“what started as a baseless conspiracy on obscure platforms has migrated into the mainstream. It has influenced rhetoric and policy debates….The foundational belief of many of the QAnon followers is that Trump is a heroic figure fighting the elite pedophile ring.” - The Conversation
“Yes, QAnon believers allege all kinds of wild things about Satan’s work in American politics. This is not the same thing as the scores of mainstream believers… who will testify that they see the work of the Devil in some mind, body and spirit warping trends in modern life.” - GetReligion
“New York Times journalist Ruth Graham says many pastors are being pressured to resist vaccines and mask mandates, embrace Trump’s claims about election fraud and adopt QANON-based conspiracy theories.” - NPR
“While these believers are racially, religiously, and politically diverse, the unifying beliefs are that their way of life is under attack and that they might be willing to resort to violence to defend their vision of the country.” - RNS
“The poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, released Monday, found that 23 percent of white evangelicals and 26 percent of Republicans believe three major tenets of the QAnon theory” - C.Headlines
“No matter the provenance of the recent interest in Byzantium from America’s white supremacists and conspiracy theorists, one thing is clear: It is based on a very warped idea of the Byzantine Empire that has emerged out of the empire’s fraught place in our histories, caught between ancient and medieval, spirituality and bureaucracy.” - The Conversat
“There was also significant support among white evangelicals for the claim that members of antifa, or anti-fascist activists, were ‘mostly responsible’ for the attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to the survey conducted by the conservative American Enterprise Institute.” - RNS
“I’ve been asked this question more times and by more people than I can count over the past several weeks. …First of all, realize that the wisdom is true that one cannot reason someone out of something one was never reasoned into in the first place. …There is no easy step-by-step argument to pull someone out of a Facebook echo chamber.
“Granted, the alt-right is concerned about much of what I am concerned about. The alt-right opposes much of what I oppose. But sometimes the enemy of my enemy is still my enemy.” - P&D
“As QAnon and other conspiracy theories begin to lose traction, pastors and church leaders face a decision. We can pretend that conspiracy theories were never really a threat to our congregation and simply move on unchanged…. Or, we can engage our people refocusing their attention back to the gospel and learn how we need to disciple better.” - Stetzer & McDonald
