Hello again.
Know what’s worse than a toddler experiencing his first cold (fever, faucet nose, probably convinced this is just what his life is forever)? Two toddlers experiencing their first colds simultaneously.
What I’m saying is: For over a week after hosting an unplanned guest, our whole household has been sick, and I’m horribly behind on the book—by my standards, which is to say, not very behind at all, but enough that I’m worked up about it. (In college, I’d write all my final papers a week or two ahead of deadline, then stick around to binge TV while waiting for a sole scheduled exam, usually for some easy gen ed course, just so you know what sort of person I am. What? Yeah, my roommate loved it.)
Anyway, here’s an email with a few things to read from my research: three books, a video, and an excerpt from a written interview I conducted with a pastor for my chapter on conspiracism. I won’t be able to include all of it in the book, but I think you’ll find it worth your time.
Books
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr. Originally written a decade ago, when social media was not what it is now, but it very much holds up. More focused on the brain than the internet—the extent to which our habits of thought and behavior are physically engrained is wild, terrifying stuff—with lots of history thrown in. If your copy takes a while to arrive, check out the original Atlantic piece from 2008 that became the basis for the book.
The Decadent Society: America before and after the Pandemic, by Ross Douthat. Douthat had the misfortune to release a book about how stagnant and sclerotic our society has become literally a week before the pandemic upended everything here in the States. This is his paperback revised edition, which ably works COVID-19 into his argument. It ended up being less relevant to my book than I anticipated, but it’s a thought-provoking read nonetheless.
Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, by Jonathan Rauch. I seriously can’t say enough good things about this book, which was written in the early 1990s but feels eerily current. Throw in a few buzzwords and a couple mentions of Twitter and you’d never know it’s not brand new. (Speaking of which, he has an actually new book on similar topics I will be reading soon.) Beyond his prescience, Rauch is also an excellent writer, remarkably skilled at making academic, philosophical topics accessible. I referenced Kindly Inquisitors a bit in this recent column for The Week and narrowly restrained myself from pitching about five more Rauch-inspired pieces.
Video
If you couldn’t attend the “Faith in the News” panel I mentioned in the last email but did want to watch me hold forth about media and its consumption, the recording is online here.
Interview excerpt
This is one of several interviews I’ve done with working pastors who are dealing with conspiracism in their congregations and/or denominations. I won’t share this pastor’s name here—he didn’t request anonymity, and he’ll be identified in the book, but I don’t want to spring surprise internet attention on anyone. Regardless, you don’t need that info to appreciate his words, which I found so insightful. His comments are unedited aside from a few line breaks to make it more readable in email form.
What is—for lack of a better word—working, and what isn't? Have you found some things particularly useful or useless in getting through to people in thrall to conspiracy theories? Do you feel you're making headway?
Argument gets you nowhere. In fact, in my experience, it only drives it deeper. Debates, reviewing evidence, snark, sarcasm, ostracizing, anger … all of it is a dead end.
Sometimes in passing I’ll come across someone who spouts a conspiracy theory about vaccines, Trump, election stuff, whatever, just out in the world somewhere. I just smile and move along. During a short encounter, there’s nothing I can do for that person unless I’m willing to have an actual relationship with them.
Likewise, I tell folks to think about helping friends and neighbors as a long-term treatment plan. It’s not something you can clear up with a single “come-to-Jesus meeting,” or “tell-it-like-it-is” session. It takes time and trust and vulnerability.
That’s why I think the first move has to be to listen. As hard as it is, you gotta hear them out. They feel so passionate about it, and they’ve spent so much time on it that you can’t just pop the balloon in a day or an afternoon. You have to help them change the entire way that they’re thinking about this stuff.
So that means listening first, and then asking good-faith questions, not playing “gotcha” or leading them down some sort of patronizing Socratic exercise. Be interested in how they got to where they are. After all, this is a loved one, and they’re mixed up in some pretty toxic sh-t. You should be interested in charting the course of that. If someone is ever going to allow you the space in their life to speak into these dark ideas, they need to trust you. The best way to build trust I’ve found in 10 years of being a preacher is just to listen.
I think at some point, once trust has been established, you have to try to move the conversation over to feelings. For me, I try to talk about how those ideas make me feel. It would be really scary to believe that I was living in a world that was run by a secret group of … fill in the blank. I would be distraught if I thought that children were being systematically abused and eaten, or vaccines were a time bomb that were going to kill everyone … so on and so forth. That paranoid fear lies at the heart of all of this, and sometimes showing people that it’s possible to live without that fear can help them rethink what they’ve chosen to believe.
Then, I think the final and most fundamental question we can ask someone who believes in QAnon is, “How has QAnon affected your own life?” In Christianity, we talk about how a tree is known by its fruit, and we say that the fruits of the Spirit are things like peace, patience, goodness, gentleness, etc. The question that seems to hit home the best is to ask, “Has QAnon given you more peace, made you more patient or kind or forgiving?”
If someone is in the right place to process that question, it becomes immediately obvious that no, QAnon has only made them more angry and paranoid and resentful. That can be a turning point for some.
That’s all for today! Feel free to reply here or on social media if anything caught your eye—I’d love to hear from you.
Best,
Bonnie
My goodness, I wish things were this simple in the Middle East. In the US, it seems like conspiracy theories are something you encounter every now and then, it's some old uncle or an unsophisticated neighbor. Here, it's nothing like that. Conspiracy theories are not just ubiquitous, they're mainstream orthodoxy. No amount of listening can change that.