The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas is a a must-see.
Visitors are self-guided through the museum in a way that brings them through the assassination of JFK starting with broad time before the event, winnowing down to counting off the seconds. They learn about the political culture of the time and place, then begin zooming in on the day, the hour, the minute…until the moment of JFK’s assassination. After that, the museum devotes itself to the aftermath.
Visitors can see the actual window in the book depository, with big X’s on the street below where the bullets struck. Through visual, audio, and physical artifacts, the museum does an excellent job reconstructing that moment in history.
Just before the self-guided tour ends, near the exit, is the display discussing the various theories surrounding the assassination. Guess which area of the museum is the most crowded?
We love secrets. Anything is fair game for having a secret.
The secret to saving the country and our body, and making both exist forever, is eschewing the government and Big Food Farma Pharma. The secret to the correct Christian life is a particular theology which is outlined in a book or conference ticket that’s for sale. The gist behind all secrets is that I’m lacking something—a vitamin, health regimen, beauty product, subscription, holiness, knowledge—but the good news is that the answer to the secret is for sale. Click here. Subscribe. Follow.
There are so many secrets. How is it that everyone seems to know more than me?
We buy things that we’re told are the secret others are missing out on, and we chase after knowing secrets. We can form an identity with others who are in on the secret, smirking knowingly at those who haven’t bought in. We’ll more readily believe just about anything if we think it’s a secret.
This is the mystery religion.
There are lots of reasons for isolation in today’s culture. Video games and the internet are commonly listed as culprits. But I want to suggest something different because of what happened on Sunday afternoon, September 11, 2022.
I stopped listening to a pastor for good that day, and the question I have for you today, in a roundabout way, is: are we not just as easily controlled by our distrust as we are by our trust?
There is nearly nothing left to talk about, but the mystery religion. There is no event, whether national, regional, or local, without the mystery religion to explain it. All action and reaction is viewed through a lens of the mystery religion; human fallenness and fallibility are never the correct answer.
If you don’t want to participate in the mystery religion, there’s nothing left to say because there are no ears to hear it.
For two years I’d listened to a pastor—and others—who had done well pointing out the naked pandemic emperor riding down the street, an emperor who was sometimes the medical industry, sometimes government, sometimes the justice system, sometimes the election machine.
Conspiracies do exist.
Conspiracy theories can be correct, either partially or mostly.
Conspiracy theories can also be bunk, either partially or mostly.
It’s in the “mostly” that we get into trouble, because that’s just enough for buy-in. If the person espousing the conspiracy is someone with our same religious or political beliefs, someone who has been right and helpful before, “mostly” is more than enough. We don’t trust the experts, except when an expert comes along espousing the mystery religion…then we do.
The conspiracy that was the pandemic started to fall apart almost as soon as it started, an instant affirmation for those who questioned the virus origins, the lockdowns, the treatments, the national players, the money, the vaccine, and the hideous way large segments of the population were punished. Emails leaked, people resigned, leaders backtracked, doctors spoke out, studies and numbers proved, and the facade crumbled almost as quickly as they could build it.
Instant affirmation is dangerous.
It’s the house letting the new gambler win the first time at the slot machine to keep them pumping in nickels and eventually life savings. Suddenly, millions of people who hadn’t needed to eat at the fruit of the conspiracy tree saw nothing more necessary to do. And in a way, regarding the pandemic, they were right. But getting their first conspiracy correct, with it serving them well, meant they were on a winning streak.
The devil ain’t dumb.
If you can’t get people from the left, you get them from the right. Either way, you get them.
Mainstream media and social platforms, in punishing and denying people who were trying to find answers, created new interest in conspiracy theory. The pandemic was a fine appetizer for both those creating and those consuming the content. It was the fentanyl of conspiracies which sent people looking down rabbit holes instead of shooting the rabbits and filling in the holes to keep their garden healthy.
I was no different.
That pastor had been giving regular Bible prophecy updates for years; he didn’t start during the pandemic. But it’s then that he came into prominence. People flocked to listen to him.
The time seemed ripe, if you remember.
We had killer bees and locusts and disease and vaccine passports and globalists and Revelation swinging in a new breeze every week, it seemed. Plus, Bible prophecy makes up 25 to 33 percent of the Bible, or thereabouts. When pastors don’t preach on it, or try to assure people it doesn’t matter by turning those passages into life lesson pablum, they can’t complain about people going to the internet to find something. We’re created to seek out the Creator who keeps some mystery to himself; we’re easily satisfied with mystery in general.1
I began to enjoy listening to Bible prophecy teachers during that time. Granted, I didn’t enjoy some of the things I started to see in their forums and comments section, and I grew so weary of hearing about George Soros and Yuval Noah Harari, but comments sections are almost always a dustbin and speculation needs a bit of extra room for a seam allowance, so I convinced myself to let it go.
But all that raw soil unearthed by the pandemic conspiracy soon sprouted incredible numbers of conspiracy weeds, including in the Bible prophecy realm.
As with anything that becomes so tightly focused—whether Bible prophecy or health freedom or conspiracy theory—the result is unhealthy myopia. Myopia is weakness because we can’t see what’s coming even though we think we have sight. It is especially so for Christian ministries who I believe ought not put content out in the name of God because of an editorial calendar or book publishing deal with a driving need to build an audience, but instead because God has actually given them something to say.
Yet I limped along in listening to that pastor, not completely convinced I should stop listening, though I was starting to wonder. It was a lonely time, and a person talking through a video was still a person talking.
That is, until September 11, 2022.
September 11 fell on a Sunday that year. As was my usual routine, I had lunch after getting home from church and then busied myself in the kitchen with fall garden vegetables while playing the live Bible prophecy Sunday message from that pastor.
“I believe God told me to preach this message today,” he started by saying, seeming more agitated than usual. And then, using scant scripture but mostly videos from Bitchute, he preached a sermon on how 9/11 was a big conspiracy and there were no airplanes involved.
[INSERT TWO WEEKS OF THE BIBLE PROPHECY REALM BLOWING UP AT EACH OTHER ONLINE, TO THE JOY OF GOD I’M SURE, HERE.]
I turned his program off for good that day. I’m not making a comment on his salvation or faith or ministry. But I knew I was done.
I can’t imagine what 9/11 having no airplanes had to do with Bible prophecy.
I can’t imagine why God would tell him to do it, if he actually did, other than perhaps making it easier for people to walk away. After speaking to a few people, I discovered I wasn’t the only one who turned off his program for good.
I left the mystery religion church that day. I am still a bit angry and a lot confused over it, though.
What he said. Why he would say it. The indifference to the thousands of people who died that day, including those on the airplanes. The apparent inability of people, including preachers, who, once they started down the rabbit hole of alternative information at the beginning of the pandemic for legitimate reasons, couldn’t stop themselves from going all the way in for permanent residence.
Rabbit hole ministry is highly profitable for views and clicks, to be sure.
When I directly pushed and prodded others in the Bible prophecy realm about such a ludicrous theory, at best I could only get was a “he might have been wrong about the airplanes but you have to admit there’s some funny stuff about the implosion and Rumsfeld and the Pentagon angle of attack and that one video he showed is kind of odd.”
I don’t care about those “what ifs” and “maybes.”
I don’t have that kind of faith. I have a faith that’s “confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see (Hebrews 11:1 NIV).” It’s not built on speculation.
Only a handful—and a tiny one—of Bible prophecy teachers spoke about the 9/11 incident and came out against it. And perhaps in God’s sense of humor and a desire to gently prod us to discern wisely instead of based on habit, one who spoke out against it was a man who had started out the pandemic taking a poor stance on things only to fall silent when he realized he got it wrong.
The messenger isn’t always the message. God uses clay pots and donkeys, whether we expect it or not.
I don’t like joining organizations or even churches because when you become a member of something—officially or unofficially—there is pressure to lose autonomy in decision and action. Questioning the group is difficult; leaving is more so. I don’t think it’s wise to circle the wagons around a standard group of Bible teachers—prophecy or church growth or whatever else—to the point that you feel awkward questioning them on something they’ve said because you booked them for your podcast next week or because you’re sharing a conference stage in a month.
I don’t know what God is telling people to say, so I want to be careful. My frustration with discernment ministries is they use the same editorial calendar approach, attacking based on a schedule instead of necessarily doing what God asks. I don’t want to do that.
But I will say this: when a Bible prophecy ministry tends toward less actual teaching from the Bible and more speculation about what kind of toilet paper George Soros has in his bathroom and why he keeps giving it to aliens, it should stop.
It pains me to write this because I know the tendency is to slide to either side of the course line and have commenters cheerlead accordingly. I’m trying to stay on trajectory, a tricky thing when attempting to poke at rough spot and not go reeling off in the other direction. Bible prophecy is important, but not when it’s wrapped in weirdo conspiracy that may or may not be true, pointing people to mystery instead of to God.
I’d like to tell anyone who heard that September 11 sermon to set it aside.
I want people to watch the interviews with the family who were on those flights, and the eye witnesses on the streets. You could start with the recent History Channel’s documentaries “9/11 Four Flights” and end with “9/11 I Was There.” I bawled through both of them.
I remember standing in the 9/11 Museum, the sound of the final voicemails from airplane passengers mixed with the radio calls of the emergency services and the air traffic controllers. Messages of love mixed with messages of controllers trying to scramble fighter jets. It was overwhelming, and I began to cry in the middle of the museum crowd.
You can wonder about Rumsfeld and the money. You can wonder about the experts who insist it was an implosion. You can try to tie the fire in Maui to missing Malaysia flight 370 to 9/11 with frickin’ lasers and Dick Cheney if you must.
But do you ever wonder why the rabbit holes attract you so much, and what you think you’ll find at the bottom of a dirty tunnel?
We should be angry about the powerful crushing the weak and profiting off of their pain. But we can’t always combat that with discovering more about the who and the how. Conspiracy for evil has always been the case since the garden. We serve a God who knows everything; there is no hidden mystery to him. All conspiracy is spiritual warfare, anyway. Our weapons are prayer, not more Rumble videos.
Let the mystery religion die.
Leave the conspiracy web pages and us-against-them podcasts and video channels. All it does is feed anger and anger kills us slowly.
The insatiable lust for mystery knowledge is upsetting.
It has changed people and created deep divides between those living in the rabbit holes and those choosing to walk by. Despite accusations, how is sticking your head down a rabbit hole much different from an ostrich sticking its head in the sand? The brain is still in the dirt, the same place we bury the dead.
I don’t want to be a jerk, but consider opening a book. Several. The publishing houses might be tainted, but slander and libel are expensive incentives to provide decent footnotes to back up their claims and let you check it out for yourself.2 Test the conspiracy theory outside of its zip code. Maybe it’ll stand on its own, maybe it won’t, maybe it’ll be a few inches shorter but still standing.
Just test it.
I cannot let this go because the reverberating effects of conspiracy theory keep hitting my life.
The mystery religion has isolated me.
People in my circle all have these large lists and I just can’t keep up. The foods they do and do not eat. The products they will and will not use. The things we can and cannot talk about. The religious beliefs we do or do not agree on. The buttons we ought not push, the triggers we shouldn’t pull. And now, the topics of the mystery religion that will pop up, because the things we consume are the things we talk about.
Put together a group these days and there’s nothing to do but drink water (with or without fluoride?) and sit in silence. We can’t even talk about the weather anymore because it’s all weather modification.
“Are you saying this conspiracy isn’t true?!”3
“Whether it’s true or not is irrelevant. What I’m saying is that it’s not important.”
When God tells us to be innocent as doves and wise as serpents, we leap on being wise as serpents, forgetting that the more information we know the less innocent we are. However you interpret it, I don’t think God is encouraging us to chase down conspiracy with more fervor than we chase after him.
Being wise is not accumulating knowledge and information. We ask God for wisdom, and he provides. I’ve been asking for wisdom at a fever pitch in recent years and the outflow of that request has been to consume less information of a certain sort.
There are entire conversations that I can no longer have with folks because of the normalization of mystery religion. Times that would have been precious conversational connection are now filled with litmus-test questions to see what I think about particular topics, perhaps followed by the side-eye, raised eyebrows, blank smiles, strategic sighs, and a dismissive “do your own research.”
What research should I be doing? Where should I look?
8chan, land of the autists? Skeptic69’s glorious YouTube channel? The one guy who makes sure the world knows he’s an engineer and then proceeds to tell the most bizarre theory as truth, as if engineers couldn’t be nuts and as if getting on a podcast or video channel meant anything other than there was an editorial calendar and need for clicks? The entire recommended reading or “customers also bought” list after buying a book on Amazon, not realizing that the algorithm profits off of feeding me into a narrow and more profitable funnel of predictability, as prediction is all algorithms know?
Research is a fight, not a water-like path of least resistance. It’s not passive and convenient. It takes time. It can’t be done while multitasking or in a quick hip social media video.
I’ve written a quite a books in my life, mostly as a ghostwriter. I wonder if people know what doing research looks like? It is exhausting, and it is also agnostic. I have to look outside of the preferred theory to make sure it can stand. On my blog, I don’t always get it right depending on the mood I’m in when I write, but I don’t sell my blog as research pieces. They are opinion pieces.
Research, to me, means reading books, newspapers, and online articles, paying particular attention to the publication source and who owns or funds it, plus the footnotes and bibliographies at the end of the work. It means going to museums to see the physical objects—which is what most of my vacations have been, instead of beaches and clubs. I have a fondness for primary sources and their power to break through assumptions, even if the placards by them insist on telling me how to think about that primary source.
Research means watching documentaries and videos, but knowing that edits and soundbites carry out-of-context power, and that just because a source is mainstream doesn’t mean it’s evil and just because it’s some guy in a basement doesn’t mean he’s onto something. It means being able to tell the difference from someone presenting information, and someone telling you how to think about the information presented.
But most importantly, I read my Bible and talk to God about the things I’m seeing.
I do all of that as best I can not because I’m so smart, but because I’m not at all. I’ve even discovered that once I left my 20’s and 30’s I knew much less than I thought I did. I’m in a place of complete honesty that the world confuses me and even a walk through stores raises questions on what the heck is happening out there. Daily I ask God what something means and what to do with information.
We are “educated” by unchecked information far beyond what our intelligence can handle. We dismiss anyone who questions any conspiracy theory in part or whole—or even why we should even care—as being an un-awakened normie, still captured by NASA and inevitably en route to Bohemian Grove to make some chemtrails.
When I took a sharp poke at people who believe the earth is flat, I lost three subscribers. When I wrote a ridiculously long blog post about trying to think critically about the things we see online, I lost two. Maybe it was the topics, maybe it was the length of the post, maybe it was sucky writing, maybe it was the fact I didn’t cram it all into a two-minute video, I don’t know.
The mystery religion is deep enough that each side—thinking they know something the other doesn’t—has no idea their rabbit hole leads to the same exact place, and it isn’t God. You will not find God at the end of speculation and conspiracy, no matter how hard and cleverly you string it to Bible verses or political action.
The worst part of pursuing secret knowledge isn’t the isolation or distraction. It’s the false confidence that comes when we think we know something that will keep us from getting fooled down the road, unaware that the all-trusting and all-distrusting are equally easy to herd.
I’ll leave you with this little story.
There is a fellow who calls himself a “watchman” in the Bible prophecy world, like many do.
He creates elaborate videos using the standard menu of conspiracy theory, tucking a wee bit of Bible mumbo jumbo in there. He has guests that nod and agree. He does deep dives into weather modification, HAARP, Illuminati, Hollywood—all of it, though not so much into Daniel or Ezekiel. He, like many platformed Christians with a desire to virtue signal holiness, make a point to note they are not pro-Trump nor pro-anyone and that only Jesus saves. He caps it off with reminders, after sharing clickbait headlines about global chaos, that the political parties are all two sides of the same evil system so there’s no point in voting, as if the fallen world weren’t completely fallen in every regard and of course there is a thread of evil running through and through and yet we are to occupy until Jesus comes. His testimony is that he got out of the NAR movement, which he labeled as a mystery religion, and is now on track with his faith.
But he’s wrong.
He’s wrong on many things, to be sure, but on one thing specifically: he’s still in a mystery religion.
It’s the mystery religion of conspiracy theory.
1 Matthew 13:11, Mark 4:11, Daniel 2:28, Amos 3:7, 1 Corinthians 2:7, etc.
2 One reason RFK Jr’s book about Fauci was so powerful was the massive amount of footnotes and the bibliography it had. You could check every claim he made. Almost a quarter of the book was listed sources.
3 If it’s about the moon landing being faked or a flat earth, yes. I’m saying that’s not true. Full stop.
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