QAnon, Conspiracies, and Discipling the Way Out
In a recent USA Today article, “I concluded that ‘we need pastors, leaders, and everyday Christians to address this conspiracy, and others like it, before others are fooled.’ With this in mind, I wanted to address some pushback and offer some steps leaders can take.” - Ed Stetzer
Recently the talk of conspiracies and the slander that often surrounds them has revived with the popularity of QAnon. I must admit that I know little about “Q” as it is often called. I have however spoken to a well educated person who has been following Q for a couple of years.
This person explained that many of the Q theories are not actually being promoted by Q him or herself. No one actually knows who Q is or if it is even one person or a number of people. Further, Q does not actually promote the conspiracy theories, but instead asks a number of questions to try to get people to do their own investigative journalism. The “conspiracy theory” behind Q the individual is that this person or group of people has access to information that others do not have and they want others to start investigating with hope that even more information will be found.
An example of this recently occurred when Q hinted that a famous celebrity should be looked into. Soon Q followers were finding all kinds of Twitter messages that promoted pedophilia. Soon others were trying to make a connection between this person and Jeffery Epstein. This led to the woman deleting much of her twitter account. Soon media sources were reporting that this was nothing but slander based on the Q conspiracy. Many had screen shot her original messages and and the scandal is still not over.
Q was successful in getting others to expose the vulgar pedophilic messages this woman had posted. Still, there is no way to police all the other speculation that inevitably comes forth. The deleted twitter messages were solid evidence. Other speculation is often slanderous rumor.
As Christians we should not want to hide evidence of evil behavior. At the same time we should condemn the spread of slanderous rumor. Whether it is an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory about our president colluding with Russia or a celebrity going to Epstein’s island, we must be careful not to slander innocent parties without actual evidence.
One of the challenges with a phenomena like Q, is that anyone can take a little information and then jump to wild conclusions and promote it in the name of Q. In other words, they are speculating based on what they read from Q even though Q never even promoted what they were speculating about. Suddenly there are people sharing ideas that they just came up with on their own in the name of Q.
Since there is so much unknown abut Q, the question is whether or not Q itself is evil- even part of some sinister conspiracy, or if people are simply using the information given by Q in an irresponsible way. Since we need to be careful about slandering others, I am left in somewhat of a conundrum. I want to warn about some of the dangerous results of Q without speaking untruth about other aspects.
As I read about people getting caught up in Q and promoting slander, I have to wonder if the real problem is Q itself, or an understanding of the sin of slander. If we steer people away from Q but do not deal with the real heart issues of slander, then we have not ministered to them as effectively as we should have. I pray that this be a lesson for how we ought to live as Christians, regardless of what we read in the internet.
A lot of good thoughts there.
Of course, Q him/herself could easily end all this, so I don’t have any sympathy for what might be incorrectly attributed to him/her.
On the whole, my take is that we have absolutely no need for Q’s “contributions” to hunting down alleged evils. There are thousands of hardworking, trained individuals who make their living doing that kind of work, and if we want to help out, we should put our energy into encouraging elected officials not to “defund” them, etc.
But we have laws and due process for a reason. Many reasons. Q Anon fans should dust off a good Civics textbook. Is our justice system perfect? Far from it. There’s never been a perfect one. Is it better than rumor and vigilantism? On the whole, absolutely… for so many reasons. Not least: what would you like to happen if you got falsely accused of some horrendous crime or if some cowardly anonymous individual nudged a bunch of zealots into investigating you? Would you want it all over social media or would you want a fair, fact-based investigation and trial?
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
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