Evangelicals are in an identity crisis. By and large, American evangelical church goers remain morally and economically conservative. As such, they represent a base of support on the right and the last obstacle to the ethical and political aims of the progressive left who rule from Times Square, Harvard Yard, Silicon Valley, Hollywood Boulevard, Wall Street, and until recently, Pennsylvania Ave. Naturally, conservatives of all stripes cast these rulers a wary eye. Evangelicalism’s intellectual and organizational leaders, meanwhile, more often reflect the values, sympathies, and presuppositions characteristic of their overwhelmingly left-wing academic milieu. This strained fault line within evangelicalism ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention the Obergefell, Bostock, and Dobbs court decisions, the COVID response, contested elections, and widespread political violence across the country in the wake of the death of George Floyd and at the Capitol on January 6th. While evangelical leaders followed most of the top down directives on these issues, resistance grew from the pew on up. We are still trying to find our footing after these disagreements and cultural upheaval.

At such a time as this, editors Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. Bock recruited a couple dozen evangelical professors to exhort naysayers in the pews to steer clear of “conspiracy theories” and dissenting opinions. Some of these contributors are old friends and professors from my own graduate education. I feel an affection and appreciation for them. Nevertheless, apart from a lot of generic epistemological and conversational advice, QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross (QCC) manages to learn and teach the wrong lesson from these tumultuous years. Captive to an elitist and partisan bent, the book fails to wonder why there has been such a loss of faith in authority. Worse, on the whole, the book discourages average Christians from “doing their own research” and questioning government sanctioned experts. As one who witnessed these events and unadvisedly did just that, I aver. For Christians and for conservatives, skepticism towards authority is the wise and necessary epistemic stance in a world whose god is the devil and in an information environment that is overwhelmingly dominated by a single political and ideological faction. Repeated and unrepentant breaches of trust by our rulers demand not less but more critically engaged citizens who will carefully examine them, publicly question them, and hold them accountable. That is good citizenship in the kingdom of heaven, and in our earthly democratic republic. Though the evangelical professoriate appears to have no appetite for the “culture war” raging around them, we must at least engage in spiritual warfare. We must respectfully demolish arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the cross, against the Christian, and against the citizen. Beware those who cry peace when there is no peace.

In early 2023 when Mike Austin announced that QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross was forthcoming, I wondered which unfounded conspiracies would remain as such until publication. At the time, critics of government proclamations and policies were crowing on social media about all the supposedly tin-foil conspiracy theories that had been validated by subsequent events. Some joked that the difference between a conspiracy theory and breaking news was: “about six months”. For example, in 2020 the public had been reassured ad nauseam by our betters that Critical Race Theory and Ibrahim Kendi-style “anti-racism” were not being taught in schools, but whistle blowers and citizen reporters on social media belied their assurances with thousands of videos and screenshots of discriminatory classroom instruction and curriculum, not only in schools but at every level of society. At Disney, an insider leaked internal videos of creators boasting about how they freely inserted their “not-so-secret gay agenda” into children’s entertainment at every opportunity, just as concerned parents had noticed. Schools had been caught facilitating attempts at gender switching without parental consent in school clubs, secret transition closets, and internal documents. On the COVID front, the forbidden “lab leak theory” of sars-cov-2 origins had achieved mainstream credibility, though not a consensus, in government inquiries and the “paper of record”. Some mask and lockdown enthusiasts had already begun backpedaling. The Cochrane review had just been released, revalidating the pre-COVID World Health Organization’s guidance based on its meta-analysis of randomly controlled trials: “there is no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing influenza transmission”, only a “mechanistic plausibility”. And after an unending parade of politicians taking to social media to concede that they had COVID, it was clear that officials’ promises that the vaccines would prevent infection were false. Meanwhile, mirroring the elusive and cryptic QAnon utterances, Jeffrey Epstein’s sex ring for the rich and powerful was by then public knowledge, though most of his secrets went with him to the grave due to a timely death in jail. Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger had published the #Twitterfiles. They exposed a vast government and NGO directed censorship apparatus and validated suspicions of partisan deplatforming and shadow banning, which had been dismissed as the paranoiac fugues of a persecution complex. Two of those social media censors, Zuckerberg‘s Facebook and Dorsey‘s Twitter, participants in the conspiracy to contain the Hunter Biden “October Surprise”, publicly admitted it was wrong of them to censor news of the scandalous laptop under the pretense of it being Russian disinformation. That election year stopgap was the product of a well-substantiated conspiracy facilitated by the government-funded Aspen Institute; paired with a brazenly false public statement signed by 51 former intelligence officials at the behest of Biden campaign advisor Antony Blinken. Moreover, the alleged conspiracy between Donald Trump and Russia, the “nothing-burger” conspiracy theory that preoccupied left wing news for years, had emerged after extensive investigation to be in actuality a conspiracy between the Hilary Clinton campaign, the Obama administration, and government actors to handicap the new president.

I could go on and on and on. These examples are but a tiny fraction of the conspiracies proven true and media narratives and government pronouncements shown false in the twenty-tweens. Such politically expedient breaches of trust are the principal cause of widespread skepticism and conspiracism. For the most part, the truth about these stories was sussed out not thanks to government authorities and establishment news sources but in spite of them. Citizen journalists, independent videographers, government accountability think tanks, social media news hounds, and even right leaning news sites willed the truth out with dogged investigating. Smart phones, hidden cameras, FOIA requests, primary sources, automated internet archives, embedded reporting, new publications, and the hostile takeover of the world’s most influential social media platform were the tools of their trade. None of the aforementioned object lessons above grace the pages of Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross. Rather, the teachable moments therein cut almost entirely in favor of credulity toward those in positions of power and prestige. It prompts the question, why were these instances — and the biggest elephant not in the room, which we’ll get to — not in the book, while less credible conspiracies made the cut? In the book’s appendix, a glossary on careful reasoning, it defines confirmation bias as “being closed to evidence that doesn’t confirm what we already believe. Being biased is natural, and so is seeking confirmation of our biases.” Just so.

Sometimes, the Lorraines are reduced to caricatures.

Why Do People Question Authority and Fall for Conspiracy Theories?

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross is most exasperating when it imputes only non-rational psychological urges and impure motives to those who entertain conspiracy theories and wrongthink. In one of many such passages, Dru Johnson supposes:

The deep satisfaction and sense of empowerment fostered by seeing through a conspiracy is, quite simply, intoxicating. It’s not difficult to understand the emotional power of believing that we’ve cracked a secret society. After all, who wants to be just another one of the sheeple? People who feel like they are losing social or political power can find themselves leaning into conspiracy mind-sets to regain a sense of control. Dementia and the loss of memory commonly fires up imagined conspiracies. In her final years of life, my mother was convinced on several conspiracies to steal her medicine or food.

Emotions, rebelliousness, powerlessness, and dementia. Well, yes. These are some of the reasons some second guess our authorities. Other times, it’s a concern for truth and justice and goodness. Johnson even cites the prevailing postmodern mood: “my truth” over “the truth”. “Conspiracy thinking injects itself into our venal lusts at this exact point. Who will guide me? The conspiracist answers: ‘I will! I, the one who knows, will peel back the corner of the tarp of history and reveal to you all its secret inner workings.'” But conspiracists are not postmodernists. In my own efforts to understand the times, and in my brushes with conspiracists, it’s Fox Mulder, not Oprah Winfrey, that is their avatar: “the truth is out there“.

Bradley Baurain‘s chapter, “Parenting Teenagers in Gullible Times”, airs out his feelings of embarrassment, isolation, and frustration with “conservative White evangelicals” who questioned and disagreed with the official line on COVID, who pitied him and his family for their naïveté. Baurain returns the compliment in spades, “gullibility, to put it mildly, appears to be the status quo among many Christians”. Slipping into hyperbole: “Frankly, it feels like we have slipped into another dimension filled with flat-earthers.” While lamenting that the COVID contrarians in his circle thought less of him, Baurain charges Christians in kind who appraised the evidence differently than he did as: absurd, learning-impaired, proud, foolish, backsliding, fickle, and rebellious. They are like the murderous Cain, like the adulterous wife of Hosea, like the idolatrous rebels of Jeremiah, like lost sheep and prodigals. Confessing his anger and depression, Baurain wonders if he will be able to forgive them for damaging his children’s faith. Baurain gets the solution right, that he will bear with his fellow believers, inspired by the relentless and infinite love of God. I would add that it would be exceedingly easier to do so if he could truly consider what he exhorts others to do, that is, to consider the possibility that he could be wrong and the certainty that different people can evaluate evidence in good faith and come to a different conclusion.

Sadly, not a single author in the book takes their benighted subjects or their concerns seriously. While the possibly mixed motives of those in power are never contemplated, as far as I can remember, none commend the dissenter’s or conspiracist’s genuine truth seeking, take note of possibly noble motives, or engage with the evidence itself. It is a given that they’re wrong, perhaps even by definition, so the dissenters’ and conspiracy theorists’ motives must be impure. To catalog all of the insults would go overlong. Surely by now the reader has a sense of the tone of parts of QCC.

The Elephant Not in the Room

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?

Unfortunately, deferring to Wikipedia, Politifact, the WHO, to experts, or even to the relevant scientific association is not a reliable solution on contested subjects. When it comes to ethical, philosophical, and historical questions, each of these institutions is beginning with different priors . Just as we must test the spirits and the prophets, we must test our experts.

For me the issue of transgenderism highlihgts the crisis of trust in our institutions as well as any other.

We know the Obama administration invested heavily in breaking the evangelical resistance to the Democrat platform, employing Michael Wear to lead the effort. We also know that a group of influential evangelical who named themselves “The Outliers”, Francis Collins, David Brooks, David French, Russel Moore, Tim Keller

In the fall of 2015, [Russell] Moore met with “The Outliers”, a group of friends and fellow high-profile believers: Tim Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City; Pete Wehner, the former head of strategic initiatives in the George W. Bush White House; Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health; and David Brooks, the New York Times columnist.

Tim Alberta, quoted at The Resistance Will Be Organized

people and wreaked destruction on our cities (more, even, than the May 31st or January 6th Capitol riots)

Stop playing for a team. Call balls and strikes. Prove to be trustworthy.

Humility for Thee

This strong political bent is likely the reason that the book doesn’t ponder the most obvious explanation for conservative’s rational skepticism toward government and academic authorities. Every conservative who is somewhat aware of the

emphasize the importance of intellectual humility, an essential epistemic virtue if ever there was one. Echoing the Apostle James, Bock offers the following tip: “ask conspiracy theorists whether they think it’s possible that they’re wrong. Humble people don’t get angry very quickly because they don’t rush to judgment too quickly. They spend time examining the evidence and listening to different points of view.” Indeed. 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 an industrial sized censorship program, who dismissed non-conforming professors, and who marginalized alternative policy prescriptions, all while making many false claims and projections from which they’ve backpedaled since. Those in power, with greater responsibility by far, need not worry that they’ll be chastised in these pages. This is not a book for them, a book of truth to power. This book only punches down.

Evangelicals are in an identity crisis. By and large, American evangelical church goers remain morally and economically conservative. As such, they represent a base of support on the right and the last obstacle to the ethical and political aims of the progressive left who rule from Times Square, Harvard Yard, Silicon Valley, Hollywood Boulevard, Wall Street, and until recently, Pennsylvania Ave. Naturally, conservatives of all stripes cast these rulers a wary eye. Evangelicalism’s intellectual and organizational leaders, meanwhile, more often reflect the values, sympathies, and presuppositions characteristic of their overwhelmingly left-wing academic milieu. This strained fault line within evangelicalism ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention the Obergefell, Bostock, and Dobbs court decisions, the COVID response, contested elections, and widespread political violence across the country in the wake of the death of George Floyd and at the Capitol on January 6th. While evangelical leaders followed most of the top down directives on these issues, resistance grew from the pew on up. We are still trying to find our footing after these disagreements and cultural upheaval.

At such a time as this, editors Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. Bock recruited a couple dozen evangelical professors to exhort naysayers in the pews to steer clear of “conspiracy theories” and dissenting opinions. Some of these contributors are old friends and professors from my own graduate education. I feel an affection and appreciation for them. Nevertheless, apart from a lot of generic epistemological and conversational advice, QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross (QCC) manages to learn and teach the wrong lesson from these tumultuous years. Captive to an elitist and partisan bent, the book fails to wonder why there has been such a loss of faith in authority. Worse, on the whole, the book discourages average Christians from “doing their own research” and questioning government sanctioned experts. As one who witnessed these events and unadvisedly did just that, I aver. For Christians and for conservatives, skepticism towards authority is the wise and necessary epistemic stance in a world whose god is the devil and in an information environment that is overwhelmingly dominated by a single political and ideological faction. Repeated and unrepentant breaches of trust by our rulers demand not less but more critically engaged citizens who will carefully examine them, publicly question them, and hold them accountable. That is good citizenship in the kingdom of heaven, and in our earthly democratic republic. Though the evangelical professoriate appears to have no appetite for the “culture war” raging around them, we must at least engage in spiritual warfare. We must respectfully demolish arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the cross, against the Christian, and against the citizen. Beware those who cry peace when there is no peace.

In early 2023 when Mike Austin announced that QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross was forthcoming, I wondered which unfounded conspiracies would remain as such until publication. At the time, critics of government proclamations and policies were crowing on social media about all the supposedly tin-foil conspiracy theories that had been validated by subsequent events. Some joked that the difference between a conspiracy theory and breaking news was: “about six months”. For example, in 2020 the public had been reassured ad nauseam by our betters that Critical Race Theory and Ibrahim Kendi-style “anti-racism” were not being taught in schools, but whistle blowers and citizen reporters on social media belied their assurances with thousands of videos and screenshots of discriminatory classroom instruction and curriculum, not only in schools but at every level of society. At Disney, an insider leaked internal videos of creators boasting about how they freely inserted their “not-so-secret gay agenda” into children’s entertainment at every opportunity, just as concerned parents had noticed. Schools had been caught facilitating attempts at gender switching without parental consent in school clubs, secret transition closets, and internal documents. On the COVID front, the forbidden “lab leak theory” of sars-cov-2 origins had achieved mainstream credibility, though not a consensus, in government inquiries and the “paper of record”. Some mask and lockdown enthusiasts had already begun backpedaling. The Cochrane review had just been released, revalidating the pre-COVID World Health Organization’s guidance based on its meta-analysis of randomly controlled trials: “there is no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing influenza transmission”, only a “mechanistic plausibility”. And after an unending parade of politicians taking to social media to concede that they had COVID, it was clear that officials’ promises that the vaccines would prevent infection were false. Meanwhile, mirroring the elusive and cryptic QAnon utterances, Jeffrey Epstein’s sex ring for the rich and powerful was by then public knowledge, though most of his secrets went with him to the grave due to a timely death in jail. Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger had published the #Twitterfiles. They exposed a vast government and NGO directed censorship apparatus and validated suspicions of partisan deplatforming and shadow banning, which had been dismissed as the paranoiac fugues of a persecution complex. Two of those social media censors, Zuckerberg‘s Facebook and Dorsey‘s Twitter, participants in the conspiracy to contain the Hunter Biden “October Surprise”, publicly admitted it was wrong of them to censor news of the scandalous laptop under the pretense of it being Russian disinformation. That election year stopgap was the product of a well-substantiated conspiracy facilitated by the government-funded Aspen Institute; paired with a brazenly false public statement signed by 51 former intelligence officials at the behest of Biden campaign advisor Antony Blinken. Moreover, the alleged conspiracy between Donald Trump and Russia, the “nothing-burger” conspiracy theory that preoccupied left wing news for years, had emerged after extensive investigation to be in actuality a conspiracy between the Hilary Clinton campaign, the Obama administration, and government actors to handicap the new president.

I could go on and on and on. These examples are but a tiny fraction of the conspiracies proven true and media narratives and government pronouncements shown false in the twenty-tweens. Such politically expedient breaches of trust are the principal cause of widespread skepticism and conspiracism. For the most part, the truth about these stories was sussed out not thanks to government authorities and establishment news sources but in spite of them. Citizen journalists, independent videographers, government accountability think tanks, social media news hounds, and even right leaning news sites willed the truth out with dogged investigating. Smart phones, hidden cameras, FOIA requests, primary sources, automated internet archives, embedded reporting, new publications, and the hostile takeover of the world’s most influential social media platform were the tools of their trade. None of the aforementioned object lessons above grace the pages of Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross. Rather, the teachable moments therein cut almost entirely in favor of credulity toward those in positions of power and prestige. It prompts the question, why were these instances — and the biggest elephant not in the room, which we’ll get to — not in the book, while less credible conspiracies made the cut? In the book’s appendix, a glossary on careful reasoning, it defines confirmation bias as “being closed to evidence that doesn’t confirm what we already believe. Being biased is natural, and so is seeking confirmation of our biases.” Just so.

Sometimes, the Lorraines are reduced to caricatures.

Why Do People Question Authority and Fall for Conspiracy Theories?

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross is most exasperating when it imputes only non-rational psychological urges and impure motives to those who entertain conspiracy theories and wrongthink. In one of many such passages, Dru Johnson supposes:

The deep satisfaction and sense of empowerment fostered by seeing through a conspiracy is, quite simply, intoxicating. It’s not difficult to understand the emotional power of believing that we’ve cracked a secret society. After all, who wants to be just another one of the sheeple? People who feel like they are losing social or political power can find themselves leaning into conspiracy mind-sets to regain a sense of control. Dementia and the loss of memory commonly fires up imagined conspiracies. In her final years of life, my mother was convinced on several conspiracies to steal her medicine or food.

Emotions, rebelliousness, powerlessness, and dementia. Well, yes. These are some of the reasons some second guess our authorities. Other times, it’s a concern for truth and justice and goodness. Johnson even cites the prevailing postmodern mood: “my truth” over “the truth”. “Conspiracy thinking injects itself into our venal lusts at this exact point. Who will guide me? The conspiracist answers: ‘I will! I, the one who knows, will peel back the corner of the tarp of history and reveal to you all its secret inner workings.'” But conspiracists are not postmodernists. In my own efforts to understand the times, and in my brushes with conspiracists, it’s Fox Mulder, not Oprah Winfrey, that is their avatar: “the truth is out there“.

Bradley Baurain‘s chapter, “Parenting Teenagers in Gullible Times”, airs out his feelings of embarrassment, isolation, and frustration with “conservative White evangelicals” who questioned and disagreed with the official line on COVID, who pitied him and his family for their naïveté. Baurain returns the compliment in spades, “gullibility, to put it mildly, appears to be the status quo among many Christians”. Slipping into hyperbole: “Frankly, it feels like we have slipped into another dimension filled with flat-earthers.” While lamenting that the COVID contrarians in his circle thought less of him, Baurain charges Christians in kind who appraised the evidence differently than he did as: absurd, learning-impaired, proud, foolish, backsliding, fickle, and rebellious. They are like the murderous Cain, like the adulterous wife of Hosea, like the idolatrous rebels of Jeremiah, like lost sheep and prodigals. Confessing his anger and depression, Baurain wonders if he will be able to forgive them for damaging his children’s faith. Baurain gets the solution right, that he will bear with his fellow believers, inspired by the relentless and infinite love of God. I would add that it would be exceedingly easier to do so if he could truly consider what he exhorts others to do, that is, to consider the possibility that he could be wrong and the certainty that different people can evaluate evidence in good faith and come to a different conclusion.

Sadly, not a single author in the book takes their benighted subjects or their concerns seriously. While the possibly mixed motives of those in power are never contemplated, as far as I can remember, none commend the dissenter’s or conspiracist’s genuine truth seeking, take note of possibly noble motives, or engage with the evidence itself. It is a given that they’re wrong, perhaps even by definition, so the contrarians’ and conspiracy theorists’ motives must be impure. To catalog all of the insults would go overlong. Surely by now the reader has a sense of the tone of QCC.

This strong political bent is likely the reason that the book doesn’t ponder the most obvious explanation for conservative’s rational skepticism toward government and academic authorities. Every conservative who is somewhat aware of the

emphasize the importance of intellectual humility, an essential epistemic virtue if ever there was one. Echoing the Apostle James, Bock offers the following tip: “ask conspiracy theorists whether they think it’s possible that they’re wrong. Humble people don’t get angry very quickly because they don’t rush to judgment too quickly. They spend time examining the evidence and listening to different points of view.” Indeed. 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 an industrial sized censorship program, who dismissed non-conforming professors, and who marginalized alternative policy prescriptions, all while making many false claims and projections from which they’ve backpedaled since. Those in power, with greater responsibility by far, need not worry that they’ll be chastised in these pages. This is not a book for them, a book of truth to power. This book only punches down.

The Elephant Not in the Room

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?

Unfortunately, deferring to Wikipedia, Politifact, the WHO, to experts, or even to the relevant scientific association is not a reliable solution on contested subjects. When it comes to ethical, philosophical, and historical questions, each of these institutions is beginning with different priors . Just as we must test the spirits and the prophets, we must test our experts.

For me the issue of transgenderism highlihgts the crisis of trust in our institutions as well as any other.

We know the Obama administration invested heavily in breaking the evangelical resistance to the Democrat platform, employing Michael Wear to lead the effort. We also know that a group of influential evangelical who named themselves “The Outliers”, Francis Collins, David Brooks, David French, Russel Moore, Tim Keller

In the fall of 2015, [Russell] Moore met with “The Outliers”, a group of friends and fellow high-profile believers: Tim Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City; Pete Wehner, the former head of strategic initiatives in the George W. Bush White House; Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health; and David Brooks, the New York Times columnist.

Tim Alberta, quoted at The Resistance Will Be Organized

people and wreaked destruction on our cities (more, even, than the May 31st or January 6th Capitol riots)

Stop playing for a team. Call balls and strikes. Prove to be trustworthy.

Evangelicals are in an identity crisis. By and large, American evangelical church goers remain morally and economically conservative. As such, they represent a base of support on the right and the last obstacle to the ethical and political aims of the progressive left who rule from Times Square, Harvard Yard, Silicon Valley, Hollywood Boulevard, Wall Street, and until recently, Pennsylvania Ave. Naturally, conservatives of all stripes cast these rulers a wary eye. Evangelicalism’s intellectual and organizational leaders, meanwhile, more often reflect the values, sympathies, and presuppositions characteristic of their overwhelmingly left-wing academic milieu. This strained fault line within evangelicalism ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention the Obergefell, Bostock, and Dobbs court decisions, the COVID response, contested elections, and widespread political violence across the country in the wake of the death of George Floyd and at the Capitol on January 6th. While evangelical leaders followed most of the top down directives on these issues, resistance grew from the pew on up. We are still trying to find our footing after these disagreements and cultural upheaval.

At such a time as this, editors Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. Bock recruited a couple dozen evangelical professors to exhort naysayers in the pews to steer clear of “conspiracy theories” and dissenting opinions. Some of these contributors are old friends and professors from my own graduate education. I feel an affection and appreciation for them. Nevertheless, apart from a lot of generic epistemological and conversational advice, QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross (QCC) manages to learn and teach the wrong lesson from these tumultuous years. Captive to an elitist and partisan bent, the book fails to wonder why there has been such a loss of faith in authority. Worse, on the whole, the book discourages average Christians from “doing their own research” and questioning government sanctioned experts. As one who witnessed these events and unadvisedly did just that, I aver. For Christians and for conservatives, skepticism towards authority is the wise and necessary epistemic stance in a world whose god is the devil and in an information environment that is overwhelmingly dominated by a single political and ideological faction. Repeated and unrepentant breaches of trust by our rulers demand not less but more critically engaged citizens who will carefully examine them, publicly question them, and hold them accountable. That is good citizenship in the kingdom of heaven, and in our earthly democratic republic. Though the evangelical professoriate appears to have no appetite for the “culture war” raging around them, we must at least engage in spiritual warfare. We must respectfully demolish arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the cross, against the Christian, and against the citizen. Beware those who cry peace when there is no peace.

In early 2023 when Mike Austin announced that QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross was forthcoming, I wondered which unfounded conspiracies would remain as such until publication. At the time, critics of government proclamations and policies were crowing on social media about all the supposedly tin-foil conspiracy theories that had been validated by subsequent events. Some joked that the difference between a conspiracy theory and breaking news was: “about six months”. For example, in 2020 the public had been reassured ad nauseam by our betters that Critical Race Theory and Ibrahim Kendi-style “anti-racism” were not being taught in schools, but whistle blowers and citizen reporters on social media belied their assurances with thousands of videos and screenshots of discriminatory classroom instruction and curriculum, not only in schools but at every level of society. At Disney, an insider leaked internal videos of creators boasting about how they freely inserted their “not-so-secret gay agenda” into children’s entertainment at every opportunity, just as concerned parents had noticed. Schools had been caught facilitating attempts at gender switching without parental consent in school clubs, secret transition closets, and internal documents. On the COVID front, the forbidden “lab leak theory” of sars-cov-2 origins had achieved mainstream credibility, though not a consensus, in government inquiries and the “paper of record”. Some mask and lockdown enthusiasts had already begun backpedaling. The Cochrane review had just been released, revalidating the pre-COVID World Health Organization’s guidance based on its meta-analysis of randomly controlled trials: “there is no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing influenza transmission”, only a “mechanistic plausibility”. And after an unending parade of politicians taking to social media to concede that they had COVID, it was clear that officials’ promises that the vaccines would prevent infection were false. Meanwhile, mirroring the elusive and cryptic QAnon utterances, Jeffrey Epstein’s sex ring for the rich and powerful was by then public knowledge, though most of his secrets went with him to the grave due to a timely death in jail. Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger had published the #Twitterfiles. They exposed a vast government and NGO directed censorship apparatus and validated suspicions of partisan deplatforming and shadow banning, which had been dismissed as the paranoiac fugues of a persecution complex. Two of those social media censors, Zuckerberg‘s Facebook and Dorsey‘s Twitter, participants in the conspiracy to contain the Hunter Biden “October Surprise”, publicly admitted it was wrong of them to censor news of the scandalous laptop under the pretense of it being Russian disinformation. That election year stopgap was the product of a well-substantiated conspiracy facilitated by the government-funded Aspen Institute; paired with a brazenly false public statement signed by 51 former intelligence officials at the behest of Biden campaign advisor Antony Blinken. Moreover, the alleged conspiracy between Donald Trump and Russia, the “nothing-burger” conspiracy theory that preoccupied left wing news for years, had emerged after extensive investigation to be in actuality a conspiracy between the Hilary Clinton campaign, the Obama administration, and government actors to handicap the new president.

I could go on and on and on. These examples are but a tiny fraction of the conspiracies proven true and media narratives and government pronouncements shown false in the twenty-tweens. Such politically expedient breaches of trust are the principal cause of widespread skepticism and conspiracism. For the most part, the truth about these stories was sussed out not thanks to government authorities and establishment news sources but in spite of them. Citizen journalists, independent videographers, government accountability think tanks, social media news hounds, and even right leaning news sites willed the truth out with dogged investigating. Smart phones, hidden cameras, FOIA requests, primary sources, automated internet archives, embedded reporting, new publications, and the hostile takeover of the world’s most influential social media platform were the tools of their trade. None of the aforementioned object lessons above grace the pages of Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross. Rather, the teachable moments therein cut almost entirely in favor of credulity toward those in positions of power and prestige. It prompts the question, why were these instances — and the biggest elephant not in the room, which we’ll get to — not in the book, while less credible conspiracies made the cut? In the book’s appendix, a glossary on careful reasoning, it defines confirmation bias as “being closed to evidence that doesn’t confirm what we already believe. Being biased is natural, and so is seeking confirmation of our biases.” Just so.

Sometimes, the Lorraines are manufactured.

Why Do People Question Authority and Fall for Conspiracy Theories?

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross is most exasperating when it imputes only non-rational psychological urges and impure motives to those who entertain conspiracy theories and wrongthink. In one of many such passages, Dru Johnson supposes:

The deep satisfaction and sense of empowerment fostered by seeing through a conspiracy is, quite simply, intoxicating. It’s not difficult to understand the emotional power of believing that we’ve cracked a secret society. After all, who wants to be just another one of the sheeple? People who feel like they are losing social or political power can find themselves leaning into conspiracy mind-sets to regain a sense of control. Dementia and the loss of memory commonly fires up imagined conspiracies. In her final years of life, my mother was convinced on several conspiracies to steal her medicine or food.

Emotions, rebelliousness, powerlessness, and dementia. Well, yes. These are some of the reasons some second guess our authorities. Other times, it’s a concern for truth and justice and goodness. Johnson even cites the prevailing postmodern mood: “my truth” over “the truth”. “Conspiracy thinking injects itself into our venal lusts at this exact point. Who will guide me? The conspiracist answers: ‘I will! I, the one who knows, will peel back the corner of the tarp of history and reveal to you all its secret inner workings.'” But conspiracists are not postmodernists. In my own efforts to understand the times, and in my brushes with conspiracists, it’s Fox Mulder, not Oprah Winfrey, that is their avatar: “the truth is out there“.

Bradley Baurain‘s chapter, “Parenting Teenagers in Gullible Times”, airs out his feelings of embarrassment, isolation, and frustration with “conservative White evangelicals” who questioned and disagreed with the official line on COVID, who pitied him and his family for their naïveté. Baurain returns the compliment in spades, “gullibility, to put it mildly, appears to be the status quo among many Christians”. Slipping into hyperbole: “Frankly, it feels like we have slipped into another dimension filled with flat-earthers.” While lamenting that the COVID contrarians in his circle thought less of him, Baurain charges Christians in kind who appraised the evidence differently than he did as: absurd, learning-impaired, proud, foolish, backsliding, fickle, and rebellious. They are like the murderous Cain, like the adulterous wife of Hosea, like the idolatrous rebels of Jeremiah, like lost sheep and prodigals. Confessing his anger and depression, Baurain wonders if he will be able to forgive them for damaging his children’s faith. Baurain gets the solution right, that he will bear with his fellow believers, inspired by the relentless and infinite love of God. I would add that it would be exceedingly easier to do so if he could truly consider what he exhorts others to do, that is, to consider the possibility that he could be wrong and the certainty that different people can evaluate evidence in good faith and come to a different conclusion.

Sadly, not a single author in the book takes their benighted subjects or their concerns seriously. While the possibly mixed motives of those in power are never contemplated, as far as I can remember, none commend the dissenter’s or conspiracist’s genuine truth seeking, take note of possibly noble motives, or engage with the evidence itself. It is a given that they’re wrong, perhaps even by definition, so the contrarians’ and conspiracy theorists’ motives must be impure. To catalog all of the insults would go overlong. Surely by now the reader has a sense of the tone of QCC.

This strong political bent is likely the reason that the book doesn’t ponder the most obvious explanation for conservative’s rational skepticism toward government and academic authorities. Every conservative who is somewhat aware of the

emphasize the importance of intellectual humility, an essential epistemic virtue if ever there was one. Echoing the Apostle James, Bock offers the following tip: “ask conspiracy theorists whether they think it’s possible that they’re wrong. Humble people don’t get angry very quickly because they don’t rush to judgment too quickly. They spend time examining the evidence and listening to different points of view.” Indeed. 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 an industrial sized censorship program, who dismissed non-conforming professors, and who marginalized alternative policy prescriptions, all while making many false claims and projections from which they’ve backpedaled since. Those in power, with greater responsibility by far, need not worry that they’ll be chastised in these pages. This is not a book for them, a book of truth to power. This book only punches down.

The Elephant Not in the Room

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?

Unfortunately, deferring to Wikipedia, Politifact, the WHO, to experts, or even to the relevant scientific association is not a reliable solution on contested subjects. When it comes to ethical, philosophical, and historical questions, each of these institutions is beginning with different priors . Just as we must test the spirits and the prophets, we must test our experts.

For me the issue of transgenderism highlihgts the crisis of trust in our institutions as well as any other.

We know the Obama administration invested heavily in breaking the evangelical resistance to the Democrat platform, employing Michael Wear to lead the effort. We also know that a group of influential evangelical who named themselves “The Outliers”, Francis Collins, David Brooks, David French, Russel Moore, Tim Keller

In the fall of 2015, [Russell] Moore met with “The Outliers”, a group of friends and fellow high-profile believers: Tim Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City; Pete Wehner, the former head of strategic initiatives in the George W. Bush White House; Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health; and David Brooks, the New York Times columnist.

Tim Alberta, quoted at The Resistance Will Be Organized

people and wreaked destruction on our cities (more, even, than the May 31st or January 6th Capitol riots)

Stop playing for a team. Call balls and strikes. Prove to be trustworthy.

Evangelicals are in an identity crisis. By and large, American evangelical church goers remain morally and economically conservative. As such, they represent a base of support on the right and the last obstacle to the ethical and political aims of the progressive left who rule from Times Square, Harvard Yard, Silicon Valley, Hollywood Boulevard, Wall Street, and until recently, Pennsylvania Ave. Naturally, conservatives of all stripes cast these rulers a wary eye. Evangelicalism’s intellectual and organizational leaders, meanwhile, more often reflect the values, sympathies, and presuppositions characteristic of their overwhelmingly left-wing academic milieu. This strained fault line within evangelicalism ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention the Obergefell, Bostock, and Dobbs court decisions, the COVID response, contested elections, and widespread political violence across the country in the wake of the death of George Floyd and at the Capitol on January 6th. While evangelical leaders followed most of the top down directives on these issues, resistance grew from the pew on up. We are still trying to find our footing after these disagreements and cultural upheaval.

At such a time as this, editors Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. Bock recruited a couple dozen evangelical professors to exhort naysayers in the pews to steer clear of “conspiracy theories” and dissenting opinions. Some of these contributors are old friends and professors from my own graduate education. I feel an affection and appreciation for them. Nevertheless, apart from a lot of generic epistemological and conversational advice, QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross (QCC) manages to learn and teach the wrong lesson from these tumultuous years. Captive to an elitist and partisan bent, the book fails to wonder why there has been such a loss of faith in authority. Worse, on the whole, the book discourages average Christians from “doing their own research” and questioning government sanctioned experts. As one who witnessed these events and unadvisedly did just that, I aver. For Christians and for conservatives, skepticism towards authority is the wise and necessary epistemic stance in a world whose god is the devil and in an information environment that is overwhelmingly dominated by a single political and ideological faction. Repeated and unrepentant breaches of trust by our rulers demand not less but more critically engaged citizens who will carefully examine them, publicly question them, and hold them accountable. That is good citizenship in the kingdom of heaven, and in our earthly democratic republic. Though the evangelical professoriate appears to have no appetite for the “culture war” raging around them, we must at least engage in spiritual warfare. We must respectfully demolish arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the cross, against the Christian, and against the citizen. Beware those who cry peace when there is no peace.

In early 2023 when Mike Austin announced that QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross was forthcoming, I wondered which unfounded conspiracies would remain as such until publication. At the time, critics of government proclamations and policies were crowing on social media about all the supposedly tin-foil conspiracy theories that had been validated by subsequent events. Some joked that the difference between a conspiracy theory and breaking news was: “about six months”. For example, in 2020 the public had been reassured ad nauseam by our betters that Critical Race Theory and Ibrahim Kendi-style “anti-racism” were not being taught in schools, but whistle blowers and citizen reporters on social media belied their assurances with thousands of videos and screenshots of discriminatory classroom instruction and curriculum, not only in schools but at every level of society. At Disney, an insider leaked internal videos of creators boasting about how they freely inserted their “not-so-secret gay agenda” into children’s entertainment at every opportunity, just as concerned parents had noticed. Schools had been caught facilitating attempts at gender switching without parental consent in school clubs, secret transition closets, and internal documents. On the COVID front, the forbidden “lab leak theory” of sars-cov-2 origins had achieved mainstream credibility, though not a consensus, in government inquiries and the “paper of record”. Some mask and lockdown enthusiasts had already begun backpedaling. The Cochrane review had just been released, revalidating the pre-COVID World Health Organization’s guidance based on its meta-analysis of randomly controlled trials: “there is no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing influenza transmission”, only a “mechanistic plausibility”. And after an unending parade of politicians taking to social media to concede that they had COVID, it was clear that officials’ promises that the vaccines would prevent infection were false. Meanwhile, mirroring the elusive and cryptic QAnon utterances, Jeffrey Epstein’s sex ring for the rich and powerful was by then public knowledge, though most of his secrets went with him to the grave due to a timely death in jail. Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger had published the #Twitterfiles. They exposed a vast government and NGO directed censorship apparatus and validated suspicions of partisan deplatforming and shadow banning, which had been dismissed as the paranoiac fugues of a persecution complex. Two of those social media censors, Zuckerberg‘s Facebook and Dorsey‘s Twitter, participants in the conspiracy to contain the Hunter Biden “October Surprise”, publicly admitted it was wrong of them to censor news of the scandalous laptop under the pretense of it being Russian disinformation. That election year stopgap was the product of a well-substantiated conspiracy facilitated by the government-funded Aspen Institute; paired with a brazenly false public statement signed by 51 former intelligence officials at the behest of Biden campaign advisor Antony Blinken. Moreover, the alleged conspiracy between Donald Trump and Russia, the “nothing-burger” conspiracy theory that preoccupied left wing news for years, had emerged after extensive investigation to be in actuality a conspiracy between the Hilary Clinton campaign, the Obama administration, and government actors to handicap the new president.

I could go on and on and on. These examples are but a tiny fraction of the conspiracies proven true and media narratives and government pronouncements shown false in the twenty-tweens. Such politically expedient breaches of trust are the principal cause of widespread skepticism and conspiracism. For the most part, the truth about these stories was sussed out not thanks to government authorities and establishment news sources but in spite of them. Citizen journalists, independent videographers, government accountability think tanks, social media news hounds, and even right leaning news sites willed the truth out with dogged investigating. Smart phones, hidden cameras, FOIA requests, primary sources, automated internet archives, embedded reporting, new publications, and the hostile takeover of the world’s most influential social media platform were the tools of their trade. None of the aforementioned object lessons above grace the pages of Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross. Rather, the teachable moments therein cut almost entirely in favor of credulity toward those in positions of power and prestige. It prompts the question, why were these instances — and the biggest elephant not in the room, which we’ll get to — not in the book, while less credible conspiracies made the cut? In the book’s appendix, a glossary on careful reasoning, it defines confirmation bias as “being closed to evidence that doesn’t confirm what we already believe. Being biased is natural, and so is seeking confirmation of our biases.” Just so.

Sometimes, the Lorraines are manufactured.

Why Do People Question Authority and Fall for Conspiracy Theories?

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross is most exasperating when it imputes only non-rational psychological urges and impure motives to those who entertain conspiracy theories and wrongthink. In one of many such passages, Dru Johnson supposes:

The deep satisfaction and sense of empowerment fostered by seeing through a conspiracy is, quite simply, intoxicating. It’s not difficult to understand the emotional power of believing that we’ve cracked a secret society. After all, who wants to be just another one of the sheeple? People who feel like they are losing social or political power can find themselves leaning into conspiracy mind-sets to regain a sense of control. Dementia and the loss of memory commonly fires up imagined conspiracies. In her final years of life, my mother was convinced on several conspiracies to steal her medicine or food.

Emotions, rebelliousness, powerlessness, and dementia. Well, yes. These are some of the reasons some second guess our authorities. Other times, it’s a concern for truth and justice and goodness. Johnson even cites the prevailing postmodern mood: “my truth” over “the truth”. “Conspiracy thinking injects itself into our venal lusts at this exact point. Who will guide me? The conspiracist answers: ‘I will! I, the one who knows, will peel back the corner of the tarp of history and reveal to you all its secret inner workings.'” But conspiracists are not postmodernists. In my own efforts to understand the times, and in my brushes with conspiracists, it’s Fox Mulder, not Oprah Winfrey, that is their avatar: “the truth is out there“.

Bradley Baurain‘s chapter, “Parenting Teenagers in Gullible Times”, airs out his feelings of embarrassment, isolation, and frustration with “conservative White evangelicals” who questioned and disagreed with the official line on COVID, who pitied him and his family for their naïveté. Baurain returns the compliment in spades, “gullibility, to put it mildly, appears to be the status quo among many Christians”. Slipping into hyperbole: “Frankly, it feels like we have slipped into another dimension filled with flat-earthers.” While lamenting that the COVID contrarians in his circle thought less of him, Baurain charges Christians in kind who appraised the evidence differently than he did as: absurd, learning-impaired, proud, foolish, backsliding, fickle, and rebellious. They are like the murderous Cain, like the adulterous wife of Hosea, like the idolatrous rebels of Jeremiah, like lost sheep and prodigals. Confessing his anger and depression, Baurain wonders if he will be able to forgive them for damaging his children’s faith. Baurain gets the solution right, that he will bear with his fellow believers, inspired by the relentless and infinite love of God. I would add that it would be exceedingly easier to do so if he could truly consider what he exhorts others to do, that is, to consider the possibility that he could be wrong and the certainty that different people can evaluate evidence in good faith and come to a different conclusion.

Sadly, not a single author in the book takes their benighted subjects or their concerns seriously. While the possibly mixed motives of those in power are never contemplated, as far as I can remember, none commend the dissenter’s or conspiracist’s genuine truth seeking, take note of possibly noble motives, or engage with the evidence itself. It is a given that they’re wrong, perhaps even by definition, so the contrarians’ and conspiracy theorists’ motives must be impure. To catalog all of the insults would go overlong. Surely by now the reader has a sense of the tone of QCC.

This strong political bent is likely the reason that the book doesn’t ponder the most obvious explanation for conservative’s rational skepticism toward government and academic authorities. Every conservative who is somewhat aware of the

emphasize the importance of intellectual humility, an essential epistemic virtue if ever there was one. Echoing the Apostle James, Bock offers the following tip: “ask conspiracy theorists whether they think it’s possible that they’re wrong. Humble people don’t get angry very quickly because they don’t rush to judgment too quickly. They spend time examining the evidence and listening to different points of view.” Indeed. 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 an industrial sized censorship program, who dismissed non-conforming professors, and who marginalized alternative policy prescriptions, all while making many false claims and projections from which they’ve backpedaled since. Those in power, with greater responsibility by far, need not worry that they’ll be chastised in these pages. This is not a book for them, a book of truth to power. This book only punches down.

The Titular Conspiracy

Gregory Bock recounts the sad story of #pizzagate and 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.” Faulting him for intemperate anger, Bock doesn’t deign to share any of the smoke that led Welch to think there was a fire at Comet Pizza. On that day, Welch seemed calm and determined en route to DC when he recorded a video for his own daughters, telling them he had a “duty to protect those who can’t protect themselves”. Upon arrival, Welch searched the pizzeria, shooting once to open a locked door, and then surrendered to police when he found no foul play. If Welch’s concerns had been validated, surely his anger would have been righteous and his cause just. His desire to protect vulnerable children from unthinkable evil is admirable. What he lacked in his vigilantism was a deference to the proper authorities. He also failed to realize that he needed to confirm what were fallible inferences from a fact pattern synthesized by internet sleuths. His friends had recommended Welch do surveillance before acting, but he failed to heed their good advice. Indeed, evidence gathering, and reporting to authorities, is precisely where anti-human trafficking organizations and ministries who share Welch’s righteous concern have specialized.

I remember well when I first read Kevin Bales’ Disposable People. I was shocked at his thesis, that sex trafficking and slavery, in the sense of coerced labor, is now more prevalent around the world than it has ever been. While I was horrified by the stories Bales recounts about slavery in Thailand, India, and Brazil, I was simply incredulous when he wrote that trafficking is endemic in the United States too. I couldn’t imagine then that people could get away with it here with our robust systems of law enforcement. I was naive. The problem is heart-wrenchingly real, evidenced by a steady stream of reported arrests and a wide variety of organizations addressing this scourge. Christians have been at the vanguard of tackling human trafficking, which often involves prostitution and sex trafficking. Nazarene Compassionate Ministries, International Justice Mission, Global Center for Women and Justice, and the Tim Tebow Foundation are but a few of many such organizations. In my community, Rebuilding Hope! and Scarlet Road help to provide an escape from bondage. The Faith Alliance Against Slavery leads the coalition. They collaborate with secular organizations like the Human Trafficking Institute and Polaris Project whose National Human Trafficking Hotline reports over 50,000 “signals” a year.

Sex trafficking is a real problem. This horrific crime is not isolated to the fringe of society or to far flung locales. In addition to being found guilty for his own sexual violations, Jeffrey Epstein is now widely believed to have facilitated illicit sexual encounters for the most elite and powerful members of society at his now infamous St. James island and other locations. The powerbrokers with whom Epstein wined, dined, and traveled were almost entirely men of the left. His bizarrely obscured death and the failure of our government to prosecute his associates has led many reasonable people to believe that his clients are in a position to stifle investigation. The nature of Epstein’s alleged crimes might lead some Christians to call him demonic.

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

Trust in the Information Age

In “Loving Our Online Communities” (chap. 19), Rachel I. Wightman notes the challenge of our internet age, how we can be overwhelmed by the cacophonous noice of a thousand tongues. No doubt, that to be a savvy filter of information in the Information Age. Wightman worries that the ability of users to create content without the code of ethics and editorial constraints of reporters at the New York Times generates conspiracy theories and misinformation. And because social media like Facebook’s and X’s algorithms are tailored to cater to the user’s interest, we may find ourselves in information bubbles.

the ability for people to create and share information so easily also creates spaces for conspiracy theories and misinformation or fake news to thrive. Most reputable news outlets have some sort of code of conduct or code of ethics, such as the New York Times’

Austin, Michael W.; Bock, Gregory L.. QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 296). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

The Disinformation Governance Board

King’s and Wyma’s straw manning of Christian concerns about government positions and policy reveals a prejudice against the less educated. It is an exercise in intellectual elitism. Leave these matters of great public concern not just to the experts, but to the government aligned experts.

The politicized management of the COVID-19 pandemic stripped doctors and patients of medical choice regarding the treatment of illness, and some public health agencies prioritized race over medical necessity in dispensing vaccines and monoclonal antibodies. Doctors and medical organizations made unscientific recommendations for prevention of COVID-19, misrepresenting the utility of masking, the benefits of natural immunity, and the efficacy of novel vaccines. Similarly, despite the absence of rigorous scientific investigation and dismissal of available data, medical professionals projected an illusory scientific consensus by insisting that the science was settled regarding the need to administer “gender-affirming care” to minors experiencing gender distress.

Monica Harris for the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 291). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

to chapters on internet discernment, and 20, no mention of narrative control at Google, Wikipedia,

The truth is, conspiracists do traffic in evidence. They scour the internet for news stories, video clips, interviews, autopsy reports, and FBI disclosures that seem to cut against the official narrative. If you’ve ever gone down the rabbit hole, you cannot but be amazed at all the disparate pieces of information they track down and weave into their conspiratorial tale. The wall of documents and red-lined connections in Charlie Day’s hilarious Pepe Silvia conspiracy rant on Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia bears a visual resemblance. Consider, for example, the curious case of Ray Epps, whom Darren J. Beattie and an army of internet sleuths have investigated at great length, suggesting a connection to the FBI.

This is no time to acquiesce. [Satirists at the Babylon Bee had a bit where they regularly paired their farcical headlines with real headlines announcing: “another prophecy fulfilled”. And social media influencers compiled lists of their .] So what examples of foolhardy conspiracism was QCC left to address?

Apart from Rachel I. Wightman, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross fails to deal squarely with the reality of conflicting expert opinion. Tim Muelhoff does mention it. However, the trading of information simply amplified our disagreement by showing how we each trusted “experts” who wildly disagreed with each other. As soon as she produced a study, I countered it with a different—and in my estimation—superior one.

Austin, Michael W.; Bock, Gregory L.. QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 240). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

The Elephant Not in the Room

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?

Unfortunately, deferring to Wikipedia, Politifact, the WHO, to experts, or even to the relevant scientific association is not a reliable solution on contested subjects. When it comes to ethical, philosophical, and historical questions, each of these institutions is beginning with different priors . Just as we must test the spirits and the prophets, we must test our experts.

For me the issue of transgenderism highlihgts the crisis of trust in our institutions as well as any other.

We know the Obama administration invested heavily in breaking the evangelical resistance to the Democrat platform, employing Michael Wear to lead the effort. We also know that a group of influential evangelical who named themselves “The Outliers”, Francis Collins, David Brooks, David French, Russel Moore, Tim Keller

In the fall of 2015, [Russell] Moore met with “The Outliers”, a group of friends and fellow high-profile believers: Tim Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City; Pete Wehner, the former head of strategic initiatives in the George W. Bush White House; Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health; and David Brooks, the New York Times columnist.

Tim Alberta, quoted at The Resistance Will Be Organized

people and wreaked destruction on our cities (more, even, than the May 31st or January 6th Capitol riots)

Stop playing for a team. Call balls and strikes. Prove to be trustworthy.

Evangelicals are in an identity crisis. By and large, American evangelical church goers remain morally and economically conservative. As such, they represent a base of support on the right and the last obstacle to the ethical and political aims of the progressive left who rule from Times Square, Harvard Yard, Silicon Valley, Hollywood Boulevard, Wall Street, and until recently, Pennsylvania Ave. Naturally, conservatives of all stripes cast these rulers a wary eye. Evangelicalism’s intellectual and organizational leaders, meanwhile, more often reflect the values, sympathies, and presuppositions characteristic of their overwhelmingly left-wing academic milieu. This strained fault line within evangelicalism ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention the Obergefell, Bostock, and Dobbs court decisions, the COVID response, contested elections, and widespread political violence across the country in the wake of the death of George Floyd and at the Capitol on January 6th. While evangelical leaders followed most of the top down directives on these issues, resistance grew from the pew on up. We are still trying to find our footing after these disagreements and cultural upheaval.

At such a time as this, editors Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. Bock recruited a couple dozen evangelical professors to exhort naysayers in the pews to steer clear of “conspiracy theories” and dissenting opinions. Some of these contributors are old friends and professors from my own graduate education. I feel an affection and appreciation for them. Nevertheless, apart from a lot of generic epistemological and conversational advice, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross (QCC) manages to learn and teach the wrong lesson from these tumultuous years. Captive to a technocratic and partisan bent, the book fails to wonder why there has been such a loss of faith in authority and on the whole the book discourages average Christians from “doing their own research” and questioning government sanctioned experts. As one who witnessed these events and unadvisedly did just that, I aver. For Christians and for conservatives, skepticism towards authority is the wise and necessary epistemic stance in a world whose god is the devil and in an information environment that is overwhelmingly dominated by a single political and ideological faction. Repeated and unrepentant breaches of trust by our rulers demand not less but more critically engaged citizens who will carefully examine them, publicly question them, and hold them accountable. That is good citizenship in the kingdom of heaven, and in our earthly democratic republic. Though the evangelical professoriate appears to have no appetite for the culture war raging around them, we must at least engage in spiritual warfare. We must respectfully demolish arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the cross, against the Christian, and against the citizen. Beware those who cry peace when there is no peace.

In early 2023 when Mike Austin announced that Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross was forthcoming, I wondered which unfounded conspiracies would remain as such until publication. At the time, critics of government proclamations and policies were crowing on social media about all the supposedly tin-foil conspiracy theories that had been validated by subsequent events. Some joked that the difference between a conspiracy theory and breaking news was: “about six months”. For example, in 2020 the public had been reassured ad nauseam by our betters that Critical Race Theory and Ibrahim Kendi-style “anti-racism” were not being taught in schools, but whistle blowers and citizen reporters on social media belied their assurances with thousands of videos and screenshots of discriminatory classroom instruction and curriculum, not only in schools but at every level of society. At Disney, an insider leaked internal videos of creators boasting about how they freely inserted their “not-so-secret gay agenda” into children’s entertainment at every opportunity, just as concerned parents had noticed. Schools had been caught facilitating attempts at gender switching without parental consent in school clubs, secret transition closets, and internal documents. On the COVID front, the forbidden “lab leak theory” of sars-cov-2 origins had achieved mainstream credibility, though not a consensus, in government inquiries and the “paper of record”. Some mask and lockdown enthusiasts had already begun backpedaling. The Cochrane review had just been released, revalidating the pre-COVID World Health Organization’s guidance based on its meta-analysis of randomly controlled trials: “there is no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing influenza transmission”, only a “mechanistic plausibility”. And after an unending parade of politicians taking to social media to concede that they had COVID, it was clear that officials’ promises that the vaccines would prevent infection were false. Meanwhile, mirroring the elusive and indecipherable Q’Anon utterances, Jeffrey Epstein’s sex ring for the rich and powerful was by then public knowledge, though most of his secrets went with him to the grave due to a timely death in jail. Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger had published the #Twitterfiles. They exposed a vast government and NGO directed censorship apparatus and validated suspicions of partisan deplatforming and shadow banning, which had been dismissed as the paranoiac fugues of a persecution complex. Two of those social media censors, Zuckerberg‘s Facebook and Dorsey‘s Twitter, participants in the conspiracy to contain the Hunter Biden “October Surprise”, publicly admitted it was wrong of them to censor news of the scandalous laptop under the pretense of it being Russian disinformation. That election year stopgap was the product of a well-substantiated conspiracy facilitated by the government-funded Aspen Institute; paired with a brazenly false public statement signed by 51 former intelligence officials at the behest of Biden campaign advisor Antony Blinken. Moreover, the alleged conspiracy between Donald Trump and Russia, the “nothing-burger” conspiracy theory that preoccupied left wing news for years, had emerged after extensive investigation to be in actuality a conspiracy between the Hilary Clinton campaign, the Obama administration, and government actors to handicap the new president.

I could go on and on and on. These examples are but a tiny fraction of the conspiracies proven true and media narratives and government pronouncements shown false in the twenty-tweens. Such politically expedient breaches of trust are the principal cause of widespread skepticism and conspiracism. For the most part, the truth about these stories was sussed out not thanks to government authorities and establishment news sources but in spite of them. Citizen journalists, independent videographers, government accountability think tanks, social media news hounds, and even right leaning news sites willed the truth out with dogged investigating. Smart phones, hidden cameras, FOIA requests, primary sources, automated internet archives, embedded reporting, new publications, and the hostile takeover of the world’s most influential social media platform were the tools of their trade. None of the aforementioned object lessons above grace the pages of Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross. Rather, the teachable moments therein cut almost entirely in favor of credulity toward those in positions of power and prestige. It prompts the question, why were these instances — and the biggest elephant not in the room, which we’ll get to — not in the book, while less credible conspiracies made the cut? In the book’s appendix, a glossary on careful reasoning, it defines confirmation bias as “being closed to evidence that doesn’t confirm what we already believe. Being biased is natural, and so is seeking confirmation of our biases.” Just so.

Why Do People Question Authority and Fall for Conspiracy Theories?

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross is most exasperating when it imputes only non-rational psychological urges and impure motives to those who entertain conspiracy theories and wrongthink. In one of many such passages, Dru Johnson supposes:

The deep satisfaction and sense of empowerment fostered by seeing through a conspiracy is, quite simply, intoxicating. It’s not difficult to understand the emotional power of believing that we’ve cracked a secret society. After all, who wants to be just another one of the sheeple? People who feel like they are losing social or political power can find themselves leaning into conspiracy mind-sets to regain a sense of control. Dementia and the loss of memory commonly fires up imagined conspiracies. In her final years of life, my mother was convinced on several conspiracies to steal her medicine or food.

Emotions, rebelliousness, powerlessness, and dementia. Well, yes. These are some of the reasons some second guess our authorities. Other times, it’s a concern for truth and justice and goodness. Johnson even cites the prevailing postmodern mood: “my truth” over “the truth”. “Conspiracy thinking injects itself into our venal lusts at this exact point. Who will guide me? The conspiracist answers: ‘I will! I, the one who knows, will peel back the corner of the tarp of history and reveal to you all its secret inner workings.'” But conspiracists are not postmodernists. In my own efforts to understand the times, and in my brushes with conspiracists, it’s Fox Mulder, not Oprah Winfrey, that is their avatar: “the truth is out there“.

Bradley Baurain‘s chapter, “Parenting Teenagers in Gullible Times”, airs out his feelings of embarrassment, isolation, and frustration with “conservative White evangelicals” who questioned and disagreed with the official line on COVID, who pitied him and his family for their naïveté. Baurain returns the compliment in spades, “gullibility, to put it mildly, appears to be the status quo among many Christians”. Slipping into hyperbole: “Frankly, it feels like we have slipped into another dimension filled with flat-earthers.” While lamenting that the COVID contrarians in his circle thought less of him, Baurain charges Christians in kind who appraised the evidence differently than he did as: absurd, learning-impaired, proud, foolish, backsliding, fickle, and rebellious. They are like the murderous Cain, like the adulterous wife of Hosea, like the idolatrous rebels of Jeremiah, like lost sheep and prodigals. Confessing his anger and depression, Baurain wonders if he will be able to forgive them for damaging his children’s faith. Baurain gets the solution right, that he will bear with his fellow believers, inspired by the relentless and infinite love of God. I would add that it would be exceedingly easier to do so if he could truly consider what he exhorts others to do, that is, to consider the possibility that he could be wrong and the certainty that different people can evaluate evidence in good faith and come to a different conclusion.

Sadly, not a single author in the book takes their benighted subjects or their concerns seriously. While the possibly mixed motives of those in power are never contemplated, as far as I can remember, none commend the dissenter’s or conspiracist’s genuine truth seeking, take note of possibly noble motives, or engage with the evidence itself. It is a given that they’re wrong, perhaps even by definition, so the contrarians’ and conspiracy theorists’ motives must be impure. To catalog all of the insults would go overlong. Surely by now the reader has a sense of the tone of QCC.

This strong political bent is likely the reason that the book doesn’t ponder the most obvious explanation for conservative’s rational skepticism toward government and academic authorities. Every conservative who is somewhat aware of the

emphasize the importance of intellectual humility, an essential epistemic virtue if ever there was one. Echoing the Apostle James, Bock offers the following tip: “ask conspiracy theorists whether they think it’s possible that they’re wrong. Humble people don’t get angry very quickly because they don’t rush to judgment too quickly. They spend time examining the evidence and listening to different points of view.” Indeed. 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 an industrial sized censorship program, who dismissed non-conforming professors, and who marginalized alternative policy prescriptions, all while making many false claims and projections from which they’ve backpedaled since. Those in power, with greater responsibility by far, need not worry that they’ll be chastised in these pages. This is not a book for them, a book of truth to power. This book only punches down.

The Titular Conspiracy

Gregory Bock recounts the sad story of #pizzagate and 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.” Faulting him for intemperate anger, Bock doesn’t deign to share any of the smoke that led Welch to think there was a fire at Comet Pizza. On that day, Welch seemed calm and determined en route to DC when he recorded a video for his own daughters, telling them he had a “duty to protect those who can’t protect themselves”. Upon arrival, Welch searched the pizzeria, shooting once to open a locked door, and then surrendered to police when he found no foul play. If Welch’s concerns had been validated, surely his anger would have been righteous and his cause just. His desire to protect vulnerable children from unthinkable evil is admirable. What he lacked in his vigilantism was a deference to the proper authorities. He also failed to realize that he needed to confirm what were fallible inferences from a fact pattern synthesized by internet sleuths. His friends had recommended Welch do surveillance before acting, but he failed to heed their good advice. Indeed, evidence gathering, and reporting to authorities, is precisely where anti-human trafficking organizations and ministries who share Welch’s righteous concern have specialized.

I remember well when I first read Kevin Bales’ Disposable People. I was shocked at his thesis, that sex trafficking and slavery, in the sense of coerced labor, is now more prevalent around the world than it has ever been. While I was horrified by the stories Bales recounts about slavery in Thailand, India, and Brazil, I was simply incredulous when he wrote that trafficking is endemic in the United States too. I couldn’t imagine then that people could get away with it here with our robust systems of law enforcement. I was naive. The problem is heart-wrenchingly real, evidenced by a steady stream of reported arrests and a wide variety of organizations addressing this scourge. Christians have been at the vanguard of tackling human trafficking, which often involves prostitution and sex trafficking. Nazarene Compassionate Ministries, International Justice Mission, Global Center for Women and Justice, and the Tim Tebow Foundation are but a few of many such organizations. In my community, Rebuilding Hope! and Scarlet Road help to provide an escape from bondage. The Faith Alliance Against Slavery leads the coalition. They collaborate with secular organizations like the Human Trafficking Institute and Polaris Project whose National Human Trafficking Hotline reports over 50,000 “signals” a year.

Sex trafficking is a real problem. This horrific crime is not isolated to the fringe of society or to far flung locales. In addition to being found guilty for his own sexual violations, Jeffrey Epstein is now widely believed to have facilitated illicit sexual encounters for the most elite and powerful members of society at his now infamous St. James island and other locations. The powerbrokers with whom Epstein wined, dined, and traveled were almost entirely men of the left. His bizarrely obscured death and the failure of our government to prosecute his associates has led many reasonable people to believe that his clients are in a position to stifle investigation. The nature of Epstein’s alleged crimes might lead some Christians to call him demonic.

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

Trust in the Information Age

In “Loving Our Online Communities” (chap. 19), Rachel I. Wightman notes the challenge of our internet age, how we can be overwhelmed by the cacophonous noice of a thousand tongues. No doubt, that to be a savvy filter of information in the Information Age. Wightman worries that the ability of users to create content without the code of ethics and editorial constraints of reporters at the New York Times generates conspiracy theories and misinformation. And because social media like Facebook’s and X’s algorithms are tailored to cater to the user’s interest, we may find ourselves in information bubbles.

the ability for people to create and share information so easily also creates spaces for conspiracy theories and misinformation or fake news to thrive. Most reputable news outlets have some sort of code of conduct or code of ethics, such as the New York Times’

Austin, Michael W.; Bock, Gregory L.. QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 296). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

The Disinformation Governance Board

King’s and Wyma’s straw manning of Christian concerns about government positions and policy reveals a prejudice against the less educated. It is an exercise in intellectual elitism. Leave these matters of great public concern not just to the experts, but to the government aligned experts.

The politicized management of the COVID-19 pandemic stripped doctors and patients of medical choice regarding the treatment of illness, and some public health agencies prioritized race over medical necessity in dispensing vaccines and monoclonal antibodies. Doctors and medical organizations made unscientific recommendations for prevention of COVID-19, misrepresenting the utility of masking, the benefits of natural immunity, and the efficacy of novel vaccines. Similarly, despite the absence of rigorous scientific investigation and dismissal of available data, medical professionals projected an illusory scientific consensus by insisting that the science was settled regarding the need to administer “gender-affirming care” to minors experiencing gender distress.

Monica Harris for the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 291). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

to chapters on internet discernment, and 20, no mention of narrative control at Google, Wikipedia,

The truth is, conspiracists do traffic in evidence. They scour the internet for news stories, video clips, interviews, autopsy reports, and FBI disclosures that seem to cut against the official narrative. If you’ve ever gone down the rabbit hole, you cannot but be amazed at all the disparate pieces of information they track down and weave into their conspiratorial tale. The wall of documents and red-lined connections in Charlie Day’s hilarious Pepe Silvia conspiracy rant on Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia bears a visual resemblance. Consider, for example, the curious case of Ray Epps, whom Darren J. Beattie and an army of internet sleuths have investigated at great length, suggesting a connection to the FBI.

This is no time to acquiesce. [Satirists at the Babylon Bee had a bit where they regularly paired their farcical headlines with real headlines announcing: “another prophecy fulfilled”. And social media influencers compiled lists of their .] So what examples of foolhardy conspiracism was QCC left to address?

Apart from Rachel I. Wightman, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross fails to deal squarely with the reality of conflicting expert opinion. Tim Muelhoff does mention it. However, the trading of information simply amplified our disagreement by showing how we each trusted “experts” who wildly disagreed with each other. As soon as she produced a study, I countered it with a different—and in my estimation—superior one.

Austin, Michael W.; Bock, Gregory L.. QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 240). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

The Elephant Not in the Room

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?

Unfortunately, deferring to Wikipedia, Politifact, the WHO, to experts, or even to the relevant scientific association is not a reliable solution on contested subjects. When it comes to ethical, philosophical, and historical questions, each of these institutions is beginning with different priors . Just as we must test the spirits and the prophets, we must test our experts.

For me the issue of transgenderism highlihgts the crisis of trust in our institutions as well as any other.

We know the Obama administration invested heavily in breaking the evangelical resistance to the Democrat platform, employing Michael Wear to lead the effort. We also know that a group of influential evangelical who named themselves “The Outliers”, Francis Collins, David Brooks, David French, Russel Moore, Tim Keller

In the fall of 2015, [Russell] Moore met with “The Outliers”, a group of friends and fellow high-profile believers: Tim Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City; Pete Wehner, the former head of strategic initiatives in the George W. Bush White House; Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health; and David Brooks, the New York Times columnist.

Tim Alberta, quoted at The Resistance Will Be Organized

people and wreaked destruction on our cities (more, even, than the May 31st or January 6th Capitol riots)

Stop playing for a team. Call balls and strikes. Prove to be trustworthy.

Evangelicals are in an identity crisis. By and large, American evangelical church goers remain morally and economically conservative. As such, they represent a base of support on the right and the last obstacle to the ethical and political aims of the progressive left who rule from Times Square, Harvard Yard, Silicon Valley, Hollywood Boulevard, Wall Street, and until recently, Pennsylvania Ave. Naturally, conservatives of all stripes cast these rulers a wary eye. Evangelicalism’s intellectual and organizational leaders, meanwhile, more often reflect the values, sympathies, and presuppositions characteristic of their overwhelmingly left-wing academic milieu. This strained fault line within evangelicalism ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention the Obergefell, Bostock, and Dobbs court decisions, the COVID response, contested elections, and widespread political violence across the country in the wake of the death of George Floyd and at the Capitol on January 6th. While evangelical leaders followed most of the top down directives on these issues, resistance grew from the pew on up. We are still trying to find our footing after these disagreements and cultural upheaval.

At such a time as this, editors Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. Bock recruited a couple dozen evangelical professors to exhort naysayers in the pews to steer clear of “conspiracy theories” and dissenting opinions. Some of these contributors are old friends and professors from my own graduate education. I feel an affection and appreciation for them. Nevertheless, apart from a lot of generic epistemological and conversational advice, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross (QCC) manages to learn and teach the wrong lesson from these tumultuous years. Captive to a technocratic and partisan bent, the book fails to wonder why there has been such a loss of faith in authority and on the whole the book discourages average Christians from “doing their own research” and questioning government sanctioned experts. As one who witnessed these events and unadvisedly did just that, I aver. For Christians and for conservatives, skepticism towards authority is the wise and necessary epistemic stance in a world whose god is the devil and in an information environment that is overwhelmingly dominated by a single political and ideological faction. Repeated and unrepentant breaches of trust by our rulers demand not less but more critically engaged citizens who will carefully examine them, publicly question them, and hold them accountable. That is good citizenship in the kingdom of heaven, and in our earthly democratic republic. Though the evangelical professoriate appears to have no appetite for the culture war raging around them, we must at least engage in spiritual warfare. We must respectfully demolish arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the cross, against the Christian, and against the citizen. Beware those who cry peace when there is no peace.

In early 2023 when Mike Austin announced that Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross was forthcoming, I wondered which unfounded conspiracies would remain as such until publication. At the time, critics of government proclamations and policies were crowing on social media about all the supposedly tin-foil conspiracy theories that had been validated by subsequent events. Some joked that the difference between a conspiracy theory and breaking news was: “about six months”. For example, in 2020 the public had been reassured ad nauseam by our betters that Critical Race Theory and Ibrahim Kendi-style “anti-racism” were not being taught in schools, but whistle blowers and citizen reporters on social media belied their assurances with thousands of videos and screenshots of discriminatory classroom instruction and curriculum, not only in schools but at every level of society. At Disney, an insider leaked internal videos of creators boasting about how they freely inserted their “not-so-secret gay agenda” into children’s entertainment at every opportunity, just as concerned parents had noticed. Schools had been caught facilitating attempts at gender switching without parental consent in school clubs, secret transition closets, and internal documents. On the COVID front, the forbidden “lab leak theory” of sars-cov-2 origins had achieved mainstream credibility, though not a consensus, in government inquiries and the “paper of record”. Some mask and lockdown enthusiasts had already begun backpedaling. The Cochrane review had just been released, revalidating the pre-COVID World Health Organization’s guidance based on its meta-analysis of randomly controlled trials: “there is no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing influenza transmission”, only a “mechanistic plausibility”. And after an unending parade of politicians taking to social media to concede that they had COVID, it was clear that officials’ promises that the vaccines would prevent infection were false. Meanwhile, mirroring the elusive and indecipherable Q’Anon utterances, Jeffrey Epstein’s sex ring for the rich and powerful was by then public knowledge, though most of his secrets went with him to the grave due to a timely death in jail. Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger had published the #Twitterfiles. They exposed a vast government and NGO directed censorship apparatus and validated suspicions of partisan deplatforming and shadow banning, which had been dismissed as the paranoiac fugues of a persecution complex. Two of those social media censors, Zuckerberg‘s Facebook and Dorsey‘s Twitter, participants in the conspiracy to contain the Hunter Biden “October Surprise”, publicly admitted it was wrong of them to censor news of the scandalous laptop under the pretense of it being Russian disinformation. That election year stopgap was the product of a well-substantiated conspiracy facilitated by the government-funded Aspen Institute; paired with a brazenly false public statement signed by 51 former intelligence officials at the behest of Biden campaign advisor Antony Blinken. Moreover, the alleged conspiracy between Donald Trump and Russia, the “nothing-burger” conspiracy theory that preoccupied left wing news for years, had emerged after extensive investigation to be in actuality a conspiracy between the Hilary Clinton campaign, the Obama administration, and government actors to handicap the new president.

I could go on and on and on. These examples are but a tiny fraction of the conspiracies proven true and media narratives and government pronouncements shown false in the twenty-tweens. Such politically expedient breaches of trust are the principal cause of widespread skepticism and conspiracism. For the most part, the truth about these stories was sussed out not thanks to government authorities and establishment news sources but in spite of them. Citizen journalists, independent videographers, government accountability think tanks, social media news hounds, and even right leaning news sites willed the truth out with dogged investigating. Smart phones, hidden cameras, FOIA requests, primary sources, automated internet archives, embedded reporting, new publications, and the hostile takeover of the world’s most influential social media platform were the tools of their trade. None of the aforementioned object lessons above grace the pages of Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross. Rather, the teachable moments therein cut almost entirely in favor of credulity toward those in positions of power and prestige. It prompts the question, why were these instances — and the biggest elephant not in the room, which we’ll get to — not in the book, while less credible conspiracies made the cut? In the book’s appendix, a glossary on careful reasoning, it defines confirmation bias as “being closed to evidence that doesn’t confirm what we already believe. Being biased is natural, and so is seeking confirmation of our biases.” Just so.

Why Do People Question Authority and Fall for Conspiracy Theories?

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross is most exasperating when it imputes only non-rational psychological urges and impure motives to those who entertain conspiracy theories and wrongthink. In one of many such passages, Dru Johnson supposes:

The deep satisfaction and sense of empowerment fostered by seeing through a conspiracy is, quite simply, intoxicating. It’s not difficult to understand the emotional power of believing that we’ve cracked a secret society. After all, who wants to be just another one of the sheeple? People who feel like they are losing social or political power can find themselves leaning into conspiracy mind-sets to regain a sense of control. Dementia and the loss of memory commonly fires up imagined conspiracies. In her final years of life, my mother was convinced on several conspiracies to steal her medicine or food.

Emotions, rebelliousness, powerlessness, and dementia. Well, yes. These are some of the reasons some second guess our authorities. Other times, it’s a concern for truth and justice and goodness. Johnson even cites the prevailing postmodern mood: “my truth” over “the truth”. “Conspiracy thinking injects itself into our venal lusts at this exact point. Who will guide me? The conspiracist answers: ‘I will! I, the one who knows, will peel back the corner of the tarp of history and reveal to you all its secret inner workings.'” But conspiracists are not postmodernists. In my own efforts to understand the times, and in my brushes with conspiracists, it’s Fox Mulder, not Oprah Winfrey, that is their avatar: “the truth is out there“.

Bradley Baurain‘s chapter, “Parenting Teenagers in Gullible Times”, airs out his feelings of embarrassment, isolation, and frustration with “conservative White evangelicals” who questioned and disagreed with the official line on COVID, who pitied him and his family for their naïveté. Baurain returns the compliment in spades, “gullibility, to put it mildly, appears to be the status quo among many Christians”. Slipping into hyperbole: “Frankly, it feels like we have slipped into another dimension filled with flat-earthers.” While lamenting that the COVID contrarians in his circle thought less of him, Baurain charges Christians in kind who appraised the evidence differently than he did as: absurd, learning-impaired, proud, foolish, backsliding, fickle, and rebellious. They are like the murderous Cain, like the adulterous wife of Hosea, like the idolatrous rebels of Jeremiah, like lost sheep and prodigals. Confessing his anger and depression, Baurain wonders if he will be able to forgive them for damaging his children’s faith. Baurain gets the solution right, that he will bear with his fellow believers, inspired by the relentless and infinite love of God. I would add that it would be exceedingly easier to do so if he could truly consider what he exhorts others to do, that is, to consider the possibility that he could be wrong and the certainty that different people can evaluate evidence in good faith and come to a different conclusion.

Sadly, not a single author in the book takes their benighted subjects or their concerns seriously. While the possibly mixed motives of those in power are never contemplated, as far as I can remember, none commend the dissenter’s or conspiracist’s genuine truth seeking, take note of possibly noble motives, or engage with the evidence itself. It is a given that they’re wrong, perhaps even by definition, so the contrarians’ and conspiracy theorists’ motives must be impure. To catalog all of the insults would go overlong. Surely by now the reader has a sense of the tone of QCC.

This strong political bent is likely the reason that the book doesn’t ponder the most obvious explanation for conservative’s rational skepticism toward government and academic authorities. Every conservative who is somewhat aware of the

emphasize the importance of intellectual humility, an essential epistemic virtue if ever there was one. Echoing the Apostle James, Bock offers the following tip: “ask conspiracy theorists whether they think it’s possible that they’re wrong. Humble people don’t get angry very quickly because they don’t rush to judgment too quickly. They spend time examining the evidence and listening to different points of view.” Indeed. 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 an industrial sized censorship program, who dismissed non-conforming professors, and who marginalized alternative policy prescriptions, all while making many false claims and projections from which they’ve backpedaled since. Those in power, with greater responsibility by far, need not worry that they’ll be chastised in these pages. This is not a book for them, a book of truth to power. This book only punches down.

The Titular Conspiracy

Gregory Bock recounts the sad story of #pizzagate and 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.” Faulting him for intemperate anger, Bock doesn’t deign to share any of the smoke that led Welch to think there was a fire at Comet Pizza. On that day, Welch seemed calm and determined en route to DC when he recorded a video for his own daughters, telling them he had a “duty to protect those who can’t protect themselves”. Upon arrival, Welch searched the pizzeria, shooting once to open a locked door, and then surrendered to police when he found no foul play. If Welch’s concerns had been validated, surely his anger would have been righteous and his cause just. His desire to protect vulnerable children from unthinkable evil is admirable. What he lacked in his vigilantism was a deference to the proper authorities. He also failed to realize that he needed to confirm what were fallible inferences from a fact pattern synthesized by internet sleuths. His friends had recommended Welch do surveillance before acting, but he failed to heed their good advice. Indeed, evidence gathering, and reporting to authorities, is precisely where anti-human trafficking organizations and ministries who share Welch’s righteous concern have specialized.

I remember well when I first read Kevin Bales’ Disposable People. I was shocked at his thesis, that sex trafficking and slavery, in the sense of coerced labor, is now more prevalent around the world than it has ever been. While I was horrified by the stories Bales recounts about slavery in Thailand, India, and Brazil, I was simply incredulous when he wrote that trafficking is endemic in the United States too. I couldn’t imagine then that people could get away with it here with our robust systems of law enforcement. I was naive. The problem is heart-wrenchingly real, evidenced by a steady stream of reported arrests and a wide variety of organizations addressing this scourge. Christians have been at the vanguard of tackling human trafficking, which often involves prostitution and sex trafficking. Nazarene Compassionate Ministries, International Justice Mission, Global Center for Women and Justice, and the Tim Tebow Foundation are but a few of many such organizations. In my community, Rebuilding Hope! and Scarlet Road help to provide an escape from bondage. The Faith Alliance Against Slavery leads the coalition. They collaborate with secular organizations like the Human Trafficking Institute and Polaris Project whose National Human Trafficking Hotline reports over 50,000 “signals” a year.

Sex trafficking is a real problem. This horrific crime is not isolated to the fringe of society or to far flung locales. In addition to being found guilty for his own sexual violations, Jeffrey Epstein is now widely believed to have facilitated illicit sexual encounters for the most elite and powerful members of society at his now infamous St. James island and other locations. The powerbrokers with whom Epstein wined, dined, and traveled were almost entirely men of the left. His bizarrely obscured death and the failure of our government to prosecute his associates has led many reasonable people to believe that his clients are in a position to stifle investigation. The nature of Epstein’s alleged crimes might lead some Christians to call him demonic.

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

Trust in the Information Age

In “Loving Our Online Communities” (chap. 19), Rachel I. Wightman notes the challenge of our internet age, how we can be overwhelmed by the cacophonous noice of a thousand tongues. No doubt, that to be a savvy filter of information in the Information Age. Wightman worries that the ability of users to create content without the code of ethics and editorial constraints of reporters at the New York Times generates conspiracy theories and misinformation. And because social media like Facebook’s and X’s algorithms are tailored to cater to the user’s interest, we may find ourselves in information bubbles.

the ability for people to create and share information so easily also creates spaces for conspiracy theories and misinformation or fake news to thrive. Most reputable news outlets have some sort of code of conduct or code of ethics, such as the New York Times’

Austin, Michael W.; Bock, Gregory L.. QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 296). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

The Disinformation Governance Board

King’s and Wyma’s straw manning of Christian concerns about government positions and policy reveals a prejudice against the less educated. It is an exercise in intellectual elitism. Leave these matters of great public concern not just to the experts, but to the government aligned experts.

The politicized management of the COVID-19 pandemic stripped doctors and patients of medical choice regarding the treatment of illness, and some public health agencies prioritized race over medical necessity in dispensing vaccines and monoclonal antibodies. Doctors and medical organizations made unscientific recommendations for prevention of COVID-19, misrepresenting the utility of masking, the benefits of natural immunity, and the efficacy of novel vaccines. Similarly, despite the absence of rigorous scientific investigation and dismissal of available data, medical professionals projected an illusory scientific consensus by insisting that the science was settled regarding the need to administer “gender-affirming care” to minors experiencing gender distress.

Monica Harris for the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 291). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

to chapters on internet discernment, and 20, no mention of narrative control at Google, Wikipedia,

The truth is, conspiracists do traffic in evidence. They scour the internet for news stories, video clips, interviews, autopsy reports, and FBI disclosures that seem to cut against the official narrative. If you’ve ever gone down the rabbit hole, you cannot but be amazed at all the disparate pieces of information they track down and weave into their conspiratorial tale. The wall of documents and red-lined connections in Charlie Day’s hilarious Pepe Silvia conspiracy rant on Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia bears a visual resemblance. Consider, for example, the curious case of Ray Epps, whom Darren J. Beattie and an army of internet sleuths have investigated at great length, suggesting a connection to the FBI.

This is no time to acquiesce. [Satirists at the Babylon Bee had a bit where they regularly paired their farcical headlines with real headlines announcing: “another prophecy fulfilled”. And social media influencers compiled lists of their .] So what examples of foolhardy conspiracism was QCC left to address?

Apart from Rachel I. Wightman, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross fails to deal squarely with the reality of conflicting expert opinion. Tim Muelhoff does mention it. However, the trading of information simply amplified our disagreement by showing how we each trusted “experts” who wildly disagreed with each other. As soon as she produced a study, I countered it with a different—and in my estimation—superior one.

Austin, Michael W.; Bock, Gregory L.. QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 240). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

The Elephant Not in the Room

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?

Unfortunately, deferring to Wikipedia, Politifact, the WHO, to experts, or even to the relevant scientific association is not a reliable solution on contested subjects. When it comes to ethical, philosophical, and historical questions, each of these institutions is beginning with different priors . Just as we must test the spirits and the prophets, we must test our experts.

For me the issue of transgenderism highlihgts the crisis of trust in our institutions as well as any other.

We know the Obama administration invested heavily in breaking the evangelical resistance to the Democrat platform, employing Michael Wear to lead the effort. We also know that a group of influential evangelical who named themselves “The Outliers”, Francis Collins, David Brooks, David French, Russel Moore, Tim Keller

In the fall of 2015, [Russell] Moore met with “The Outliers”, a group of friends and fellow high-profile believers: Tim Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City; Pete Wehner, the former head of strategic initiatives in the George W. Bush White House; Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health; and David Brooks, the New York Times columnist.

Tim Alberta, quoted at The Resistance Will Be Organized

people and wreaked destruction on our cities (more, even, than the May 31st or January 6th Capitol riots)

Stop playing for a team. Call balls and strikes. Prove to be trustworthy.

Evangelicals are in an identity crisis. By and large, American evangelical church goers remain morally and economically conservative. As such, they represent a base of support on the right and the last obstacle to the ethical and political aims of the progressive left who rule from Times Square, Harvard Yard, Silicon Valley, Hollywood Boulevard, Wall Street, and until recently, Pennsylvania Ave. Naturally, conservatives of all stripes cast these rulers a wary eye. Evangelicalism’s intellectual and organizational leaders, meanwhile, more often reflect the values, sympathies, and presuppositions characteristic of their overwhelmingly left-wing academic milieu. This strained fault line within evangelicalism ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention the Obergefell, Bostock, and Dobbs court decisions, the COVID response, contested elections, and widespread political violence across the country in the wake of the death of George Floyd and at the Capitol on January 6th. While evangelical leaders followed most of the top down directives on these issues, resistance grew from the pew on up. We are still trying to find our footing after these disagreements and cultural upheaval.

At such a time as this, editors Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. Bock recruited a couple dozen evangelical professors to exhort naysayers in the pews to steer clear of “conspiracy theories” and dissenting opinions. Some of these contributors are old friends and professors from my own graduate education. I feel an affection and appreciation for them. Nevertheless, apart from a lot of generic epistemological and conversational advice, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross (QCC) manages to learn and teach the wrong lesson from these tumultuous years. Captive to a technocratic and partisan bent, the book fails to wonder why there has been such a loss of faith in authority and on the whole the book discourages average Christians from “doing their own research” and questioning government sanctioned experts. As one who witnessed these events and unadvisedly did just that, I aver. For Christians and for conservatives, skepticism towards authority is the wise and necessary epistemic stance in a world whose god is the devil and in an information environment that is overwhelmingly dominated by a single political and ideological faction. Repeated and unrepentant breaches of trust by our rulers demand not less but more critically engaged citizens who will carefully examine them, publicly question them, and hold them accountable. That is good citizenship in the kingdom of heaven, and in our earthly democratic republic. Though the evangelical professoriate appears to have no appetite for the culture war raging around them, we must at least engage in spiritual warfare. We must respectfully demolish arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the cross, against the Christian, and against the citizen. Beware those who cry peace when there is no peace.

In early 2023 when Mike Austin announced that Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross was forthcoming, I wondered which unfounded conspiracies would remain as such until publication. At the time, critics of government proclamations and policies were crowing on social media about all the supposedly tin-foil conspiracy theories that had been validated by subsequent events. Some joked that the difference between a conspiracy theory and breaking news was: “about six months”. For example, in 2020 the public had been reassured ad nauseam by our betters that Critical Race Theory and Ibrahim Kendi-style “anti-racism” were not being taught in schools, but whistle blowers and citizen reporters on social media belied their assurances with thousands of videos and screenshots of discriminatory classroom instruction and curriculum, not only in schools but at every level of society. At Disney, an insider leaked internal videos of creators boasting about how they freely inserted their “not-so-secret gay agenda” into children’s entertainment at every opportunity, just as concerned parents had noticed. Schools had been caught facilitating attempts at gender switching without parental consent in school clubs, secret transition closets, and internal documents. On the COVID front, the forbidden “lab leak theory” of sars-cov-2 origins had achieved mainstream credibility, though not a consensus, in government inquiries and the “paper of record”. Some mask and lockdown enthusiasts had already begun backpedaling. The Cochrane review had just been released, revalidating the pre-COVID World Health Organization’s guidance based on its meta-analysis of randomly controlled trials: “there is no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing influenza transmission”, only a “mechanistic plausibility”. And after an unending parade of politicians taking to social media to concede that they had COVID, it was clear that officials’ promises that the vaccines would prevent infection were false. Meanwhile, mirroring the elusive and indecipherable Q’Anon utterances, Jeffrey Epstein’s sex ring for the rich and powerful was by then public knowledge, though most of his secrets went with him to the grave due to a timely death in jail. Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger had published the #Twitterfiles. They exposed a vast government and NGO directed censorship apparatus and validated suspicions of partisan deplatforming and shadow banning, which had been dismissed as the paranoiac fugues of a persecution complex. Two of those social media censors, Zuckerberg‘s Facebook and Dorsey‘s Twitter, participants in the conspiracy to contain the Hunter Biden “October Surprise”, publicly admitted it was wrong of them to censor news of the scandalous laptop under the pretense of it being Russian disinformation. That election year stopgap was the product of a well-substantiated conspiracy facilitated by the government-funded Aspen Institute; paired with a brazenly false public statement signed by 51 former intelligence officials at the behest of Biden campaign advisor Antony Blinken. Moreover, the alleged conspiracy between Donald Trump and Russia, the “nothing-burger” conspiracy theory that preoccupied left wing news for years, had emerged after extensive investigation to be in actuality a conspiracy between the Hilary Clinton campaign, the Obama administration, and government actors to handicap the new president.

I could go on and on and on. These examples are but a tiny fraction of the conspiracies proven true and media narratives and government pronouncements shown false in the twenty-tweens. Such politically expedient breaches of trust are the principal cause of widespread skepticism and conspiracism. For the most part, the truth about these stories was sussed out not thanks to government authorities and establishment news sources but in spite of them. Citizen journalists, independent videographers, government accountability think tanks, social media news hounds, and even right leaning news sites willed the truth out with dogged investigating. Smart phones, hidden cameras, FOIA requests, primary sources, automated internet archives, embedded reporting, new publications, and the hostile takeover of the world’s most influential social media platform were the tools of their trade. None of the aforementioned object lessons above grace the pages of Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross. Rather, the teachable moments therein cut almost entirely in favor of credulity toward those in positions of power and prestige. It prompts the question, why were these instances — and the biggest elephant not in the room, which we’ll get to — not in the book, while less credible conspiracies made the cut? In the book’s appendix, a glossary on careful reasoning, it defines confirmation bias as “being closed to evidence that doesn’t confirm what we already believe. Being biased is natural, and so is seeking confirmation of our biases.” Just so.

Why Do People Question Authority and Fall for Conspiracy Theories?

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross is most exasperating when it imputes only non-rational psychological urges and impure motives to those who entertain conspiracy theories and wrongthink. In one of many such passages, Dru Johnson supposes:

The deep satisfaction and sense of empowerment fostered by seeing through a conspiracy is, quite simply, intoxicating. It’s not difficult to understand the emotional power of believing that we’ve cracked a secret society. After all, who wants to be just another one of the sheeple? People who feel like they are losing social or political power can find themselves leaning into conspiracy mind-sets to regain a sense of control. Dementia and the loss of memory commonly fires up imagined conspiracies. In her final years of life, my mother was convinced on several conspiracies to steal her medicine or food.

Emotions, rebelliousness, powerlessness, and dementia. Well, yes. These are some of the reasons some second guess our authorities. Other times, it’s a concern for truth and justice and goodness. Johnson even cites the prevailing postmodern mood: “my truth” over “the truth”. “Conspiracy thinking injects itself into our venal lusts at this exact point. Who will guide me? The conspiracist answers: ‘I will! I, the one who knows, will peel back the corner of the tarp of history and reveal to you all its secret inner workings.'” But conspiracists are not postmodernists. In my own efforts to understand the times, and in my brushes with conspiracists, it’s Fox Mulder, not Oprah Winfrey, that is their avatar: “the truth is out there“.

Bradley Baurain‘s chapter, “Parenting Teenagers in Gullible Times”, airs out his feelings of embarrassment, isolation, and frustration with “conservative White evangelicals” who questioned and disagreed with the official line on COVID, who pitied him and his family for their naïveté. Baurain returns the compliment in spades, “gullibility, to put it mildly, appears to be the status quo among many Christians”. Slipping into hyperbole: “Frankly, it feels like we have slipped into another dimension filled with flat-earthers.” While lamenting that the COVID contrarians in his circle thought less of him, Baurain charges Christians in kind who appraised the evidence differently than he did as: absurd, learning-impaired, proud, foolish, backsliding, fickle, and rebellious. They are like the murderous Cain, like the adulterous wife of Hosea, like the idolatrous rebels of Jeremiah, like lost sheep and prodigals. Confessing his anger and depression, Baurain wonders if he will be able to forgive them for damaging his children’s faith. Baurain gets the solution right, that he will bear with his fellow believers, inspired by the relentless and infinite love of God. I would add that it would be exceedingly easier to do so if he could truly consider what he exhorts others to do, that is, to consider the possibility that he could be wrong and the certainty that different people can evaluate evidence in good faith and come to a different conclusion.

Sadly, not a single author in the book takes their benighted subjects or their concerns seriously. While the possibly mixed motives of those in power are never contemplated, as far as I can remember, none commend the dissenter’s or conspiracist’s genuine truth seeking, take note of possibly noble motives, or engage with the evidence itself. It is a given that they’re wrong, perhaps even by definition, so the contrarians’ and conspiracy theorists’ motives must be impure. To catalog all of the insults would go overlong. Surely by now the reader has a sense of the tone of QCC.

The Titular Conspiracy

Gregory Bock recounts the sad story of #pizzagate and 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.” Faulting him for intemperate anger, Bock doesn’t deign to share any of the smoke that led Welch to think there was a fire at Comet Pizza. On that day, Welch seemed calm and determined en route to DC when he recorded a video for his own daughters, telling them he had a “duty to protect those who can’t protect themselves”. Upon arrival, Welch searched the pizzeria, shooting once to open a locked door, and then surrendered to police when he found no foul play. If Welch’s concerns had been validated, surely his anger would have been righteous and his cause just. His desire to protect vulnerable children from unthinkable evil is admirable. What he lacked in his vigilantism was a deference to the proper authorities. He also failed to realize that he needed to confirm what were fallible inferences from a fact pattern synthesized by internet sleuths. His friends had recommended Welch do surveillance before acting, but he failed to heed their good advice. Indeed, evidence gathering, and reporting to authorities, is precisely where anti-human trafficking organizations and ministries who share Welch’s righteous concern have specialized.

I remember well when I first read Kevin Bales’ Disposable People. I was shocked at his thesis, that sex trafficking and slavery, in the sense of coerced labor, is now more prevalent around the world than it has ever been. While I was horrified by the stories Bales recounts about slavery in Thailand, India, and Brazil, I was simply incredulous when he wrote that trafficking is endemic in the United States too. I couldn’t imagine then that people could get away with it here with our robust systems of law enforcement. I was naive. The problem is heart-wrenchingly real, evidenced by a steady stream of reported arrests and a wide variety of organizations addressing this scourge. Christians have been at the vanguard of tackling human trafficking, which often involves prostitution and sex trafficking. Nazarene Compassionate Ministries, International Justice Mission, Global Center for Women and Justice, and the Tim Tebow Foundation are but a few of many such organizations. In my community, Rebuilding Hope! and Scarlet Road help to provide an escape from bondage. The Faith Alliance Against Slavery leads the coalition. They collaborate with secular organizations like the Human Trafficking Institute and Polaris Project whose National Human Trafficking Hotline reports over 50,000 “signals” a year.

Sex trafficking is a real problem. This horrific crime is not isolated to the fringe of society or to far flung locales. In addition to being found guilty for his own sexual violations, Jeffrey Epstein is now widely believed to have facilitated illicit sexual encounters for the most elite and powerful members of society at his now infamous St. James island and other locations. The powerbrokers with whom Epstein wined, dined, and traveled were almost entirely men of the left. His bizarrely obscured death and the failure of our government to prosecute his associates has led many reasonable people to believe that his clients are in a position to stifle investigation. The nature of Epstein’s alleged crimes might lead some Christians to call him demonic.

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

Trust in the Information Age

In “Loving Our Online Communities” (chap. 19), Rachel I. Wightman notes the challenge of our internet age, how we can be overwhelmed by the cacophonous noice of a thousand tongues. No doubt, that to be a savvy filter of information in the Information Age. Wightman worries that the ability of users to create content without the code of ethics and editorial constraints of reporters at the New York Times generates conspiracy theories and misinformation. And because social media like Facebook’s and X’s algorithms are tailored to cater to the user’s interest, we may find ourselves in information bubbles.

the ability for people to create and share information so easily also creates spaces for conspiracy theories and misinformation or fake news to thrive. Most reputable news outlets have some sort of code of conduct or code of ethics, such as the New York Times’

Austin, Michael W.; Bock, Gregory L.. QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 296). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

The Disinformation Governance Board

King’s and Wyma’s straw manning of Christian concerns about government positions and policy reveals a prejudice against the less educated. It is an exercise in intellectual elitism. Leave these matters of great public concern not just to the experts, but to the government aligned experts.

The politicized management of the COVID-19 pandemic stripped doctors and patients of medical choice regarding the treatment of illness, and some public health agencies prioritized race over medical necessity in dispensing vaccines and monoclonal antibodies. Doctors and medical organizations made unscientific recommendations for prevention of COVID-19, misrepresenting the utility of masking, the benefits of natural immunity, and the efficacy of novel vaccines. Similarly, despite the absence of rigorous scientific investigation and dismissal of available data, medical professionals projected an illusory scientific consensus by insisting that the science was settled regarding the need to administer “gender-affirming care” to minors experiencing gender distress.

Monica Harris for the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 291). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

to chapters on internet discernment, and 20, no mention of narrative control at Google, Wikipedia,

The truth is, conspiracists do traffic in evidence. They scour the internet for news stories, video clips, interviews, autopsy reports, and FBI disclosures that seem to cut against the official narrative. If you’ve ever gone down the rabbit hole, you cannot but be amazed at all the disparate pieces of information they track down and weave into their conspiratorial tale. The wall of documents and red-lined connections in Charlie Day’s hilarious Pepe Silvia conspiracy rant on Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia bears a visual resemblance. Consider, for example, the curious case of Ray Epps, whom Darren J. Beattie and an army of internet sleuths have investigated at great length, suggesting a connection to the FBI.

This is no time to acquiesce. [Satirists at the Babylon Bee had a bit where they regularly paired their farcical headlines with real headlines announcing: “another prophecy fulfilled”. And social media influencers compiled lists of their .] So what examples of foolhardy conspiracism was QCC left to address?

Apart from Rachel I. Wightman, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross fails to deal squarely with the reality of conflicting expert opinion. Tim Muelhoff does mention it. However, the trading of information simply amplified our disagreement by showing how we each trusted “experts” who wildly disagreed with each other. As soon as she produced a study, I countered it with a different—and in my estimation—superior one.

Austin, Michael W.; Bock, Gregory L.. QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 240). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

The Elephant Not in the Room

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?

Unfortunately, deferring to Wikipedia, Politifact, the WHO, to experts, or even to the relevant scientific association is not a reliable solution on contested subjects. When it comes to ethical, philosophical, and historical questions, each of these institutions is beginning with different priors . Just as we must test the spirits and the prophets, we must test our experts.

For me the issue of transgenderism highlihgts the crisis of trust in our institutions as well as any other.

We know the Obama administration invested heavily in breaking the evangelical resistance to the Democrat platform, employing Michael Wear to lead the effort. We also know that a group of influential evangelical who named themselves “The Outliers”, Francis Collins, David Brooks, David French, Russel Moore, Tim Keller

In the fall of 2015, [Russell] Moore met with “The Outliers”, a group of friends and fellow high-profile believers: Tim Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City; Pete Wehner, the former head of strategic initiatives in the George W. Bush White House; Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health; and David Brooks, the New York Times columnist.

Tim Alberta, quoted at The Resistance Will Be Organized

people and wreaked destruction on our cities (more, even, than the May 31st or January 6th Capitol riots)

Stop playing for a team. Call balls and strikes. Prove to be trustworthy.

Evangelicals are in an identity crisis. By and large, American evangelical church goers remain morally and economically conservative. As such, they represent a base of support on the right and the last obstacle to the ethical and political aims of the progressive left who rule from Times Square, Harvard Yard, Silicon Valley, Hollywood Boulevard, Wall Street, and until recently, Pennsylvania Ave. Naturally, conservatives of all stripes cast these rulers a wary eye. Evangelicalism’s intellectual and organizational leaders, meanwhile, more often reflect the values, sympathies, and presuppositions characteristic of their overwhelmingly left-wing academic milieu. This strained fault line within evangelicalism ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention the Obergefell, Bostock, and Dobbs court decisions, the COVID response, contested elections, and widespread political violence across the country in the wake of the death of George Floyd and at the Capitol on January 6th. While evangelical leaders followed most of the top down directives on these issues, resistance grew from the pew on up. We are still trying to find our footing after these disagreements and cultural upheaval.

At such a time as this, editors Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. Bock recruited a couple dozen evangelical professors to exhort naysayers in the pews to steer clear of “conspiracy theories” and dissenting opinions. Some of these contributors are old friends and professors from my own graduate education. I feel an affection and appreciation for them. Nevertheless, apart from a lot of generic epistemological and conversational advice, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross (QCC) manages to learn and teach the wrong lesson from these tumultuous years. Captive to a technocratic and partisan bent, the book fails to wonder why there has been such a loss of faith in authority and on the whole the book discourages average Christians from “doing their own research” and questioning government sanctioned experts. As one who witnessed these events and unadvisedly did just that, I aver. For Christians and for conservatives, skepticism towards authority is the wise and necessary epistemic stance in a world whose god is the devil and in an information environment that is overwhelmingly dominated by a single political and ideological faction. Repeated and unrepentant breaches of trust by our rulers demand not less but more critically engaged citizens who will carefully examine them, publicly question them, and hold them accountable. That is good citizenship in the kingdom of heaven, and in our earthly democratic republic. Though the evangelical professoriate appears to have no appetite for the culture war raging around them, we must at least engage in spiritual warfare. We must respectfully demolish arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the cross, against the Christian, and against the citizen. Beware those who cry peace when there is no peace.

In early 2023 when Mike Austin announced that Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross was forthcoming, I wondered which unfounded conspiracies would remain as such until publication. At the time, critics of government proclamations and policies were crowing on social media about all the supposedly tin-foil conspiracy theories that had been validated by subsequent events. Some joked that the difference between a conspiracy theory and breaking news was: “about six months”. For example, in 2020 the public had been reassured ad nauseam by our betters that Critical Race Theory and Ibrahim Kendi-style “anti-racism” were not being taught in schools, but whistle blowers and citizen reporters on social media belied their assurances with thousands of videos and screenshots of discriminatory classroom instruction and curriculum, not only in schools but at every level of society. At Disney, an insider leaked internal videos of creators boasting about how they freely inserted their “not-so-secret gay agenda” into children’s entertainment at every opportunity, just as concerned parents had noticed. Schools had been caught facilitating attempts at gender switching without parental consent in school clubs, secret transition closets, and internal documents. On the COVID front, the forbidden “lab leak theory” of sars-cov-2 origins had achieved mainstream credibility, though not a consensus, in government inquiries and the “paper of record”. Some mask and lockdown enthusiasts had already begun backpedaling. The Cochrane review had just been released, revalidating the pre-COVID World Health Organization’s guidance based on its meta-analysis of randomly controlled trials: “there is no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing influenza transmission”, only a “mechanistic plausibility”. And after an unending parade of politicians taking to social media to concede that they had COVID, it was clear that officials’ promises that the vaccines would prevent infection were false. Meanwhile, mirroring the elusive and indecipherable Q’Anon utterances, Jeffrey Epstein’s sex ring for the rich and powerful was by then public knowledge, though most of his secrets went with him to the grave due to a timely death in jail. Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger had published the #Twitterfiles. They exposed a vast government and NGO directed censorship apparatus and validated suspicions of partisan deplatforming and shadow banning, which had been dismissed as the paranoiac fugues of a persecution complex. Two of those social media censors, Zuckerberg‘s Facebook and Dorsey‘s Twitter, participants in the conspiracy to contain the Hunter Biden “October Surprise”, publicly admitted it was wrong of them to censor news of the scandalous laptop under the pretense of it being Russian disinformation. That election year stopgap was the product of a well-substantiated conspiracy facilitated by the government-funded Aspen Institute; paired with a brazenly false public statement signed by 51 former intelligence officials at the behest of Biden campaign advisor Antony Blinken. Moreover, the alleged conspiracy between Donald Trump and Russia, the “nothing-burger” conspiracy theory that preoccupied left wing news for years, had emerged after extensive investigation to be in actuality a conspiracy between the Hilary Clinton campaign, the Obama administration, and government actors to handicap the new president.

I could go on and on and on. These examples are but a tiny fraction of the conspiracies proven true and media narratives and government pronouncements shown false in the twenty-tweens. Such politically expedient breaches of trust are the principal cause of widespread skepticism and conspiracism. For the most part, the truth about these stories was sussed out not thanks to government authorities and establishment news sources but in spite of them. Citizen journalists, independent videographers, government accountability think tanks, social media news hounds, and even right leaning news sites willed the truth out with dogged investigating. Smart phones, hidden cameras, FOIA requests, primary sources, automated internet archives, embedded reporting, new publications, and the hostile takeover of the world’s most influential social media platform were the tools of their trade. None of the aforementioned object lessons above grace the pages of Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross. Rather, the teachable moments therein cut almost entirely in favor of credulity toward those in positions of power and prestige. It prompts the question, why were these instances — and the biggest elephant not in the room, which we’ll get to — not in the book, while less credible conspiracies made the cut? In the book’s appendix, a glossary on careful reasoning, it defines confirmation bias as “being closed to evidence that doesn’t confirm what we already believe. Being biased is natural, and so is seeking confirmation of our biases.” Just so.

Why Do People Question Authority and Fall for Conspiracy Theories?

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross is most exasperating when it imputes only non-rational psychological urges and impure motives to those who entertain conspiracy theories and wrongthink. In one of many such passages, Dru Johnson supposes:

The deep satisfaction and sense of empowerment fostered by seeing through a conspiracy is, quite simply, intoxicating. It’s not difficult to understand the emotional power of believing that we’ve cracked a secret society. After all, who wants to be just another one of the sheeple? People who feel like they are losing social or political power can find themselves leaning into conspiracy mind-sets to regain a sense of control. Dementia and the loss of memory commonly fires up imagined conspiracies. In her final years of life, my mother was convinced on several conspiracies to steal her medicine or food.

Emotions, rebelliousness, powerlessness, and dementia. Well, yes. These are some of the reasons some second guess our authorities. Other times, it’s a concern for truth and justice and goodness. Johnson even cites the prevailing postmodern mood: “my truth” over “the truth”. “Conspiracy thinking injects itself into our venal lusts at this exact point. Who will guide me? The conspiracist answers: ‘I will! I, the one who knows, will peel back the corner of the tarp of history and reveal to you all its secret inner workings.'” But conspiracists are not postmodernists. In my own efforts to understand the times, and in my brushes with conspiracists, it’s Fox Mulder, not Oprah Winfrey, that is their avatar: “the truth is out there“.

Bradley Baurain‘s chapter, “Parenting Teenagers in Gullible Times”, airs out his feelings of embarrassment, isolation, and frustration with “conservative White evangelicals” who questioned and disagreed with the official line on COVID, who pitied him and his family for their naïveté. Baurain returns the compliment in spades, “gullibility, to put it mildly, appears to be the status quo among many Christians”. Slipping into hyperbole: “Frankly, it feels like we have slipped into another dimension filled with flat-earthers.” While lamenting that the COVID contrarians in his circle thought less of him, Baurain charges Christians in kind who appraised the evidence differently than he did as: absurd, learning-impaired, proud, foolish, backsliding, fickle, and rebellious. They are like the murderous Cain, like the adulterous wife of Hosea, like the idolatrous rebels of Jeremiah, like lost sheep and prodigals. Confessing his anger and depression, Baurain wonders if he will be able to forgive them for damaging his children’s faith. Baurain gets the solution right, that he will bear with his fellow believers, inspired by the relentless and infinite love of God. I would add that it would be exceedingly easier to do so if he could truly consider what he exhorts others to do, that is, to consider the possibility that he could be wrong and the certainty that different people can evaluate evidence in good faith and come to a different conclusion.

Sadly, not a single author in the book takes their benighted subjects or their concerns seriously. While the possibly mixed motives of those in power are never contemplated, as far as I can remember, none commend the dissenter’s or conspiracist’s genuine truth seeking, take note of possibly noble motives, or engage with the evidence itself. It is a given that they’re wrong, perhaps even by definition, so the contrarians’ and conspiracy theorists’ motives must be impure. To catalog all of the insults would go overlong. Surely by now the reader has a sense of the tone of QCC.

The Titular Conspiracy

Gregory Bock recounts the sad story of #pizzagate and 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.” Faulting him for intemperate anger, Bock doesn’t deign to share any of the smoke that led Welch to think there was a fire at Comet Pizza. On that day, Welch seemed calm and determined en route to DC when he recorded a video for his own daughters, telling them he had a “duty to protect those who can’t protect themselves”. Upon arrival, Welch searched the pizzeria, shooting once to open a locked door, and then surrendered to police when he found no foul play. If Welch’s concerns had been validated, surely his anger would have been righteous and his cause just. His desire to protect vulnerable children from unthinkable evil is admirable. What he lacked in his vigilantism was a deference to the proper authorities. He also failed to realize that he needed to confirm what were fallible inferences from a fact pattern synthesized by internet sleuths. His friends had recommended Welch do surveillance before acting, but he failed to heed their good advice. Indeed, evidence gathering, and reporting to authorities, is precisely where anti-human trafficking organizations and ministries who share Welch’s righteous concern have specialized.

I remember well when I first read Kevin Bales’ Disposable People. I was shocked at his thesis, that sex trafficking and slavery, in the sense of coerced labor, is now more prevalent around the world than it has ever been. While I was horrified by the stories Bales recounts about slavery in Thailand, India, and Brazil, I was simply incredulous when he wrote that trafficking is endemic in the United States too. I couldn’t imagine then that people could get away with it here with our robust systems of law enforcement. I was naive. The problem is heart-wrenchingly real, evidenced by a steady stream of reported arrests and a wide variety of organizations addressing this scourge. Christians have been at the vanguard of tackling human trafficking, which often involves prostitution and sex trafficking. Nazarene Compassionate Ministries, International Justice Mission, Global Center for Women and Justice, and the Tim Tebow Foundation are but a few of many such organizations. In my community, Rebuilding Hope! and Scarlet Road help to provide an escape from bondage. The Faith Alliance Against Slavery leads the coalition. They collaborate with secular organizations like the Human Trafficking Institute and Polaris Project whose National Human Trafficking Hotline reports over 50,000 “signals” a year.

Sex trafficking is a real problem. This horrific crime is not isolated to the fringe of society or to far flung locales. In addition to being found guilty for his own sexual violations, Jeffrey Epstein is now widely believed to have facilitated illicit sexual encounters for the most elite and powerful members of society at his now infamous St. James island and other locations. The powerbrokers with whom Epstein wined, dined, and traveled were almost entirely men of the left. His bizarrely obscured death and the failure of our government to prosecute his associates has led many reasonable people to believe that his clients are in a position to stifle investigation. The nature of Epstein’s alleged crimes might lead some Christians to call him demonic.

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

Trust in the Information Age

In “Loving Our Online Communities” (chap. 19), Rachel I. Wightman notes the challenge of our internet age, how we can be overwhelmed by the cacophonous noice of a thousand tongues. No doubt, that to be a savvy filter of information in the Information Age. Wightman worries that the ability of users to create content without the code of ethics and editorial constraints of reporters at the New York Times generates conspiracy theories and misinformation. And because social media like Facebook’s and X’s algorithms are tailored to cater to the user’s interest, we may find ourselves in information bubbles.

the ability for people to create and share information so easily also creates spaces for conspiracy theories and misinformation or fake news to thrive. Most reputable news outlets have some sort of code of conduct or code of ethics, such as the New York Times’

Austin, Michael W.; Bock, Gregory L.. QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 296). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

The Disinformation Governance Board

King’s and Wyma’s straw manning of Christian concerns about government positions and policy reveals a prejudice against the less educated. It is an exercise in intellectual elitism. Leave these matters of great public concern not just to the experts, but to the government aligned experts.

The politicized management of the COVID-19 pandemic stripped doctors and patients of medical choice regarding the treatment of illness, and some public health agencies prioritized race over medical necessity in dispensing vaccines and monoclonal antibodies. Doctors and medical organizations made unscientific recommendations for prevention of COVID-19, misrepresenting the utility of masking, the benefits of natural immunity, and the efficacy of novel vaccines. Similarly, despite the absence of rigorous scientific investigation and dismissal of available data, medical professionals projected an illusory scientific consensus by insisting that the science was settled regarding the need to administer “gender-affirming care” to minors experiencing gender distress.

Monica Harris for the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 291). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

to chapters on internet discernment, and 20, no mention of narrative control at Google, Wikipedia,

The truth is, conspiracists do traffic in evidence. They scour the internet for news stories, video clips, interviews, autopsy reports, and FBI disclosures that seem to cut against the official narrative. If you’ve ever gone down the rabbit hole, you cannot but be amazed at all the disparate pieces of information they track down and weave into their conspiratorial tale. The wall of documents and red-lined connections in Charlie Day’s hilarious Pepe Silvia conspiracy rant on Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia bears a visual resemblance. Consider, for example, the curious case of Ray Epps, whom Darren J. Beattie and an army of internet sleuths have investigated at great length, suggesting a connection to the FBI.

This is no time to acquiesce. [Satirists at the Babylon Bee had a bit where they regularly paired their farcical headlines with real headlines announcing: “another prophecy fulfilled”. And social media influencers compiled lists of their .] So what examples of foolhardy conspiracism was QCC left to address?

Apart from Rachel I. Wightman, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross fails to deal squarely with the reality of conflicting expert opinion. Tim Muelhoff does mention it. However, the trading of information simply amplified our disagreement by showing how we each trusted “experts” who wildly disagreed with each other. As soon as she produced a study, I countered it with a different—and in my estimation—superior one.

Austin, Michael W.; Bock, Gregory L.. QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 240). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

The Elephant Not in the Room

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?

Unfortunately, deferring to Wikipedia, Politifact, the WHO, to experts, or even to the relevant scientific association is not a reliable solution on contested subjects. When it comes to ethical, philosophical, and historical questions, each of these institutions is beginning with different priors . Just as we must test the spirits and the prophets, we must test our experts.

For me the issue of transgenderism highlihgts the crisis of trust in our institutions as well as any other.

We know the Obama administration invested heavily in breaking the evangelical resistance to the Democrat platform, employing Michael Wear to lead the effort. We also know that a group of influential evangelical who named themselves “The Outliers”, Francis Collins, David Brooks, David French, Russel Moore, Tim Keller

In the fall of 2015, [Russell] Moore met with “The Outliers”, a group of friends and fellow high-profile believers: Tim Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City; Pete Wehner, the former head of strategic initiatives in the George W. Bush White House; Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health; and David Brooks, the New York Times columnist.

Tim Alberta, quoted at The Resistance Will Be Organized

people and wreaked destruction on our cities (more, even, than the May 31st or January 6th Capitol riots)

Stop playing for a team. Call balls and strikes. Prove to be trustworthy.

Evangelicals are in an identity crisis. By and large, American evangelical church goers remain morally and economically conservative. As such, they represent a base of support on the right and the last obstacle to the ethical and political aims of the progressive left who rule from Times Square, Harvard Yard, Silicon Valley, Hollywood Boulevard, Wall Street, and until recently, Pennsylvania Ave. Naturally, conservatives of all stripes cast these rulers a wary eye. Evangelicalism’s intellectual and organizational leaders, meanwhile, more often reflect the values, sympathies, and presuppositions characteristic of their overwhelmingly left-wing academic milieu. This strained fault line within evangelicalism ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention the Obergefell, Bostock, and Dobbs court decisions, the COVID response, contested elections, and widespread political violence across the country in the wake of the death of George Floyd and at the Capitol on January 6th. While evangelical leaders followed most of the top down directives on these issues, resistance grew from the pew on up. We are still trying to find our footing after these disagreements and cultural upheaval.

At such a time as this, editors Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. Bock recruited a couple dozen evangelical professors to exhort naysayers in the pews to steer clear of “conspiracy theories” and dissenting opinions. Some of these contributors are old friends and professors from my own graduate education. I feel an affection and appreciation for them. Nevertheless, apart from a lot of generic epistemological and conversational advice, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross (QCC) manages to learn and teach the wrong lesson from these tumultuous years. Captive to a technocratic and partisan bent, the book fails to wonder why there has been such a loss of faith in authority and on the whole the book discourages average Christians from “doing their own research” and questioning government sanctioned experts. As one who witnessed these events and unadvisedly did just that, I aver. For Christians and for conservatives, skepticism towards authority is the wise and necessary epistemic stance in a world whose god is the devil and in an information environment that is overwhelmingly dominated by a single political and ideological faction. Repeated and unrepentant breaches of trust by our rulers demand not less but more critically engaged citizens who will carefully examine them, publicly question them, and hold them accountable. That is good citizenship in the kingdom of heaven, and in our earthly democratic republic. Though the evangelical professoriate appears to have no appetite for the culture war raging around them, we must at least engage in spiritual warfare. We must respectfully demolish arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the cross, against the Christian, and against the citizen. Beware those who cry peace when there is no peace.

In early 2023 when Mike Austin announced that Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross was forthcoming, I wondered which unfounded conspiracies would remain as such until publication. At the time, critics of government proclamations and policies were crowing on social media about all the supposedly tin-foil conspiracy theories that had been validated by subsequent events. Some joked that the difference between a conspiracy theory and breaking news was: “about six months”. For example, in 2020 the public had been reassured ad nauseam by our betters that Critical Race Theory and Ibrahim Kendi-style “anti-racism” were not being taught in schools, but whistle blowers and citizen reporters on social media belied their assurances with thousands of videos and screenshots of discriminatory classroom instruction and curriculum, not only in schools but at every level of society. At Disney, an insider leaked internal videos of creators boasting about how they freely inserted their “not-so-secret gay agenda” into children’s entertainment at every opportunity, just as concerned parents had noticed. Schools had been caught facilitating attempts at gender switching without parental consent in school clubs, secret transition closets, and internal documents. On the COVID front, the forbidden “lab leak theory” of sars-cov-2 origins had achieved mainstream credibility, though not a consensus, in government inquiries and the “paper of record”. Some mask and lockdown enthusiasts had already begun backpedaling. The Cochrane review had just been released, revalidating the pre-COVID World Health Organization’s guidance based on its meta-analysis of randomly controlled trials: “there is no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing influenza transmission”, only a “mechanistic plausibility”. And after an unending parade of politicians taking to social media to concede that they had COVID, it was clear that officials’ promises that the vaccines would prevent infection were false. Meanwhile, mirroring the elusive and indecipherable Q’Anon utterances, Jeffrey Epstein’s sex ring for the rich and powerful was by then public knowledge, though most of his secrets went with him to the grave due to a timely death in jail. Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger had published the #Twitterfiles. They exposed a vast government and NGO directed censorship apparatus and validated suspicions of partisan deplatforming and shadow banning, which had been dismissed as the paranoiac fugues of a persecution complex. Two of those social media censors, Zuckerberg‘s Facebook and Dorsey‘s Twitter, participants in the conspiracy to contain the Hunter Biden “October Surprise”, publicly admitted it was wrong of them to censor news of the scandalous laptop under the pretense of it being Russian disinformation. That election year stopgap was the product of a well-substantiated conspiracy facilitated by the government-funded Aspen Institute; paired with a brazenly false public statement signed by 51 former intelligence officials at the behest of Biden campaign advisor Antony Blinken. Moreover, the alleged conspiracy between Donald Trump and Russia, the “nothing-burger” conspiracy theory that preoccupied left wing news for years, had emerged after extensive investigation to be in actuality a conspiracy between the Hilary Clinton campaign, the Obama administration, and government actors to handicap the new president.

I could go on and on and on. These examples are but a tiny fraction of the conspiracies proven true and media narratives and government pronouncements shown false in the twenty-tweens. Such politically expedient breaches of trust are the principal cause of widespread skepticism and conspiracism. For the most part, the truth about these stories was sussed out not thanks to government authorities and establishment news sources but in spite of them. Citizen journalists, independent videographers, government accountability think tanks, social media news hounds, and even right leaning news sites willed the truth out with dogged investigating. Smart phones, hidden cameras, FOIA requests, primary sources, automated internet archives, embedded reporting, new publications, and the hostile takeover of the world’s most influential social media platform were the tools of their trade. None of the aforementioned object lessons above grace the pages of Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross. Rather, the teachable moments therein cut almost entirely in favor of credulity toward those in positions of power and prestige. It prompts the question, why were these instances — and the biggest elephant not in the room, which we’ll get to — not in the book, while less credible conspiracies made the cut? In the book’s appendix, a glossary on careful reasoning, it defines confirmation bias as “being closed to evidence that doesn’t confirm what we already believe. Being biased is natural, and so is seeking confirmation of our biases.” Just so.

Why Do People Question Authority and Fall for Conspiracy Theories?

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross is most exasperating when it imputes only non-rational psychological urges and impure motives to those who entertain conspiracy theories and wrongthink. In one of many such passages, Dru Johnson supposes:

The deep satisfaction and sense of empowerment fostered by seeing through a conspiracy is, quite simply, intoxicating. It’s not difficult to understand the emotional power of believing that we’ve cracked a secret society. After all, who wants to be just another one of the sheeple? People who feel like they are losing social or political power can find themselves leaning into conspiracy mind-sets to regain a sense of control. Dementia and the loss of memory commonly fires up imagined conspiracies. In her final years of life, my mother was convinced on several conspiracies to steal her medicine or food.

Emotions, rebelliousness, powerlessness, and dementia. Well, yes. These are some of the reasons some second guess our authorities. Other times, it’s a concern for truth and justice and goodness. Johnson even cites the prevailing postmodern mood: “my truth” over “the truth”. “Conspiracy thinking injects itself into our venal lusts at this exact point. Who will guide me? The conspiracist answers: ‘I will! I, the one who knows, will peel back the corner of the tarp of history and reveal to you all its secret inner workings.'” But conspiracists are not postmodernists. In my own efforts to understand the times, and in my brushes with conspiracists, it’s Fox Mulder, not Oprah Winfrey, that is their avatar: “the truth is out there“.

Bradley Baurain‘s chapter, “Parenting Teenagers in Gullible Times”, airs out his feelings of embarrassment, isolation, and frustration with “conservative White evangelicals” who questioned and disagreed with the official line on COVID, who pitied him and his family for their naïveté. Baurain returns the compliment in spades, “gullibility, to put it mildly, appears to be the status quo among many Christians”. Slipping into hyperbole: “Frankly, it feels like we have slipped into another dimension filled with flat-earthers.” While lamenting that the COVID contrarians in his circle thought less of him, Baurain charges Christians in kind who appraised the evidence differently than he did as: absurd, learning-impaired, proud, foolish, backsliding, fickle, and rebellious. They are like the murderous Cain, like the adulterous wife of Hosea, like the idolatrous rebels of Jeremiah, like lost sheep and prodigals. Confessing his anger and depression, Baurain wonders if he will be able to forgive them for damaging his children’s faith. Baurain gets the solution right, that he will bear with his fellow believers, inspired by the relentless and infinite love of God. I would add that it would be exceedingly easier to do so if he could truly consider what he exhorts others to do, that is, to consider the possibility that he could be wrong and the certainty that different people can evaluate evidence in good faith and come to a different conclusion.

Sadly, not a single author in the book takes their benighted subjects or their concerns seriously. While the possibly mixed motives of those in power are never contemplated, as far as I can remember, none commend the dissenter’s or conspiracist’s genuine truth seeking, take note of possibly noble motives, or engage with the evidence itself. It is a given that they’re wrong, perhaps even by definition, so the contrarians’ and conspiracy theorists’ motives must be impure. To catalog all of the insults would go overlong. Surely by now the reader has a sense of the tone of QCC.

The Titular Conspiracy

Gregory Bock recounts the sad story of #pizzagate and 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.” Faulting him for intemperate anger, Bock doesn’t deign to share any of the smoke that led Welch to think there was a fire at Comet Pizza. On that day, Welch seemed calm and determined en route to DC when he recorded a video for his own daughters, telling them he had a “duty to protect those who can’t protect themselves”. Upon arrival, Welch searched the pizzeria, shooting once to open a locked door, and then surrendered to police when he found no foul play. If Welch’s concerns had been validated, surely his anger would have been righteous and his cause just. His desire to protect vulnerable children from unthinkable evil is admirable. What he lacked in his vigilantism was a deference to the proper authorities. He also failed to realize that he needed to confirm what were fallible inferences from a fact pattern synthesized by internet sleuths. His friends had recommended Welch do surveillance before acting, but he failed to heed their good advice. Indeed, evidence gathering, and reporting to authorities, is precisely where anti-human trafficking organizations and ministries who share Welch’s righteous concern have specialized.

I remember well when I first read Kevin Bales’ Disposable People. I was shocked at his thesis, that sex trafficking and slavery, in the sense of coerced labor, is now more prevalent around the world than it has ever been. While I was horrified by the stories Bales recounts about slavery in Thailand, India, and Brazil, I was simply incredulous when he wrote that trafficking is endemic in the United States too. I couldn’t imagine then that people could get away with it here with our robust systems of law enforcement. I was naive. The problem is heart-wrenchingly real, evidenced by a steady stream of reported arrests and a wide variety of organizations addressing this scourge. Christians have been at the vanguard of tackling human trafficking, which often involves prostitution and sex trafficking. Nazarene Compassionate Ministries, International Justice Mission, Global Center for Women and Justice, and the Tim Tebow Foundation are but a few of many such organizations. In my community, Rebuilding Hope! and Scarlet Road help to provide an escape from bondage. The Faith Alliance Against Slavery leads the coalition. They collaborate with secular organizations like the Human Trafficking Institute and Polaris Project whose National Human Trafficking Hotline reports over 50,000 “signals” a year.

Sex trafficking is a real problem. This horrific crime is not isolated to the fringe of society or to far flung locales. In addition to being found guilty for his own sexual violations, Jeffrey Epstein is now widely believed to have facilitated illicit sexual encounters for the most elite and powerful members of society at his now infamous St. James island and other locations. The powerbrokers with whom Epstein wined, dined, and traveled were almost entirely men of the left. His bizarrely obscured death and the failure of our government to prosecute his associates has led many reasonable people to believe that his clients are in a position to stifle investigation. The nature of Epstein’s alleged crimes might lead some Christians to call him demonic.

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

Trust in the Information Age

In “Loving Our Online Communities” (chap. 19), Rachel I. Wightman notes the challenge of our internet age, how we can be overwhelmed by the cacophonous noice of a thousand tongues. No doubt, that to be a savvy filter of information in the Information Age. Wightman worries that the ability of users to create content without the code of ethics and editorial constraints of reporters at the New York Times generates conspiracy theories and misinformation. And because social media like Facebook’s and X’s algorithms are tailored to cater to the user’s interest, we may find ourselves in information bubbles.

the ability for people to create and share information so easily also creates spaces for conspiracy theories and misinformation or fake news to thrive. Most reputable news outlets have some sort of code of conduct or code of ethics, such as the New York Times’

Austin, Michael W.; Bock, Gregory L.. QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 296). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

The Disinformation Governance Board

King’s and Wyma’s straw manning of Christian concerns about government positions and policy reveals a prejudice against the less educated. It is an exercise in intellectual elitism. Leave these matters of great public concern not just to the experts, but to the government aligned experts.

The politicized management of the COVID-19 pandemic stripped doctors and patients of medical choice regarding the treatment of illness, and some public health agencies prioritized race over medical necessity in dispensing vaccines and monoclonal antibodies. Doctors and medical organizations made unscientific recommendations for prevention of COVID-19, misrepresenting the utility of masking, the benefits of natural immunity, and the efficacy of novel vaccines. Similarly, despite the absence of rigorous scientific investigation and dismissal of available data, medical professionals projected an illusory scientific consensus by insisting that the science was settled regarding the need to administer “gender-affirming care” to minors experiencing gender distress.

Monica Harris for the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 291). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

to chapters on internet discernment, and 20, no mention of narrative control at Google, Wikipedia,

The truth is, conspiracists do traffic in evidence. They scour the internet for news stories, video clips, interviews, autopsy reports, and FBI disclosures that seem to cut against the official narrative. If you’ve ever gone down the rabbit hole, you cannot but be amazed at all the disparate pieces of information they track down and weave into their conspiratorial tale. The wall of documents and red-lined connections in Charlie Day’s hilarious Pepe Silvia conspiracy rant on Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia bears a visual resemblance. Consider, for example, the curious case of Ray Epps, whom Darren J. Beattie and an army of internet sleuths have investigated at great length, suggesting a connection to the FBI.

This is no time to acquiesce. [Satirists at the Babylon Bee had a bit where they regularly paired their farcical headlines with real headlines announcing: “another prophecy fulfilled”. And social media influencers compiled lists of their .] So what examples of foolhardy conspiracism was QCC left to address?

Apart from Rachel I. Wightman, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross fails to deal squarely with the reality of conflicting expert opinion. Tim Muelhoff does mention it. However, the trading of information simply amplified our disagreement by showing how we each trusted “experts” who wildly disagreed with each other. As soon as she produced a study, I countered it with a different—and in my estimation—superior one.

Austin, Michael W.; Bock, Gregory L.. QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 240). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

The Elephant Not in the Room

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?

Unfortunately, deferring to Wikipedia, Politifact, the WHO, to experts, or even to the relevant scientific association is not a reliable solution on contested subjects. When it comes to ethical, philosophical, and historical questions, each of these institutions is beginning with different priors . Just as we must test the spirits and the prophets, we must test our experts.

For me the issue of transgenderism highlihgts the crisis of trust in our institutions as well as any other.

We know the Obama administration invested heavily in breaking the evangelical resistance to the Democrat platform, employing Michael Wear to lead the effort. We also know that a group of influential evangelical who named themselves “The Outliers”, Francis Collins, David Brooks, David French, Russel Moore, Tim Keller

In the fall of 2015, [Russell] Moore met with “The Outliers”, a group of friends and fellow high-profile believers: Tim Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City; Pete Wehner, the former head of strategic initiatives in the George W. Bush White House; Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health; and David Brooks, the New York Times columnist.

Tim Alberta, quoted at The Resistance Will Be Organized

people and wreaked destruction on our cities (more, even, than the May 31st or January 6th Capitol riots)

Stop playing for a team. Call balls and strikes. Prove to be trustworthy.

Evangelicals are in an identity crisis. By and large, American evangelical church goers remain morally and economically conservative. As such, they represent a base of support on the right and the last obstacle to the ethical and political aims of the progressive left who rule from Times Square, Harvard Yard, Silicon Valley, Hollywood Boulevard, Wall Street, and until recently, Pennsylvania Ave. Naturally, conservatives of all stripes cast these rulers a wary eye. Evangelicalism’s intellectual and organizational leaders, meanwhile, more often reflect the values, sympathies, and presuppositions characteristic of their overwhelmingly left-wing academic milieu. This strained fault line within evangelicalism ruptured with the polarizing election of Donald Trump, not to mention the Obergefell, Bostock, and Dobbs court decisions, the COVID response, contested elections, and widespread political violence across the country in the wake of the death of George Floyd and at the Capitol on January 6th. While evangelical leaders followed most of the top down directives on these issues, resistance grew from the pew on up. We are still trying to find our footing after these disagreements and cultural upheaval.

At such a time as this, editors Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. Bock recruited a couple dozen evangelical professors to exhort naysayers in the pews to steer clear of “conspiracy theories” and dissenting opinions. Some of these contributors are old friends and professors from my own graduate education. I feel an affection and appreciation for them. Nevertheless, apart from a lot of generic epistemological and conversational advice, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross (QCC) manages to learn and teach the wrong lesson from these tumultuous years. Captive to a technocratic and partisan bent, the book fails to wonder why there has been such a loss of faith in authority and on the whole the book discourages average Christians from “doing their own research” and questioning government sanctioned experts. As one who witnessed these events and unadvisedly did just that, I aver. For Christians and for conservatives, skepticism towards authority is the wise and necessary epistemic stance in a world whose god is the devil and in an information environment that is overwhelmingly dominated by a single political and ideological faction. Repeated and unrepentant breaches of trust by our rulers demand not less but more critically engaged citizens who will carefully examine them, publicly question them, and hold them accountable. That is good citizenship in the kingdom of heaven, and in our earthly democratic republic. Though the evangelical professoriate appears to have no appetite for the culture war raging around them, we must at least engage in spiritual warfare. We must respectfully demolish arguments and pretensions that set themselves up against the cross, against the Christian, and against the citizen. Beware those who cry peace when there is no peace.

In early 2023 when Mike Austin announced that Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross was forthcoming, I wondered which unfounded conspiracies would remain as such until publication. At the time, critics of government proclamations and policies were crowing on social media about all the supposedly tin-foil conspiracy theories that had been validated by subsequent events. Some joked that the difference between a conspiracy theory and breaking news was: “about six months”. For example, in 2020 the public had been reassured ad nauseam by our betters that Critical Race Theory and Ibrahim Kendi-style “anti-racism” were not being taught in schools, but whistle blowers and citizen reporters on social media belied their assurances with thousands of videos and screenshots of discriminatory classroom instruction and curriculum, not only in schools but at every level of society. At Disney, an insider leaked internal videos of creators boasting about how they freely inserted their “not-so-secret gay agenda” into children’s entertainment at every opportunity, just as concerned parents had noticed. Schools had been caught facilitating attempts at gender switching without parental consent in school clubs, secret transition closets, and internal documents. On the COVID front, the forbidden “lab leak theory” of sars-cov-2 origins had achieved mainstream credibility, though not a consensus, in government inquiries and the “paper of record”. Some mask and lockdown enthusiasts had already begun backpedaling. The Cochrane review had just been released, revalidating the pre-COVID World Health Organization’s guidance based on its meta-analysis of randomly controlled trials: “there is no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing influenza transmission”, only a “mechanistic plausibility”. And after an unending parade of politicians taking to social media to concede that they had COVID, it was clear that officials’ promises that the vaccines would prevent infection were false. Meanwhile, mirroring the elusive and indecipherable Q’Anon utterances, Jeffrey Epstein’s sex ring for the rich and powerful was by then public knowledge, though most of his secrets went with him to the grave due to a timely death in jail. Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger had published the #Twitterfiles. They exposed a vast government and NGO directed censorship apparatus and validated suspicions of partisan deplatforming and shadow banning, which had been dismissed as the paranoiac fugues of a persecution complex. Two of those social media censors, Zuckerberg‘s Facebook and Dorsey‘s Twitter, participants in the conspiracy to contain the Hunter Biden “October Surprise”, publicly admitted it was wrong of them to censor news of the scandalous laptop under the pretense of it being Russian disinformation. That election year stopgap was the product of a well-substantiated conspiracy facilitated by the government-funded Aspen Institute; paired with a brazenly false public statement signed by 51 former intelligence officials at the behest of Biden campaign advisor Antony Blinken. Moreover, the alleged conspiracy between Donald Trump and Russia, the “nothing-burger” conspiracy theory that preoccupied left wing news for years, had emerged after extensive investigation to be in actuality a conspiracy between the Hilary Clinton campaign, the Obama administration, and government actors to handicap the new president.

I could go on and on and on. These examples are but a tiny fraction of the conspiracies proven true and media narratives and government pronouncements shown false in the twenty-tweens. Such politically expedient breaches of trust are the principal cause of widespread skepticism and conspiracism. For the most part, the truth about these stories was sussed out not thanks to government authorities and establishment news sources but in spite of them. Citizen journalists, independent videographers, government accountability think tanks, social media news hounds, and even right leaning news sites willed the truth out with dogged investigating. Smart phones, hidden cameras, FOIA requests, primary sources, automated internet archives, embedded reporting, new publications, and the hostile takeover of the world’s most influential social media platform were the tools of their trade. None of the aforementioned object lessons above grace the pages of Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross. Rather, the teachable moments therein cut almost entirely in favor of credulity toward those in positions of power and prestige. It prompts the question, why were these instances — and the biggest elephant not in the room, which we’ll get to — not in the book, while less credible conspiracies made the cut? In the book’s appendix, a glossary on careful reasoning, it defines confirmation bias as “being closed to evidence that doesn’t confirm what we already believe. Being biased is natural, and so is seeking confirmation of our biases.” Just so.

Why Do People Question Authority and Fall for Conspiracy Theories?

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross is most exasperating when it imputes only non-rational psychological urges and impure motives to those who entertain conspiracy theories and wrongthink. In one of many such passages, Dru Johnson supposes:

The deep satisfaction and sense of empowerment fostered by seeing through a conspiracy is, quite simply, intoxicating. It’s not difficult to understand the emotional power of believing that we’ve cracked a secret society. After all, who wants to be just another one of the sheeple? People who feel like they are losing social or political power can find themselves leaning into conspiracy mind-sets to regain a sense of control. Dementia and the loss of memory commonly fires up imagined conspiracies. In her final years of life, my mother was convinced on several conspiracies to steal her medicine or food.

Emotions, rebelliousness, powerlessness, and dementia. Well, yes. These are some of the reasons some second guess our authorities. Other times, it’s a concern for truth and justice and goodness. Johnson even cites the prevailing postmodern mood: “my truth” over “the truth”. “Conspiracy thinking injects itself into our venal lusts at this exact point. Who will guide me? The conspiracist answers: ‘I will! I, the one who knows, will peel back the corner of the tarp of history and reveal to you all its secret inner workings.'” But conspiracists are not postmodernists. In my own efforts to understand the times, and in my brushes with conspiracists, it’s Fox Mulder, not Oprah Winfrey, that is their avatar: “the truth is out there“.

Bradley Baurain‘s chapter, “Parenting Teenagers in Gullible Times”, airs out his feelings of embarrassment, isolation, and frustration with “conservative White evangelicals” who questioned and disagreed with the official line on COVID, who pitied him and his family for their naïveté. Baurain returns the compliment in spades, “gullibility, to put it mildly, appears to be the status quo among many Christians”. Slipping into hyperbole: “Frankly, it feels like we have slipped into another dimension filled with flat-earthers.” While lamenting that the COVID contrarians in his circle thought less of him, Baurain charges Christians in kind who appraised the evidence differently than he did as: absurd, learning-impaired, proud, foolish, backsliding, fickle, and rebellious. They are like the murderous Cain, like the adulterous wife of Hosea, like the idolatrous rebels of Jeremiah, like lost sheep and prodigals. Confessing his anger and depression, Baurain wonders if he will be able to forgive them for damaging his children’s faith. Baurain gets the solution right, that he will bear with his fellow believers, inspired by the relentless and infinite love of God. I would add that it would be exceedingly easier to do so if he could truly consider what he exhorts others to do, that is, to consider the possibility that he could be wrong and the certainty that different people can evaluate evidence in good faith and come to a different conclusion.

Sadly, not a single author in the book takes their benighted subjects or their concerns seriously. While the possibly mixed motives of those in power are never contemplated, as far as I can remember, none commend the dissenter’s or conspiracist’s genuine truth seeking, take note of possibly noble motives, or engage with the evidence itself. It is a given that they’re wrong, perhaps even by definition, so the contrarians’ and conspiracy theorists’ motives must be impure. To catalog all of the insults would go overlong. Surely by now the reader has a sense of the tone of QCC.

The Titular Conspiracy

Gregory Bock recounts the sad story of #pizzagate and 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.” Faulting him for intemperate anger, Bock doesn’t deign to share any of the smoke that led Welch to think there was a fire at Comet Pizza. On that day, Welch seemed calm and determined en route to DC when he recorded a video for his own daughters, telling them he had a “duty to protect those who can’t protect themselves”. Upon arrival, Welch searched the pizzeria, shooting once to open a locked door, and then surrendered to police when he found no foul play. If Welch’s concerns had been validated, surely his anger would have been righteous and his cause just. His desire to protect vulnerable children from unthinkable evil is admirable. What he lacked in his vigilantism was a deference to the proper authorities. He also failed to realize that he needed to confirm what were fallible inferences from a fact pattern synthesized by internet sleuths. His friends had recommended Welch do surveillance before acting, but he failed to heed their good advice. Indeed, evidence gathering, and reporting to authorities, is precisely where anti-human trafficking organizations and ministries who share Welch’s righteous concern have specialized.

I remember well when I first read Kevin Bales’ Disposable People. I was shocked at his thesis, that sex trafficking and slavery, in the sense of coerced labor, is now more prevalent around the world than it has ever been. While I was horrified by the stories Bales recounts about slavery in Thailand, India, and Brazil, I was simply incredulous when he wrote that trafficking is endemic in the United States too. I couldn’t imagine then that people could get away with it here with our robust systems of law enforcement. I was naive. The problem is heart-wrenchingly real, evidenced by a steady stream of reported arrests and a wide variety of organizations addressing this scourge. Christians have been at the vanguard of tackling human trafficking, which often involves prostitution and sex trafficking. Nazarene Compassionate Ministries, International Justice Mission, Global Center for Women and Justice, and the Tim Tebow Foundation are but a few of many such organizations. In my community, Rebuilding Hope! and Scarlet Road help to provide an escape from bondage. The Faith Alliance Against Slavery leads the coalition. They collaborate with secular organizations like the Human Trafficking Institute and Polaris Project whose National Human Trafficking Hotline reports over 50,000 “signals” a year.

Sex trafficking is a real problem. This horrific crime is not isolated to the fringe of society or to far flung locales. In addition to being found guilty for his own sexual violations, Jeffrey Epstein is now widely believed to have facilitated illicit sexual encounters for the most elite and powerful members of society at his now infamous St. James island and other locations. The powerbrokers with whom Epstein wined, dined, and traveled were almost entirely men of the left. His bizarrely obscured death and the failure of our government to prosecute his associates has led many reasonable people to believe that his clients are in a position to stifle investigation. The nature of Epstein’s alleged crimes might lead some Christians to call him demonic.

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

Trust in the Information Age

In “Loving Our Online Communities” (chap. 19), Rachel I. Wightman notes the challenge of our internet age, how we can be overwhelmed by the cacophonous noice of a thousand tongues. No doubt, that to be a savvy filter of information in the Information Age. Wightman worries that the ability of users to create content without the code of ethics and editorial constraints of reporters at the New York Times generates conspiracy theories and misinformation. And because social media like Facebook’s and X’s algorithms are tailored to cater to the user’s interest, we may find ourselves in information bubbles.

the ability for people to create and share information so easily also creates spaces for conspiracy theories and misinformation or fake news to thrive. Most reputable news outlets have some sort of code of conduct or code of ethics, such as the New York Times’

Austin, Michael W.; Bock, Gregory L.. QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 296). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

The Disinformation Governance Board

King’s and Wyma’s straw manning of Christian concerns about government positions and policy reveals a prejudice against the less educated. It is an exercise in intellectual elitism. Leave these matters of great public concern not just to the experts, but to the government aligned experts.

The politicized management of the COVID-19 pandemic stripped doctors and patients of medical choice regarding the treatment of illness, and some public health agencies prioritized race over medical necessity in dispensing vaccines and monoclonal antibodies. Doctors and medical organizations made unscientific recommendations for prevention of COVID-19, misrepresenting the utility of masking, the benefits of natural immunity, and the efficacy of novel vaccines. Similarly, despite the absence of rigorous scientific investigation and dismissal of available data, medical professionals projected an illusory scientific consensus by insisting that the science was settled regarding the need to administer “gender-affirming care” to minors experiencing gender distress.

Monica Harris for the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism

QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 291). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

to chapters on internet discernment, and 20, no mention of narrative control at Google, Wikipedia,

The truth is, conspiracists do traffic in evidence. They scour the internet for news stories, video clips, interviews, autopsy reports, and FBI disclosures that seem to cut against the official narrative. If you’ve ever gone down the rabbit hole, you cannot but be amazed at all the disparate pieces of information they track down and weave into their conspiratorial tale. The wall of documents and red-lined connections in Charlie Day’s hilarious Pepe Silvia conspiracy rant on Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia bears a visual resemblance. Consider, for example, the curious case of Ray Epps, whom Darren J. Beattie and an army of internet sleuths have investigated at great length, suggesting a connection to the FBI.

This is no time to acquiesce. [Satirists at the Babylon Bee had a bit where they regularly paired their farcical headlines with real headlines announcing: “another prophecy fulfilled”. And social media influencers compiled lists of their .] So what examples of foolhardy conspiracism was QCC left to address?

Apart from Rachel I. Wightman, Qanon, Chaos, and the Cross fails to deal squarely with the reality of conflicting expert opinion. Tim Muelhoff does mention it. However, the trading of information simply amplified our disagreement by showing how we each trusted “experts” who wildly disagreed with each other. As soon as she produced a study, I countered it with a different—and in my estimation—superior one.

Austin, Michael W.; Bock, Gregory L.. QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories (p. 240). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

The Elephant Not in the Room

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?

Unfortunately, deferring to Wikipedia, Politifact, the WHO, to experts, or even to the relevant scientific association is not a reliable solution on contested subjects. When it comes to ethical, philosophical, and historical questions, each of these institutions is beginning with different priors . Just as we must test the spirits and the prophets, we must test our experts.

For me the issue of transgenderism highlihgts the crisis of trust in our institutions as well as any other.

We know the Obama administration invested heavily in breaking the evangelical resistance to the Democrat platform, employing Michael Wear to lead the effort. We also know that a group of influential evangelical who named themselves “The Outliers”, Francis Collins, David Brooks, David French, Russel Moore, Tim Keller

In the fall of 2015, [Russell] Moore met with “The Outliers”, a group of friends and fellow high-profile believers: Tim Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City; Pete Wehner, the former head of strategic initiatives in the George W. Bush White House; Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health; and David Brooks, the New York Times columnist.

Tim Alberta, quoted at The Resistance Will Be Organized

people and wreaked destruction on our cities (more, even, than the May 31st or January 6th Capitol riots)

Stop playing for a team. Call balls and strikes. Prove to be trustworthy.