Conspiracy Theories: Navigating the Swamp

What a strange year 2020 has been.

Whether urgent pleas not to be self-centered and to abide by shelter in place orders, equally urgent concerns about the seeming ability of one virus to wipe away the rights of American citizens like a hand sanitizer-soaked sponge across a whiteboard, or gallows humor that seems to be getting a pass as people understand it's that kind of season, my FB newsfeed has been covered up in content about the coronavirus epidemic since late February.

For several days last week much of the focus was on "Plandemic," a video project I had not heard of until a few people on my newsfeed emerged to promote the trailer, and about 2 to 3 times as many people immediately began sharing pre-refutations and urging others not to share it or talk about it. Of course, because of how human psychology works, that made me very interested in it.

I have not watched that trailer, though I plan to do so later. I have already seen one video explaining the Buddhist/New age spiritual beliefs of one of the producers and that Christians may want to be very cautious and do more research before supporting the project. Yet to underline the point of this whole post, when I went back to watch it again, I found that video is no longer available for public viewing on Youtube. Does that make it more or less trustworthy? We cannot know.

1. The Problem: Why I'm Writing This

As a rule I do not spend much time reading about specific conspiracy theories. But I am familiar with how the broader "conspiratorial" mindset works. I was aware of the term "the narrative" long before it entered the popular consciousness, and the Daily Show hadn't yet run those clips showing journalists across many various channels repeating exactly the same lines with which they had clearly all been supplied. If you haven't seen what I'm talking about, a couple years ago there was a dramatic example of the same thing, where journalists on dozens of local stations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting Group were all required to read the same statement on how biased, non-mainstream news online was "dangerous to our democracy". (Apparently the ominous irony was entirely lost on whoever wrote the statement all those news stations were required to read)

So conspiracy theories have become increasingly popular, because more and more people are becoming aware that something is up, on a large scale. Something that, prior to the internet, it would have been very difficult to figure out. When journalists all speak in lockstep, the sheer effort it would take to compare different channels and somehow get that information out to people 30 years ago would make you easily dismissed as a crazy obsessive person. Now, we can all watch these videos on YouTube (before they get deleted) and wonder what's going on.

There is no way to prove conspiracies on the global, generational-spanning scale that are being alleged by innumerable conspiracies theories and schools of thought. We don't have access to that information, and can only choose to believe either what the authorities tell us, which tends to be, uh, "comfortingly consistent," or else what those people who say the authorities are lying tell us, which is of almost endless variety, some that is reluctantly plausible and much that is anxiously fanciful.

But what is quite clear at this point is that the information we are presented with via mainstream media channels has been carefully curated. That realization encourages people to turn to non-mainstream sources, like people in Nazi-occupied Europe subjected to Third Reich propaganda but secretly tuning into VOA or other underground radio broadcasts to get the real news. In fact our situation today is very much like that, because that wasn't exactly the real news either. There was no "real news" about the war to listen to, you either accepted that Allied reports or underground radio (or the German communists, with their "People's Radio," etc.) were telling you the truth, or not.

One difference for us today is that the internet allows "mixed-truth" information to be disseminated at such a rapid pace that there's no way to keep on top of it all. There are not a few radio channels, there are a myriad of channels, some saying the same things and some disagreeing with each other. (Not to mention there is now AI software that can cobble together basic articles and even news reports with visuals and audio voiceovers, making it even easier to dump literally fake news into the turbid waters of online information.)

Social media has altered the equation too, by making these stories show up on your "own" news feed, shared by people you know. There was a popular late night radio show called Coast to Coast AM (I only caught it once or twice, I recall one caller was very interested in lizard people), hosted by Art Bell, and the fringe ideas shared there had their mysterious appeal based partly on their fringe-ness. Now the same process by which morally fringe behavior has become normalized in the eyes of society is being repeated in the world of news, where previously recognized authorities and standards have been dethroned, and now the concepts of "true/factually accurate" and "untrue" are being eroded even more quickly than "right" and "wrong" behavioral standards were in previous decades.

Bell's current spiritual successors sharing what used to be considered fringe theories on their various podcasts and shows are only part of the wave of unverified news and alarmist articles now coming from mainstream sources too. Much of it is designed intentionally to appeal to our sense that we're being lied to, that something big is going on and "the powers that be" are trying to keep us from figuring it out. They often portray themselves like those old underground radio broadcasts, brave men and women trying to get the truth to you despite opposition from the Deep State or Shadow Government or whoever.

To be interested in that sort of content is a very human trait. Just like it's a very human problem to be addicted to looking at your phone too much, because they are specifically designed to take advantage of human psychology to addict you, so the draw toward the world of conspiracy theory is too, for reasons we'll delve into later. That idea of "underground, government-discouraged sources" is also psychologically appealing to Americans in general and Christians in particular. It has nothing to do with the content being true or false, and everything to do with many people being pre-disposed to look favorably on information coming from that angle, and wanting to pass it along to others.

Art Bell, harbinger of the era when fringe news went mainstream

2. The Problem: The Antifragility of Conspiracy Theories

Another reason I'm writing this is that as soon as the Plandemic video trailer began popping up, various Christian outlets began popping up quickly denouncing it. This interested me, because a term those people in the world of non-aligned thought use is "gatekeeping." That is to say, there are people who self-identify or are popularly identified as being "on your side/part of your movement" but who actually exist to supply the appropriate rhetoric to make sure people don't stray too far from the narrative they're supposed to be following.

To be clear, I don't think that's what these editorials by big Christian websites are doing. I think articles like this one contain the genuine thoughts of the writer, who is probably tired of people in his congregation sharing totally unverifiable stories. But that article and others I've seen (Ed Stetzer has written multiple times for Christianity Today calling for Christians to repent and stop spreading conspiracy theories), and the angles from which they approach the problem, seemed a little misguided on a fundamental level. This from Stetzer's article:

"Yet in perpetuating the Seth Rich conspiracy, some Christians again are looking silly. The conspiracies were debunked by independent investigations such as websites like PolitiFact and FactCheck.org. And if that isn’t convincing enough, Fox News itself retracted their original story, stating, 'The article was not subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require” and “was found not to meet those standards.'"

Oooh, fact checking websites, and even Fox News itself! Aren't you embarrassed, Christians who believe we can't trust the mainstream media, to hear that the mainstream media has cleared itself of any suspicion? Such failures in perception are one reason I'm writing this article, because they aren't going to help their target audience.

Antifragility, which I have written about in the past, is that quality of things that benefit from disorder, shocks, and apparent damage instead of being hurt by them. The most common metaphor is that of a Hydra from Greek mythology. Cutting off one head only leads to more growing.

A conspiracy theory has a kind of antifragility. This can be seen in that having accepted it, not only are people mentally inclined to defend against every attack on the theory's validity, but the very effort expended in trying to debunk it looks like more proof that it's true. Any idea that says "They'll try to stop me from telling you this, but--" has the potential to gain this kind of antifragility, if a widespread sense of recognition for it emerges. Fringe theories become very powerful if they can ever escape the fringe, and denouncing them as fringe/hearsay/debunked, as Stetzer and others have done, only increases the rate of their spread. As Nassim Taleb (developer of the concept of antifragility) has remarked, for a book to be publicly banned can only help its sales.

I'm sure that some people do share conspiracy theories out of "hatred for Hillary Clinton" as Stetzer claimed in that article, and that is not Christian behavior. We are commanded to love our enemies, and spreading unverified, negative stories about someone in order to discredit them is the sin of slander. But some others shared them because that "banned" motivation: they were trying to get the secret information out despite the blanket of government misinformation.

3. The Problem: False vs. True Prophets

As a rule I do not promote or share specific conspiracy theory-type stories about Hillary or vaccines or 5G or COVID-19, even when they seem probably true. This is because to paraphrase the common dictum about wrestling with pigs, when you enter the muddy arena of semi-truths and rumors and false cover stories and conspiracies to wrestle with swamp creatures, you just get muddy too, and besides, the swamp creatures like it.

That being said, there is a difference between conspiracy theories and "explanations we don't approve of." The emergence of COVID-19 has a lot of weird things associated with it. We shouldn't believe every story connecting the dots by dragging in the Rothschilds and the kitchen sink too, but I also believe there is so much geopolitical dynamite attached to a pandemic that spread out of China that we'll probably never be told the real story by any mainstream news source. We will be told whatever stories make people feel towards China, or Trump, or the CDC, or other parties, in the way that whoever is paying the salaries of those media institutions wants people to feel. That's not a conspiracy theory, that's an observation of how politics and media work in 2020.

I am working as a full-time missionary, and if I am informed that the fallen world is menaced in some new way by fallen leaders working in league together, the best thing I can do is spread the gospel and strengthen churches, not wade into the darkness of the swamp. Behind every corrupt, lying, neo-babelonian politician are 100 others. I would rather lead 10 people to Christ and train them to lead 10 each in turn, and so on. The Church is the ultimate antifragile institution on earth, and it has endured and grown through many centuries of stability and chaos.

In Old Testament Israel, true prophets did not exist alone. There were lots of false prophets spreading disinformation. Some could do so convincingly, with visual aids:

"Now the king of Israel and Jehoshaphat the king of Judah were sitting on their thrones, arrayed in their robes, at the threshing floor at the entrance of the gate of Samaria, and all the prophets were prophesying before them. And Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah made for himself horns of iron and said, “Thus says the Lord, ‘With these you shall push the Syrians until they are destroyed.’” And all the prophets prophesied so and said, “Go up to Ramoth-gilead and triumph; the Lord will give it into the hand of the king.” 1 Kings 22:10-12

In 2020, you and I and anyone with a TV or internet connection are like kings on thrones. Below us are many voices "prophesying" (professing to reveal the truth to us), clamoring for our attention, and we must decide who speaks truly or falsely. The fact that lots of them are saying the same thing does not mean it is true, and in fact none of them may be right, and we may need to call for, as happens in this story, someone else who tells us what we don't want to hear.

That should be a truth-tell we never lose sight of: the Truth will always have some things we don't want to hear. If it sounds like exactly what we expected, if it confirms what we want to believe, it's probably mixed with falsehood. If a conspiracy theory seems "too pat" and seeks to bolster my prejudices against someone, it's probably just addictive, artificially-sweetened fodder created for my mental consumption. Beware of those who offer those snacks for free, it leads to mental obesity.

As for those false prophets, scripture tells us that the proof of a true prophet is that their word comes to pass. So when I hear someone putting out a conspiratorial-type theory that sounds like it may have some real information behind it, or is in line with things I already know to be true, I may give it my ear, but if later it proves to be untrue (which is different than "the story goes away"), then I know that they are at worst a false prophet, deserving of censure, and at best a peddler of unhealthy snacks, best avoided.

4. Christians and Conspiracies: Planned vs Randomness

There are two major competing theories in the West to explain the world we see around us. One is that it all emerged gradually, through changes that took unimaginable lengths of time to slowly happen. Modern science assumes this; the theory of evolution is an obvious example, and even the Big Bang has become problematic for some who want to upgrade the scientific method into an all-encompassing worldview because our universe exploding from an infinitesimal primordial nugget into its current state is too like a creation event that needed an outside force to kick it off.

The other major perspective is that things as we see them now came into being much more rapidly, and could do so by means of important and specific events. In Genesis we see the forming and populating of the earth with life by God as a work He began and completed. There is also Noah's flood and the vast effect on the world that it had, and the languages being divided at Babel. These events dramatically speed up the timeline of reality and human history as we know it to lengths of time comprehensible to our minds (We have no real way to conceptualize one million years or even one hundred thousand, let alone a trillion years)

There is no use trying to reconcile these two perspectives. Either things came about through randomness, which required a basically infinite supply of time to allow them to happen, or they came about through a plan, which required a basically infinite supply of power to accomplish. Whether the design took a long time (Old Earth Creationism) or the randomness also involved near-infinite amounts of applied power (Alien-creator-race theories) is not as important, but we can see both groups trying to massage the arbitrary infinite-ness of one factor (Incomprehensible depths of time, or God-like/Divine power) by balancing it with the other.

As we think about conspiracy theories, it's important to recognize that Christians are typically going to be coming from a worldview that understands there to be a Divine plan behind reality, not that things gradually arose naturally and for no particular reason. Yet in the West they are typically also immersed in a society and culture that holds the latter view.

Modern news is often presented from that Random/Uncaused angle that "things just happen in the world and we tell you about them." Stories about lone gunmen, often the subject of conspiracy theories, are a good example of this. We are assured that it was just one random person who did a terrible thing but it's over now. But with the mainstream media deservedly losing credibility, people begin to search for other explanations behind the story. Perhaps this wasn't a random incident.

And now people are more open than ever to the idea that perhaps major events didn't even take place, that the whole event and news story was faked for some ulterior motive. Maybe there is some big plan, with lots of power behind it, and this is one small piece of it. It would be wrong to say this is unbiblical thinking, as studying a scriptural account of reality in some sense trains our minds to think in this way. (How does this particular story or event fit into the big picture, long-term plan?)

However, the Bible also gives us a balancing principle: Things act according to their nature and the laws that govern them. A good tree bears good fruit, and an evil tree bears evil fruit. Sinful people do sinful things, and so it doesn't require a conspiracy to explain why a few people might do especially wicked things, or want to cooperate to do evil. Whenever we are informed of a "secret master plan" as the explanation for various events, we should remind ourselves that this need not always be the case, and that God's sovereignty means that even if evil people have come up with a secret plan, it will not succeed unless He permits it, to accomplish His greater purposes.


5. Christians and Conspiracies: Selective Listening

Anyone who grew up going to church in the U.S. is probably quite familiar with the debate I mentioned above, between the narrative of evolution's gradual, emergent changes and a universe made quickly into something much like its current form through a specific creation event and subsequent divine interventions.

Yet I cannot recall meeting a single Christian who denied the legitimacy of Science or History outright. What happens instead is that when "experts" make truth claims which are irreconcilable with the Bible's truth claims, we simply ignore those experts. Sometimes we do listen to other things they say, but ignore those particular statements, like parents skipping past "that one scene" in a movie the family can otherwise enjoy together. (a practice which seems endangered now in the days of streaming and uninhibited consumption of media)

The Church is, then, quite comfortable with taking a selective approach to science and history. Did we all stop believing because well-credentialed archaeologists at one point claimed Pontius Pilate never existed, or because many historians still believe the Old Testament was an invented back story to unite various Canaanite groups who found themselves exiled together in Babylon?

While the idea of rejecting "expert" academic claims when they go against what the Bible says but listening to other things they say gives some people fits, in truth for the average believer (i.e. someone not having the academic background to really debate the issue effectively) this is a very robust and pragmatic way of solving the problem. We have different categories of authority, and the Bible is in that "non-negotiable" category, while academic experts are not. (And do not deserve to be, since their authority is mostly borrowed and they rarely have any "skin in the game" -- they won't suffer any consequences except at worst a loss of reputation in their field if their theories turn out to be wrong)

So then, for Christians we're already used to navigating a lower hierarchy of truth claims based on a higher one. When the Bible says there's a reef there, we don't sail that way even when "the latest, peer-reviewed paper on the effect of tidal forces on reef development" says it ought to be clear water. (And those progressive-minded souls in the Church who do make the attempt must be fished out of the water, though often they go down with their ship.)

This means that for some Christians, it's very easy to shift into that mode of thinking where a conspiracy theory (based not on verifiable claims, but believed for other reasons) becomes our guiding truth claim, and we start rejecting official sources when they contradict it. This is a problem because now the conspiracy theory has become the filter by which we judge reality. If we are not careful, just as can easily happen with political convictions, it will become part of that filter by which we read scripture as well. We should be very wary of letting unverifiable claims through a backdoor to become part of our worldview.

Of course, there is another thing Christians do, which provides ammunition for the other side of the debate, the people who have no patience for those attracted by conspiracy theories. Because Christians are used to believing things based on authority, and indeed are taught (more in some circles than others) respect for authority, some transfer this to what they have been taught are, or come to regard as, respectable and reliable sources of information. Any conspiracy theory that comes along, if "debunked" by these respectable sources, will then be considered unworthy of future speculation. And anyone forwarding these conspiracy theories will look incredibly foolish in the eyes of those who still look at establishment media as possessing authority to say what is accurate and what has been proven false.

6. Christians and Conspiracies: Religion vs. Conspiracy

It has been said that the exclusive claims of the world's major faiths force us to conclude that either they are all wrong, or one is right and the others are wrong. Either the LORD, the Creator of the universe, also made humans according to His own likeness, or the Chinese goddess Nuwa made them from dragging a rope through mud, or they were made from driftwood by Odin and his brothers, or they are the result of chemicals that randomly bounced into each other long enough to kick off one reaction that led all the way to human consciousness, but those explanations cannot all be correct.

In the same way, it cannot be true that the way to heaven is to slaughter one's enemies with sufficient valor, to earn enough merit through multiple lifetimes and understand that reality is an illusion, or to trust in the grace of God as seen in the work of Jesus Christ, all at the same time. And those various conceptions of heaven/the afterlife are all mutually exclusive too.

So either we A) reject all religions, or B) we must figure out which one is true. Or, C) we could decide we don't care or couldn't ever figure out what is True, and pick the religion we think is most attractive or useful, or pick some parts of several of them and follow them without regard for potential internal contradictions (which is the approach one typically encounters in Taiwan).

Conspiracy theories are stories that claim, usually with at least some cursory attempt at providing evidence, that many events we see are not natural/normal, but are brought about by the actions of a secretive group with specific motives. But to an atheist or non-religious person, who goes with option A) above, Christianity is exactly this--an attempt to explain observable events and phenomenon (which can "already be explained by Science") by providing a unproveable backstory of unseen forces (God, etc).

This seems like the simplest approach, but our materialist friend has a big problem: he's got to ignore too much of reality to make his theory work. One single, real, true miracle, the kind countless people claim to have experienced throughout human history, renders his choice moot. In these kinds of situations, there are usually 2 strategies he will fall back on.

1) Deny the event: Claim that anyone who thinks they have witnessed something miraculous, supernatural, or violating the laws of physics as we know them were mistaken, confused, deceived, or lying. The burden of historical proof testifies overwhelmingly against this, but your average materialist science groupie has no concept of historical proof, and may in fact consider history to be merely one long struggle to achieve particle accelerators and rockets which can land themselves.

2) Use the Science-of-the-Gaps argument: Because most people throughout history, including many Christians, explained things they could not understand by saying they were or were caused by gods or spirits or other unseen powers, yet now we understand them to be natural phenomenon which we can describe and measure by the scientific method, so all those things and also that which we cannot explain scientifically in 2020 will in the same way be explained by future advancements in science.

Both of these seek to keep reality free of any behind-the-scenes Actor/s whose existence would make his simple dismissal of all religious belief untenable.

Those who dismiss all conspiracy theories automatically are more or less doing the same thing. They are seeking to keep reality and their concept of history and what they read in the news simple and clear: Things happen, and the news exists to inform us of these happenings, and don't try to sell me on some secret society or scheme behind them. If they existed, The Papers Walter Cronkite CNN Fox News would have told us so. Yet these people have a similar problem to our atheist friend above: There must be a true explanation, and if those establishment sources turn out in the end not to be reputable sources, perhaps one of the conspiracy theories floating around is actually the correct story of what happened. So the option of simply dismissing them all is another kind of lazy thinking, or one trying to reduce the world to a more simplistic (and less scary) model than it really is.

7. "Why are Christians being drawn to Conspiracy Theories?"

"If you're a Christian, you think that the entire fabric of the cosmos was ruptured, by this strange singularity, where Someone who is a god and a man sets everything on its head. And to say it's supernatural is to downplay it; this is a massive singularity at the very heart of things. And if you don't believe that, it seems to me that you aren't really a confessional Christian--you may be a cultural Christian, but you're not a confessional Christian. So if you believe that, then it should be possible to dwell on all the other weird stuff that traditionally comes as part of the Christian package." - Tom Holland (Not Spider-Man)

Christians, by contrast, have already chosen B) from part 4 above and believe that one religion is true and only that one, and others cannot be chosen along with it. The others may have much that is good in them, but they must necessarily fall short of complete truth, since none profess Christ as Lord and seek atonement through His finished work on the cross. That is a good, straightforward assertion which we make through faith, and which we believe will one day be sight.

We cannot prove that faith, but we have evidence in lots of areas of life (historical references to biblical events and people, changed lives after a decision of faith, answers to prayer which can't be put down to coincidence, etc) that it is true. This kind of evidence is important because Christians reject option C) up above, believing there is Truth which can be known and believed. We believe the Bible tells a long, true story which can be learned and lived by, which is also the underlying narrative of all human history and reality. A reality which is full of miraculous, wonderful, and terrifying things, and exists partly as an unseen world of which we have scant knowledge.

This understanding of the world, coupled with today's growing recognition of how inaccurate or intentionally misleading is so much of the information we're constantly immersed in, leads people to turn away from now-distrusted official sources and seek the real story behind reality somewhere else, just as believers turn away from academic sources who say Noah's flood never happened but might get misled by a well-spun yarn about finding the real ark somewhere in the mountains of Turkey.

We are misled because we believe that the ark is real, and therefore stories that affirm (or maybe, cater to; or perhaps, take advantage of) that conviction can get past our primary filter which would reject mainstream academic sources claiming it wasn't true. Or worse, we are lazy, and simply see "ark" and "discovered" and share the story without feeling it's important to know whether it's factual or not.

Either way, too many Christians have not developed a secondary filter, one that can intuit if something is plausible within a context of belief on the one hand and selective rejection of mainstream sources on the other. This is true for newly-"woke" Christians who have only recently become aware of the extent to which they've been lied to about the world we live in. Put another way, they hadn't realized that the god of this age who has blinded the minds of unbelievers (2 Corinthians 4:4) to prevent them from seeing the truth of the gospel did so in certain ways that Christians can easily fall prey to as well if they lose a biblical worldview and do not practice discernment.

Yet this is not a new phenomenon for Christians. Think of the popular eschatology phases where everyone had books and maps and charts and theories about the end times. How many were sure the world was going to already be over by now? How many conspiracy theories circulated about how the antichrist was some politician or world leader of their day? In a sense, we have seen this whole thing before, we just didn't have social media then. How many of those Christian thought leaders who convinced people the rapture was coming at a certain date or that accused various political leaders of being the antichrist were called to account?

Of course, it's more palatable to believe one has been intentionally deceived than to believe one has sinfully failed to exercise discernment, and so the impulse is strong to believe conspiracy-theory-type stories or explanations which make some sense of confused reality and simultaneously assert that things would make much more sense if they weren't being intentionally deceived by a massive conspiracy. Again, this does not mean any particular conspiracy theory is not true, or that none of them are, but it gives us a reason to be cautious about accepting them or sharing them as true.

8. How to be discerning in a climate of conspiracy and information overload?

As we start to wrap up this long post, I want to mention a few ideas we can internalize in order to build a stronger filter which will help us navigate the excess of information and truth claims we're bombarded with. Some of the points are obvious, some perhaps less so, but I hope they are helpful, or at least thought-provoking, as you wade through the claims about the coronavirus and everything else:

1. The person who agrees you are being lied to, might also be lying to you

There is a whole highway system across the internet by which conspiracy theories get shared and passed along and commented on, and they are by nature antifragile; the more mainstream media companies take action to suppress them, the more it looks like evidence that they are true. 

Some followers of conspiracy theories are like preteens who, having realized their dad (or mom) isn't the superhero they'd imagined them to be in earlier childhood, begin to idolize a teacher or older classmate who demonstrates some of the qualities they were disappointed to find lacking in their default hero figure, not realizing they are committing the next step of the same mistake. Thus having realized, to the great disappointment of their healthy lack of cynicism, that they cannot trust the mainstream media whose job it was (and not merely a job, but a sort of implied social contract) to inform them of what was happening in the world, these people now automatically turn a credulous ear to anyone who invokes the new password: "the mainstream media cannot be trusted." 

2. Is your intuition being hijacked?

A person skilled in rhetoric always sounds persuasive, and although it's an art, it's something of a science as well at this point. Humans have buttons, and they can be pushed, and vast amounts of money circulate around that fact. For explanations that are "outside the mainstream," the way the information is presented will attract different kinds of people. For some, authenticity will look like a lone dissenter, a "voice crying in the wilderness" with a bare-basics website, and anything that seems to have some money behind it becomes untrustworthy. For others that would be too fringe to take seriously, and a more polished approach with good rhetoric and some credentialed names will win them over.

P. T. Barnum's famous aphorism, "there's a sucker born every minute," still holds true in 2020. But these days one doesn't need to be a sucker to be deceived, either by mainstream or alternative sources. "Going with your gut" when deciding whether to trust a source or not is dangerous, because decades of studies have figured out what can make people's intuition push them one way or another. Unfortunately your gut intuition has been commoditized, without your permission, and those whose profession is mass marketing, whether its products or ideas they are trying to sell you, know how that works. So a darkly plausible sounding accusation about a politician you don't like, or an empathetically morally outraged article about life-improving information suppressed by profit-hungry forces, or any other article that feeds some sense of satisfying grievance, should be taken with many grains of salt.

3. Hanlon's Razor

"Do not attribute to maliciousness what can be adequately explained by incompetence." Think of the situations, events, well-intended plans, work projects you've seen go wrong before; think of people in very high positions of power or influence who say or do really dumb things. People simply aren't good at executing carefully controlled secret plans, and that goes for rich and smart people too.

That doesn't mean it never happens (the existence of secret societies and political conspiracies is part of the historical record), but it probably shouldn't be your go-to explanation without serious evidence from trusted sources. And what are trusted sources these days?


4. Are there biblical or historical principles that already cover it?

The Bible describes a world where people are flawed and sinful, where people in positions of authority abuse their power to do terrible things, and yet Paul says our battle is not against flesh and blood but with evil spiritual powers of this dark world and in heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12)

I believe what the Bible says about God's kingdom, which is not of this world, inaugurated by Christ and advancing against the kingdom of this world, which is the hierarchy of secular authority which goes all the way up to the Prince of this World and his fallen spiritual allies. That some world leaders would be deeply under their influence and foolishly imagine themselves their allies instead, and practice perverse rituals to reinforce that belief, doesn't surprise me at all. It has always been so.

So when I see rumors and dark intimations online describing the secret cultish behavior of some world leaders, etc., they don't sound all that conspiratorial to me. We have historical evidence that Aztec leaders were conducting public rituals that involved cutting the living hearts out of their enemies, and Roman emperors were setting live Christians on fire as human candles in Rome. More recently, for decades before and during the turn of the 20th century, seances were popular activities. Many people, including famous people you've heard of, tried to talk to the dead through mediums, sometimes for amusement but sometimes in earnest. In Taiwan up until recent years it was a regular practice for children to be taken to temples and "opened up" to spiritual influence so they can serve as mediums, an ability they apparently retain for life. Though I keep a distance from such things here, my understanding is that the practices continues today, to a lesser extent.

All that is to say, sometimes breathless stories insisting that we should be alarmed that certain famous people are secretly engaged in dark and illicit activities have the opposite effect; the testimony of history, the bible's take on the world, and human nature more or less guarantee some of them are up to much worse things than the average conspiracy theory alleges. That certainly doesn't mean we need to believe every specific story we hear.

5. Know what you can't know, and whether that matters

At this point I view everything I read online on a sliding scale of unverifiability. I don't know if any of it is true, and I can't verify or debunk a CNN article about a bombing in Kenya which proves Al-Qaeda is active there, any more than I can verify the secret discovery of an ancient supercomputer under the Sphinx, or that some government officials instructed their family members to get out of NYC on Sept 10th, or that the Coronavirus is a man-made ploy to get us to accept the vaccine which will be administered via bioinfernal Mark of the Beast technology. I can't know if those things happened to begin with, nor whether the explanation provided to me about those things is correct. There is no strong reason for me to trust an unverifiable conspiracy theory video on YouTube more or less than I trust unreliable poll numbers on MSNBC. (Though in a pinch, if it's MSNBC, I'd go with the YouTube video. Just kidding. Probably.)

If you are sheltering at home because of the coronavirus, and especially if you've suffered or lost friends and/or family members because of it, it's only reasonable to try and figure out what's going on. If the government seems to be lying, with their track record of dishonesty, it's also reasonable to entertain other theories, though not wise to share them with others. What if you are sharing, and thus promoting, false prophecy? But we have to recognize that we won't be able to personally verify if the people telling you it's a planned virus being exploited to create a one world government are correct, any more than people in Beijing will be able to verify if it's a weaponized virus created by the CIA to attack China, as they're being told over there. If it turns out that people really were lying, anger is also reasonable. But will it ever "turn out"?

Will the truth ever be found and explained? We don't know, and that's frustrating enough to turn a lot of people to conspiracy theories to provide an illusion of knowing and thus a little less lack of control.


6. Do you want it to be true?

“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils." - C.S.Lewis

Lastly, I offer this Lewis quote not to suggest that some people in positions of power are not involved in filthy atrocities, but that our desire to keep filling our minds with conspiracy stories about them and clinging to those explanations which attribute maximum evil intent to people can be unhealthy.

If you find yourself rejecting evidence for a more mundane explanation ("sometimes accidents just happen") because you don't want there to be a more mundane explanation, because that would be less entertaining, or less cathartic, or because that particular story would prove what you suspected all along about Trump, or Obama, or the Republicans, or the Democrats, or Big Pharma, or Monsanto, then be very, very careful. Because that is a point where the truth of the story is no longer the thing that matters most to you, and you wish evil to be true of others.

That is the negative version of believing something because you wish it to be true. The positive version could be represented by my own sympathy toward stories that claim sightings of creatures thought to be long extinct, because I want them to still be alive, and I want to believe the world is still big enough in 2020 for mysterious life to still be hiding somewhere. So I have to be extra careful to guard my mind against embracing those kinds of stories, which typically are based on very flimsy evidence. A historically famous example of this was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of Sherlock Holmes fame, who defended various, obviously fake reports of fairies, ghosts, etc., because of his strong desire to prove the existence of the supernatural.

Christians can commit the same error... every time people share a fake story about someone who went to heaven or hell without trying to verify it (witness the ruin caused by this example), they are promoting a lie and weakening the Church's testimony that heaven and hell are real. That it supports what you believe to be true does not mean it should get an automatic pass.

9. Conclusion: Wisdom... and Patience

Simply put, if you believe respectable institutions and elected officials don't cooperate to deceive us, you are a fool. But if you believe and share every conspiratorial, alarmist, or political attack story you see, you are a different kind of fool. We are drowning in information, and sharing half-truths or fake news means you are part of the problem. Yet, if we are not being told the truth by official sources, we will seek for it in other places, and these stories are not going away, and censorship only strengthens their appeal, as we saw above.

I have no delusions that articles like concerned Christians I mentioned earlier, or this one, or others like it, will have any great effect on human nature. But you, reading this, you can change. You can choose to be wise and exercise restraint when you want to share the latest tantalizing rumor or urgent, probably-true update, and to be patient and wait until more facts come out before sharing a conspiracy theory trying to explain an event based on "what we already know about how those people act" vs. whatever evidence is available. If you believe the evidence will be faked or changed as necessary to keep people from figuring out those people are behind it, that is indeed a kind of consistent logic, but it's also an inescapable trap, so just be aware you are in it.

At very least, educate yourself broadly on the topics you are sharing stories about. (And I don't mean in the YouTube rabbit hole way) Don't have a careless attitude towards spreading half-truths and unverified accusations, but be very focused on sacrificial love and doing good in this world, not "raising awareness" or "putting everyone on alert" from the safety of your digital device. Needlessly raising the anxiety level of a world suffocating in anxiety is not a light sin.

So as you encounter stories and rumors about the coronavirus, about political leaders, about alternate versions of history or government cover-ups or aliens or vaccines or false flags or anything else, I hope you will keep some of what I've said here in mind. It would be hypocritical of me to suggest you should just stop listening to alternative theories and believe the official stories about everything--I often do not believe them either. But the fact that scripture calls Satan the father of lies should make us extra careful not to accidentally do his work for him.

"Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil." - Ephesians 5:15-16

Be well, guard your mind and heart, and let His word be a lamp to your feet
and a light to your path among these swamps of misinformation and deceit.

The Unseen World - Part 1: The Past Darkness

1. The Reality of the Unseen World

"For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."

[Ephesians 6:12] 

As a kid, I was always interested in and drawn to things like traditional superstitions of the Old South, stories about my great aunt who lived in a haunted house, even that weird feeling you sometimes get walking alone in the woods, that you've silently entered something else's domain. These always seemed like little doors or invitations into a wider reality, yet one that seemed both confirming of, and not allowed by, my faith. If the Bible is true, and God is real, then for a Westerner it seems like any evidence for the existence of the supernatural is evidence for faith. (A point we'll return to later) Yet at the same time, pursuing knowledge of the more darkly mysterious side of reality seemed to lead quickly in unwise directions, and felt like a kind of secretive lure away from God.

Many years later, after coming to live in Taiwan, I have slowly realized that for the majority of people here, the unseen world was not a mysterious possibility but a part of their daily life. They were surrounded by reminders and habits that displayed this. Spending my youth in the rural American South had prepared me for this perhaps better than most Westerners, but still I had not experienced anything on this level: Daoist trigram mirrors over doors, fear over picking up dropped money that could be a lure for ghost-marriage, incense sticks offered not only at temples but at the front doors of apartment buildings, people burning paper money on street corners in ubiquitous metal cans designed specifically for that purpose, gnarly-rooted sacred trees encircled with red cords, pendants and amulets worn around the necks of both adults and children.

These tables loaded with snacks, incense, and spirit money are an offering
to appease any harmful ancestral spirits which may be in the area 

And this is not some kind of remote tribal area. Taiwan is a technologically advanced island nation with more smartphones than people, with convenience stores where you can pay your bills and buy concert tickets and send packages and pay for it all with a metro card, and where green energy and smart cities are becoming a reality more quickly than for most of the United States.
Life in Taiwan has taught me that the unseen world does not flee just because technology progresses.

Yet most Americans do not consider an unseen world in their day to day life. The excluded middle, the part of reality which touches the spirit world yet remains connect to our own as well, is something many traditional cultures fear and give great importance to, yet remains ignored if not disbelieved in by most Westerners. There are various philosophical reasons for why the West moved away from this, cartesian dualism being one, and others will be discussed below.
But it's a worldview-level difference, which is true for most conservative evangelicals. (Charismatic or Pentacostal churches would be a halfway exception) We leap from our visible surroundings to God on His throne and rarely consider that anything lies in between, and find more or less all parts of the Bible that mention non-scientific phenomenon to be something that has to be taken on faith, as evidence for the unseen world is not exactly a common phenomenon (Not like it is in some parts of the world. When spiritual fear would drive people to Church, the Enemy pretends not to exist. When spiritual fear drives people to ally with darkness, the Enemy is quite active).

For most Westerners, though, with no context of or seemingly much evidence for a supernatural world we inhabit prior to death, our faith becomes focused on a supernatural world which exists after death, but our Christian life in the meantime becomes very intellectualized, a set of propositions to which we give assent and which we defend from attack by means of logic and reasoned debate and the principles of God's revelation to us. Which is good, and necessary, but it leaves out a whole giant piece of reality, which many other cultures are quite concerned about, and which local religions exist to deal with. When we bump into people from those religions, we find that they are not interested in our logical and reasoned debate, since religion for them is a matter of the unseen reality that affects their lives, yet they find Christians have little to say about this.

To be sure, many Americans have inherited, or brought with them from their family's origin countries, certain beliefs or superstitions, perhaps reduced to a rote family tradition, which harken back to an older time. And the older, geographically-established American subcultures, places like rural New England or the Appalachians, have their own local folk culture. Folk culture always knows about the unseen world. It may have confused, exaggerated, or purely fanciful explanations for it, but there is a tacit acknowledgment there that puts them ahead of we moderns who think ourselves clever for disbelieving in evil spirits but talking about "bad vibes."

(Ironically, despite disbelieving in this "middle world," the American church still struggles to avoid a Christian folk religion mentality, for which this article is a decent introduction)

2. The Unseen World vs. Fantasy vs. Folk Tradition, for Christians

A close reading of the Bible shows us that this unseen world is both acknowledged and treated critically as well. We have both acknowledgments that behind idols are spiritual forces of darkness, and sarcasm about how an idol is nothing but the other half of the wood the idol maker cooked his food with. (Interestingly, my purely subjective experience in Taiwan has the same dichotomy--some temples feel dark and disturbing on the spiritual level, others like a scam to fool sincere people)

I am not suggesting that Christians are supposed to accept wholesale the claims of various cultures regarding the unseen reality around us. From selkies frolicking in an Irish cove while keeping an eye on their seal skins to the gates of Chinese hell that are thought to open at the beginning of Ghost Month, there are innumerable beliefs about the unseen world across human culture. We don't need to give specific credence to any of them in particular, but we should recognize that the idea of an unseen reality in this life has been something humans always knew, and that every culture likes to make up stories about it does not mean it's not real any more than sci-fi proves that space travel never really happened.

So why did Christendom seem to move away from all this interest in the unseen world? How did Christians follow along with this idea of a material world yet retain a belief in high heaven and God on His throne? Part of the reason may be that the Bible's take on the unseen world is much darker than much of what we find in popular folk culture, or perhaps we could say it is less balanced.

We don't find any mention in scripture of unseen forces doing what C.S.Lewis once called "minding their own business." There are no little sprites or fairies just doing their own thing. If anything like the vast number of folk culture entities and creatures have ever existed, Genesis is almost entirely silent about them (the Nephilim being a sort of intriguing exception), yet it speaks of angels and demons quite straightforwardly. The part of reality that scripture is concerned with, visible or invisible, is a conflict between God and the enemies of God, and how God's redemptive plan plays out from the beginning to end of human history. Lewis and some of his friends actually seemed to mourn this fact, as expressed in his novel That Hideous Strength by Dr. Dimble at one point, that all of reality was getting caught up into the all-encompassing battle between Good and Evil. The old "elf land" or that part of the unseen world which seemed to be an almost neutral territory, was passing away, or had already done so, and now everything was drawing near to the final cosmic battle of Good and Evil; everything had to take a side, in the end. (Current and prolific author John C. Wright's Moth and Cobweb series deals with this as well--his "twilight world" characters begin to find themselves caught up in a war between light and darkness, and it becomes obvious that there is no middle ground to hesitate on for long)

As a tradition, however, even elves--which Tolkien sort of baptized into the noble Eldar--were thought of in a somewhat darker fashion before Tolkien wrote about High Elves, filled with the light of Valinor, and it became a new archetype. Before then elves and other creatures of the "middle world" had been mostly thought of as capricious beings, prone to stealing from people and playing tricks on them; if not fully bent on evil, yet also the sorts of beings which could not endure the sound of a church bell. There is a whole realm of fantasy, derived from folk traditions, of creatures which could not stay in "Old England" after the Church arrived and became established. Rudyard Kipling portrays this with a sort of nostalgic wistfulness in the story Dymchurch Flit, showing that same desire of Lewis, that what of that old world could not baptized need not be entirely banished. (But while I can feel their wistfulness strongly as expressed in their writings, I suspect it's a very sneaky form of temptation that certain well-educated people are susceptible to, rather like our "pet sins" like narrowly-focused gluttony that are so hard to confess and get rid of because they seem innocuous)

Due to this complicated idea present in English-speaking culture (I think the West in general, but I have not studied the question in other languages) that the "grey area" or twilight world, the Old things, must go away when the light of the gospel has arrived, we can see one way that the Church wasn't putting up much of a fight to retain a biblical concept of the unseen world. The entire folk tradition was relegated to anthropological studies as both the advent of the Church and the industrial revolution made it both unrighteous and increasingly irrelevant. Thus in the West, we stopped thinking about the world in terms of even having this unseen "middle" realm. 

In Taiwan, the same thing is happening in churches to a problematic degree--people either want to turn off that side of reality which represents their old spiritual bondage, or they found it more natural to become Christians because they never put much stock in traditional religion to begin with. That makes it challenging for many Taiwanese believers to share their faith incarnationally with other Taiwanese who still follow the old traditions.

3. The Unseen World in Scripture: Earth as Enemy-Occupied Territory

When we look at scripture's portrayal of the unseen world, which possesses not an ounce of the (possibly wrongful) sense of nostalgia we find in the authors I mentioned above, we learn that we live in a wider, and darker, world than we have typically been willing to recognize. The Bible was written by people who lived in that world and knew it, and it is full of commands to stop serving those unseen powers and worship God alone. Every idol and pagan altar--and even those "high places and spreading trees" I didn't understand about before I lived in Taiwan, with its divine trees and temples or shrines at every picturesque elevated spot--was a portal to that unseen world which affected all areas of life, and still is considered to do so in many parts of the Old World where traditional folk culture survives.

As I mentioned above, the world peopled lived in was all the folk world, once upon a time, usually before the gospel had been there long. Grimm's Fairy Tales, at least in their original conception, harken back to a time when Germans considered the forest to be full of portals to the unseen world--with its dark silent valleys, mysterious rings of mushrooms, ominous standing stones, and hollow halls beneath the fells. For Celtic peoples, the original feasting and rituals at the end of Autumn, which have partially continued and partially re-emerged as Halloween, were originally an open recognition of the dark side of that other world, and a simultaneous attempt to rebuff and appease it. (That doesn't necessarily mean holidays with an original pre-christian influence are harmful, as I wrote about Christmas a while back)

Once, that dark unseen world reigned supreme on earth. G.K.Chesterton has written powerfully in the Everlasting Man about that Old World, which he identifies with Carthage, the Canaanite superpower finally utterly defeated by Rome (Carthago Delenda Est!) 140 years before the coming of Christ. With its dark rituals and infant sacrifices to Moloch lying underneath all the trading and sea voyaging, Chesterton argues, Carthage was the final culmination of a kind of hellish pragmatism which was happy to cooperate with dark powers of the unseen world to any level of depravity, so long as it achieved the desired results. (This article is a decent brief summary of Chesterton's take on what was hanging in the balance with Rome vs Carthage, and draws a tragic parallel between infant sacrifice and the abortion industry)

We can catch a glimpse of that darker world here and there throughout scripture, often in verses we gloss over or find confusing as modern Americans. One chilling example is 2 Kings 3:27, when Israel's armies have defeated and cornered a pagan king, who in desperation performs a ritualistic sacrifice of his own firstborn son, and summons wrath against Israel, who retreat and head back home.

When the king of Moab saw that the battle was too fierce for him, he took with him 700 men who drew swords, to break through to the king of Edom; but they could not. Then he took his oldest son who was to reign in his place, and offered him as a burnt offering on the wall. And there came great wrath against Israel, and they departed from him and returned to their own land. [2 Kings 3:26-27]

Some well-meaning commentators trying to make sense of the account miss the point and say that since it seems impossible that it could be God's great wrath against Israel, it must have been human wrath, either the Moabites being roused to angry desperation, or even that the invading army was disgusted at the display and changed their minds about attacking. Some translations use different wording on the assumption that this is the case. (I am using the NASB above). Yet this word wrath is associated with divine wrath and not human indignation when used elsewhere in scripture. At least one commentator concludes, as seems the most straightforward interpretation to me, that the sacrifice was a "success" and demonic wrath was summoned against the invading army, who departed as a result. I have heard enough testimonies when learning about spiritual warfare at seminary, and much more so from Taiwanese people about temple healings and exorcisms, and other demonically-motivated "helpful" results, to know that the Enemy will "play by the rules" and offer help on their own terms if it keeps people in spiritual bondage.

That is the spiritual darkness that Israel was surrounded by, and repeatedly ensnared by and plunged into, until God would send such severe punishment that they nationally repented and tore down the altars and high places, only to succumb to the lure of darkness once again. To understand the conquest of Canaan and ongoing fighting between Israel and the surrounding nations, one must understand that Canaanites did not merely fear the dark unseen world and try to appease it, but were outright worshiping and allying with it, especially against Israel. Canaan combined advanced cultural achievements, like iron weapons and the precursor to the alphabet we still use today, with dark rites and whatever aid from the unseen world they could muster, whether imaginary or real. (Witness their confusion as they call upon different powers to aid them in their battles, and understand that God was in a sense proclaiming Himself to them as He shattered their armies, as He shattered Egypt and their dark spiritual traditions generations earlier)

That was in the time of Moses, and the generations that followed. Even as Moses led Israel through the desert, they continued to practice rituals to appease the unseen spirit world. The book of Leviticus commands the Israelites to stop making sacrifices to demons of the desert, as they had been prone to do. (Leviticus 17:7)

Going back even earlier, Genesis suggests that the pre-flood world was yet more deeply under the influence of evil, and the unseen world was in fact dominating the world in a rather visible fashion. Evil spirits walked among men and, depending on your interpretation, even took human women to be their wives, and gave birth to men of unearthly power (the Nephilim mentioned above), a crime for which some spirits were imprisoned permanently in "chains of darkness" to await final judgment, referred to in passing in 2 Peter 2.
Noah's flood cleaned the world in more than one sense, then, yet in particular evil locales, enclaves, and time periods of history, wicked people have repeatedly tried to bring back that deeper darkness. Much interesting fiction has been based around the struggle to stop this kind of thing (bad group of people try to make an alliance with evil powers, good guys have to go stop them), and when we feel that somehow it's a true picture of the world even though we ourselves never seem to encounter it, we are subconsciously resonating with a truth about this world, just one that we've never been taught to see with the eyes of a biblical worldview. Yet that is the world we live in; one in which unseen evil power strives against the people of God, against the truth of the gospel, and seeks to keep lost people lost, and draw them more deeply into darkness.

3.5 Note: I am not being dark for dark's sake

I hope the reader will not misunderstand. I am not trying to be lurid or provocative in this post. Living in the spiritually darker environment of Taiwan has helped me to notice that the Bible is pretty straightforward about the darkness of the unseen part of the world we live in. It's easier to miss in some translations which seem to obscure it by choice of wording due to an unconscious cultural bias on the part of some translators or commentators which the writers of scripture did not possess.

It has also made me more sensitive to false and misleading portrayals of evil. When one has experienced the cruel hatefulness of the Enemy, the ruined lives and pain caused by satanic deception and bondage, you realize that whatever somber yet stylish aesthetic the forces of darkness are often portrayed with in Hollywood is a lie. Real evil is fearful and twisted and sickeningly ugly. At best it can temporarily pretend not to be so, but it does not love the beauty or even the intelligence it must use as tools of deception until it has enough control over its victims to drop the pretense.

I live and work in a place where that darkness is less deep than it was generations ago but has still not been effectively lifted, as it once had been in most of the West (as we continue into post-christianity it will eventually return, unless a major revival happens), and that is a burden of doing ministry here. Spiritual darkness is neither an esoteric, "best not to go there" topic to be nervously avoided, nor is it anything to be inquiring too eagerly into. It's just a bitter fact of life for many people in the world, something the freedom of Christ can deliver them from, breaking the sometimes multi-generational chains of fear and misunderstanding that bind them. It's also a reality of ministry, especially in certain parts of the world.

So my goal is not to creep anyone out, much less leave you with a morbid fascination, but to point out that the supernatural world is not something you only experience after you die, you live in it now, even if you close your eyes to it. And remember the Bible nowhere says that the devil is on a throne down in hell, that is not a scriptural teaching. (The lake of fire after judgment is punishment for Satan too.) He was cast down to earth, not to some volcanic inferno realm of Dante, and remains here, and wherever people live in spiritual bondage and serve the unseen world by following its rules, evil is behind it. When you see news articles about about weird and disturbing stuff that powerful people are caught doing, that's all part of it too.

4. But now...

We do not live in the same era as the the old Canaanite alliances with evil. Something has happened. A light has shined in the darkness, and it became our light. Our King has come, and conquered.

When the Son was born into this world as a human, he was coming to be a sacrifice for sin, but in the doing of it He was also literally invading the world, both seen and unseen. Demons were terrified of Jesus for a reason, then, and the legion possessing the Gerasene man begging not to be sent into the abyss make sense in this context. They had not expected this kind of divine invasion, not before the judgment that they knew was eventually coming. Satan seems to have more or less panicked and tried everything he could think of to stop Jesus: temptations, slander, and eventually betrayal and murder, though of course he only succeeded in doing exactly what God had already intended from the beginning. (Check and mate, God wins.) And when Christ died and rose again, He proclaimed victory over death, and over the powers of darkness in the unseen world, and His name now carries the ultimate authority:

9 

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations... [Matthew 18:18-19a]

Sometimes we skip over or rush through verse 18 to get to the "missions part." But verse 18 is what predicates the Great Commission that follows. We can carry on the mission of disciple making and kingdom growing because Jesus initiated it and it proceeds on his authority. We can take the gospel as a light into dark places, because the darkness still has strength and malice, but its authority has been taken away. Christ has won, and now His kingdom advances. And we are the servants of His kingdom, with His authority.

Let us be not oblivious to the unseen world, nor overly fearful, nor pridefully incautious, but go forth and shine in dark places, that unseen chains shall be broken and those who have dwelt in darkness may see a great light.

(Thanks for reading. We'll continue this discussion of Christ's victory and the unseen world in the Church Age later in Part II)

Get Moving I - Holding the Line vs. Advancing the Kingdom

"Hold the Line" or "Advance the Kingdom"?

How do we in the Church balance a responsibility to "hold the line"--for doctrinal purity within churches, for resisting the decay in the culture outside of them, etc.-- with the responsibility of following the Great Commission? The first implies a defensive, static position, while the second is outwardly focused and concerned with advancing the spiritual kingdom of God on earth.

It would seem the two are in conflict, and while the idea of "missional"churches, and the ramifications of it, solves some of the problems, in this post I want to suggest a lot could be improved by simply changing the way Christians think about the problem, with a little help from an analysis of tactics strategy then offer a few steps to getting back into the battle where it's actually being fought.
First, a look at some the related issues:

1. Conservatism

The first issue I want to address is Conservatism. Most people identify this with political conservatism, but the cultural phenomenon of conservatism in America is broader than politics. I strongly believe one problem in the American evangelical church (and perhaps others) is that of conservatism, again not politically but as an approach to life and ministry and "being the Church."

A reckless and overly aggressive attitude Church-wide would of course be a problem, but as per Screwtape and the people wielding fire extinguishers in a flood, it does not seem to be the special problem of our time to be primarily guarded against. On the contrary, there seems to be a default tendency to avoid action because of uncertainty, lack of clear direction, and the desire to avoid potentially costly failures. This kind of reflexive conservatism, a fear of moving lest we move wrong, actually hinders the Church's work a great deal. If "don't rock the boat," "be careful," "don't make people uncomfortable," "don't go overboard," "we'll think about it (please go away)," is the default attitude in those churches which most revere and promote careful attention to scriptural truth, it's no wonder that around the world it is not conservative and evangelical but charismatic churches which are seeing most of the rapid growth.

In the US, in this new era which began roughly with 9/11, the cultural situation looks different for millennials. They are not fighting to conserve, but either to carve out stable lives in an increasingly unstable culture, if they're self-motivated, or simply remain in their current situation, if they're not. The system of comparative stability inherited by previous generations has finally begun to break down, and so conservatism is less appropriate than building anew, something which is more suited to weather the dark times that seem to be coming and the instability that is already becoming normal.

So my contention with regard to conservatism and the Church is that we may have found ourselves in the position of making great efforts to keep alive a beloved, mighty oak whose roots are all but dead, but which is still covered in acorns each year. I believe we should be less concerned with keeping the old tree going another year than with planting those acorns as fast as we can. Take pride, if you must, not in the grand old oak, but in fields of new saplings. Some won't grow into strong, healthy trees, but many will.
Now is not exactly the time to be conservative, then; we need to be active, intentional, and busily preparing for the future more than regretting what we've lost or fearing change we can't stop anyway.

2. Zeal vs. Fear

That brings us to the second issue. Continuing the oak tree analogy, despite the need for a new forest, there are those who for various reasons are very ambivalent about the work of planting new trees to begin with. In the parable of the wheat and the tares, instead of accepting the regretful loss of a few healthy wheat sprouts as an acceptable exchange for getting rid of those invasive weeds, his landowner commands that they be allowed to grow up together. The point is not a flawless field, the point is the wheat. I believe we may be in a situation where in many conservative evangelical churches today people are perplexed with a small and shrinking harvest but nevertheless point with pride to our immaculate church fields, where all our time and effort has gone into making sure all the weeds are eradicated before any new seed is put out. (On the other hand, many churches avoid even mentioning what happens to weeds at the harvest, for fear any of them might take offense)

Planting more churches, spreading the gospel actively (while none of these things are illegal yet)... all these things engage us in the harvest work we are called to as a Church. It may even be that we should be giving thanks for this season; not as a fearful time of corrosion of the Church's cultural influence, but as a time when overgrown fields everywhere are waiting to be planted and harvested, and we can simply rise up and do so. (That especially while we can see to the East, smoke rising off burning fields.)

So we should plant with zeal while we can, advancing into new fields and not spending all our energy in "holding the line" against the influence of weeds from the next field over. Maybe one field even gets slightly overrun and in need of serious attention, but in the mean time we have planted four new ones, and can now return and attend to it. If Paul had spent his whole life in Antioch to make sure that church stayed perfect, we wouldn't have a global Church today; our times are more like Acts than we know.

3. There are Two Lines

It's clear, then, that we can neither be apathetic about holding the line of truth with regards to what is taught and preached in our churches, nor lax in our efforts to advance the kingdom by planting more churches and taking the gospel into our communities. Both things must be attended to, and how can we do that, with churches full of "attendees" plus a small core of already over-worked volunteers?
It may be that in this decade, we need to overthrow the 80-20 (or even 90-10) rule; if the church is to survive, thrive and do the work it's called to do, it cannot be primarily composed of Christians who consider showing up regularly on Sunday mornings to be the majority of their Christian duty.
Even a shift to a third of church-goers deciding they weren't content to simply sit and listen, but demanded to be involved in taking what they learned and putting it into practice, and teaching others to do the same, would mean a massive increase in manpower and what the Church was capable of.

This dance of holding the line and advancing the kingdom is not a zero-sum game, however. More of one does not automatically mean less of the other. That is because, in reality, they are of course two different lines.

Think of a war: there is a line of battle, perhaps several, and a line further back which denotes secured territory. The line that protects doctrinal purity, that ensures our foundation remains biblical truth--that line must be held. But the line that expands out into a fallen world in need of light--that line must advance.

To win battles, both things must be happening at the same time. You must take ground, hold it, and keep it secure. You cannot take new ground by holding the line, and you cannot keep it secure by moving your troops away somewhere else.

Aha, you may say, but then they do detract from each other, because you need troops to do either the one or the other. In a physical battle that's true. In a church, it is to be hoped that some of the same people capable of recognizing and defending against false teaching are also capable of taking the gospel out into new territory. In fact, being good in one area hopefully implies one is skilled in the other as well. In a healthy church, there will be priority given to having these experienced warriors training others to walk in the same way.

Hold here or advance?

4. "The Line" vs. "Maneuver Warfare"

I think there's a better picture we can use, however, for this ongoing battle. While within the church there is absolutely a doctrinal line which cannot be compromised, perhaps in terms of engaging our culture, advancing the kingdom into our communities, the appropriate image should not be "a line" at all.

In World War I, the infamous "trenches" were lines held against the enemy, with a no man's land in between into which few could venture and return alive. Early artillery pounded, machine guns rattled, and soldiers fought to hold positions and keep from being overrun, with such horrific casualties and suffering that it shook Europe to its philosophical core.

When we talk about "culture wars," we could extend the analogy to these front lines. (I believe I've actually heard the phrase "on the front lines of the culture wars" used more than once) A lot of American Christians seem to have internalized this idea. If you understand this, it makes more sense why seemingly innocuous things like coffee cups and chicken sandwiches can become massively controversial: small things in and of themselves, they represent a feint or real thrust across the (constantly narrowing) no man's land of cultural neutrality. If not rebuffed, perhaps ground will be lost, and lost ground means a new foothold for the enemy.

A "holding the line" mentality means Christians have 1) blurred the kingdom of God and the cultural footprint of the Church (not the same thing), and 2) tacitly admitted than cultural conditions are too scary, and they are not really thinking of making progress anymore. Enemy trenches in what was, until fairly recently, neutral territory (things like "the Arts," and "the Sciences") and historically constructed largely by the Church itself, are ground so long not occupied that they have become unfamiliar anyway, and possibly dubious. (Maybe that's not ground we even want to hold. We can build our own little versions of them, over here on our side.)

But let's fast-forward to World War II now. The Germans have developed a new theory of tactics, called maneuver warfare. While the initially powerful French army, still thinking in terms of "lines," has spent vast amounts of resources and effort constructing the impressive Maginot Line, the Germans have decided that lines need not be overrun by force, when they can simply be evaded and attacked from an angle of their choosing. You may remember the history: the Germans simply used their tanks to drive around the Maginot Line and through Belgium. France fell within two months.

I have often seen the technological aspect emphasized here (the innovation of armored tanks changing warfare) but in this case the much more important thing is the core idea: "Your lines will not determine where the battle happens; we will determine that."

A Tiger Tank in occupied France.

There is a two-fold lesson here for the Church:

1. Culturally, there is no "line" to hold.
There may once have been; no longer. Forget it. Regardless of what you believe about America being founded as a Christian nation or as a secular nation with Christian influence, right now in 2015, America is "The World" (As in, "The Devil, the Flesh, and...") and we need to stop talking about "taking 'our' culture back."
Like Germany vs. France, the Enemy has not countered the influence of Christianity in the culture by drawing up an entrenched line of battle against it, he's simply driven all over the place and taken over. He owns the battleground, and already does in this world by default, until Christ's spiritual victory is made terrestrially manifest.
(That is what the Church in Europe attempted to do prematurely, by flawed, time-and-culture-bound human effort, therefore creating a "Christendom" at once as glorious as cathedrals and as miserable as serfs. God's eternal version improves on the cathedrals yet elevates His serfs above the angels. Wait for it. Trust me, you don't want a theocracy before the actual Second Coming)

Think of the times recently when the church finds itself in conflict with mainstream culture over an issue, doesn't it usually seem to be behind the times, caught off guard and trying to catch up? That's not because Christians are stupid and backward (of course some people are, inside and outside the Church, but that's always been true), and not because the gospel is irrelevant to today's culture, but because the enemy has been picking the battles, having them occur at the time and place of his choosing. It may also be due to the fact that as the culture increasingly rejected Christian values, the church increasingly retreated from culture as well, losing a sense of what the big issues are outside its protective cloister walls while we argued about worship music styles within.

2. If we sit behind a line of our own imagining, we do so merely to the Church's detriment.
Since the enemy has not confined himself to any sort of line, if we are still thinking in those terms, we are merely restricting our own actions to a failing and outdated conceptualization. Meanwhile, as mentioned above, there are acres and acres of fields, formerly full of wheat, now lying overgrown and dormant, on the other side of that line. We can either languish behind a shrinking area of cultural influence, observing which denominations and cultural institutions seem to still fall on our side, and which have "gone over" to the enemy's side, or we can discard that outdated concept and start thinking of all spirit-filled, scripture-honoring churches as individual outposts in the midst of a dark and darkening culture. The light there, if it is there, will shine more and more brightly as the storm gathers. Our goal is not to control, but illuminate; therefore it should be getting easier, not harder. As the culture increasingly teaches people we are wrong and dangerous, if we are following Christ, we will appear increasingly right and whole. People will be drawn to the Truth even having been taught to shun it.

5. A Path Out of the Trenches

So then, if we want to break out of the trenches in this so-called culture war, both because the important battles are being fought elsewhere now, and also because that's not really the battle the Church is called to fight, what do we do?

Reading this, ideas may already be occurring to you. Not radical ways to reinvent the Church, which seldom take hold widely. But simple things every Christian can begin changing in the way they look at the world, that will help them begin impacting people for Christ in their own context.

Here, I will just list a few steps to get you going.
(Points if you already recognize the reference...)

Step 1. Observe
As I have explained, some churches are still sitting behind the line of a battle which has moved elsewhere. If you're still down there, you need to get out of the trenches and find out where people are right now. Some Christians have non-churched friends and know how they think differently about life and what they do with their time, and are evangelizing over the long term by bringing scriptural truth into their lives and being good witnesses. A lot of Christians spend all their extra time on Church activities and with other Christians, however, and don't have a clear idea about what goes on in the wider culture. They've grown up in an alternate, parallel culture behind the lines. They may not know what unchurched people do, or how they think, and their attempts to reach them may be based on godly intentions but also a fair amount of ignorance.
While I never unspecifically recommend giving up ministry obligations, I can state without equivocation that if you actually don't have any friends outside of church, you are not being obedient to God in this area and need to fix that. God did not give you His love and truth for you to keep them to yourself and among those who already know Him; the Great Commission is quite clear that He intends us to let the entire world know about His offer of reconciliation, love, and life.

So try going to popular places and seeing how the majority of people in your neighborhood, community, or city spend their time. Have conversations with strangers. Do a little research about your area's demographics and neighborhoods. Equip yourself with some knowledge of what things are like in the environment in which God has placed you.

Step 2. Orient
Not a reference to the Far East where I live, but of orienting yourself. In this step, taking what you found in step 1, you combine your observations with what you already know. Pray thoughtfully about how God would have you, and if appropriate, your family too, engage the people around you for His kingdom. What are your talents and your background? Is God giving you a burden for a need that exists in your community? You don't have to strike off on your own with no experience (I don't actually recommend that), so what ministries may already exist that you can join to get more experience in that area?

Step 3. Decide
Make a decision. You may want to ask wise and experienced people you know for advice, ask friends and family to pray for you, etc. What is God leading you to do? Are you already involved in ministry and have no more time? Maybe you are called to stay there. Maybe God is calling you to ask about starting something new at your church, or maybe there's something another church is doing that's in line with what you feel drawn towards, and it's a change for you to introduce a link of cooperation between two churches. You may decide to get more training in a certain area. You may even decide to do nothing for now, and repeat steps 1 and 2.

Step 4. Act
Now the decision has been made, and it's time to get moving. You may be starting something new and need to begin gathering resources and volunteers, or be joining something already in progress. It may be a slow gradual beginning, or you may be off to a running start in a ministry with which you're already familiar. What you do is up to you and God, but I will say this: If it's successful, watch out. Progress in ministry and advancing God's kingdom puts a target on your back. Don't let fear slow you down, but be alert and pray. Old temptations may return, or new ones may arise. People who previously seemed friendly may suddenly seem like they are putting obstacles in your way, or even jealous of your progress. On the other hand, other people will almost certainly appear as unexpected help and blessings.
When something great happens, write it down. (I'm guilty of not doing this enough) When difficult times come later, you can remind yourself of what God has done.

"Going over the top"... out of the trenches and into combat

That's all I've got for now. I'm tired of the nit-picking debates on who exactly said what appropriately and non-offensively, tired of the gloom-and-doom talk of our declining culture; it's time we stopped focusing on what we can't change and begin focusing on what we definitely can, in whatever context God has placed us.