Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Should Christians Get Into Conspiracy Theories? | Questions You're Asking | Philippians 3.20

Episode Date: August 20, 2020

Do you buy into conspiracy theories? Or do you think they're silly? Could they be harmful? Discover how Pastors Keith Simon and Patrick Miller respond to conspiracy theories as we continue our series on answering Questions You're Asking. Interested in more content like this? Check out https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/who-picked-which-books-went-into-the-bible/ (Who Picked Which Books Went Into the Bible?) Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. To learn more, visit our website and 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 and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. And I'm Keith Simon. Some of you will remember Pizza Gate. If you don't, let me give you the story behind it. There was a guy from all accounts, a nice Christian guy. He loved John Eldridge. He wanted to follow Jesus and be faithful to Jesus.

He had a Bible verse tattooed on him, didn't he? He did. Isaiah, the passage about ewes growing wheat, but the Lord never does. and this is a faithful guy, but somehow, at the end of this story, he's going to be surrounded by police outside of a pizza hut holding a gun. How does that happen? Well, what ended up happening to this guy is he got snuckered by fake news. Most people think was produced by Russia. And in this fake news, it was saying that the Clintons were running an illegal sex trafficking ring and that one of the locations was a pizza place called Comet Pingpong that he lived near in Washington, D.C. And he had a to do what he thought was the Christian thing, which was take his gun and go free these children from the sex enslavement. And sure enough, he shows up to Pizza Hut with his gun. He breaks down a door where he thinks they're supposed to be a staircase leading down to some sort of dungeon, and instead it's just a janitor's closet. And the next thing he knows, he's in jail for four years.

Now, while this might not quite qualify as a conspiracy theory, I think it does underline the fact that even well-meaning Christians can be easily deceived by things. fake news by stories that seem plausible, but in reality, aren't true at all. And so in today's episode, we're going to talk about conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories have become, it seems like, in the last five years, more and more popular among certain circles. And Christians need to think carefully about whether we should buy into those things and how we should discern them, think through them, and respond to people who we know and love that might be buying into these conspiracy theories. Yeah, this is a big issue these days. This is a question that came across our

Facebook page, Emily asked, what about Christians who are dealing with people they love and care about who buy into conspiracy theories? And I think conspiracy theories, like the one you just laid out, Patrick, even though maybe it doesn't quite qualify, it's a really embarrassment to Christianity. Because people are looking around and seeing Christians believe the wildest, craziest things. And they're coming to the conclusion that Christians live in an alternate reality, like they're out of touch. So let's see if we can get a definition for a conspiracy theory. You Googled one that you seem to like. Yeah, so I found this on the source of all knowledge, dictionary.com. I'm impressed. People are just so impressed. But I think it's a helpful definition.

Right now, Patrick is staring at his computer screen. It's like four feet away from him across the room, and he's got big font on it. So he can read to you from dictionary.com. Here we go. A conspiracy theory is a theory that rejects the standard explanation. for an event and instead credits a covert group or organization with carrying out a secret plot. I think that's a pretty good definition. So a conspiracy theory in layman's terms, not private school, not private school, hold on. If dictionary.com is private school, I mean, maybe if I'm doing like the OED, you know, something like that, that's fine. Oxford English Dictionary for those of you who aren't quite tracking with my private school buddy. Anyway, a conspiracy theory is a theory that says that some unknown group of people are controlling events so that what you see is not reality.

You're being lied to. But if you only knew that behind the scenes, there are these people, unknown, always unknown, always the bad people, and they are really in control. So there have been conspiracy theories about politics, about finances, all kinds of examples out there. But there's something attractive. Okay, hold on a second. What are some, of the most popular or some of your favorite conspiracy theories that you've heard out there, maybe even ones that you've heard of Christians buying into and believing? Well, I don't know if they're my favorite because I think they're all kind of yucky, to be honest. For example, there's one about 9-11 being an inside job that somehow the CIA

or the CIA in Israel teamed up to take down the trade towers so that they would have an excuse to attack Middle East countries. And I don't know. It just seems. It just seems. kind of disgusting, revolting. I don't think there's any reason to believe it's true. And yet, of course, there are people who sincerely believe that their government can't be trusted. There were some people here at our church, this is years ago, back around the time of 9-11, who became convinced that this was true, that it was an inside job done by the United States. They literally believe that black helicopters would be coming from the United Nations to spy on Americans. And so they moved up to northern Missouri, living off the land, not sending their kids to

school, trying to hide out in the country, growing their own vegetables, their own food, so they wouldn't have to have any contact with society or the government. I think another example, we are a podcast, and a lot of guys I know listen to Joe Rogan's podcast, and I don't want to weigh in on that particular thing. But one thing that he is known for. He is a bigger podcast than us. Yeah, he's actually, I think, the biggest podcast in the world. I heard he's making a lot of money from Spotify. Yeah, he's doing real well. Is that ever going to work out for us?

Yeah, no, we make zero dollars, but we're happy to make zero dollars because this is fun. Here's a deal. Joe Rogan. Yeah, Joe Rogan. But one of the things that he's known for is he buys into a lot of these conspiracy theories. He believes, and I don't know if you actually believe that he believes this, but I think he does believe it. He believes in dark government, lizard people, this idea that there are aliens that are literally running our government. We don't know who they are, but they take on the form of politicians. If I don't

if you've ever heard of elves, people take this crazy drug and they have an interdimensional experience where they see these elves who talk to them. And again, he talks a lot about this on his podcast. These are all things that are just talked about as though they are normal, credible, acceptable things. UFOs, the whole bit. It's all on the podcast. No, no, no. I refuse to believe that intelligent, rational, sane people. And whatever you think of Joe Rogan, he meets all those criteria, believes really that lizards run the world and take the form of human beings. It's so dumb. Just say that back to yourself and ask, does any intelligent, sane person believe that? If you believe that, sincerely believe that,

you should be locked up. You are dangerous to the world. And yet, the simple reality is that there are a lot of people who, whether or not they fully believe the idea, they are bought into the notion that there is some sort of dark government, whether it's run by humans or non-humans or some sort of organization that is running the entire world. So let's talk about, other ones. For example, the moon, the United States never landed on the moon, and that was all staged. There's one about JFK and his assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald and then Jack Ruby, and that was all a front for maybe the mafia, maybe Cuba, maybe other people who wanted them dead so they wouldn't tell the truth. One of the things that's interesting about conspiracy theories is that they always

confirm your prior beliefs. For example, back when Bill Clinton was president, there was a conspiracy theory going around that said that he and his wife were responsible for the death of Vince Foster, a good friend of theirs and an aide of President Clinton's. And Vince Foster reportedly took his own life. And it was a sad situation, but people were saying, no, that Clintons are really behind that. Then when George Bush got into the White House, there were people who said that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were all kind of a conspiracy to help Dick Cheney make money off of war. oil. Now, what my point I think is, is that we tend to believe conspiracy theories about people that we don't like that we're suspicious of. Conspiracy theories don't ever run against our prior beliefs, but they confirm the biases that we already have. I think the other thing that can

convince people about conspiracy theories, and I mean, anybody who has Netflix is probably at some point seen or maybe even watched one of these conspiracy theory documentaries. is that they reorder facts. They reorder what we know to be true in a plausible way that presents a case for something that is totally outlandish. So there's documentaries about 9-11. There's documentaries about UFOs. And they take things that we know, things that everybody acknowledges, but they change the order of them and say, see, there's something darker, something deeper, something that we didn't know about. And that's happening right now in the midst of COVID. We're in stories of people who think that COVID's caused by 5G technology. People in Europe burning down cell towers.

so that they don't get COVID. Yeah, that's real. I mean, there really are people going around burning down cell towers convinced that this is somehow a plague visited upon us by big tech. And it seems like the COVID crisis has caused conspiracy theories to gain more prominence. One of my sons has a friend whose family is trying to convince him to not take the vaccine because they're pretty sure that the vaccine is the mark of the beast, that COVID is a big hoax. and that it was all done so that Christians will take the vaccine, but if you take the vaccine, according to this conspiracy theory, you won't go to heaven.

Another one that came up, Bill Gates and a bunch of other billionaires, they have this organization. And one of the kind of goals of the organization is to predict and prepare for certain circumstances. But none of it's based on research or what they actually think is going to happen. It's just they're creating scenarios to be ready for it. And a few years ago, they had a scenario that dealt with a pandemic. and people have looked back at that scenario to help shape the decisions that are being made now. But there are other people have looked at and said, see, Bill Gates knew that there was going to be COVID-19, and he was using it in order to create a vaccine that would be able to somehow control people, put chips inside of people.

It's kind of back to this Mark of the Beast idea. There's this big conspiracy behind COVID-19 to get this big tech guy in charge of the world. Christianity has been the victim of conspiracy theories. Think of the novel The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. That was fiction, obviously, but was kind of laying out this whole idea that Christianity had been hijacked by a group of people in the early history of the church, and that they were hiding the fact that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and they are the ones who controlled what books ended up in the Bible. Now, nobody knows who these people are. They're all part of mysterious sounding groups, but evidently they controlled Christianity, and what we think of Christianity isn't real, at least according to this conspiracy theory. Yeah, and in fact, just a quick plug, we did an episode on who chose the books that went into the Bible a few weeks ago where we're going to deal with some of that. Because what's interesting about the Da Vinci Code one is, if you talk to a lot of people, both non-Christians and Christians about how the Bible came together, they actually

buy this conspiracy theory. And so sometimes we think, well, just these wacky people out there who are buying into these lies. There are some conspiracy theories that are bought into by a lot of people. Let's pivot for a second. Why do people believe in conspiracy theories? What's the attraction to it? Well, first of all, it says something about you as a person, that you are a truth seeker. You're a person who refuses to be duped. You are special. You see what's really happening behind the scenes. You're not one of those sheeple, which is what conspiracy theorists believers call people like, maybe like me, who don't quite buy into them. I'm a sheeple. I'm part sheep, part, person. I'm easily led astray. I'm gullible. And so there's a sense in which it makes a person feel special, feel like they are unique, feel like they are an insider, feel like they really know the truth. And of course, the human ego that we all have loves to feel special in some way. We have a word for that in Christian circles. It's called pride. We all have pride over different things,

but one way to have pride is, again, I see the truth that no one else sees. I think another element, our culture is a highly cynical culture. And sometimes we equate intelligence with cynicism. I see this all the time when people tell me, oh, I've got this really smart friend. They're just really skeptical. They're always asking questions. And I'll go and I'll talk to the friend and I'll realize you're actually not that smart. Yeah, you won't believe anything and you think you sound smart because you ask all of these questions, but you haven't come to any real conclusions. And the same thing can go with conspiracy theories. We think that we're smart if we doubt everything that the media says, if we doubt all authority, see how smart I am? I don't. I don't buy into things. But intelligence does not equal, I never trust authority. I never believe anything. Intelligence is knowing what to believe. I think you're right, though, that there is a rise in conspiracy theories that are prominence of them now because of the lack of trust that people have in institutions. People don't trust the media. They don't trust government. They don't trust each other. And so if you don't trust what is being reported in newspapers or on televisions or in magazines or wherever you get your news, then you are susceptible to thinking that there is a story behind the scenes that you're missing out on. And of course, I'm not saying that you have to believe everything the newspaper writes.

That's not what a conspiracy theorist says. A conspiracy theorist says that there is a coordinated attempt to keep people in the dark so that, that they won't know the truth because the conspiracy thrives in the darkness. Let me add to that. What we, again, are not trying to say is that you should believe everything you read in the news. We would be the first people to tell you that our church has been in the news before, and it's always a mixed bag of whether or not what those reporters say are true or not true, but they don't have a conspiracy to present us in a certain way or to hide something.

It's just good or bad reporting. There's not much you can do with that. And I think we should, as Christians, have a certain world wariness, right? We shouldn't trust all the narratives that are being presented in the media. But on the alternative, we shouldn't trust conspiracy theories to be the source of truth. I really like what Ephesians 414 says. It says, Then we will no longer be infants tossed back and forth by the waves and blown here and there by the wind of every teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people and their defeatful scheming. This is Paul's vision of maturity, not being someone who may be by

into everything that the media says. I heard it on the news, so it must be true. Or on the flip side, I can't believe anything on the news. I'm going to buy into all these conspiracy theories. And either way, you're actually the same person. You're just getting twisted back and forth, up and down through the winds of different ideas and theories and teachings, none of which are maybe grounded in reality. So let me thread the needle here a little bit and make sure that we're all clear on the differences between misinformation and a conspiracy theory. Last fall, The Crossing participated in a medical debt reduction plan for the people in our community and paid off nearly, I think it was $500 million in medical debt for people around Missouri.

And when we did interviews about it, because the media called quite frequently, everybody here talked a lot about how the reason we paid off people's medical debt is because God had paid off our debt, our spiritual debt, and therefore it was a way for us to love our neighbor. and the media did not do a very good job of representing what we said. In other words, they reported the facts, but they didn't report why we did it, that this was something that was rooted in our relationship with God. Now, is that a conspiracy against us?

No, that's just people who are choosing to not put in the whole story. Now, you might think it's bad reporting, and I probably agree with you, but it's not a conspiracy. A conspiracy would be that there are people in New York City in Washington, D.C., who are quietly sitting in smoke-filled rooms, and they have decided to take God out of media. And so they have special agents all around different media outlets, NBC, ABC, Washington Post, New York Times, and they are willfully editing God out. and they are secretive, and they control the newspapers, and they control what newspapers print. Now, if you believed that, that there was this secret covert group who was erasing the name of God from our culture,

then you would be believing a conspiracy theory. That's really helpful. One of my big concerns about conspiracy theories is that they often present an alternative worldview to Christianity. Christianity, following Jesus, he is offering us a comprehensive worldview. which is to say a comprehensive way of viewing all of life, all of the world, and often conspiracy theories are doing the exact same thing. This goes back to what I was mentioning earlier with conspiracy theories about world government organizations. These theories are claiming that if you want to understand reality, you need to understand that our entire world, all of our nations, are being

run by this secret organization. Now, that's a different story than the story of the Bible. Hebrews 139 warns us. It says, so do not be attracted. by strange new ideas. Apparently, this is not a new thing that we are always kind of interested by these bizarre ideas about the world. It says, look, don't be attracted to strange new ideas. Your strength comes from God's grace. Our strength doesn't come from not being sheeple and seeing the truth about reality. The author of Hebrews is saying, look, our strength comes from God's grace. So don't get tricked by strange new ideas. Christians need to understand that conspiracy theories are lies. They're slander. They're slandering people's name. They're making up stuff about people

that just isn't true. And the Ninth Commandment forbids that. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor. Christians are called to people of the truth and not lies, because lying might seem like a simple sin or a respectable sin, but remember who told the first lie? Oh yeah, that was Satan back in the Garden of Eden. And do you remember who Jesus said is the father of lies? Oh, again, that's Satan, John 8. And so we might think that lying about our political opponents or someone else like that is not that big of a deal. It's just the way politics is played, or it's what a discerning Christian has to do. No, not at all. Conspiracy theories are lies and go against the kind of life that God's people are called to live.

theories are also rooted in a lot of fear. And Jesus warns us against being too fearful about what's going to happen next. In Matthew 6, he says, seek first God's kingdom and his righteousness, and all the things that you're worried about, they'll be added to you. Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. And he's warning us that if we spend too much time worrying and fearing, especially about these kinds of big, grand ideas that there's an organization trying to control or manipulate people, that's not going to put us in a good place spiritually. In fact, I'll go a step further and I'll say that's paranoia. And paranoia is a sign of mental illness, not spiritual maturity.

So let's stay on that idea of fear because I think that there is a kind of fear that has crept into our cultural moment that causes us to buy into conspiracy theories, Christians, good people, to buy into them. And part of that is the way that we have demonized our political opponents, that instead of believing the best about them, these are people who want good for the country and good for families, but they have different beliefs about how to get there. We now in our current political environment have said, no, those are bad people. They're evil people. They don't need to be persuaded. They need to be defeated. And so in that kind of environment where you think very, highly of yourself and people like you, and you have extremely negative views of people on the other

side of political positions than you have. You're going to be susceptible to buying into conspiracy theories. You're going to think, yeah, those are the kind of people, whether it's Republicans or Democrats, those are the kind of people who would really do, and then you can fill in the blank, run a sex ring out of a comet ping pong pizza place. They're the kind of people who have blow up the World Trade Center. Our willingness to assume the worst definitely gives fertile ground for conspiracy theories. I love Proverbs 1817. If I could, maybe we should put this out on our office door because I think it's a huge problem today. Culturally and just among normal everyday people, this is what it says. The first to speaking court sounds right until the cross-examination begins.

It's so true. Everybody sounds right until you hear the other side. And when you look at these conspiracy theories, it's almost always one-sided. You've got to. got one expert or one group of experts who all agree and they're all talking together and all sounds so plausible when they talk. But you talk to one person who knows what they're talking about on the other side and you realize, huh, this doesn't add up the way I thought it did. I always sound right until you listen to my wife. When you hear her side, then my side doesn't sound quite so convincing. Recently, I've looked into how you should talk to people who believe in conspiracy theories because it's not uncommon for us to get emails about how COVID is.

predicted in the book of Revelation, or perhaps to be forwarded a link to a YouTube video called Plandemic that I think now has been taken down that accuses the coronavirus as being part of a government plan. We get that all the time. And so how do you talk to people who you care about, you love them? I think that, you know, I said Emily is the one who gave us this question, and my guess is it comes from her personal experience. She cares about people who buy into conspiracy theories. Well, here's one thing that I learned from my reading is that what you don't do is you don't mock them like I was doing with Joe Rogan and the reptiles. So on that case, you do mock them. Oh, that one. That one. That's the exception. But no, okay, back to reality for a second.

You don't mock them because what that does is it just causes them to be more entrenched in their beliefs. It just confirms to them that you're a sheeple, that you don't quite see it, but that they do. Instead of mocking, you've got to try to talk about facts in ways that are not judgmental. In other words, instead of arguing with them so that they become more entrenched in their position, you say, well, what about these facts? And you start trying to talk about the facts that everybody can agree on. And then finally, show them how people are hurt by these conspiracy theories. If people won't take the vaccine for COVID, whenever that comes out,

God, I hope it comes out. If people won't take that, that's going to have serious implications for them personally, but also for our society, if people are scared to take that vaccine. When somebody shows up at a pizza joint and someone is killed because they believed in misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, that's really harmful. When people believe that 9-11 was done by the United States of America, that has consequences. in their life, but in their whole circle of influence. So if you can help people see, look, this is dangerous, and it can really hurt people, then good people, the people who want to believe the truth, who want to do what's right,

will be kind of exposed to the fact that these conspiracy theories are really dangerous. They have to be more careful in how they talk. And this is especially the case. If you're talking to someone who's a follower of Jesus, because here's one of the greatest risks, if you as a follower of Jesus are going around touting conspiracy theories, and you're doing that to people who aren't following Jesus, what do you think they are going to think is true about God, about Jesus, about the resurrection? Well, they're going to think that's a conspiracy theory. They're going to say,

yeah, see, here's this person who believes all these crazy things over there. It's no surprise that they buy into this Jesus nonsense. In other words, if we go around touting conspiracy theories, we are probably whether or not we intend to diminishing the name of Jesus and making him seem much less credible to outsiders. And that's a really, really big deal that has eternal consequences in people's lives. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps other people find this podcast more easily. Also, ask yourself, who could you share this podcast with? Texting an episode to a friend or a family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out

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