Four Foundational Lies of Q
Conspiracy theories require fertile soil.
A conspiracy which is unbelievably out of whack can only gain root if the ground where it lands has been filled with slightly-out-of-whack stuff for a long time.
Q still spreads amongst evangelical Christians, no matter how quiet it seems now that the election is over. Why is this ground so fertile? What tilled and amended this ground to prepare it for the seed of Q?
A few lies I saw floating around evangelicalism like so much flotsam in the summer pool were left to rot until they have ruined the whole thing. These are not necessarily robust theologies (though some authors have made them so) as much as they are broad notions that people agree to in passing without real consideration. Added together they spell disaster:
1. America is the new Israel / We Fight for Power
Look closely — do you see the replacement there in the middle, where Israel and America are linked to be one and the same? This kind of language has been around since before America was America and surfaces from time to time when religion most closely mingles with American exceptionalism. Ronald Reagan really hammered in on the board idea by borrowing the Puritan Winthrop’s words “City on a Hill” over and over again as President, something Obama, Romney, and others have done as well. Winthrop used the phrase to suggest the eyes of the world were watching the faith of the Puritans, “So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.” Presidents and commentators use it to indicate American uniqueness. Winthrop wanted his people to turn to God because the eyes of the world were on them; modern commentators want us to think we are already special and need to work harder to keep our place in history.
The “city on the hill” motif is not the clearest indicator of the “America is the New Israel” motif. Rather, the abuse of the Old Testament for nationalistic purposes has indicated evangelicals’ willingness to put America in the place of Israel in the text of the Bible itself. The most egregious example is the whole “If my people…” craze of the turn of the century. Including songs, t-shirts, conferences, and major evangelical speakers, everyone seemed to think that 2 Chronicles 7:14 directly applied to America without any other hermeneutical interventions! Nevermind that the verse itself comes from a direct word of the Lord to Solomon about the nation of Israel, and is itself more prophetic than anything because it points to the ultimate failure of Israel (v.19 and following); nevermind that the usage of the verse in this way implies a works-righteousness understanding of salvation; nevermind that Christ alone is our sure salvation; nevermind all that and ask: how on earth did we think we could ever just yank a verse from the Old Testament and make it about America, as though God had Americans in mind as “my people” and America as “their land?”
Ah me.
This American supercessionism is rarely delineated very clearly, but the situation seems to be getting more opaque and more strident at the same time. Without a theology as to why, Churches are nevertheless celebrating ever-greater “Patriot Sundays” and there is even a Patriot Church movement.
We seek to establish local churches of any size, stir up Christians, and network with like-minded Churches, Pastors, and Parishioners to preach the gospel and fight for Freedom, Righteousness, and the Well-Being of the United States of America.
The new “city on a hill” types are very pro-Israel at the same time that they apply Old Testament teachings directly to America without any meaningful interpretive lens. The tension here is unresolved: America is Israel, but Israel is also Israel, so we need to support both 100%. Only America, however, gets to be told what to do. And tell America what to do is awfully big business.
Indeed, the base idea — America is chosen by God / is the new Israel — provides the foundation of a massive empire of works-righteousness efforts to control morality through law by means of the church controlling broad spheres of influence. Christian broadcasters utilize the laws of God to condemn America literally every day, with Pat Robertson telling politicians how they are wrong based on his interpretations of the Bible. This America/Israel conflation spills into the prophetic movement, as John Hagee was one of the most vocal, claiming all sorts of wild prophetic fulfilments regarding America and Israel.
Hagee later wrote Four Blood Moons, that became a best-seller, being more than 150 days in Amazon.com’s top 150 by April 2014.For the week ending March 30, 2014, it was the ninth best selling paperback, according to Publishers Weekly.By mid-April, Hagee’s book was №4 on The New York Times best-seller list in the advice category.
“The claim of a blood moon being a sign of the beginning of the end times originates in the Book of Joel, where it is written “the sun will turn into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.”
These waters are murky; the ideas here are never laid out. There is no Westminster Confession of American Christian Exceptionalism. But these thoughts operate at a gut level in many churches as folks ingest hours of Christian TV programming which peddles in this stuff and go to parachurch ministry events focused on 2 Chronicles 7:14. They send money to Israel-focused patriotic online personalities. So maybe the pastor and leaders aren’t speaking it, but they feel it, and it spreads everywhere in evangelicalism.
Why is this so pernicious? Because the Old Testament cannot be fully understood by Christians without the light of Christ. More importantly, the Old Testament cannot be rightly applied without both understanding its context in ancient Israel AND its theological development in the light of Christ. Israel is Israel; America is a nation of people, many of whom are Christian, founded on a system of ideas, some of which were rooted in Christian values, some of which came from liberal philosophy and political theory.
We love our country and we love our citizenship, but our Kingdom is in Heaven and our citizenship is there, too, in the end. We love America enough to fight for her good — this is not wrong at all — but we cannot save our country, for we cannot even save ourselves. Any efforts to transform a nation or a people that do not come from God, with God’s power, for the glory of God, are just more works righteousness. When God decides to deal with nations, he does so on his terms. As he said to Moses, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again. The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.”
2. Democrats are the Devil
Look, Democrats do themselves no favors when actual satanists run for public office and Hillary Clinton lets Planned Parenthood run point for her campaign in the Southern suburbs (it happened, I was there, they knocked on my door in pink shirts and all). But Democrats are not devil-worshippers (well, except for that guy I linked to above).
You may publish that Satan Would Be A Democrat or you have the Mission Impossible guy who turned out to be a bad guy say they are satanic or you write a book literally titled Satan, Socialism and the Democrat Party: What do they have in common? Pain and Suffering! Unfortunately, it’s intended for you! It is a free country — call whomever you want satanic! But let’s stop for a moment. Pause. Deep breath.
FDR was a lifelong Episcopalian. Jimmy Carter a baptist. JFK the first Catholic president. Woodrow Wilson was extremely devout, known for daily bible reading and constant attendance at his Presbyterian church. The religious practices of individual political leaders has been all over the map, from Jefferson cutting out parts of the Bible he didn’t like to John Adams rejecting the divinity of Christ to… well, the list goes on. None — not one political leader of national prominence— has been explicitly or even slightly pro-Satan.
The main question, then, comes to policy, not personalities. And let’s be extremely honest here, folks: the issue at the core of this accusation is abortion. White evangelicals (and increasingly many minority Christians) simply cannot fathom a dogged adherence among Democratic leadership to abortion. They do not understand why Hyde — banning federal funding of abortions — is under threat. They cannot grasp why Democratic states consistently fight for expanded funding for and access to abortions. They simply do not get it, because they understand a baby is a baby. It is that maddeningly simple:
They do not believe this because of some particular bible verses. They believe this because of ultrasound technology and the feeling of a baby kicking and the idea a baby shower and all that goes into creating new life. And if a baby is a baby, then killing a baby is murder.
Yes, I know there are exceptions and difficulties, but the vast majority of all abortions are elective, done because a mother does not want her baby. Of women who had abortions,
Single-issue voters and conservative people in general cannot understand the idea of abortion on demand. To them, it is the peak of evil. It is state-sponsored murder. It is the denigration of life. Government-funded abortion on demand is even worse! Even pro-life humanists are wondering what is going on.
The disagreement over abortion is one of those intractable disagreements about a fundamental truth that causes immense anger and threatens to rend the very fabric of society. Importantly, though, Democrats who support abortion generally don’t do so because they are Satan worshippers (although some definitely do). They do so because they genuinely believe, for the most part, that women ought to be the one making the choice about their body, and believe that a baby is not a baby until… some other time that Christians and anti-abortion folks believe it is. I don’t entirely know when that is, and the answer seems to change from advocate to advocate, but that’s the core question.
Now, you and I might argue that science is proving the anti-abortion cause right, that a baby is viable very early and can feel pain and is worthy of protecting, but that does not change the fact that the motivation of pro-choice activists is not worship of Satan.
Why do I care about this? Because precision matters. Do you recall back in the 1990’s when everyone in evangelicalism lost their minds and started finding demons under bushes?
There were over 12,000 accusations nationwide of widespread cultic sexual abuses involving satanic ritual, but investigating police were not able to substantiate any allegations of organized cult abuse.
I remember books telling me that individual items in a room could hold satanic power and drain me of my ability to love Jesus or feel the Holy Spirit. I remember being told if certain songs entered my ears, Satan came right with them. I remember feeling as a child in those days that the demons were right there, ready to get me.
The demonology of those days (Which still continues in some ways) was wrong precisely because it was inaccurate. Christians mislabeled evil and the enemy, and in doing so refused to commit themselves to genuine spiritual warfare. They externalized an internal battle, the battle against sin, and tried to solve sin with systems, laws, and structures.
Inaccuracy about things we don’t like often serves broader political purposes, and the demon scare was no different. The demons were linked to the Democrats, and to this day people in evangelical circles link Democrats to the occult. Inaccuracy about demonology allowed evangelicals to forget about crushing their own sin and instead set about crushing their political enemies by any means necessary. Qanon spreads amongst evangelicals precisely because it is viewed as a cosmic battle against evil.
The right wing conspiracy theory movement known as Q or QAnon, which originated on 4Chan in 2017, has adopted many of the tropes of SRA and Satanic Panic. Instead of daycare centers being the center of abuse, however, liberal Hollywood actors, Democratic politicians, and high-ranking government officials are portrayed as a child-abusing cabal of Satanists
Is it any wonder that the insurgents of January 6th planted a Christian flag on the Senate floor after beating police with it? If you think you are fighting demons, you will do anything to win. Fear becomes violence.
In the abortion debate we confront a wave of sin and pain, of sin upon sin, of terrible choices made in terrible circumstances by scared and angry and sad and selfish people running their life by a sin nature nothing but the power of God can overcome. My friend once worked the front desk of a hotel near an abortion clinic. He told me of women being forced to get the abortion by the men with them. He told me of fiends who would try to avoid the mandatory overnight stay (in case of post-abortion medical emergency) who would try to get refunds right after the abortion. These are real people, even the ones who you may think are committing murder or advocating for the government to pay for murder.
Recall that God is in the business of redeeming murderers (See: Moses, David) and harlots (see Rahab, the Samaritan woman) and worse. By all means, advocate for justice, if such is your calling. But in the process let us be clear about who or what we are fighting: first, an idea, that a baby is not a baby; second, the sin nature itself; third, the people who live and advocate according to one or the other or both. The first is handled with truth, the second by the Holy Spirit, and the third with love.
3. The Denigration of Expertise
“The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”
Whatever we may say about evangelicalism’s power in America, take note of this: we have a Catholic President, a non-Evangelical Baptist Vice President, a Catholic Speaker of the House, a Jewish Senate Majority Leader, and our Supreme Court is Catholic, Catholic, Jewish, Catholic, Catholic, Jewish, Anglican, Catholic, and Catholic.
Our supposedly evangelical previous President was vaguely Christian-esque and his Vice President attended church… somewhere?
The most prominent almost-evangelical might be Frances Collins, director of the NIH who has been panned by many evangelicals because of his leadership on COVID. Or, rather, his support of Dr. Fauci.
Look at this sad list of the 100 most influential Evangelicals from 2017. How many have fallen or never believed! How many are cranks, liars, false prophets, prosperity preachers, and pathetic charlatans! Very few are considered intellectuals or people with last impact on the world. The ones who are public intellectuals — Plantinga, Noll, Yancey, Peterson, some others — have been sidelined as being too liberal or too stuffy.
The anti-intellectual streak in evangelicalism is incredibly strong and extremely aggravating. People who trust doctors for their cancer hate doctors on COVID. Folks who listen to history podcasts will turn around and argue that the moon landing was faked or slavery wasn’t that bad. Degrees (I went to Duke!) are viewed with awful suspicion, and educated folks in evangelicalism are on watch for their inevitable slide into liberalism.
How did we get here? This is a good primer.
Hofstadter and Noll, who is an evangelical, point to peculiarities in how Christianity took root in America. The English Puritans who settled throughout New England had a deep scholarly tradition, which led to the founding of Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth. Puritan clergy were expected to be paragons of both learning and piety. American Christianity took a decisive shift, however, toward religious “enthusiasm,” as Hofstadter puts it, during revivals that swept the colonies in the mid-eighteenth century, a period that came to be known as the First Great Awakening. Believers’ direct connection to God became the primary focus. Ministers who believed in the importance of learning and rationality in religion found themselves increasingly under threat… Revivalism changed the nature of Protestant Christianity. Religious faith became more individualistic and less tethered to institutional authority; immediate experience took priority over tradition. A marketplace of religion took shape in America, and winning over converts took precedence, which meant “very little time or energy was available to think about God and nature, God and society, God and beauty, or God and the shape of the human mind,” Noll writes.
The revivalist anti-intellectualism gave ample space for a humanistic takeover of institutions of higher learning, leading to the charges of godlessness and anti-Christian liberalism in the 20th Century. Democratized blue-collar evangelicalism wrote off the ivory tower as being anti-God, which, in fact, it had largely become after being abandoned by religious conservatives.
Folks who went to the ivory tower have thus lived with the double-mind of the anti-intellectual evangelical and the knowledge-hungry learner. They have felt (I have felt) the constant doubt of skeptical audiences and friends who wonder why I didn’t choose a safer college. All the while, highly educated folks struggle to balance the humility required of the mind of Christ with the desire to share the knowledge learned and skills gained. Highly educated Christians are often prefer silence over correction, lest they appear too learned, too stuffy, too holier-than-thou, or too liberal.
The absence of godly people in higher learning (or the fear of highly learned people to speak) means that goodly Christians have been shut out from the highest intellectual planes. This creates a vicious cycle: fewer Christians at high levels, meaning less trust amongst the uneducated, meaning fewer people send their kids to get educated, meaning even less trust… and on and on.
The evangelical pursuit has ceased to be an intellectual and spiritual pursuit. Knowledge has been abandoned for experience. Avid readers and deep thinkers are less common than spiritual-high-seekers, all this despite the Apostle Paul’s asking “bring me books” when he was unable to travel.
What is to be done?
For Christian thinking to flourish, Noll argues that evangelicals must be willing to exchange some of the cultural and theological ornamentation that mark their movement for what is truly indispensable. “Much of what is distinctive about American evangelicalism is not essential to Christianity,” he writes… evangelicals should understand the Bible as “pointing us to the Savior” and “orienting our entire existence to the service of God.” … evangelicals should realize that gratitude to God can engender an array of other praiseworthy responses… “To confuse the distinctive with the essential is to compromise the life-transforming character of Christian faith,” Noll writes. “It is also to compromise the renewal of the Christian mind.”
What is essential? Knowing Christ and being known by Christ. Being filled with the Spirit and the Word. Renewing our minds by both. And to that end, God gave teachers, and preachers, and those with words of knowledge, and…
You get the idea. Big ideas and hard ideas are not inherently anti-God. Do not be afraid to ask the hard questions and seek the difficult truths, for much good comes from much God-filled God-directed thought. Do not shy from the sciences, from the law, from places where faith is challenged and questions asked. I found God more deeply at Duke than I ever expected, and came out of there with a greater love for His Word than I had going in. Many of my friends are now pastors, missionaries, Bible teachers, and scholars. The supposedly godless anti-Christian liberal bastion that is Duke University couldn’t quench the Spirit. Let’s not assume God is too short to reach the Ivory Towers.
4. Comfort with False Prophecy
First, there were 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988.
Then, when it didn’t happen, The final shout: Rapture report 1989.
Well, that didn’t work out, so 23 reasons why a pre-tribulation rapture looks like it will occur on Rosh-Hashanah 1993.
And of course, with us still standing, Edgar Wisenhunt finish with And now the earth’s destruction by fire, nuclear bomb fire.
Millions of copies of his books were sold. Millions!
And that is just ONE false prophet in America! Every single day the airwaves of our “Christian” TV stations are filled with lying liars full of false prophecies which are never exposed or held accountable.
I mean, the Bible literally says to stone false prophets. Its right there — if ever there was a verse to be stolen from the Old Testament and applied directly to America, it is this one!
But the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of other gods, even that prophet shall die.
American evangelicals are so blatantly comfortable with false prophets that soak up the money from our parishioners that the New York Times has taken notice. Millions of Americans are being deceived daily, and tens (Or hundreds!) of millions of dollars are being robbed from God’s people by these thieves, and yet we rarely hear sermons from the most important and influential folks against them. Where is Franklin Graham on Paula White? Where is the screed by Eric Metaxas against Jennifer Eivaz? Where is the battle that ought to be raging amongst Christians against these lying liars and the lies they tell? These are the wolves, the dogs, the ones with lying tongues the New Testament warned us about, but there they go, not a scratch on them, because at least they aren’t demon-worshipping democrats, I suppose.
Hey, at least the Satanic Democrat guy was honest…
Let’s put it all together:
America is the chosen nation and must be protected by holy people, democrats worship Satan, experts are all corrupted and untrustworthy so we have to find new sources of information, and we let liars lie with impunity provided they are on our side. Does that sound like fertile ground for a conspiracy theory that is rending families, churches, and communities apart?
So Q spreads amongst evangelicals, and pastors are largely silent. Now at least 15% of Americans — most claiming to be Christians — believe the world is controlled by baby-eating satan worshippers. Many are ready for violence.
My friends, this must not be.
I urge you:
- Reclaim the proper sense of America as a passing place in Scripture and love America as a mission field and a home, not as an idol.
- Find love for those with whom you disagree and dive deeper into politics to achieve the justice you desire
- Reclaim the virtues of wisdom and knowledge, diving deeper into reading and understanding the world than you ever have before, doing all of this with the mind of Christ
- Confront falsehood within the church first and foremost, for it is the most destructive force in the Kingdom of God
Q is here. It is spreading. It is dividing families and ruining the gospel witness. No, it will not conquer, for not even the gates of Hell itself will stand against the Kingdom of God, but as an effective parasite it may well suck the life out of the church in America if we do not act.
