The eCrozier

Last week, I watched the film Catch-22. It had been decades since I’d last seen it. The film, based on the best-selling book by Joseph Heller, chronicles the absurdity people experience when they are caught up in war. One of the best lines from the book is this: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you!” That line came back to me after encountering Anna Merlan’s new book, Republic of Lies, which documents the long history of conspiracy theories in our country and their recent growth. These “theories,” aided by people’s gullibility and augmented by social media, serve to erode the public’s confidence in finding the truth of any situation.

My paternal grandfather was the purveyor of such theories. I remember him going on and on about the Roman Catholic Church’s secret plan to take over the world. He was an ex-Roman Catholic who had clearly been hurt in some way (but he never spoke of it) by the Church. When my grandfather would hear some church news, he’d make it somehow fit into the conspiracy theory he’d already adopted. That’s not to say the Roman Church has not engaged in conspiracies, especially around hiding clerical abuses. It has. But not in a convoluted, Dan Brown sort of way. Once these ideas get firmly entrenched in people’s worldview, then everything becomes further proof of what they’ve already decided to believe. So, “confirmation bias” sets in and they see exactly what they want to see. As Merlan points out, using the example of the so-called “Pizzagate” conspiracy, Edgar Welch showed up at the D.C. pizza restaurant armed and ready to liberate the children being secretly held there by Hillary Clinton. Of course, none of it was true.

What makes these theories digestible to the gullible is that there are sometimes facts around them that make them potentially believable. That, however, doesn’t make them true. For example, there’s the “birther” nonsense that Barack Obama had to endure. He had a foreign-born father, he lived for some of his early life outside the U.S., and he had an unusual (read: not Anglo-Saxon) name. So, for some people susceptible to conspiracy theories it was a “logical” leap to assume he wasn’t born in the U.S. And then, of course, there are those who vilely used people’s gullibility to score political points. They themselves don’t believe the nonsense, but they’ll sure use it for their own purposes.

I appreciated Merlan’s approach in her book. She didn’t take cheap shots at the people she documented who are caught up in believing this stuff. She set the recent growth of conspiracy theorists in the larger context of the culture wars we’re going through and the growing income inequality we’re experiencing. Those two trends are the prime ingredients in a stew of resentment and alienation for lots of people. And resentment and alienation are necessary components for whacky conspiracy theories to thrive.

As Christians, we must embrace the truth, even when it doesn’t conform to what we want to believe. Allowing our resentments or feelings of alienation to lead us into conspiracy theories is a direct denial of what we say we believe about God’s Providence, namely, that for all the troubles of the world, God’s purposes for the creation will always prevail. And no alien told me to say that.

+Scott