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross fails to deal squarely with the reality of conflicting expert opinion. King and Wyma could have introduced us to Judicious Jay, a Stanford epidemiologist who carefully distinguished between true and false claims about lockdowns and vaccines during COVID and led an effort by hundreds of thousands to recommend a different strategy to mitigate the harms of the pandemic; for his trouble Jay was censored by Twitter at the government’s behest and treated to a “devastating takedown” as a “fringe epidemiologist” by Francis Collins at the pinnacle of power. Or meet Admirable Aaron, a University of California at Irvine Director of Medical Ethics and a frontline doctor who, having survived infection, objected to coerced vaccines for himself and fellow medical practitioners; after being censured by colleagues and fired from his post, he joined a Supreme Court lawsuit to challenge government breaches of our First Amendment rights. The authors may already know Distinguished Doug, a Christian scientist and fellow professor who had co-authored a prescient book raising the alarm about dubious evidence and the unintended consequences of lockdowns.

Is it really true that the problem with characters such as these — who withstood enormous social, peer, and political pressure, or fired, like many others — was that they were weak willed?

Not only do King and Wyma not profile responsible dissidents that complicate our cast of characters, they do not contemplate the passions of other actors. Billionaire Bill, who is the benefactor of thousands of our institutions and stood to gain billions more from mandatory vaccinations, is not noteworthy. CNN Cindy, whose primary source of advertising dollars is the pharmaceutical industry, enjoys no scrutiny. Unchallenged too is Mainstream Mandy, who absorbs narratives from Wikipedia-approved news outlets and the curated first-page results of Google searches without second-guessing them, even when those claims don’t square with a biblical worldview. God’s creation order, male and female, must be jettisoned. It’s a spectrum, “a kaleidoscope”, says Bill Nye and our medical associations. Men menstruate and give birth, Google assures her. Who is she to question? When she runs across the annual Easter and Christmas cover articles in Time debunking the miraculous birth of Jesus and the Resurrection of Christ, she is stymied in her faith. Pastor Go-along Gary is conscientious about Romans 13, always deferential to governing authority. He does not question government mandates, so he parrots CDC issuances on social media, makes compliance a matter of Christian obedience, closes the church doors to the unclean, and shames those who have moral qualms about vaccines or the sexual chaos promoted at every level of government.

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.

Highpoints

Twenty-four chapters long, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross features a number of edifying chapters and recurrent threads. The importance of intellectual humility is a steady drumbeat throughout, though this admonition is almost entirely directed at average Christians, not toward government bureaucrats or university professors. A few authors exhort the reader to ask themselves if their online media consumption is leading them toward love of neighbor and enemy, or toward anger, despair, and hate. Gregory Bock reminds us: “Christians should be careful that their beliefs about the world don’t interfere with their ability to love others.” As a Christian, this is an essential question for self-examination. In that vein, Rick Langer‘s “Testing Teachings and Torching Teachers” is an excellent and practical guide to the principles and habits of heart we must cultivate as we engage others and judge truth claims. Reiterating 2nd Timothy, he is right that, among other obligations: “We are simply obliged, as followers of Christ, to discard habits of wrath, anger, and divisiveness, and cultivate habits of gentleness, peacemaking, and kindness.” Apart from a needless swipe at the largely vindicated Scott Atlas, Garrett J. Deweese is the contributor who most enjoins the reader to critically engage with experts and government narratives using the very epistemic virtues that are touted throughout the book. DeWeese also pinpoints what I take to be the primary fount of conspiracism: a loss of trust in establishment news and institutions. He notes: “An authoritative ‘Be quiet and listen to the experts’ falls flat in the face of mistrust of the experts.” Deweese enumerates reasons for a guarded skepticism toward the pronouncements of The Science™, from instances of falsified data to the replication crisis. Chase Andre contributes a catalog of the ways in which the anonymous Q and his interpreters weaved pseudo-religious themes into their cryptic messages to incite a syncretistic cult of God and Country zealotry.

As I mentioned, QCC includes generous portions of salutary advice. For example, Chad Bogosian counsels:

What counts as good evidence is sometimes debated case by case, but generally, we should seek out the best quality of evidence from each source relevant to the subject matter. On the topics of science, religion, morality, and politics, reliable and trustworthy sources might include direct evidence from original or other quality documents, knowledgeable persons who seek the truth, as well as expert testimony. Additionally, good evidence might include indirect evidence about the topic at hand: what experts have to say about the direct evidence, that politicians are often deceptive and conniving, and the fact that both experts and your intellectual peers disagree about the topic. Wishful thinking, conjecture, blind leaps, gut feelings or hunches, opinionated friends on social media, etc., are generally considered poor quality evidence. While you might turn out to have a true belief about something you wish for, this is likely a matter of cognitive luck, since wishful thinking doesn’t typically generate true beliefs.

Dru Johnson argues rightly from the biblical text that Christians are called “nd people who must be reasoned with, the Scriptures want us to consider the ethics of knowing.” But Johnson’s analysis of the text is sauce for the gander as well, as it’s clear every follower of Christ must not be “led astray” by rumors of wars or claims that Christ has returned, “look here, look there”. Each of us must evaluate the evidence for ourselves. In a great chapter on Augustine’s Two Cities Katie Schleiss also inadvertently

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 dissident’s truth seeking, take note of 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

Not a CIA invention.

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

Those White, Christian, Male, Heteronormative Conspiracists

Even with its consistent defense of reasonable faith and a passing critique of postmodernism, knowing the tilt and intellectual milieu of this book, it’s no surprise that critical theory makes an appearance to scapegoat the predominate rival and thus favorite bogeyman of the political left: the white, Christian, male, heterosexual. Susan Peppers-Bates notes an instructive and oft-told aspect of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. The hero of Jesus’ story was a member of an ethnicity and sect that were generally reviled by his Jewish audience. In addition to expanding the pharisees’ notion of “whom is our neighbor”, the parable challenges us to self-examine and ask, “Who do I regard with prejudice as a Samaritan?” Bringing Critical Theory to task, Peppers-Bates takes it that Americans, and evangelicals more specifically, are guilty of reviling “voices of women, people of color, LGBTQI, and other marginalized groups”. It’s evident that for the authors of this book, it is conspiracy theorists and Trump supporters occupy the reviled place of the Samaritan, but that thought is not entertained.

Peppers-Bates expertly employs the relentless criticism of the critical theoretical mode on her subjects, seeing misogynist and white supremacist motives and undertones even where more charitable explanations are available. Christians haven’t insisted upon the role of God as father and the incarnation of Christ as a man because of fidelity to God’s self-disclosure, but rather because “God’s masculinity has become and idol”. European artists did not portray Jesus as looking like themselves, like artists from other cultures, because their models were white and the exact pigment of Jesus’ skin was and is unknown, but rather as the “logical conclusion of four centuries of conquest, enslavement, and theft of native lands”. True to form, Peppers-Bates traces past sins to the current political moment, equating churches who segregated along racial lines in the past with Christians today who exclude LGBTQI from church leadership based on the biblical prohibitions of sexual immorality.

How does Peppers-Bates connect the universal acid of critical theory to conspiracism? Following the example of Peter Wehner

As Justin Giboney points out: “Messages about the Christian sexual ethic and the sanctity of life start to disappear from our platforms. We don’t want to lose secular political allies, offend the custodians of culture, or go viral for having “regressive” views.”

Sycophants and Simps

Demonization of unvaccinated are scum.

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 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?

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