New podcast: Conspiracy theory news isn't going away, so how will religious leaders respond?

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.

There is no “Crossroads” podcast during this short work week, but there is another GetReligion-related podcast for those with ears to hear.

Jon Ward, senior political correspondent for Yahoo! News, contacted me after seeing some of the social-media fallout from the recent trilogy of GetReligion posts about the Atlantic Monthly “Shadowland” project, especially the content about white evangelicals and the mysterious QAnon movement.

For those who missed them, those posts were: “The Atlantic probes QAnon sect and finds (#shocking) another evangelical-ish conspiracy,” “New podcast: The Atlantic needed to interview some evangelical leaders about QAnon heresy” and “Thinking about QAnon: Joe Carter sends strong warning to evangelicals about new heresy.”

If you have not followed his work over the years, Ward describes himself this way:

I write about politics, culture and religion. I'm pro-complexity, pro-nuance, and pro-context. I've covered two White Houses and two presidential elections. I'm the author of "Camelot's End," a book released in 2019 about the epic clash between Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter in 1980. I'm trying to understand how our politics is broken and how to fix it, and host a podcast on that topic called "The Long Game." I live in D.C. with my wife and our kids.

I ended up spending an hour-plus online with Ward, recording material for an episode of his “The Long Game” series.

The podcast that grew out of our conversation (“Religion reporter Terry Mattingly on White Evangelicals and the Qanon political cult”) in part of an effort by Ward to explore the broader world of conspiracy theory life, with some extra attention devoted to the anti-vaccine movement.

During our conversation, Ward noted that he grew up in evangelicalism (as did I, on the way to Eastern Orthodox Christianity). This entire discussion, he said, has reminded him of the famous book by historian Mark A. Noll entitled, “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind”

Here is a key comment from Ward: