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

When fellowship is superior to facts.

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I’m going to share with you the question I get more than virtually any other. It comes from sons and daughters, husbands and wives, uncles and aunts. It’s a simple question with a hard, complicated, and often completely unsatisfactory answer. Here it is:

A person I love is deeply committed to conspiracies. What can I do? 

Sometimes the question is followed by another. What resources can I share with them to prove that vaccines are safe? Or that COVID is real? Or that the election was lawful? I’ve had a tendency to respond to the question with a question. Is your loved one merely conspiracy-curious, or are they conspiracy committed? 

If conspiracy-curious—they’re coming to you with genuine questions about misinformation—my advice has been simple: Engage enthusiastically. In other words, don’t be alarmed by bizarre questions. Instead, view them as an opportunity to have honest and genuine conversations. I love it when someone asks me, for example, if late night “ballot dumps” turned the election for Biden. The question communicates an open mind. 

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  1. Rev. Matthew Young

    Just caught up to this -- it is so brilliantly helpful. As an evangelical Christian pastor -- and the son of evangelical Christian parents who have embraced conspiracy theories -- this hits home and I will come back to its insights again and again. Thank you, as always, dear brother David.

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    David Burke

    There is tribalism and then there is tribalism. There is party affiliation and then there is party affiliation. There is religious practice and then there is religious practice.

    But with all due sincerest respect, the White Evangelical Christian Body seems predisposed to cultish adherence. Merely regard the slavish devotion to many of their ministers and adoration of trump, regardless of all the horrid harm they have caused, and peel the onion from there. There seems to be a fervor for a severe father figure. Which one would think odd as they present the Gospels of the Good News of forgiveness and acceptance and inclusion yet live in fear of the wrathful God and people unlike themselves. The practice of their faith in the Mystery, the core of Christianity, is taken to an untenable extreme. It seems as though they must understand nothing else at all to practice well.

    One could write a book about the streams and rills and creeks of odd off-shoot practices and tangled understanding of Christianity from the isolated hills and hollers of the southern past that have poured into the river of Christianity that is the modern Southern White Evangelical Christian Movement.

    The whole - and I emphasize whole as of course there is much individual exception - of the demographic is not fully cemented in, nor seems to be concerned with reality as experienced by most people. It has always been a fervent facet of the American Christian experience, with some tendrils of fanaticism. It’s just now that it seems the tendrils are becoming heavy branches.

    Reminds one of the extremist factions of the Muslim faith that so unnerve us.

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  3. DivingTurtle

    I think you are seriously underestimating the power of surveillance capitalism to communicate directly with the elephant’s fear and outrage. Until we tackle that, I don’t believe there’s any hope of reaching Christian conspiracy theorists. Everyone is susceptible to surveillance capitalism, but I think that fundamentalist (or evangelical) Christians are especially susceptible, given that their preferred ‘cognitive style’ is reliance on authority, and a strong preference for faith (feeling) over reason (thinking). I strongly recommend that you read the article by Shoshana Zuboff (The Coup We Are Not Talking About) in the New York Times (29Jan21).

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    George.Rozes

    Anyone still have hope??

    A majority of Trump voters, 54 percent, say they feel more loyalty to him than to the Republican Party at 34 percent, according to a new Suffolk University/USA TODAY poll. If the former president formed a third party, 46 percent would support it, while 27 percent would stay in the GOP, and 27 percent say they aren’t sure. Just 17 percent of Trump voters surveyed say Biden was legitimately elected, while 73 percent say he was not; and only 26 percent say Republicans in Congress should work with the president. As for the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, 58 percent of Trump voters say they believe the lie that it was an antifa-inspired attack.

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    1. Tm S.

      I don't think the people who hold these ideas will be "converted" to the truth. They are likely to become hardened and events and characters will become further mythologized. These ideas will have to die off with the mortality of those who hold them. I am ready for an extended period of a post-truth, ahistorical era in America. Objective reality is dead for partisan politics and tribalism is the overwhelming filter for truth.

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      1. ๆๆ

        I reluctantly agree. I also think preparing yourself for an extended period of post-truth is maybe an optimistic take.
        Because you have to be comfortable to afford to ignore objective reality.
        I think war, either civil or otherwise, is another way these mutually exclusive bubbles could burst

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  5. Adam Ewy

    “Yet it is folly to argue against determined hardness; eloquence may strike the ear, and the language of sorrow draw forth the tear of compassion, but nothing can reach the heart that is steeled with prejudice.”

    — Thomas Paine, American Crisis.

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  6. Very Old Grumpy Guy

    Great stuff, again from David. No personal upside, all downside. I guess he didn't get the memo about how we are all supposed to comport ourselves these days...

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  7. ๆๆ

    David French, thanks for this. I find you essential reading these days, and consider your work and your general posture to be absolutely vital bulwarks against many of the destructive currents of our times.
    This piece in particular belongs among your most important works, in my opinion. Rebuilding a shared epistemological foundation is pretty critical if we're to have a functioning american and global society.

    I have my doubts about whether we have the collective will to do so, before things get even worse. It is such hard work saving a soul. We simply don't have enough time to soothe that many elephants. Or, to put it another way, most people will not allow themselves to be moved by a passing saint. If they are to be moved, you must be willing to embrace the whole of them. And besides the constraints of time, people tend to be jealous and insecure and want our saviors to be soul-specific.

    Are we willing to do this? Are we willing to make the effort to know and reckon with them? To give them a new imma?
    There are, after all, hundreds of millions on our side. We do not lack for company here in our hemisphere.
    I'm not sure we're willing to do so, given our current cultural and technological and economic constraints and imperatives. So what do we do?
    I proposed to a friend that perhaps a hybrid online-offline verification system, where each individual is responsible for knowing a certain number of others, and that these are linked, so that we can all vouch for each other's authenticity and can verify for ourselves within the system that our parts are legit.. Something like this, piggybacked on Facebook I groaningly suggest?
    I find it an unsatisfying solution. But I know of know other but sheer unadulterated love and that shit ain't cheap.
    Anyway, thank you. Keep it up. We need you.
    You are loved

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  8. Diane Francis

    The Holy Bible was never fact-checked and much of the world's mentality is based on faith, superstition, and blind faith. It's human nature, unfortunately.

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  9. Daniel

    I find pieces like this counterproductive - not because I disagree, but because you are not addressing the Trumpers core arguments on their own terms and by failing to do so, you are preaching to the choir.

    Pick a trump liar (i.e. John Eastman) and rip up his arguments.

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    Bill Nelson

    Faith, all faiths, are based on belief (which is appropriate). It is when belief overcomes rational analysis that it is a problem, and reason finds it hard to overcome belief.
    John Paul II produced a really good encyclical titled “Faith and Reason”. It provides an excellent description of the interaction of faith with reason (both science and philosophy). It is a very technical read, worth the effort.
    https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/education/catholic-contributions/fides-et-ratio-faith-and-reason.html

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    1. Tm S.

      Isn't Faith required to overcome rational analysis in its most basic beliefs? If not, then what is the "leap of faith?" Faith and Reason may be seen by the person of faith to be complementary (a good thing in my book), but they are fundamentally separate and distinct from one another. No one could have been said to have "deduced" God, Jesus, Allah, Nirvana, etc. Belief without proof is the core of faith, isn't it? Once we cross the threshold of believing things without proof, how do separate the Wacky Cultists (bad) from the Faithful (good)?

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