Christians and "Misinformation"

Fix your truth detector

In the last 5 years the amount of blatant lies spread on social media has reached a fever pitch.

Oddly enough, just about everybody agrees on this point. We just disagree sharply about what the lies are, and who’s doing the lying.

One large group holds to what we’ll call “the official narrative” and finds broad distrust and “conspiracy theories” to be corrosive to social cohesion. The other smaller—but growing—group holds to what we’ll call “alternative narratives” and believes the official narrative is usually questionable at best.

Contained within this latter camp is a wide spectrum, ranging from limited dissents (masks don’t work, for example) to throwing out entire paradigms (the earth is flat, for example).

In any case, civic and congregational unity is going to be hard to achieve when people are operating on such radically different social analysis software.

Fortunately, since I began writing this post, a perfect example of this incongruence appeared online. Check out this snippet by Karen Swallow Prior, from a video she did for the Holy Post entitled “Why Do We Believe Conspiracy Theories.”

In an attempt to talk about the danger of Christians and conspiracy theories, she cites three examples—election fraud, Hollywood child abuse, and Covid coverups. The problem is, the latter two are almost certainly true, and the first is growing in support all the time.

If Hollywood sex abuse rings are a pie in the sky conspiracy, what exactly were Diddy and Epstein up to? If Covid’s origins weren’t covered up, why were Fauci and his colleagues emailing about the virus looking “engineered” while telling the public otherwise?

The very examples she uses to point to the ridiculousness of conspiracy theories actually appear to point to the necessity of conspiracy theories. What she would condemn as “misinformation” I would call “information.”

It quickly becomes clear that our two groups are occupying two different realities.

This presents us with two problems:

First, there’s only one truth

It’s possible neither of us are right, but it’s not possible that we’re both right.

Some of these things are not provable one way or the other. We’re presented with a page full of dots that I might connect in one way and you might connect in another. Of course, if the truth does come out and in hindsight I realize I’ve connected the wrong dots on the last 10 pages in a row, I might need to work on my truth detector. But case by case there might be room to disagree.

But in another sense, many of these things aren’t all that consequential. There are millions of facts in life that won’t impact you much if you’re wrong about them. If you believe with all your heart that San Francisco is the capital of California and refuse to believe otherwise, you’re wrong but it shouldn’t matter that much.

But that’s where the second problem comes in.

Second, there has to be room for dissent

Not only do a lot of people believe San Francisco is the capital, so to speak. They are adamant that it is and will either strongly imply it is morally wrong to disagree, or even go so far as to demand censorship of anyone who says it’s Sacramento. Social media sites might even comply, and search engines might make it to where the top 50 results all insist that Sacramento’s prominence is a debunked conspiracy theory.

This does not make San Francisco the capital. But more importantly, it doesn’t make the people who say it’s Sacramento into crazy troublemakers. Yet this kind of thing just keeps happening.

Obviously Covid spawned a tsunami of cases in which the truth was banned for being “misinformation.” I’ll never forget seeing a Christian lady turn and walk away once she found out the sister she was talking with was unvaccinated. The unvaccinated sister was skeptical the shot would provide immunity or stop transmission. We know now she was right, but she didn’t get an apology.

My colleague Dr. Brad Harrub posted early on about the possibility of a lab leak, which received a number of scathing comments calling it “irresponsible” and arguing his credentials should be revoked for such wild speculation. As information has come out to reveal he was likely correct, the replies remain posted without retraction.

For my part, I was thrown out of a preacher group I helped start and was told I could only come back if I admitted to everyone I had “lied.” My crime was saying that Covid statistics were being indiscriminately counted, conflating hospitalizations “from” the virus and “with” the virus. Two years later, those far-right conspiracy theorists at CNN acknowledged the same problem.

But it didn’t just stop as Covid tapered down. “Liz Cheney and the firing squad” was the latest fabrication a couple of weeks ago. Even less significant stuff like the Olympic “Last Supper” debacle this summer show how they can mobilize the average person to shout down dissent because “it makes the church look bad” and “you’re spreading disinformation.”

For every person who got the story right, there were plenty of others who were wrong—yet brimming with confidence—there to let the poster know he was “spreading misinformation.”

Oddly enough, in the few cases where a retraction has been extended, it’s usually so under the radar that the people who dutifully shouted down dissenters don’t see it. This means they miss out on a valuable chance to gain some discernment so they won’t get duped again on the next major lie. No accountability, no apologies, no learning.

If this all sounds absurd, you’re probably not one of the people who has had a dissenting opinion turn out to be right. And now that the cases are piling higher and higher with literally every passing month, there’s an ever-growing supply of such people. For every one of them, they can’t unsee the process once they’ve seen it.

And if you’ve been mistreated at the hands of people who turned out to be wrong, and you know they’re going to do it again on the next thing, unity is a pretty tough sell.

If the basis of our fellowship is subject to a CNN fact check, we’re not exactly “preserving the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace,” are we? Can’t “tolerate one another in love” extend to reading the news a bit differently? Why does just one side believe they can speak boldly and browbeat their opponents into silence while insisting that they themselves have the moral high ground?

If the conditions of our unity are that we can work together so long as I never openly hold an opinion you don’t like, who’s doing the dividing here?

Yes, I’m not thrilled about some of the things I see other Christians believing. One time on a guest preaching trip a man shook my hand and slipped me a piece of paper detailing how we needed to get the word out about the flatness of the earth. Others believe John F. Kennedy, Jr. faked his own death in 1999 and has been working for 25 years to run a shadow government with Donald Trump. Once the “red pills” start flowing, restraint is needed to not swallow the whole bottle.

But I’m going to be honest with you—it’s easier to have unity with a flat earther than with those who want to silence everyone who disagrees with them. I’m just fine with Karen Swallow Prior types thinking I’m a bit crazy for saying the government didn’t want people to find out the virus looked a whole lot like the projects they were funding.

Why can’t they be okay with me thinking they’re wrong? Why do they need so badly to see us come to heel or shut our mouths? Could it be they want the praise of man more than they want to be united with their brethren?

As the world seems set to drastically change in the coming years, we as Christians had better figure out how to give each other grace and learn to live with these second-level disagreements.

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