There is a trend that has been going on for the last year and a half which needs to be addressed. I am speaking of the incessant and growing chorus of voices that are sounding the alarm or otherwise accusing conservative evangelicalism of increasingly being infiltrated by the QAnon phenomenon. There is much to say about this subject, and I have yet to see it discussed with a multi-faceted level of penetrating analysis. This post assumes a rudimentary understanding of the spread of QAnon on the part of the reader, so if you are unfamiliar, read a few articles on it first. For an excellent one, click here.
We should start out by acknowledging the phenomenon is real. By real, I mean that there really are social media groups and online forums and videos and blog posts and other avenues of media promulgating a set of theories about the “deep state,” and cabals of sex traffickers, and Trump’s imminent return to the White House, etc. and there really are people swallowing this stuff wholesale, getting outraged and paranoid and taking to social media to pass on the information they have received with some folks are getting in so deep that they are starting to have a worldview completely reshaped and dominated by a QAnon lens. Many of these people are not Christian of course, but some are.
By way of anecdote, I know of multiple Christians whose parents (also Christians) have come under the sway of QAnon conspiracy theories and I have personally interacted with multiple conservative Christians voicing rhetoric or beliefs tinged in QAnon sentiment and have friends who have as well. And that says something, doesn’t it? It’s one thing to hear something on the news, it is another thing to witness it yourself. You think: this really is happening, I’m seeing it with my own eyes. It’s no longer only the histrionics of the news cycle, it’s real life. In summation: news about individuals believing “fake news” is, as it turns out, not always fake news; and conservative evangelicals shouldn’t dismiss reports of QAnon’s growing influence as nothing more than lefty slander. It’s real. It’s happening.
But to say that the spread of QAnon is happening does not mean one is suggesting at what magnitude its spread is occurring, nor does acknowledging its existence mean you are acknowledging some pre-determined level of threat that its spread supposedly poses to evangelicalism or greater society or of its implications as to the nature of conservative evangelicalism as a whole; it’s simply to say it exists. This must be noted as it may be the case that some evangelicals are afraid to do the first part because they equate it with the second. Many critics of conservative evangelicals have seized upon QAnon as the latest weapon in their rhetorical arsenal by which they can paint conservatives as dumb, foolish, unreasoning simpletons and conservatives may be tempted to think acknowledging QAnon’s existence is the same as acknowledging the Left’s assertions as to the meaning of QAnon’s existence. But the two are not the same.
Which brings us to an important line of inquiry: who are the people sounding the alarm over QAnon’s advance in evangelicalism? This is a key question to answer as it is often the case that the loudest voices speaking out about an issue will at least partially inform us on how to view the issue itself. When the CCP is blustering on about how Taiwan has illegitimately broken away and how the nations of the world must respect that there is only “one China,” you can surmise that since Taiwan is a free and democratic nation, and China is not, whatever is coming out of the CCP’s mouth is probably a bunch of crap. Unless you’re into the whole rule-by-tyranny-and-oppression sort of thing.
In our case, the voices sounding alarm about QAnon and evangelicalism can be broadly sorted into three groups. The first group is your garden-variety, secular, left-leaning journalists. These are the folks who don’t care much about the Church outside of its effects on our nation’s political processes. They don’t identify as Christian, and as such, they only care about the fact that there is a huge block of voters formed by a religious affiliation that tends to vote ruby-red republican—a fact which is a reoccurring subject of their frustration and ire.
The second batch of people is left-leaning/left-sympathizing, self-professing Christians. These run the gamut of everything from full-on progressive Christians attending churches with rainbow flags hanging from their eaves to Christians with more traditional views who nonetheless find themselves sympathetic or in hearty agreement with the Democratic party and some of its aims like the welfare state, climate change, matters of race, and so on. They may be pro-life and orthodox in their views of sexuality but if so they find those issues of little or, perhaps better said, of exaggerated importance in shaping how they vote, or they may be completely in agreement with the LGBTQ+ cause and radically pro-choice.
The spectrum of people in this group being so broad, they may view conservative evangelicals as being everything from enemies in the ranks, wolves in sheep’s clothing as it were, to those members of your extended family whom you must begrudgingly accept—their political views perpetual sources of exasperation and even shame. The bottom line is they don’t like the influence or the evidence of political conservatism in the Church and are usually working to remove it at some level.
The third group would be conservative evangelicals alarmed at QAnon’s spread within their ranks. These folks find the working out of their orthodoxy to be best and most consistent with conservative political priorities: pro-life, pro-marriage, strong borders, freedom of speech, limited government, anti-cancel culture, anti-C.R.T., etc. They may or may not have been Trump supporters, but if they were not, they certainly did not vote for Biden and found Trump’s brand of populism not principally conservative enough, or else his character too compromised to stomach. These individuals are not against conservatism in evangelicalism—on the contrary, they are for it—but they are against a perverted or misshapen conservatism, one formed more by crass emotive appeals and misinformation about the “libs” than principled arguments and ideas and robust use of the facts.
Of the three groups of voices, this last one seems to be the smallest. The bulk of the voices appear to be coming from groups one and two, which means the majority of this hoopla of the spread of QAnon in conservative evangelicalism is coming from conservative evangelicalism’s critics—those hostile and committed to its demise. That being the case, it is not entirely unreasonable for any common sense conservative Christian to make the tentative conclusion that all this QAnon talk might be just a bunch of overblown lies. After all, when those who hate or dislike you are speaking ill of you, your inclination is to assume they are engaging in slander. But two things preclude us from taking such a simplified view of things.
The first is, just like the most powerful lies, the most powerful critiques have elements of truth in them, even if in the final balance their conclusions are unwarranted and wrong. A wise person, then, does not immediately toss out a critique whose conclusions he knows to be false; he first extracts whatever is true from the critique so that he can formulate a better conclusion of his own. Take the example of Principal Jones who hates sophomore student Johnny Smith and is predisposed to conclude that Johnny is a stupid kid and a delinquent. His school counselor, Mrs. Brown, who has had many conversations with Johnny, knows his assessment is far off the mark. Jones, however, points to Johnny’s report card of straight F’s and his record of truancy in school as proof for his conclusions. Mrs. Brown, while knowing that Principal Jones’ conclusions are wrong and probably fueled by malice, is nonetheless smart enough not to throw out the facts he has given her and is instead rightly troubled by them. Regardless of Principal Jones’ false conclusions, something wrong is happening to Johnny. Thus, armed with those facts, she ferrets out their true meaning.
Turns out, Johnny’s bum dad left his infirm mom for a new squeeze, leaving Johnny, his mother, and his two younger sisters short on cash. Johnny’s been working late nights to take care of his mother and siblings, and the exhaustion and lack of time coupled with bouts of severe depression over the situation have caused the otherwise bright-minded Johnny to stop caring about school. Principal Jones had a wrong conclusion, but Johnny had real problems.
Conservatives, in handling their critics, must first determine whether they are on the receiving end of baseless slander, or the slander of the subtler sort which consists of real problems but wrong conclusions. With regards to QAnon, if it is slander, it is to some extent at least the latter and not the former kind, and that means there are real problems that need diagnosing, however small or large they might turn out in the end to be.
The second thing which precludes us from completely dismissing concerns of QAnon in evangelicalism is the fact that even if most of the voices are the voices of conservative evangelicalism’s enemies, not all of them are. Some of those voices are the voices of its friends. That is a clear indication that something is probably going wrong that needs addressing. When your enemy tells you your zipper is down he may be lying, but when your friend does, you owe it to him and yourself to cast a downward glance.
Some among the most zealous of conservative evangelicalism’s culture warriors might protest that such forays into introspection are a waste of time: we’ve got a bunch of progressives who want to overthrow the Constitution, take away our liberties and indoctrinate our children—why waste time nitpicking about some conspiracy theory whose influence is probably overblown anyway? The answer is simple: a good general doesn’t just keep his troops in the right spot focused on the right target, he also dispatches medical offers to investigate whenever there are any credible reports of outbreak in the camp. He knows (like Napoleon learned all too well in his invasion of Russia) that the health of his troops has a lot to do with whether he wins battles or not. Or, to put it as the Apostle Paul did: a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough. Error left unchecked spreads and grows in destructive power, which is why you don’t ignore it when it is small but instead judiciously excise it from your midst.
Furthermore, if there is a sickness spreading in your part of town, you’re a fool if you don’t know what its symptoms are and how you can keep yourself from getting exposed to it. You’re also not much help to your friends and may even end up being a vector for their infection. If QAnon is a sickness spreading however slowly in conservative circles, then if you are a conservative you best know what its symptoms are and how to help yourself and others stay free of it.
If it’s beginning to sound like I am in the third group previously classified, to such charges my reply is: perhaps, and, not quite. The truth is, looking at QAnon as a sickness might not be the best level of analysis, though it’s not a bad one. It may be more germane to see the spread of QAnon as a symptom of a much larger social disease, one to which conservative evangelicals are not solely liable to catch, but one which is infecting various segments of the American populace as a whole, conservatives and progressives alike, in different ways and in different measures. And it is at this level of analysis we will work toward in future posts, by which we may then rightly understand not only the QAnon movement and any attendant dangers it may possess, but the health of American society as a whole.
Until then, it is well worth our time to consider that in a society becoming increasingly polarized as ours is, one in which more and more time is devoted exclusively to denigrating and becoming outraged by the other side, it will be an unpopular though not unwise practice to take a look at the moral and intellectual health of our own side from time to time. In the long run, it will be the side that does this best that “wins.”
Paths of Righteousness 