What do you think? Is this whole QAnon conspiracy thing important or not? And should mainstream evangelical leaders be concerned?

That was the messy topic that “Crossroads” host Todd Wilken and I discussed in this week’s podcast (click here to tune that in). Looming in the background were some Twitter debates in which several people criticized my recent GetReligion post that ran with this headline: “The Atlantic probes QAnon sect and finds (#shocking) another evangelical-ish conspiracy.”

Let’s review a few things that I said in that earlier post. For starters, I do plead guilty to saying that some folks on the cultural left are a bit too fond of conspiracy theories involving scary evangelicals. Here’s how I stated that, while taking a shot at fringe folks on the right, as well:

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.

I was reacting to that recent “The Prophecies of Q” at The Atlantic, part of a larger “Shadowland” package about the growing importance of conspiracy theories in American politics.

Now, I think this Atlantic material is must reading, in part because the QAnon phenomenon isn’t well known in the evangelical mainstream. There are run-of-the-mill evangelical leaders who need to know more about this dark-web stuff, just as they needed to know about the twisted religious elements in the larger alt-right. When it comes to technology and politics, this “Shadowlands” package breaks new ground.

Did I attack The Atlantic — a publication frequently praised at GetReligion — and tell people to ignore this topic? Did I say QAnon has nothing to do with the big, complex world of evangelicalism? Let’s see. Here is the end of my earlier piece.