Delivered August 20, 2023, Unitarian Church of Lincoln
This reflection is in some ways the counterpoint to Thursday night, out at Antelope Park. Who was there? For those who weren’t, or for those that were, one of the things that we talked about was an old phrase in our tradition: Unitarians don’t stand for anything, we move forward. But the question that haunts that faith in progress in why we haven’t done it yet. If we are about progress onward and upward forever, how do we talk about the things that hold us back, externally and internally. So this reflection is going to start in sociology, but stay with me. We are going to finish back in humanist theology.
A few years ago, I began attending public meetings around Lincoln as part of my job. Which meetings varies from month to month; sometimes city council, county commission, local or state board of education. And the issues have varied, from sex education standards, to zoning and the Niskithe Prayer Camp, to advocating for funding for diversion programs in the county budget. But what hasn’t changed, in all those meetings, is the consistent, loud, attendance by some of the angriest people I know. It is usually the same people. I don’t know if they recognize me, but I mostly recognize them by this point. And while the issue sometimes changes (from stolen elections to nefarious school boards corrupting the youth), they are always at the meeting alleging that some secret group of people is doing great harm to this community or country. A conspiracy.
I remember a time in my life, not that long ago, when I thought conspiracy theories were fun, eccentric hobbies without huge consequence. I spend a lot of time in Unitarian spaces, it will not surprise you to know I have a high comfort level with eccentricity. But sometime in the last decade, conspiracy theories have gone from being a marker of eccentricity to something that is deadly serious, with real world effects. I’ve spoken to elected officials who think, before every public meeting, what their response will be if -when- one of these meetings turns violent.
Conspiracy theories have moved from the fringes to the center of our cultural conversations. Election denial and anti-vaccine views are open topics of conversation for presidential candidates, and that trickles down to conversations we are having in towns, churches, and families. The Joseph Uscinski, professor of political science at the University of Miami writes:
“Conspiracy theories are not fringe ideas, tucked neatly away in the dark corners of society. They are political, economically, and socially relevant to all of us. They are intertwined with our everyday lives in countless ways. Conspiracies theories are everywhere, and, like other ideas, they have consequences.
When people believe conspiracy theories they may act on them. In democracies, conspiracy theories can drive majorities to make horrible decisions backed by the use of legitimate force. Conspiracy beliefs can conversely encourage abstention. Those who believe the system is rigged will be less willing to take part in it. Conspiracy theologies form the basis for some people’s medical decisions; this can be dangerous not only for them but for others as well. For a select few believers, conspiracy theories are instructions to use violence.”[1]
So this is something that we should be talking about in this congregation. And, as a personal note, this is a sermon I’ve worried about. Because, while it is easy to critique right wing conspiracies from this pulpit, this is not a left-right issue. It is a cultural issue, and one that this congregation is not separate from. I’ve had conversations in this church on the evils of mandatory vaccines, on alien conspiracies, and the nefariousness of the NATO alliance. In the broader Unitarian Universalist world, I’ve seen some of these theories becoming jumping off points to blatant anti-semitism, the ur-conspiracy theory that is so often at the root of all the others.
If we are going to respond, as individuals and as a community, we need to understand why these theories are so enticing, and how we can respond effectively.
We know what doesn’t work very well: actually correcting the underlying facts. I went to two county commission meetings last month. In the first, officials from the election commission came to the meeting, explaining in careful, measured detail how elections work, and why we can be confident in them. In the second, the same conspiracies were spouted, unchanged. The information from the Election Commission simply did not land.
So the problem of conspiracy theories is not a lack of knowledge. The problem is in the capacity to distinguish the truth from fiction, the signal from the noise, the pearl from the [manure].
Let’s back up. We need to understand, first, why conspiracies are so attractive. By conspiracy here, I mean what Joe Forrest describes as “a well-organized effort initiated by an elite group of powerful men and women secretly working toward a singular goal or vision that often involves collaboration between government agencies and the media.”[2]
There are, naturally, some shades of grey in this definition. There is absolutely shady stuff that happens in the world. McCarthyism, the Tuskegee experiments, the collaboration between RT and the Russian government are all events that could fit Forrest’s definition, and are well documented historical realities.
But one piece that is almost always also present in conspiracy thinking is some kind of component of secret knowledge on the part of the theorist. That I have secret knowledge of what they are doing. This sense of unreality, that the world we see is not the world as it is, is the crux of a lot of current conspiracy theories, and what I worry about. What is the leap from “The United States Public Health Service did some terrible things in Tuskeegee between 1932-1972” to “The ‘plandemic’ is an opportunity for ‘them’ to microchip our kids?” Here’s my best guess:
In The Death of Experience, Tom Nichols writes:
Conspiracy theories are also a way for people to give context and meaning to events that frighten them. Without a coherent explanation for why terrible things happen to innocent people, they would have to accept such occurrences as nothing more than the random cruelty either of an uncaring universe or an incomprehensible deity. These are awful choices, and even thinking about them can induce the kind of existential despair that leads a character in the nineteenth-century classic The Brothers Karamazov to make a famous declaration about tragedy: “If the suffering of children of to make up the sum of the sufferings necessary to buy truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.
The only way out of this dilemma is to imagine a world in which our troubles are the fault of power people who had it within their power to avert such misery. In such a world, a loved one’s incurable disease is not a natural event: it is the result of some larger malfeasance by industry of government… Whatever it is, somebody is at fault, because otherwise we’re left blaming only God, pure chance, or ourselves.[3]
We are pattern-making creatures. The main character in Ada Twist scientist is precocious, but she’s asking very human questions:
Why does it tick and why does it tock?
Why don’t we call it a granddaughter clock?
Why are there pointy things stuck to a rose?
Why are there hairs up inside your nose?
She started with Why and then What? How? And When?
By bedtime she came back to Why? Once again.
She drifted to sleep as her dazed parents smiled
At the curious thoughts of their curious child
Who wanted to know what the world was about.
They kissed her and whispered, “You’ll figure it out.”
Humans evolved in circumstances where the first person to notice a pattern had an evolutionary advantage. If you noticed that leopards usually hung out around trees that look like that, or that boiling water made you sick less often, you were more likely to pass on your genes. We are naturally disposed to curiosity and pattern finding. And when we can’t find a pattern, often we create one.
But when those traits were developed, humans lived in small bands or villages of a few dozen people, at most. The limits of what to be curious about were pretty sharp: maybe 100 square miles, and a few hundred people who passed stories orally. In that context, I suspect, the dilemma that Tom Nichols writes about “Whatever it is, something is at fault” give rise to religion.
Now though, there are many ways of making sense out of the senseless. Religion is absolutely still one of them. Religion (at least mine) does come with some built-in accountability, which we’ll come back to.
One of religions strengths is in community, in having a group of people that share an answer, or at least an approach, to life. In 2023, finding that community outside of established religion is easy. There is so much information available now that finding like-minded people is easy. And communities of like-minded people quickly become self-reinforcing, with language and cultural norms that distinguish between those ‘in’ and ‘out.’ For instance, let’s do an experiment: “Root beer and chili dogs.” If you were a member of a particular group of Star Trek fans online, that is an instantly recognizable meme that references, in five words, an in-joke that would take at least half an hour to explain. But for the 180,000 members of that particular group, it’s a way to recognize each other.
This is the great strength of social media: it lowers the bar of connection and community based on shared interests (say, irreverent Star-trek based humor). And the great danger of social media is that it lowers the bar of connection and community based on shared interests. It is a tragic bargain.
Because the same algorithms that make it easier to connect with folks you share a worldview with also reinforce what you are already looking at, giving you a distorted view of reality. The more time you spend on a particular interest or community (say, Star Trek Shitposting), the more content you see from that group, and the less from others.
And, here’s the kicker, often the recommendations the algorithm gives you are even more dedicated communities of the same tenor. Pretty soon that is all your are seeing online is reinforcement of the worldview you started exploring, while everyone in the world of atoms seems to be sleepwalking. How infuriating that they do not see what you do, and how special it feels to be one of the chosen with special knowledge. If this sounds familiar, another way to frame this dynamic is as a leaderless cult, set up (intentionally or not) to break outside relationships. The collateral damage of conspiracy theories is not just to society in the abstract, but loved one who are put in the position of seeing the world fundamentally differently from those they are in relationships with.
So how do we respond? Now that we’ve spent 2000 words admiring this problem, what do we actually do? As a reminder here, it is easy to say that this is not our problem, that it is all other people. It is not. I’ve been in UU spaces and heard about microchips, global cabals, and antisemitism. The call is coming from inside our own house – as well as every other house on the street.
First, we need to respond with humility. It’s not just that it is more complicated than ‘us’ and ‘them,’ it is that the dynamics that give rise to conspiracy theories – pattern making, curiosity, worry about the state of the world- are dynamics that we all participate in. And, unless you are wholly cut off from media in 2023, you are not separate from the algorithmic sorting that happens. We should respond in humility as well, because there is a lot that we do not know, and if anyone had the magic answer for the increasing role of conspiracy thinking in our broader culture we probably would have heard it by now.
Second, when we do respond directly, it needs to be with honesty, compassion, and grounded in relationship. It is sometimes impossible to do all three: I can respond honestly and with compassion to the election deniers attending the county commission, but not in relationship. They don’t want it, and I don’t have the energy or desire to force a relationship there. But it is different for friends of mine who have gone down rabbit holes on the internet. There, curiosity comes first, but also a candid conversation about what I don’t agree with, and an affirmation of relationship. Here’s what I mean by that: I imagine there are some folks in this congregation who are pretty unhappy with me right now, and with this topic, presented in this way.
If you are one of those people, please know that, while this has been on my mind the last few years, it in no way diminishes my respect and affection for you. I would love to keep this conversation going, if you want to let’s find time to sit down and talk, even if it is to share our view with each other without an expectation that anyone is going to be convinced.
Last, we need to respond to conspiracy theories with intellectual rigor. Part of the problem of modern conspiracy theories is the enormous availability of information without corresponding expertise in how to interpret that information. Here’s what I mean by that: Google is not graduate school. And despite the number of articles I’ve read about EV tech, and how batteries work, I am not a materials scientist. I am a preacher, not an engineer. I can be clear about the things I have expertise in (leading churches, liberal theology, pastoral care, nonprofit budgeting, community organizing) while also having clarity about the many things I’m interested in but not an expert (music, physics, mid-century American poetry, the Bhagavat Gita). Intellectual rigor is tied to humility: one of the gifts of academia is understanding how much time and effort goes into becoming an expert on one little area, which then allows you to both better understand the breadth of human knowledge, and appreciate the depth of experience true experts bring to their subject.
And, even if I’m not an expert, I can bring intellectual rigor to a subject. We know how to do this, we list it out, right there is a central principle of Unitarian Universalism: we are all asked to participate in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Free, meaning that there are no boundaries around our exploration, but responsible, meaning that we bring our tools with us. Ada Twist’s tools: direct experience. Testing hypothesis. If something doesn’t make sense, throw out the hypothesis and try again. Ask questions, listen to your parents, figure it out. This is the accountability that separates religion from conspiracy: the most important question we ask ourselves and each other in that place is “how’s that working out for you?”
In May 2020, at the height of COVID-related conspiracy theories around church closures, the Christian theologian and social activist DL Mayfield wrote:
“People believe conspiracy theories because it is psychologically easier to believe a singular and unlikely narrative rather than engage in a hard and complicated reality where your own long-term participation is needed.”[4]
This is the key to the whole thing. The people protesting an election from three years ago at the county commission aren’t there (only) because of hate. They aren’t even there because they think they are going the change things. They are there because it is easier to believe a simple, if unlikely, thing, presented by a source of authority, that to have to muddle through a hard and complicated reality where nobody is really in charge and despite lots of people doing their best, bad things still happen. It is so much easier to blame a shadowy “them” than to admit that we contributed to these problems, we might be a part of the solution, but it is hard and there is no guarantee of success.
That is a hard sell. But it is right in our humanist wheelhouse to say that together, the world is understandable (even if we don’t fully understand it yet). That we figure it out together, in community and conversation with each other, because none of us, no group of us, has the whole truth that is hidden from the rest. And that documented, replicable hypothesis can chance the world. This Unitarian blend of humility that any individual knows the whole picture and optimism for what humanity can comprehend and achieve is the answer.
The humanist tradition in Unitarian Universalism says that the world is complex, but not opaque. This community that we build together give each of us the space to be your authentic self, and tether us together. In sharing that journey, we can start to see and appreciate the world’s complexity. May it ever be, and amen.
[1] Joseph Uscinski. “Down the Rabbit Hole” in Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 1.
[2] Joe Forrest, “Why Your Christian Friends and Family Members Are So Easily Fooled by Conspiracy Theories,” Instrument of Mercy, May 7, 2020 <https://instrumentofmercy.com/2020/05/07/why-your-christian-friends-and-family-members-are-so-easily-fooled-by-conspiracy-theories/>
[3] Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. ~ Chapter 3 <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Death_of_Expertise>
[4] https://www.instagram.com/p/B_5ASfUJszu