The Bad Theology Behind a Dangerous Conspiracy Theory

In the past 30 days, according to the CDC, COVID deaths in the US have averaged 1,840 per day, That’s higher than heart disease, the number one cause of death in our country.

The liberal crowd tends to believe that these numbers are trustworthy, and climbing because so many have decided that mask wearing and social distancing aren’t that important. Folk from my Evangelical camp continue to worship indoors, complaining about government overreach, while many others continue to hit the bars and restaurants, refusing to let COVID get in the way of good livin’.

Currently, we’re the top country in per capita COVID deaths.

To many who lean conservative, there’s a conspiracy here, one whose ultimate aim is to dismantle the Trump administration, with the CDC’s COVID data at the center of it all. The numbers have been exagerrated in an attempt to paint Trump as a fumbling, uncaring cretin in the middle of a global pandemic. Evangelicals have been indicted in these COVID theories (CT’s), accused of being too gullible to discern the truth, trust science, or consider perspectives that don’t jive with our own.

But we’re always being misrepresented, especially by left leaning media outlets. The world seems to love a good story about dumb religious people.

CT’s are a fascinating thing, and certainly not limited to Evangelicals, or a specific political affiliation. According to a study on partisan conspiracy theories, everyone’s a sucker, it just depends on who’s in office. Referencing the past 30 years, liberals have birthed far more CT’s under a conservative administration, and vice versa when a republican is in office. It’s also interesting to note that, according to a Cambridge study, liberal CT’s tend to center around evil operators in the coporate arena, while conservatives see more conspiracies originating from government circles.

But I’ve never seen so many CT’s launched from my Evangelical camp as I have in these past 4 years. From my perspective, limited and non-peer-reviewed as it is, I don’t have any liberal friends posting on social media about the government “coming to get us” or engaging in anti-America overreach. These come almost exclusively from my Evangelical friends, many of whom I’ve known most of my life.

Moving a bit beyond my limited view, the world’s largest Evangelical publication, Christianity Today, has spoken multiple times about our attraction to fake news and its attending CT’s, calling out our tendency to get suckered into this stuff and spread it as far as possible.

“Sadly, Christians seem to be disproportionately fooled by conspiracy theories.”

“…God has not called us to be easily fooled. Gullibility is not a Christian virtue. Believing and sharing conspiracies does not honor the Lord. It may make you feel better, like you are in the know, but it can end up harming others and it can hurt your witness.”

As America’s leading Evangelical pastors shut down their indoor worship services, and as the most famous Evangelical in the world begs us to show up differently, we’re compelled to rethink our devotion to what has grown to be a liturgy of sorts, one that’s done great internal damage while running counter to our calling, in the case of COVID, now contributing to a body count that is unimaginable to the people we’re supposed to be reaching.

“But the numbers aren’t real,” we say, or they’re simply not reliable. 3,000 people didn’t die yesterday from COVID. What about comorbidity, or the fact that the CDC’s overall death count hasnt risen significantly since all of this started? To us, there are plenty of reasons why we shouldn’t trust the CDC, or WHO, or the COVID Tracking Project, or the other organizations around the world that believe the numbers are real..

But that’s what we say when we’ve categorically failed to sit down with someone who’s well versed in the other side of the story. This is one of the reasons why CT’s have so much power with us. We’ve segregated ourselves from liberal voices, accusing them of mindless, nation-daming politics. No self respecting Evangelical should be found giving ear to NPR, the New York Times, Reuters, USA Today, New Yorker, Time, The Economist, etc. In this, we’ve distanced ourselves from the data required for a fuller picture, ultimately segregating ourselves from the truth.

This lack of unity, and all the Godless drivel that drives it is condemned over and again in our scriptures. We’re called to sit and listen, to have patience with each other, suspend judgment, and consider every single facet of the story.

“The gullible believe anything they’re told; the prudent sift and weigh every word.” ~ Proverbs 14:15

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told that my perspective is garbage by people who couldn’t articulate my perspective to save their life. Again, it’s not because of stupidity, but because we’ve all decided that the “sifting of every word” simply isn’t required. I don’t have to take my liberal friend out for coffee and listen to their side of the story. Why would I when theirs is part of a conspiracy to destroy my country?

To that, I’d like to offer the side of the story that compels us to reconsider the CDC’s numbers, and the behavior that should follow. You don’t have to agree, but I’ll ask that you gain some ability to articulate what’s below before dismissal. Please comment if you’d like to debate, but understand that I’m a data nerd and can best most at the art of sitting down for hours looking up things on the internet.

1. The majority of world epidemiology takes no issue with the CDC’s numbers, or those of the World Health Organization. A friend of mine asked how I could possibly know that, so we had a tit-for-tat exchange, both of us posting noted epidemiologists who either support or oppose the CDC and their attendant guidelines. So far, we’ve come up with 7 who believe that the numbers are way off and/or that CDC/WHO guidance is overreach. While that’s nothing to sneeze at, it doesn’t compare with the sheer number of epidemiological staff/leadership at the CDC, WHO, and the multitudes of health organizations and their overqualified faculties; to name a few: Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, Yale School of Medicine,  the Perelman School of Medicine at UPenn, and the Joan & Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University, all giving no indication that the CDC numbers are unreliable, or that the resulting state/federal mandates and guidelines are misguided.
2. MD level docs are reporting their first-hand experiences with overwhelmed hospitals. I’m somewhat connected with the medical community in Denver purely by proxy of being married to a doc, and can confirm the very real lack of resources. A friend of mine who had just come off of an ER rotation recently told me, with a fair amount of emphasis, “COVID is real,” then went into some detail about what it’s like to watch someone die from it. I’ll spare the details.
3. Regions with strict protocols see less case/death counts, and vice versa. Hawaii might be the best example of this, shutting things down in a way that few Americans on the mainland would tolerate. Lacking the benefit of neighboring states to lend a hand, and citing a limited supply of ventilators, the state went full-on, in some cases arresting people who didn’t quarantine in their condo for 14 days after arrival. If the COVID numbers were unreliable, there wouldn’t be such a huge correlation in case/death numbers between the regions that have locked down, and the ones that haven’t.
4. Comorbidity is a factor in most deaths. The CDC recently reported that only 6% of COVID deaths were “pure” COVID deaths, i.e., not attended by any comorbidities. The non-medical community jumped on this as further evidence that the CDC’s death counts are bogus. If you got suckered into this one, have a quick chat with an MD about what comorbidity means and how it relates to recorded COVID deaths.
5. The CDC’s total death counts are provisional. If you visit their website, you’ll see that the CDC is currently posting total deaths in the US that aren’t much different that those of prior years. If so many are dying of COVID, why aren’t these reflected in current counts? There’s a disclaimer on this site that frequently gets missed, clearly stating that these numbers don’t reflect what’s currently happening, and are frequently updated. This implies that the CDC isn’t tracking total numbers the same way that they’re tracking COVID numbers.
6. I’ve had more COVID conversations with medical professionals than you have. I realize how this sounds, but my MD friends aren’t questioning the CDC, frequently referencing their stats to make difficult decisions. If you’d like to challenge me on this, go and have 15 conversations with 15 different docs, then let’s talk.
7. Evangelical COVID conspiracy theory fits the mold of previous conservative/religious CT’s. Again referencing the above research, conservative conspiracy theories have historically focused on evil operators in government. This particular CT is all that: the government is trying to control us, shut down our worship services, take away our freedoms, destroy the economy, etc. The only thing that doesn’t fit is that this one is embraced by conservatives under a conservative administration. Beyond that, we should take a moment and consider how fishy this is.
8. Nobody wants the economy to tank. If everyone follows CDC guidelines, nobody’s arguing that the US will suffer financially, maybe catastophically so. But if the death rate is anywhere in the neighborhood of the CDC numbers, we have a bigger problem than economic peril, one that, by definition, will result in exponentially more. I don’t see a way to deal with this apart from taking a tragic economic hit. But that’s where humanity is supposed to step in, especially us Evangelicals; we’re the ones who’ve been called to help in difficult times. It’s not like we don’t have the resources.

You might not agree on what’s above, but you can at least understand why I’ve come to believe that the only conspiracy here is the one against data, majority medical opinion, common sense, the front-line medical community, and the American population at large.

You could rightly question my devotion to or understanding of the more conservative side of the argument, but keep in mind that I’ve spent the majority of my adult Chrstian life as a conservative Evangelical, living and voting as you might think I would. I’ve sat through many a church service where it was heavily implied that the liberals were coming for us, and sat through (even led) many a Bible study on the godlessness of non-conservative politics.

In my mid-thirties I married a highly educated non-white lady, moved to a much more liberal part of America, and began to have legitimate conversations that I never once had in my previous, predominately white, Southern, conservative Christian existence, full of truth to be sure, but not fully true. Now, there are parts of my political mind that are conservative, and parts that lean liberal because there’s truth and falsehood on both sides.

Initially, I didn’t vote for Trump because he called for physical violence at his campaign rallies, a sign that his character wasn’t up to the task. His further calls to division, and his final magnum opus of downplaying the deadliest pandemic I’ve ever seen were the last three nails in the coffin for me. I’m not implying that everything Trump’s done while in office has been bad. Every president manages to do some good for our country; Nixon and A. Johnson being fine examples. But they’ll forever go down in history as bad presidents, as will Trump.

I’m not claiming that I’ve sat down and had a ton of personal conversations with people who don’t think like me, but I’m not devoid of those encounters. In addition to the conversations I am having, I’ve lived a big chunk of my life as a person who doesn’t think like me.

But, just like everyone else, I’m well served by the listening required to restore peace and unity to our country. To that, let’s have a zoom call, or an email exhange, or whatever, where I listen to your side of the story, read it back to you, then ask you to extend the same to me.

I triple-dog dare you.

In the meantime, if we come to believe that we’re being lied to by a large number of highly qualified people whose data has never before been so challenged, we should prove it before we get suckered into a conspiracy theory, one that’s encouraged too many Americans to put themselves and others at risk.

We should know better.