I’ve heard a little about QAnon in the wild, primarily that one of my congressional candidates has favorable views on it. World’s current cover story reports the rising concerns among Christians over friends and family members who profess to believe in the QAnon conspiracy. As I understand it, they believe an secret society of Satanists is running the world or pushing toward an evil one world government and Donald Trump is the chosen one to defeat them. I’ve read that he has already defeated many of them in secret ways the public may never know.

“In the pandemic lockdown, QAnon accounts exploded in popularity as people spent more time online,” Emly Belz writes. “Many Christians have sunk so deeply into Q that it fills a lot of their conversations and most of their time online.”

The theories spun are the sticky, tangled kind. I don’t want to try to refute specific claims here, but I do want to talk about conspiracy theories in general, their uselessness, and how they run contrary to what we know of human nature. First, let’s look at what conspiracies actually are.

You could easily come to think a conspiracy theory is just wild hare, an elaborate explanation for a particular disaster with an unsatisfactory explanation or a series of unthinkable events. The Kennedy assassination, the Zodiac killer, and why Firefly was cancelled are prime subjects for theories like this. The official explanations are either incomplete or unsatisfactory, so some people construct better theories.

Conspiracy theories argue that the powerful have fed us these incomplete explanations because the lie is better than the truth at maintaining the status quo. They remain theories because investigators cannot unearth enough facts to prove them; if the claims were to be revealed as true, we would call start called the theories “history.”

The world’s most famous actual conspiracy led to the death of Christ. Temple leaders, including the high priest, wanted Jesus of Nazareth dead for political, and ultimately spiritual, reasons. They were powerful men, but they didn’t have that kind of power. If Herod or Pilate or Caesar Tiberius had wanted him dead, they could have given the order, but the high priest didn’t have the power to execute people. Plus he didn’t have the backing of all of the temple leaders. Plus the optics weren’t right; too many people loved this wandering rabbi. So a few of them conspired behind the backs of other temple leaders to conduct a mock trial, get him before Pilate, lobby for his execution, and have him dead before Monday. That’s a conspiracy.

The Gunpowder Plot that launched the face of a thousand Guy Fawkes was an attempt to blow up the House of Lords with the king and many supporters with it. They had to plot in secret because they didn’t have any real power to direct or overthrow their own government. They had to try unexpected brute force. What they should have tried was some explosive ideas, but with all of this gunpower lying around, why let it go waste?

This is how conspiracies actually work (or don’t). These secret cabals didn’t have the power to accomplish their goals outright, so they did what they could in the shadows. Compare that to modern day China murdering and abusing the Uighurs for the last few years. They aren’t conspiring against them; they are directly abusing them and lying to the world about it. The only secret is what the outside world knows about it. This is not like the QAnon claims of the powerful directing our society through shadow strings, celebrity endorsements, and trafficking networks. We’ll get to a better explanation in another post.

As Abe Lincoln’s first VP, Hannibal Hamlin, famously said, “Once the twenty-four news gets ahold of this, there’ll be a conspirator in every pew. Verily.”

Photo by Mohammad Hoseini Rad on Unsplash