Why Is it So Hard to Reach the Christian Conspiracy Theorist?

I’m reminded of when my “nonsense detector” was pegged while a pastor at my church was using the (false) story of the lift bridge operator crushing his son in the gears—I’d looked up the bridges that existed in the area, looked up whether there are contemporary news reports, did some thinking on how railroad signaling is done (the first thing you do when opening a bridge is to signal it’s opening well before anything moves), the time it requires for such a bridge to operate, a quick look at Snopes, and everything I saw said “this is nonsense”. I presented this to the pastor, and the response was not to take a look at the data, but was rather to simply attack Snopes.

Unrelated on its surface, but it’s symptomatic of our “group bias”, and the degree to which we will believe things not because we have good evidence, but because it’s “what our group believes”. I see a ton of this with regards to the coronavirus as well—sadly on both sides of the shutdown and mask arguments.