Evangelicals are known for sharing their faith and standing for truth. But these virtues can turn into vices that threaten our gospel witness.
Are Christians especially primed for conspiracy theories during this crisis? Are evangelical especially susceptible?
Many are shocked (or not shocked at all) with how frequently conservative Christians share conspiracy theories online.
Why are we doing this? And I say “we” because I’m talking about my people.
It is easy for the pundits to chalk this up as another instance of evangelical stupidity, gullibility, or willful ignorance, or to just focus on political factors.
But these are tired and reductionistic explanations.
So let’s look a little closer at 3 evangelical virtues that can turn into conspiracy theory vices—noting that these vices work alongside the 3 common explanations for why people follow conspiracy theories (also see this lengthy post by Joe Forrest):
- Epistemic Motive: Conspiracy theories give meaning to a chaotic, random, or overwhelming situation.
- Existential Motive: This meaning makes us feel safe and in control, which reduces anxiety.
- Social Motive: Conspiracy theories make us feel in the know, feel part of an exclusive group who understands what is really going on.
The 3 evangelical virtues that I want to look at that can turn into vices are:
- From Witnessing to Speculating
- From Suppressing the Truth to Spreading a Theory
- From Understanding the Times to Reading the Tea Leaves
And for clarity, by conspiracy theory I mean “the belief that there are groups that meet in secret to plan and carry out malevolent goals” (via Kendra Cherry).
And I write as an evangelical pastor and theologian who appreciates these virtues, but wants to guard against these unintended vices, which plague evangelicalism far beyond promoting conspiracy theories.
1) From Witnessing to Speculating
Witnessing to the Truth
Evangelicals emphasize sharing their faith, or “witnessing”. But the virtue of witnessing to the truth can become the vice of speculating on theories.
There are two aspects of witnessing we need must think about.
First, witnessing to God’s work in the (western secular) world is inherently weird.
Among other things, Christians believe in the incarnation of God as a human, the resurrection from the dead, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, among a host of others. And we witness to them, we share them with others who don’t think along these lines.
In fact, evangelicals often assume a certain level of resistance to when witnessing to an unwelcome truth, and are now used to pushing through this resistance.
Second, witnessing assumes a certain kind of first hand experience to which we testify (1 John 1:1-3).
A “testimony” is the story of how God tangibly acted in our lives and what it meant for us. We witness to what we have experienced first hand. We don’t just rely information learned from others.
This is the evangelical virtue of witnessing.
Speculating on a Theory
This virtue turns into a vice when we take the first part of witnessing (sharing an unwelcome truth) and separate it from the second (sharing a personal experience of first hand knowledge).
Conspiracy theories are just that, theories. And we hear about them from other people—supposed experts. We don’t have first hand experience of the “cover up” or the “plan”. We didn’t sit in on the “meeting” where “they” decided what would happen to the world.
To believe a conspiracy theory is to take someone else’s word for it. It is to believing their “theory” and treating it as our “truth”.
But these theorists are just fitting together facts that they have pulled from various places, speculating each step of the way.
Result: The Wrong Kind of Foolishness
With the same gusto that we seek to share the gospel, many evangelical share conspiracy theories as a way of “helping” or “informing” others.
But rather than being known for the foolishness of gospel truth (1 Cor. 1:18), we become known for promoting a theory.
2) From Suppressing the Truth to Spreading a Theory
But being seen as foolish often doesn’t bother us evangelicals because we know that those without faith live in the “futility of their minds” and “they are darkened in their understanding” (Eph. 4:17-18).
Suppressing the Truth
This might be hard to call an evangelical virtue, but we live within the reality that people “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (Rom. 1:18), regularly avoiding inconvenient truths
At its best, this is a virtue when it promotes compassion, patience, and understanding for people resistant to spiritual realities and truths about God.
This reality should make us diligent in becoming, like Paul, “all things to all people” so that we “may by all means save some” (1 Cor. 9:22).
Spreading a Theory
But this virtue becomes a vice when it is separated from the revelation God has given us (through creation and the Bible), and replaced with less reputable sources.
When promoting a conspiracy theory, the evangelical mindset is tempted to think that no one else sees it because “they are suppressing the truth in unrighteousness.”
But this is a vicious (hence, a vice) overreach of the idea of “suppressing the truth”. Paul was focused primarily on what people think of God and what it means for their daily lives. These people—and many people still—were “exchanging the truth of God for a lie” (Rom. 1: 25).
But promoting a conspiracy theory is not to get behind the lie (the conspiracy) to a truth that has been suppressed. Rather it is to be taken in by a tenuous string of fast and theories.
Result: Focusing on the wrong thing
To promote a conspiracy theory (even as a curiosity) is not to stand for God’s truth while others are suppressing it. Rather it is to bear false witness to the truth by focusing on the wrong thing (the enemies) instead of focusing on God (the victor).
3) From Understanding the Times to Reading the Tea Leaves
But why are these speculations so enticing?
Understanding the Times
They are appealing because evangelicals pride themselves for being like the men of Issachar and like the Bereans.
You don’t know how many times I was told that the church (the embattled evangelical church) needed to be like the men of Issachar, “who understood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron. 12:32).
Or that I needed to be like the Bereans, of noble character, who received Paul’s message, but also “examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true” (Acts 17:11).
“Understanding the times” and cross checking the “Scriptures every day” was a critical posture that encouraged us evangelicals to always be on our guard so we wouldn’t be taken in by superficial theologies not based on God’s word.
We were trained to always look beneath the layers of current events for what was really going on and how we could partner with God in this work.
This is the evangelical virtue of discernment according to God’s word and work in the world.
This virtue already flirts with becoming a vice in evangelicalism in two ways.
First is dispensational premillennialism and it’s extravagant speculations about the chronology of the end times . As one raise in fundamentalism I am quite familiar with all the charts explaining all the biblical prophecies and the ages of God’s work (see all these charts of Clarence Larkin, circa 1920, snd see this for the brave of hermeneutical heart).
Second is the evangelical suspicion of science stemming from the fundamentalist-modernist controversy and the Scopes Trial.
Reading the Tea Leaves
But this virtue turns into a vice as we turn from understanding God’s work in the world (which reasonable people can disagree about) to unmasking the supposed hidden villains of world history.
The turns into a vice as we shift from what God is doing in the world to what the “enemy” is doing—either the political/cultural enemy, or the spiritual enemy, but most often it is both.
This vice seeks to peal away the veneer of everyday life (and all its complexity), and replace it with a conspiracy that ties everything together—a captivating simplicity and that everyone has missed (or better, they are “suppressing the truth in unrighteousness” [see the previous vice]).
Result: Mistaking Forth-Telling for Fortune Telling
Paying attention to conspiracy theories are little more than reading the tea leaves (fortune-telling), rather than truly understanding the times (forth-telling God’s work).
Advice for an Anxious World
1) Share what you know God has done for you.
For those already anxious about world events, sharing a conspiracy theory will probably only heighten fear rather than help it. And it doesn’t focus people on what God is doing.
So share what God is teaching you, or how you have seen God work recently in your life.
If you don’t have anything to share along those lines then you probably need to stop reading about conspiracy theories and start walking with the Lord again.
2) Focus on what you know (the gospel)
Conspiracy theories suggest we are on the edge of a catastrophic defeat. But the gospel is the declaration of an unlikely and wonderful victory.
We need live into the actual victory of Jesus over sin, death, and over all those conspiring against the will of God. It is standing on this truth—not vacuous theories—that we become more than conquerors (Romans 8:37).
Living in this victory is to receive the peace and power of Jesus through the Spirit (John 20:21-22; Acts 1:8).
3) Live in Love
Conspiracy theories do not promote love. They promote fear, suspicion, and division. Without love we are nothing more than noisy gongs and clanging cymbals (1 Cor. 13:1).
Rather than a fear that suspects all things, shuns all things, fears all things, and runs from all things, we need to promote a love that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor. 13: 7).
Let this kind of love—in the face of all circumstances or supposed conspiracies—be the kind of foolishness we evangelicals are known for.