Here we go again. This week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) offers yet another journey into the world of QAnon and its impact in American pews.

All the evidence is that this subject is not going away, even as it gets more complex. See this week’s post entitled, “The New York Times looks at QAnon leader who is, wait, a Manhattan mystic from Harvard?” Some interesting court trials loom ahead, no doubt, after the January 6th riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Still, if you were looking for a thesis statement that captures how elite American newsrooms view QAnon, and the red-hot topic of conspiracy theories in general, it would be a bite of revealed truth drawn from the must-read “Shadowlands” package published last June by The Atlantic. In “The Prophecies of Q,” author Adrienne LaFrance claimed that QAnon is an emerging sect that is defined by its evangelical hopes and dreams, since the “language of evangelical Christianity has come to define the Q movement.”

In a GetReligion post at the time (“The Atlantic probes QAnon sect and finds (#shocking) another evangelical-ish conspiracy“) I offered my own opinion on that:

There are times, when reading the sprawling “Shadowland” package … when one is tempted to think that the goal was to weave a massive liberal conspiracy theory about the role that conservative conspiracy theories play in Donald Trump’s America.

At the center of this drama — of course — is evangelical Christianity. After all, evangelical Christians are to blame for Trump’s victory, even if they didn’t swing all those crucial states in the Catholic-labor Rust Belt.

It’s almost as if evangelicals are playing, for some strategic minds on the left, the same sick, oversized role in American life that some evangelicals assign to Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Bill Gates and all those liberal Southern Baptist intellectuals who love Johnny Cash and Jane Austen.

That’s still half of what I think on this topic.

It is certainly true that (a) leaders of the “political cult” called QAnon — to use a term from a must-read Joe Carter FAQ on this topic — speak fluent evangelical and that (b) the gospel according to Q and similar conspiracy heresies have influenced many people in pews (including some who traveled to the National Mall for Trump’s March to Save America rally).

That’s an important, ongoing story that must be covered.