Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - QAnon or Christ? How to talk to Christians Caught up in Conspiracy Theories

Episode Date: January 14, 2021

We explain what QAnon is and share how conspiracy theories are spiritually dangerous, and how approach friends and family caught up in a conspiracy. Why talk about this now? After the storming of the Capitol, news came out that many of the protestors were influenced by the QAnon conspiracy and Christianity. Can QAnon and Christianity co-exist? Add to this, more and more families and communities are being torn apart by people buying into conspiracy theories and evangelizing for them. How do we respond to friends and family members caught up in this? Want to talk more? Chat with Patrick on https://twitter.com/PatrickKMiller_ (Twitter: @PatrickKMiller_) Or follow us on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks (TenMinuteBibleTalks) Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. After the storming of the Capitol last Wednesday, if you read the news, you started to hear that many of the people who were involved have associations with a conspiracy theory group called QAnon. In fact, the woman who was shot, she was a protester, she was shot by police and she was trying to break into the Capitol, had been over several years. before going there, somewhat radicalized by Q&N. This was a big part of her thinking, a big part of her life. She said before she went there that she was going to bring the quote-unquote storm, which is this day of judgment in the world of Q&N. And so it's brought Q&N into the foreground of the news,

once again, it's not the first time. Perhaps what's more interesting to me is the fact that mixed in with a lot of these Q&ON conspiracy theorists are Christians, that the ideas that have been mainstreamed by Q and on, you are beginning to see crop up in the thinking of a lot of evangelicals. Now, I don't actually personally know a lot of people who put a lot of stock into these ideas, but there's enough of it happening, and we're a Christian podcast. I think it's a worthy conversation for us today. Now, Keith, you didn't want us to talk about this today. I think this whole conversation on conspiracy theories is interesting, but it is ambiguous in my mind. and hopefully what we can do is bring some clarity to our thinking.

And like Patrick said, this particular conspiracy theory is affecting the church. But I think that's unique to the United States. In other words, when you see this same group, QAnon, around the world, they're not associated with Christians much or the church. They're associated with hippies or people from the left or people who seemingly have no connection to the evangelical church. This is a worldwide conspiracy theory that's moving very fast. Yeah, there's protests in Berlin recently. It's happening in Australia. It's happening all over the world right now. Well, if I understand it right. Berliners wearing, I think, Trump shirts and QAnon shirts. These are all kind of one big thing. Oh, we can beat that. The niece of Osama bin Laden, newer is her name, if I'm

pronouncing it correctly. She is a Q&ON follower. She was in a Trump shirt that she posted online. Osama bin Laden's niece was in a Trump shirt. She posted it online and she said that Trump was the one who could save America from another 9-11. So this isn't just some sort of Christian thing. It's a worldwide conspiracy theory that in the United States is affecting Christians, which is why we need to think about it. And to be crystal clear, if we haven't been already, to be a Republican or to be on the right is not the same thing as being a supporter or believer of QAnon. To vote or have voted for Donald Trump is not the same thing as being a supporter or believing in Q&N. That's not the point we're trying to make. Well, even let's just go even further and say that even the people who were protesting at the Capitol last week, there were thousands of people protesting.

Only a small part of those assaulted the Capitol. And they all, again, seemingly from what the news has come out, the vast majority of them seem to have had some sort of association with this conspiracy theory. That's from what we know so far. But a small group. It's a small group, yeah, out of that other group. And so you might be thinking, why are we talking about this on Tim and the Bible talks? Well, we've already said that it's affecting the church. But at that rally were these big signs that said Jesus saves, right?

Yeah, people who broke into the Capitol, who, again, in the same conspiracy theory group, they were holding those signs. Jesus saves. That's part of the message. A lot of people saw the pictures of the Viking guy. He's called the QAnon Shaman. His real name is Jake In Jelly. And he kept repeating, God and truth are on our side.

So there's a religious, a Christian religious component that people, are saying. In fact, there are people who were planting Q&N churches. Did you think it got a devotional? Well, I saw online, I didn't buy it yet, but I probably will. It was too expensive for a 37-page book, but it said that it was... That means not many people are buying it. It was a meditation. A meditation on biblical passages from a Q&N perspective. That is nuts. And I haven't read it yet, so who knows, maybe it's a Pulitzer. I don't know. Probably not. So... But the bigger picture here is, I mean, this is in the last week alone, I've had two different families reach out to me deeply concerned about a family member who has become kind of radicalized by

these ideas. And it's tearing apart their families because that particular individual not only won't stop talking about it, but is demanding that the rest of his family either buy in or accept their place as one of the sheep. I think beyond that, when you go online and you look at some of the major American influencers who are spreading these ideas, it becomes incredibly bizarre because many of them are female influencers. They have their little beauty brands and they post Bible verses about how you should love your children. And it looks very normal, evangelical, these Christian, and then all of a sudden it's, and 5G will make you sick. You know, and then all of a sudden it's, oh, and underneath these tents in Central Park

where they're treating COVID patients, there is a system of tunnels that they are trafficking children through, and people need to go take care of that. Yeah, that's true. Samaritan's purse. Which is a Christian organization. Yeah, Franklin Graham. You may remember they set up kind of a makeshift hospital in Central Park when they thought they would be needed to help treat COVID patients. And people were saying that the tents were just a way to hide, that they were running children for sex trafficking purposes.

Now, how in the world do you prove that that didn't happen? Let's don't even go there yet. Let's take a step back. You may have listened to a podcast we did a few months ago on conspiracy theories. And to be honest, I kind of laughed my way through that. But this last episode at the Capitol made me go, okay, I got to pay more attention to this. So we've been thinking about this, talking to people, reading about it. And we want to come back a little bit more of a sober approach in this episode.

Let's start with this, Patrick. Let's get a definition of what a conspiracy theory is. Before we dive into Q&N, what's a good definition of a conspiracy theory? I think it's easy to draw ideas into focus by comparing them to other ideas. So maybe rather than directly answering the question, what's a conspiracy theory? Let's start with something that might be kind of related to conspiracy theories, but I think is definitely different. And that would be misinformation. So misinformation is when someone intentionally often, but maybe unintentionally, gives wrong information or misleading information. In other words, they take data, but they interpret it in a manner that doesn't really make sense of the data. So an example is, I'm not trying to be controversial and people can disagree with me. But when you had people who were saying that these last set of elections were fraudulent. Well, there's truth in that claim. Every election has fraud. If you don't believe that, you probably aren't very connected to reality. That's part of American politics. And yet, on the other side, the idea that there was a

comprehensive fraudulation of the results, which needed to overturn it, was probably misinformation. And I say that because the evidence that was given, if you looked into it, you began to realize wasn't really evidence at all. But what makes it misinformation is that it's a one-off. It didn't claim to have that there's this constellation of events happening behind the scenes that was causing this giant fraudulent vote to occur. And that's the difference between conspiracy theories and misinformation. A conspiracy theory says it wasn't just that we had a fraudulent election. The fraudulent election was created, caused by the deep state, that there are actors who are actually controlling everything and who were nefariously working in Georgia and Pennsylvania and all these

other states. And it wasn't just a one-time event. This is connected to a whole giant other series of events. And when you start talking about it that way, you realize we've entered into the world of mythology. We're telling a grand story about what's happening behind the scenes of reality. It takes all these different stars, all these different little events, and it starts drawing the constellations and saying, see, look at how things fit together. And I think that's what's at the heart of a conspiracy theory. It's not just misinformation. It's a constellation of information which is purporting to give you a true interpretation of reality which normal people cannot see. So maybe this is too narrow of a definition and you can push back on it if you want. But to me, when I think of conspiracy theory, I think of a group of people who are in the know, who are intentionally spreading lies in order to control or manipulate people. So think of the matrix. And you have the chance to take the red pill or the blue pill. And I've never seen the movie, so I don't really know which color is which. But if you take the right pill, then you will be let in on this conspiracy.

that people are controlling the world and you're really living in a simulation. If you take the wrong pill, well, then you'll just go on through the simulation and you'll never know what's really happening behind the scenes. And what makes challenging conspiracy theories so challenging is that they are often rooted in truth. And in fact, the conspiracy theorists can point to other true examples of the kind of thing they're describing happening. So they could say, well, look at Watergate. There was a real-life conspiracy where you had a president doing nefarious things, and it was brought to light. See, so these kinds of things happen in the world. And so you should believe what I say because of those kinds of things happen. So Elvis being alive, that's not a conspiracy theory.

That's just kind of people who are just making stuff up, having fun. I mean, I'm sure a few people believe it's actually real, but probably very few. I mean, that's not a conspiracy theory, because there's no group of people who are trying to manipulate or control through lies and deception. Yeah, and to be really clear about what Keith is saying, he's not saying that the conspiracy theorists are trying to lie in manipulating controllers? He's saying that the nature of the conspiracy theory itself is that it's saying there are people out there who are trying to lie and control others. A similar example that happens in Q and non was there was a belief before the most recent election that JFK Jr. was going to not come back from the dead, but that he

had essentially been in hiding and that he would be Trump's running mate in 2020. And so there's an example similar to the Elvis isn't dead story. If you don't know, this JFK Jr. died in 1999. in a tragic plane accident. But similar to what you just said, but the difference is it says, look, JFK Jr. saw the reality of what was happening in the deep state. And so he went into hiding intentionally. He faked his own death so he could go into hiding and then come back alongside Trump to fight back against the deep state.

Well, that's a conspiracy theory. One more thought here that I think needs to be asked. Misinformation, again, tends to come from relatively credible sources who are, again, they're giving misleading information or they're misinterpreting the, evidence. One of the other major things we should say about conspiracy theories is that they tend to be rooted in information from unknown, anonymous, unclear sources. These sources make a lot of claims about what they know, but they don't offer any actual evidence of what they know. And then it goes from there into crowd speculation. The crowd takes whatever it is that that person has said,

and they begin to speculate and expand upon it. So sometimes it helps me to just think about something other than the specific issue we're talking about. So let's take sports and gambling and television revenue and officiating. We all know that officials make bad calls in sporting events. We even know that sometimes they do that intentionally. So all the way back in 2019, Tim Donahey was an NBA ref who was accused of cheating and he was doing that in order to be paid off for fixing NBA games. That happens. That might be equivalent to what we're talking about here about misinformation, bad stuff that happens out in the world. But some people believe that there's a conspiracy that, say, the SEC and the NBA and Major League Baseball is in cahoots with the television networks to fix games so that the television revenues are higher and the sports leagues get paid out more. Now, that's a conspiracy theory that says there's a few people sitting in the backroom who are going to control sporting events in order to make a profit off of them.

I think that's a conspiracy theory that quite a few sports fans are at least sympathetic to, even though there's absolutely no reason whatsoever, no basis for it, zero evidence. And let's just use that example to point out how difficult it is to confront that deception, which might not have a lot of impacts in people's life. we realize that because I could look at Keith after he says and say, well, Keith, do you have any evidence that this conspiracy is actually happening? And of course the answer is yes. I mean, there are bad calls all the time. And I have a motive that TV wants to make money. And so do all the different leagues, either college or professional. So of course I've got evidence, or at least what passes for evidence in my mind. And it often, this is what people mean by what aboutism? It leads to someone I'm saying, well, what about this particular instance where there was someone who was taking money

to throw games? Or what about this time that something similar happened? And that becomes proof or evidence of the bigger point. There's a giant conspiracy. Now, that's not actually evidence of the conspiracy. First Peter 315 tells Christians to make a reasonable defense of their faith. In other words, part of a Christian's life is to have a reasonable reason for why we walk with and trust Jesus. But when we start buying into things that are absolutely non-evidentiary, absolutely non-reasonable, we throw into question the reasonableness of our faith, and that's a really big deal. The way we are wired is that we want to make sense out of the world that we live in, and because we don't have complete information, we try to connect dots that probably shouldn't be

connected. So right now in our world, there are so many dots out there in the chaos of 2020 that people are trying to connect. Maybe it's Jeffrey Epstein's suspicious death. Maybe it's COVID, and the new vaccine that's coming out. Maybe it is the lack of trust in the media and what they see is media bias. And a conspiracy theory, it takes all those things and it tries to tie them all together and says that these are all working in conjunction with one another for nefarious purposes. And unfortunately right now we are living in a cultural time where, and we're going to talk more about this later, where social trust has broken down so much that people don't think twice

about assuming the worst about those who disagree with them. And we have to simply say the facts that for people on the far right, finding evidence of the ways that the media, for example, has euphemized the truth. So we can think about when they talked about mostly peaceful protests, and people called them on and said, buildings are being burned down right now. That's not mostly peaceful protest. You're hiding the truth from us. And when people start seeing those things, what Keith is saying, what that will lead some people to do is to start connecting the constellation and saying, I can't trust anything out of the media. It's all totally nefarious.

They're all trying to hide reality from me, and it justifies the fact why I would see no evidence of the very things that I believe are happening. So let's get in a little bit. We can come back to that, like you said, but let's get in a little bit into QAnon specifically. And so some of you are really familiar with it. Some of you have just maybe heard about it in passing.

So let's try to kind of give a big picture of what QAnon is. Let's start with the name QAnon and what that means. Q is a figure, and people actually aren't entirely sure if this is one person, multiple people, no one really knows, who claims to have connections to military intelligence and drops these information bombs. They call them Q drops, where he will tell them what's happening on the inside of the government. And because he's anonymous, that's where we get the name QAnon. Now, Mark Sayers, he's an Australian, he's a pastor, but he's a pastor.

His real expertise is kind of cultural commentary, really sharp guy. And again, this is happening in Australia. But he has a somewhat long description of Q&O, and I'm going to read it because I think it's really, really helpful and good. You ready to buckle up, Keith? Let's go. All right. So he says Q&O is a rapidly growing global cultural political movement that's centered around a crowd-sourced conspiracy theory. The group centers itself around the idea that the world is controlled and held back by a cabal of elite pedophiles. This group ranges from members of the Democratic Party to the Clintons, to people and banking like the Rothschilds, to the Royals, to the Vatican, to members of Wall Street and celebrities. This evil, nefarious force in the world is being pushed back by essentially President Trump alone, who is being backed by various patriots, including the military and military intelligence. We're now in a moment which is moving towards what's called the storm, which is a reckoning and judgment day for elites. This might be imprisonment, death, and will lead to a golden age of America.

This has been sparked by an internet poster named Q who gives drops of insight and knowledge from the Trump White House or military intelligence. He is telegraphing what to expect in this grand narrative. Wow, that's quite a mouthful. And the thing I think you said at the beginning that's really important is that this started with an anonymous drop of information on 4chan. and then it became crowdsourced. So if you're looking for kind of a through line, if you're looking for it to make sense, you're going to be confused, disappointed.

It doesn't quite all make sense unless you're on the inside. And I'm not even sure it all makes sense even to those people because what it's trying to do is, again, connect dots to everything that's happening in our world. So this is more than any one person can quite get their mind around.

And just because you're a part of QAnon, just because you buy into some of it, does it necessarily mean that you buy into all of it? You might not even be aware of everything that people in Q&N are suggesting is true. That's one of our hopes even for this podcast, is that this can be a podcast, one, that if you have family members who are buying into this stuff, we want to at the end give you some advice and help you think through it.

But beyond that, maybe as you're listening to this, you start to realize, oh, gosh, I've heard some of those ideas, and maybe I need to question some of those ideas because I didn't realize that they were attached to some of these speculative groups. And like he just said, this is an online community. So there's no belief statement. You're going to find people who disagree about everything that I just said. There's no way to say this is what everybody in QAnonoblies. We're just trying to paint with broad brushstrokes what's happening. And I think, again, it's worth pointing out that part of what

this comes out of, it's rooted in reality. For example, we can think about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. There have been these massive drops of information that have shown that there really are some nefarious things happening behind the scenes. And so again, this goes back to the what aboutisms, but when you see that, gosh, there can be conspiracies happening. Maybe there's other ones out there. So when WikiLeaks dropped all the information from the government, there was more than anybody could kind of sift through, and people were doing it on their own. It was being crowdsourced. And one thing that people saw was there were a lot of references to pizza. This specifically came out when John Podestis, who was in the Clinton administration, his emails were published.

Somehow WikiLeaks got a hold of that, published all his emails. And so, try to follow this logic if you can. I know it's a little bit hard, but there were evidently a lot of references to pizza. Cheese pizza. People decided that cheese pizza, the CP, really was a code for child pornography. And so they decided that's because in the early 2000, so well after his time in the Clinton administration, there were internet trolls who were using the phrase cheese pizza to talk about child pornography. Okay, so I didn't realize that. So there really was a connection then in their mind. Are they connected these two dots? Chronologically unconnected because those emails are from the mid-90s, and the phrase cheese pizza happens almost a decade later.

But they read that back into his emails. And so then they came to the conclusion that there was a human trafficking, a child sex ring being run by John Podesta and other Democrats and other elites. And so that led to a shooting in Washington, D.C. at a pizza joint called Cosmic Pingpong pizza. By a pastor. By a pastor? I know he's a guy from North Carolina. Yeah. He drives up because he believes that there are kids being kept in the basement of this pizza joint.

And so he comes up from North Carolina. I guess he's a pastor. If Patrick says so. And he went to private school, not me. So he comes up with a gun armed because he's going to save these kids who are locked in the basement. He tries to shoot a lock off a door. By the way, the pizza place doesn't even have a basement. There are no kids.

in there, but he believes that there are. So he thinks he's doing righteousness because he's believed a lie. Not necessarily because he's a bad dude, but he believes that there are kids locked in a basement and he's trying to save him. But it's not true. But it's dangerous because here's a guy with a gun shooting up a restaurant. So this stuff really matters. Okay, see, now I'm doing to myself what I ask that other people would do, which is you should look up your information before you just start spouting it. And I did look up. I did not find these a pastor. I think he was just a Christian. I think I was mixing up another story. But hey, see, that's called misinformation, not a conspiracy theory. Live correction right here. Live correction right here. Why not?

That's the way we should be. But the story he just told made a point. It was partially rooted in truth. There's these emails about pizza, and there is such a thing as cheese pizza being this terrible euphemism for child pornography, but they get wrapped together and lead to this bizarre event happening. And again, the stories can just go on and on. Another example of this is censorship. There are people who think that big tech is not censoring people. I don't know what news they're reading. There is actually tremendous amounts of evidence that show that big tech really is censoring people. Now, that is a fact. But again, we can look as Q&N starts using this as evidence for the fact that they are actually trying to hide a grand conspiracy. That it's not merely the fact

that big tech, like anybody who's got a lot of power, is going to use their power and influence to call winners and losers. And that's probably just all that's happening inside a big text. We're just giving these examples to say this is what makes having conversations about this challenging because there's no consistency about the set of beliefs. So you're having a conversation. You think someone believes X, but it turns out they don't, but instead they believe why. And there's going to be some truth behind the things that are being said. There's going to be little bits of evidence that say, well, see, this was true, therefore that is true. We could go on. Some in Q&ON believe that COVID is a plot by people like,

Tom Hanks and Bill Gates and other. It's put nanobots inside of you. That's the vaccine. And that's why you're finding a lot of people won't take the vaccine because they don't trust. I'm not saying they're part of QAnon. I'm just saying that there's such a lack of social trust that we can't trust that the government has actually vetted these vaccines and really they're trying to control us or manipulate us. Yeah. So again, I think doing the examples helps. Think about misinformation versus a conspiracy theory. During the debates, Kamal Harris very famously said that she would refuse to take

a vaccine if it had been developed under the Trump administration, and then very publicly after the election took said vaccine, which was developed under the Trump administration. Well, to me, that's misinformation. She was making a political statement that was probably intended to mislead people about the reliability, but it's not a conspiracy theory. She didn't say you can't trust it because there's a deep state that is actually controlling it and trying to put nanobots inside of you. Okay, so again, why does all of this matter? Well, Keith and I are pastors, and whether we like it or not, our job is to confront lies. Why? Because what lies and ideas in general, they have consequences. Colossians 2-8 says this, don't let anyone capture you with empty philosophies and high-sounding nonsense that come from human thinking and from the spiritual powers of this world rather than from Christ. Apparently, all the way back in the days of Paul, this has been a I think for all humans, but certainly for Christians, to get taken captive by these man-made nonsense philosophies. And Paul says those things, they're not small deals. He says that they actually

come from the spiritual powers of the world. So here's the interesting thing. He's saying, look, there is such a thing as spiritual darkness, and do you want to know what it does? It guides you into this kind of thinking. We as Christians believe that we can discover truth, true truth, capital T truth. We believe there's objective truth out there. And anytime that that thought, that idea is undermined, anytime we buy into conspiracy theories that cause people to say, well, how would we know if anything is true? We could just make up our own truth. That is a direct attack on Christianity. It's a direct attack on Jesus who says, I am the truth. Or the apostle Paul who says that we should fix our mind on what is true in Philippians 4-8.

There are conspiracy theories in the Bible. You think, Patrick? This is unexpected. Where is this going? No, I don't think so. Let me try this and see what you think. So let's go to Matthew 24. Jesus says, you will hear of wars and rumors of wars.

See that no one leads you astray. For many will come in my name, and they will lead many astray. Oh, man, you just mic dropped on me. He does talk about it. He's warning people of a conspiracy theory that could try to connect dots of wars, rumors of wars, and then draw a wrong conclusion that Jesus is coming. Well, and I think that's what makes that passage show fascinating because that comes from Jesus's, it's called the mini apocalypse, where he's talking perhaps about his return or the future day of judgment on the temple. Either way, he's saying, don't get taken in by worldviews that offer a alternative apocalypse, a alternative end times,

which is for sure, and we'll get there what Q&N on is offering to some degree. So what the Bible calls us to do is to examine our faith, look for evidence. Christianity is not the kind of faith that says, oh, just believe it. What it says is that Christianity is reasonable, and we should search for evidence and then believe it if we find it something that is persuasive. So, for example, in the resurrection, we don't just say, oh, Jesus rose from the dead. We say, here are reasons. We believe that that is exactly what.

happened. And if it's not what happened, then none of us want to be Christians. Or you could take the passage in Genesis 18, where God hears a report of injustice in Sodom and Gomorrah, and he sends messengers. He sends angels to determine whether it's true. Or if someone is accused of idolatry, Deuteronomy demands that they investigate. Probe, find out what happened. Ask for witnesses. So there's a sense in which the Bible calls us to examine our beliefs intellectually, rigorously, and to ask for evidence. Outsized claims require outsized evidence. And so if you're going to believe the theories that QAnon promotes, then you're going to have to say, okay, I want to see the evidence for that.

And it can't just be something that somebody posted on Reddit. That's a really good point. It makes me think about just to use a metaphor, parenting. If Iris comes to me and she says, Daddy, Oliver just drew all over the wall, I will say, show me. And she'll take me. And sure enough, as happens frequently,

he has drawn all over the wall. What's he draw? He likes markers. Oh. This favorite thing. Luckily, they're washable. A little tied in water, my wife tells me,

she's into this tide and water thing now, and she's cleaning everything up. But if Iris comes to me and she goes... Be funny if you drew like a big cue. Yeah. So Iris walks up to me and she says, Daddy, Oliver has been drawing on the walls because Mommy has been whispering to him at night every night before he goes to sleep that he should draw on the walls.

And he should only do it when Daddy's watching him so that Mommy can blame Daddy for him drawing on the walls. Now, I would say, huh, Iris, that's a creative story. Let's go talk with Mommy. And if Mommy denied it, maybe I'd start listening in on the monitor to see if I could hear these so-called whispers of a conspiracy. In other words, what keeps saying, I need way more evidence for Irish to claim that my wife has a conspiracy against me than I do just for the basic claim of Oliver Drew on the wall. Yeah, so if you're going to claim that you can't trust the vaccine because it was developed under the Trump administration, I mean, that's a huge claim. People are dying of COVID. And you're saying you're not going to take the vaccine. Well, you better have really good evidence that that vaccine is ineffective or dangerous. But you can't just say, I don't like Trump, and therefore I don't want to take the vaccine.

I don't trust Trump. He's not the one who developed the vaccine, people. So, again, the big point, if you're going to make outsized claims, you've got to have outsized evidence. Another reason why we care about this as pastors is that if you don't confront lies, lies tear apart communities. In Ephesians 4, it's a famous passage where Paul is talking about how we live life together. It's one of the passages where he talks about the body of Christ and different gifts that. people get so that they can bless each other as a part of that body. But catch what he says in the middle of this. He says, we, and he's talking about this collective of the church, we won't be

tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth. Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, his church. Why this passage matters is when people in the church start buying into conspiracy theories, it always threatens to tear apart the community that Jesus died to mend and bring back together. Because it ends up eroding trust in two ways. One, you'll find it difficult to trust someone who's buying into conspiracy theories, but if you start buying into conspiracy theories, you will start finding it difficult to trust people who haven't bought into the same thing, because the conspiracy theory will tell you that pastor

is a sheep, or sheeple, as they like to say, that church member is not a truth-seeker, like you, and so they cannot be trusted. You can see how these ideas, which sound true, they can begin to tear apart and erode communal trust. So if we're going to go down the road of kind of false claims, the QAnon community has made some incredibly false claims. So they said that the storm would take place. So this kind of big revolt against the deep state would take place on November 3rd, 2017. But that didn't happen. They said that the Trump military parade would never be forgotten, but it turns out that parade was canceled. They said that people targeted by the president would commit suicide in mass on February 10, 2018, but no prominent people committed

suicide that day. They said that Twitter, Jack Dorsey, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg would have to resign and even flee the United States, but neither of those things have happened. They said John McCain would resign from the Senate, but of course he didn't resign from the Senate. this information, which came out of Q drops. So this is Q giving us information. The anonymous guy supposedly in the upper echelon of U.S. military intelligence. It has not only been proven false beyond a shadow of a doubt, and that would make you think that people would say, ah, maybe I shouldn't be trusting this. Instead, what happens is that they invented an idea called Blackhats, which is essentially the concept that when the information is wrong, it's because

cue was trying to knock someone off his tail. Someone's starting to figure out who he is on the inside, and so he releases false information to get them off of his trail. Now, aside from just, okay, that's incredibly convenient, it should beg the question, if you have a unfalsifiable belief, your belief is probably false. I think that's a really good point. What would cause you to change your beliefs? And if you can't answer that question, you're in trouble. So for example, what would cause me to say I will no longer be a Christian? And there's probably several things, but if you could show me that it is entirely unreasonable to believe that Jesus rose from the dead, you could show me the bones of Jesus, but it wouldn't have to be that specific.

If you could convince me that Jesus didn't rise from the dead, then I would abandon Christianity, or at least Christianity as I understand it. But when it comes to conspiracy theories, it's hard to get people to say what will cause them to abandon their beliefs. Their claims are unfalsifiable. So, Keith, what would it take for you to believe that you have an addiction to monster? What? I do believe I have a addiction. Oh.

Well, I don't think so. I have not heard that confession. I'm just glad to have it in your own public. No, no, no. Here's what it called. If you want me to prove I don't have an addiction to monster, then you put $500 in an envelope in our office. And I won't drink a monster until June 1st. No, don't drink a monster for the rest of your life.

You just owe me the 500 back. $1,000. For $1,000, I'll do that. No, you're easier to work with when you're on monsters, so selfishly, I'm just going to go ahead and let the addiction roll on. The bigger point in here is really important. If you are someone you love is believing, like he said, outsized claims about there being some sort of giant conspiracy, which is impossible for ordinary people to believe, you should have good evidence. to buy into that. I think the other big problem with the conspiracy theory, Q&N, is that it's actually

a false gospel. It takes a lot of elements out of the Bible and refabs them, refurbishes them in a kind of secularized way. So let's look at a few examples. One that comes to mind is the way that Q&N basically secularizes spiritual warfare. So the Bible does believe that there is a unseen realm and that there are powers behind the scenes of reality, which are spiritual powers, which are at work, which we don't have access to and can't see. Now, that might sound a lot like Q&N. The main difference is that Q&N, rather than saying that those are spiritual forces, says, no, those are very this-worldly forces. There are elites from Hollywood and from both Republican and Democratic Party that are at work and cahoots with one another to conspiratorially destroy America and destroy the world.

The Bible teaches that we will all face the judgment of Christ, that when a person dies when Christ returns, that we will all stand before him and be judged by him. So QAnon picks up on that a little bit and says that the elites will be judged on the day of the storm. In fact, Ashley Babbitt, the person that Patrick referred to earlier that was sadly killed in the rage, she was one of the people who had participated in the assault on the Capitol. She had said before that she was going to bring, quote, the storm, close quote, in D.C. And so there's a sense in which judgment is coming, but instead of entrusting that to God, these people believe that they are going to bring judgment on people.

And Q&N also has messianic figures. I already mentioned the example of JFK Jr. coming back from underground to run alongside Donald Trump, but Donald Trump himself has become a messianic figure within Q&N. And again, the point here isn't if you voted for Donald Trump, that means that you've bought into this. No, not at all. That's silly. The point is that within the conspiracy, theory of QAnon, he is the hero. He is the Messiah who's pushing back the deep state and is going to set people free. There's even an oath that people take in Q and on. I'm going to mess it up here.

It's where we go one, we go all. Yeah, it's not very catchy. I think they could do better than that. But you might see that on a hashtag where they take the WWG1, WWJD, WWF, WWE. I don't know. But there's a hashtag that where we go one, we go all. And you even saw Michael Flynn, who was the first national security advisor for Trump, state that publicly. Took the oath. Which, again, this is significant for Christians because we are called to make a oath of allegiance, but not to a conspiracy theory, not to a presidential figure or political leader. We are called to give our allegiance to Jesus. Romans 10 tells us that if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord, you will be saved. And so we have a confession of allegiance to make.

And when we start making confessions of allegiance to other parties, groups, or ideologies, that should be really disconcerting. The Texas Republican Party slogan is, we are the storm. So they've denied it has anything to do with Q&I. I'm the kind of person that just take care of your word. That's fair. But doesn't it seem odd to you that Q&9 keeps talking? about the storm, and they've had people who espoused those beliefs elected to federal

national office, and the Texas Republican Party says that we are the storm, is there a slogan? I don't know. I just, I don't know. I would guess that they will change that in the near future. I hope so. If I had to make any prediction. I hope so. Again, the broader picture, though, that QAnon is a false gospel. Why is it so convincing for people? Why are people buying it? into Q&ON. I was on Twitter today and I was interacting with one of our listeners. And he was making some, I think, interesting and helpful points. And he said something that just hit hard. I was like, that is so true. He said, people who are buying into Q, he said, they're hurting. These are people who feel powerless. They feel voiceless. And in a real way, I think he's right. And when you feel

powerless and voiceless, you will buy into a narrative that explains your situation and gives you hope for something better, which that's exactly what the gospel is supposed to be for people who feel powerless and voiceless. It is good news for the poor. It's good news for the needy. It's good news for the voiceless. And it gives us hope, but not hope in some sort of coming political storm and a golden age in America. It's the hope of a new creation with the king who is perfectly just and good. Now, let's talk for a second about the kind of person who is more likely to buy into conspiracy theories. And you might think that it's a person who's uneducated. And a lot of what I've read has said that's true, that people who follow conspiracy theories are usually less educated, oftentimes more oppressed.

They've been hurt and wronged by the world. And so they're looking for some sort of explanation. But I'll just be frank with you. The people I know who are at least sympathetic to all kinds of conspiracy theories are very educated people. I would agree with that. Very normal people. And I read some stuff that actually makes a point you're making right now that if our image, is of someone who's uneducated, which tends to be euphemism for unintelligent, and I think that's false. But a lot of the people who have been drawn into Q&N are very educated, intelligent, everyday, normal people. And to me, that's convicting as a past reason. I think, man, how have we not presented the gospel, the story of the gospel, and what Jesus promises in such a compelling way that instead people start turning to conspiracy theories like Q&ON.

Well, and let's go back to the social. trust idea. In order for the world to work, we've got to have some trust in our neighbor. Maybe your parents or grandparents used to say we didn't lock the doors. Well, that's a sign of social trust. I can leave my car or house unlocked and I have this confidence. Nobody's going to break in here and steal my stuff. Well, there's all kinds of social trust. When I drive down the highway, I have a sense of social trust that people are not going to recklessly run into me. the banking system, employment, paychecks, a babysitter coming to your house, a church working to their PTA working together for the common good of a school. All of those require a certain amount

of social trust. But that trust has been breaking down. People trust the government less. People trust media less. And let's be honest, the government and the media have both given people reason to doubt their trustworthiness. We could all list lots of examples of where the government or the media have seemingly lied to us. I think they have lied to us. But that lack of social trust has trickled down into a local area, to our school system, to our neighborhoods. And I can resonate with that personally. I mean, we've experienced this, Keith, when you have a news, and it's funny because I read stories of people had similar experiences, and then again, got kind of radicalizing the Q&N, when you have a news reporter come in and they interview you, and then they go and they write a story,

and you read it, and you think, wow, that's not a lot. even close to what I said. Somehow, you heard something that I never even would have thought and just published that. Or in my case, I run a lot of social media for our church. And I thought people who talked about social media censorship were wonks. I was like, oh, this is crazy. They're making stuff up. And then on pretty nonpartisan, non-controversial posts, we started getting censored. In fact, it's happened about a half dozen times now. And I thought, okay, something is happening. I don't know what it is. I can't explain it. I don't have the evidence. And I can see how When those kinds of things happen to you, you start thinking, you know what, I can't trust the media.

There is something big happening, and I'm going to find the truth here. So we take that people are hurting. We take that there's a lack of social trust. And then there's a sense in which people want to be able to explain the world. We want to see a pattern. We don't want to see things as random. And if you don't have kind of the faith to see that God is sovereign, that God is control of all things, and that you're not going to quite understand it.

Deuteronomy 2929 says the secret things belong to God. In other words, we see partly, but we don't see the whole picture. Only God sees the whole picture. If we're going to try to take on God's role and try to connect all the dots, well, there's something about that that's exciting, that gives us meaning that makes us feel like we're a part of a bigger story. Take also that we are inside more, alone more, because of COVID and all of those restrictions. take the influence that social media is having and how quickly ideas move from one place to another

and how it's hard to verify the truthfulness of any of these ideas. And then add to that that there might have been someone who believed something a little outlandish, maybe we even say a little bit crazy, but they wouldn't have had any way 20, 30 years ago to communicate with a person in another part of the world that shared that same belief. But now through the internet and social media, now they flocked together into these checks. out rooms or Reddit threads, and you just have this recipe for a lot of conspiracy theories to thrive. And there have been scads and scads of studies that have shown that the human brain is tribal. We are literally hardwired to believe what we see other people believing. And it's because

thinking requires a lot of metabolism and energy. And you can hack that by not doing the thinking yourself and instead seeing, well, gosh, if everybody else believes this and they're all good, decent people like me who seem to be pretty reasonable, then this can't be a crazy idea. And so when you live in an internet world where you can just hop online and find a massive crowd of people who, in many cases, whether or not you like it, if you met them face to face, you think, that's a really nice person who I could get along with pretty well. And they believe these kinds of things. Your tribal brain is wired to say, huh, maybe this isn't as crazy as I think. When we have this brain, breakdown of in-person relationship, which has happened both as a result of COVID and people

being inside, but just in general, social media over the last 10 years has really accelerated that. When that happens, people move their communities online, and then they can get into these echo chambers where their conspiratorial thoughts are reinforced. And I have to say, this happens on both the right and the left. We did an episode not too long ago about critical theory, and I don't want to go back into that, but I would, I won't. But I would point out that some of the thought patterns, which exist in the conspiracy theorist camp, actually, in many ways, are reflective or the bizarre mirror image of the thinking that happens in the critical theorist camp.

Like, for example, the woke terminology, Ashley Babbitt, and I know we're using her name a lot just because some of her social media threads and conversations have been in the news lately, but she talked about being woke to the deep state, to the powers that be. There's a power differential. People are controlling us, and she had become woke to that. And of course, there is parallel language within the critical theory movement of being woke to power structures. That's what I'm going to say. It goes back into power, this idea that power is everywhere, and that if you just put on the right glasses, you'll be able to see it. Now, I'm not trying to equate these two things. They think very, very differently about the world. I'm simply pointing out that when you get into, and it's actually really interesting, there's a Christian cult expert

named Bob Harden, he's a Christian himself, and he said, whenever you see these kinds of social upheavals happening, this stuff starts to surface, and he goes on to say, typical in cult thinking is black and white thinking, good and evil thinking, dividing the world up into us and them. And again, that kind of thinking is characterizing the extremes of our political community today on both sides. And so we should be concerned by that. Let's spend the last few minutes saying maybe there's somebody in your life that you care a lot about and this person is involved in some sort of conspiracy theory. Maybe it's Q&On, maybe it's something else. How would you go about talking to them? I think the first place,

to start is to pray. And I know that sounds so religious and what a pastor should say, but I think you've got to realize that unless God opens their heart, unless God kind of intervenes, this isn't going to go well. So if you're going to rely on your ability to talk them out of this, if you think you're going to argue them out of this, good luck. I doubt it. I think you praying, maybe asking friends to pray, and really going before God and saying, God, you've got to show up, you've got to work, You've got to use whatever words I say, whatever articles I can give them. But if you're not the one using them, then it's just isn't going to work. You cannot be their Holy Spirit.

Only the Holy Spirit can be their Holy Spirit. Only the Holy Spirit can change people's hearts and minds. And I sincerely believe that with these kinds of deceptive philosophies, there are spiritual forces at work to keep people chained by them. And you're not going to break those chains. That's something only God can do. So if you aren't praying, you've already gone down the wrong path. And I would be careful about laughing at the people.

And, you know, I said at the beginning of this podcast episode that I think I kind of laughed my way through the last time we talked about this. And I've been a little bit more sobered by the reality of it. And I think I was probably wrong to laugh at people. And so if you're going to talk to somebody about this, I'm not sure that laughing, at least if they're really committed, maybe if they're just on the fringe and you can kind of joke about it and help them see how absurd it is. Maybe that works.

And you know the person better than I do. So you do what you think's best. But if somebody's really committed to this and they're serious about it, then I don't think laughing at their beliefs would work. You wouldn't laugh at somebody who was a Muslim or who was a Jehovah Witness. You wouldn't think that is respectful or kind or winsome. So I wouldn't laugh at people. I can't recommend all of the strategies in this book, but there's an interesting book called

How to Have Impossible Conversations by James Lindsay. Oh, it's a great book. And there's some really helpful things on having conversations like this. but one of my favorite things that he says is when you're talking to someone who's really committed to an idea, ask them on a scale of one to ten. How much would it take? Let's say one is very little evidence and ten is a ton of evidence. How much evidence would it take for me to convince you that this idea was wrong?

And he makes a point that if you're talking to someone who gets a nine or ten, you're probably never going to convince him. It goes back to Keith and I's point about an unfalsifiable belief. They don't believe it because of evidence, so they're not going to disbelieve it because of evidence. But if they give you a six or a seven, the follow-up question is, okay, tell me what kind of evidence. you would need to disprove this idea and let them think through it and lay it out and then as an act of love try to seek out that evidence. Now, if they give you a set of evidence that is so outrageously ridiculous, it's something you couldn't possibly do. Chances are whether or not they're saying it,

they're actually at an eight or a nine or a ten in their belief set. But that can be a helpful way for you not to try to prove them wrong. Ask them, what do you need to be proven wrong on this? I read an article in a paper the other day in an interview with a guy who was a big Trump supporter who believed that the election was fraudulent. And they were asking them in a sense the questions that you're suggesting. Like, what would it take? What if I could do this or that for you? Would that convince you that the election was legitimate? If the courts weighed in, if the secretary of state weighed in, if the poll workers weighed in, would that cause you to see that it was legitimate?

and they guys like, no, no, no, no. What if Donald Trump came to you and said, hey, the election was completely legitimate, would that convince you? And the guy said, well, maybe. And you just start realizing that some beliefs are unfalsifiable. They're not believed because of evidence. They won't be disbelieved because of evidence. But if somebody can give you the reasons that they believe in their conspiracy theory

and what it would take to convince them that it wasn't true, then that gives you, an opportunity to have a polite, respectful conversation about those pieces of evidence that they say are important. And if they are not in a place where they're willing to hear reasonable evidence, again, it goes back to changing your strategy. I would say continue to pray for them, continue to love them, probably try to avoid the topics with them. Wait for another time, because who knows in six months they might be open? People change. And I think you need to remember, these are hurting people who feel powerless and voiceless, and they've turned to a new, narrative that promises them not just power, but a chance to change things. And so maybe part of what

you need to do is share in your life how the gospel has given you a voice with God, how the gospel has renewed your own sense of volition and power over your life, not to be a powerful person, but to give sacrificially, to love generously. That's a wonderful thing for you. I think it's a really good point because the goal isn't to get someone to not believe in a conspiracy theory. The goal is to help ourselves and other people to walk with Jesus, to know Jesus, to live in loyal allegiance to Jesus. And so your goal is not to just strip someone of their belief system. It's to point them to a greater belief system, a true belief system that is found in Jesus. Thanks for listening.

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