QAnon Conspiracies Are Tearing Through Evangelical America

anybody that believes what the left believes is absolutely on the side of evil america may fall one day but it will not fall to joe biden trump will be back whatever that looks like humanon runs on the tracks that faith has laid i watch the clips myself this firsthand information he scares the out of me so cunon is making you guys look like crackpots oh i i don't think that's an unfair estimation could it be that you're wrong no absolutely not the mysterious figure behind cuenon the sprawling conspiracy theory that holds that the world is

controlled by satanic pedophiles hasn't been heard from in almost a year and trump who found the flames of q hasn't been in office in 10 months yet the wild theories that have helped fuel the movement live on undaunted by logic truth or reality the world goes under deep state illuminati possession what next shut your churches down the pedophiles the sadness take your kids out of your home with their wicked plots rape your wife you think we are on the losing side well you better look at history put you in a concentration camp since its emergence

in 2017 q on has used myriad channels to spread its wild theories most of them online now the movement has found other ways to radicalize new believers notably evangelical churches a recent study found that as many as one in four white evangelicals believe in core tenets of qnon we're on the outskirts of nashville tennessee at the global vision bible church this is a church run by a man named pastor greg locke the parking lot is filled to capacity the tent is crowded now pastor locke exists square in the middle of the venn diagram between right

politics and evangelical christianity he's really leaning into the notion of a stolen election evil democrats pedophiles elites and his church is booming [Applause] a lot of the people that started watching us started making their journey here and so we grew numerically from about three 350 to about 1200 within 15 months locke has amassed millions of followers on social media 2.2 million on facebook alone while railing against things like coven masks the fraudulent election and pedophiles which he claims are everywhere particularly on the left and in the halls of power we got a buck wild government

yes we do demonic while he says that he's not a follower of q this is all classic q and stuff i've told you the whole time this election was fraudulent we got so much proof the only people that can deny it are crack smoking demon possessed leftists [Music] evangelicals have been a powerful force in gop politics for years but faced with a changing nation the church is finding itself older and wider than the rest of the country fearing diminished influence many pastors are grasping for answers and finding them in conspiracy theories people like do you

honestly believe that the military uncovered tunnels beneath the capitol building and beneath the white house and in the five-fingered lakes do you really believe that they found kids yeah both live ones and dead ones and if you try to keep that on the dl you're just as complicit as hunter biden bunch of crack smoking perverts wow lock is a masterful preacher bruce garenser is a former evangelical pastor turned atheist who lives in rural ohio he says that the spread of conspiracy theories like q anon in the evangelical church has been a long time coming there

was this increasing uh adoption of national white nationalistic thinking starting with you know jerry falwell and paul weirich back in the i guess the late 70s with the moral majority for example and you know so they birthed this baby that you know when trump uh you know it it came of age they realized that the way to power was through politics i was in one church in southeast ohio for 11 years i preached a certain viewpoint it was certainly a you know we were a christian nation bruce preached fundamental evangelicalism and conservative values for almost

three decades but by the late 1990s his religious and political beliefs had softened and eventually left him completely but even though he moved away from the church conspiracy theories still found a way to his family none of them are evangelicals except for my third oldest son great kid but was very non-political his whole life never voted and then in january of 2020 something changed he has gone to a southern baptist church he's told me or my pastor believes a lot of the same things i believe he sees this [Music] otherworldly element working within the government

now when biden got elected all of a sudden you know satan was sitting in the oval office do you feel like your son has been led astray it's hard to sit by when someone espouses those things and there's really nothing you can do about it bruce's son didn't want to be interviewed and didn't respond to our emails they don't see each other as much as they used to i want to hope that there's going to come a point where he wakes up one day and says this is not the path i want to be on

but my fear is he's going to become more deeply involved in these things he's not only an awesome son but you know he's the father of my to my grandchildren and they mean the world to me you better know that america may fall one day but it will not fall to joe biden it will not fall for nancy pelosi he sure ludicrousness aside the genius and insidiousness of cue is that anyone can be a part of it and you don't even need to call yourself a believer people can regurgitate cute tropes until the cows come

home while still claiming with a straight face that they have no idea what qnon is even trump did that well i don't know much about the movement other than i understand they like me very much which i appreciate [Music] people call me a q a on conspiracy i ain't no cue okay i'm not in all that nonsense i'm a truth seeker and a truth teller i'm very calculated with what i say and so i'm very aware very self-aware i don't say things that i couldn't fight for if they sued me i say things that i

have verifiable evidence or eyewitness testimony or pictures or a background and a narrative too i'm a little smarter than a lot of people give me credit for it so you have evidence of of biden being a pedophile and kamala harris being i can promise you that i say it from that platform just like when i said tom hanks is a pedophile it does not matter to me if people say tom hanks is going to sue you i wish he would why don't you show us the evidence i don't have to show you the evidence i

will when time comes so you must also know that this is exactly what q anon says as well right well it doesn't matter to me what q and says everybody wants to paint you in a corner and say that you're conspiracy theorists the problem is the only difference between truth and conspiracy lately has been about six weeks because now we need some new ones because they all happen to be coming to pass do you believe that the left is evil absolutely one thousand percent anyone involved anybody that believes what the left believes is absolutely on

the side of evil and you say that to your congregation absolutely does it not concern you that when you're telling people that a large group of people are evil that they might take it upon themselves to to act on those two things number one jesus did the same thing and number two there's no seat belts in that tent they can leave any time they want to nobody's keeping them there what is keeping them there is that lock is not only validating extreme ideas he's anointing them giving them biblical truth could it be that you're wrong

no absolutely not not in this issue now have i been wrong before about things yeah have i apologized yes but in these massive issues to me they're like fundamental staples and there's no way i'm wrong about them you know when those capital riders prayed in jesus name with evangelical sounding prayers i think it was a stunning wake-up call to a lot of evangelical leaders that we have an issue in our movement we need to address ed stetzer is an evangelical pastor and the executive director of the billy graham center at wheaton college outside of chicago

as far as evangelical street cred goes ed has more than most and he's not surprised that q anon is spreading in the church what is it about the evangelical movement that kind of lends itself to to this form of conspiracy thinking i think for people of faith um q anon runs on the tracks that faith has laid it appears that humanon has latched on to some of the the yearning and aspirations of evangelical christians for some change in culture and society they feel that their views and their ideas are no longer welcome and what happens

when people do feel marginalized is that they find ways to push back against that i'm curious about what you're hearing from from fellow pastors out there about this i think overwhelmingly pastors are not cue and honors and are concerned at the disproportionate presence of human on believers inside their churches they asked me regularly how do i address this in my church if i and particularly too they've been taught we've all been taught in seminary not to politicize the pulpit and are trying to figure out how to address this in their congregations i think it's a

very real issue so it seems that these kind of q anon churches are cropping up more and more right and i think cropping up is a good way to put it people are wanting their ideology to be reflected in their church where prior times it was more wanting their theology to be reflected in their church but people are being discipled by their cable news choices spiritually shaped by their social media feed and the end result is they're saying well you know if i believe this i want i want to hear this on sunday i grew

up in the church and he says the same stories i've always known they kind of are so similar to like things that are happening and it's like wow how do you feel about when he says things that you know joe biden's a pedophile or the left is evil is that something that is off-putting to you no not really when there's fruit out there i mean okay pastor locke is describing a biblical showdown right now yes between good and evil yes you know he's he's described kamala harris as demonic yes or demon possessed yes he has

said that joe biden is a pedophile yeah you know he describes this network of child trafficking tunnels you believe this yes i do and it is demonic and i believe wholeheartedly in my spirit without anyone else telling me anything that trump will be back whatever that looks like in an effort to curb the spread of covet disinformation locke has been permanently kicked off twitter but as his in-person attendance continues to grow so does the concern felt by folks like bruce i grabbed drinks with him and his friends a current pastor and an ex-pastor turned journalist

to chat about what if anything could be done so i feel like i'm stepping into a joke a pastor a journalist and an atheist walked into a bar and i'm not sure what the punchline is going to be but it's okay we aren't quite sure either but so what do you guys think is is happening in this moment to me it's a very fear-based faith structure absolutely um and of course the political structure is fear-based as well there's always got to be an enemy that you're fighting whether it's satan or the evil leftists there always

has to be some kind of evil thing that you're fighting because if you don't fight we're all going to hell there's a lot of identity stuff that's going on in politics right now the issues of abortion and the issues of gay rights and so whenever the republican party took a turn and started becoming more and more extremist i think that everything started to to just snowball if january 6 taught us anything it's how easy that stuff can turn violent are you worried about what this might mean for the church and the implications for the christian

church and its witness are substantial and i think it it is part of our responsibility these are people that are part of our congregations these are people that we would say are our sisters and brothers in christ and when we see them being led astray we need to help bring them back we're not going to get in we are going to go forward and then we're going to go forward yeah [Applause]