Conspiracy Theory

Hello and welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson, here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome.

Today we’re talking about conspiracy theory. I feel like we’ve been looking forward to this episode for a long time without knowing it. Greg, you’ve already mentioned that you have “way too much experience” with conspiracy theory. Would you like to tell us how you acquired this excess of knowledge?

Well, it starts when I was but a child. I think for a time my father belonged to the John Birch Society until it became too liberal.

I don’t know what that is.

Oh, you don’t? Wow. I don’t remember when it was organized. I’m going to guess and say late ‘50s and ‘60s, maybe barely into the ‘70s. It may still exist, but in that era there it was the society that tried to point out Communist intrigue and influence wherever it reared its head. It was named after a missionary who had been martyred, I believe in China, by the Communists, who had nothing to do with the organization beyond lending his name.

It then moved beyond that to saying, “Wait, this Communist conspiracy – there’s more to it. There’s actually an older conspiracy behind it,” and then speculations began and histories that may or may not have been real were written.

They produced a magazine, for lack of a better word, called American Opinion. They had American Opinion bookstores that sold books on conspiracy theories and such, so my dad moved in those circles. And although he never sat me down and said, “Look son, this is the way the world works,” enough of it leaked through that the idea of “trust no one” is kind of engraved into my nature, particularly when the someone has any kind of connection with the civil government, the United Nations, the press, basically the liberal establishment.

Beyond that, as I got older I began collecting books, because I’m also a historian, and I began buying books on historical conspiracies, or at least conspiracies that people claimed were historical, and I have a shelf or so of those, as well as inheriting a bunch of my dad’s books, not all of which by any means have I read, but this was the start of it.

A lot of the people I’ve read or listened to and the historians I’ve read – if they’re not willing to say conspiracy, they’re at least willing to say, “Here were some powerful movers and shakers at this particular time in history.” Some of them will say, “And of course this was not a conspiracy. They just happened to share common aims,” or “Isn’t it a marvelous coincidence that…” – yeah, uh-huh.

My reading goes from the Bavarian Illuminati, through the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, through the Round Table Society organized by Cecil Rhodes, through the conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy – there’s a lot there. And perhaps for that reason, if no other, this is a good thing to talk about, just to prove I’m not insane.

As you read the people who are respected – the psychologists, the sociologists, the university professors who have big names – and you hear them talk about conspiracy, basically they identify conspiracy thinking with insanity or with extreme naïve ignorance, the kind that you might experience in some backwoods southern militia. The idea that conspiracies might be a real thing, that they might actually happen among people of wealth and power and influence, is not something that we’re supposed to believe.

The argument goes a couple ways. “History is driven by socio-economic forces and is beyond the reach of any few people, however powerful they are.”

That’s funny, because the Marxists believe that we’re really into trying to manipulate them.

But Marxism says it’s inevitable, and yes, the contradiction. “So come join us and change the world.”

“Wait, it’s all predestined by the laws of dialectical sociology. Huh? Why do I have to do anything? Can’t I just go out for pizza and wait for the revolution to come?”

Well, apparently not, but the question is why.

So that on the one hand, or on the other hand people look on this as simply an escape mechanism. “Life is too big for me. There are too many hard things. There are too many things against me. Isn’t it easier just to blame conspiracies someplace? It’s because there’s a conspiracy against me.”

Along these lines, a book that I will not put among the recommendations, although I certainly could, is Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, which is a book about conspiracy theory, and I may mention it later. At one point, one of his characters argues that that’s what conspiracy thinking is like. The man who can’t get a job decides to blame it on a group of insiders who don’t like him for reasons A, B, or C, and therefore will never give him a job, and the fact that they won’t give him a job is just more proof there’s a conspiracy. It doesn’t occur to him that maybe he’s inept and incompetent. “No, I could do this fine, but the world is against me. There’s this deliberate conspiracy of people.”

It’s actually a conspiracy of him not to do any work.

Yeah, so you have these things going on. There’s one question we need to ask up front. What does the Bible think of conspiracies?

That is the question.

Having said that, that falls into a number of things.

Does the Bible acknowledge any conspiracies? Does it say, “Hey, here’s a conspiracy.”?

Did said conspiracies actually amount to anything? Were they more than just a bunch of people getting together and inventing silly signs and hats and claiming they were going to do something, and in fact nothing at all happened? Or did these conspirators actually act in a way that changed the history of the world?

Are these conspiracies outside of God’s control? Are they so powerful that Christians should wring their hands and be very sad for God that he can’t stop them?

Or be so grateful that God has us to stop them.

Yeah, there’s that. So that brings us to -

What is the role of the Christian – or the conservative, depending on who you are, or Libertarian – in the face of these horrible conspiracies? What should we do to stop it, since obviously God can’t or doesn’t want to or whatever. What does the Bible say about all these things?

To this I would add another one that’s less obvious perchance, but I think is ultimately more important. Where does this propensity to conspire come from? What’s the archetype? Why this?

Then the last question at the end of things is why do some conspiracies seem to succeed and others just fail miserably? That’s an important question.

We’ll end before we’re done in the book of Isaiah, where Isaiah is warned of God, and through Isaiah God warns Israel/Jerusalem, “Quictcalling everything a conspiracy. Stop fearing conspiracies. Start fearing me,” so that’s where this is all going when we’re done, in case you’re worried, people who are listening.

Let’s begin. Where is the original impulse? What’s the archetype for conspiracy? The archetype for everything is the Triune life of God, and the three Persons of the Trinity conspire – the Latin word means ‘breathe together.’ Now, it’s taken on a negative connotation for us. We think of conspiracies as something that blocks everybody out, hides it from them, and is aimed at evil nefarious purposes, but the word doesn’t necessarily imply that, and its roots certainly don’t.

Do the Persons of the Trinity on their own without any outside help and without ever telling everybody exactly what their plans are come together and talk, breathe together, close fellowship together, commune together, and come up with plans to accomplish something of great importance, and work to execute these plans, and were they effective in executing this plan, and is that okay?

In other words, does he actually secretly run the world?

Yes, who actually secretly runs the world? The Triune God.

Now, it’s not a secret that he runs the world because he’s told us that, and he’s even told us some of his mechanisms and methods and ways and means. He hasn’t laid out a thorough plan. He has not, for instance, anywhere revealed, say, who the next president of the United States is going to be. He’s not told us how long this nation, the United States of America, may endure. There’s a whole lot in his plans that we don’t know about, but he’s not hiding them from us because he’s evil and out to get us. Well, you might argue that with respect to the wicked, but with respect to his people he’s not.

He brings us into fellowship with himself in Christ, and Christ can sit with his disciples, his apostles, the night before his crucifixion and say, “I have told you everything my Father wants you to know. I’ve called you friends, not servants, because slaves don’t know what’s going on, but you know. I’ve told you all that the Father wants revealed. I’ve told you.”

Christianity in that sense is not an esoteric secret religion where only a few people know the secret ins and outs, the secret handshakes, the secret signs, the secret ceremonies. It’s not Gnostic. The very word gnostic speaks of secret knowledge, esoteric knowledge that a few people can have that would set them apart from everybody else. Gnosticism didn’t have any respect for the institutional Church, only for those few people who had special knowledge that could promote me along the path, and it often involved magic words and magic symbols and rituals and such things. Christianity is not that.

When Jesus was on trial they said, “What have you been saying?” He said, “Ask the people who heard me. They know. I didn’t say anything in secret.” That’s not exactly true. He said things in secret, but then he later told everybody or told the apostles, “There’s going to become a time when you’re going to tell everybody.” The bulk of his message was extremely public, which is what got him into trouble.

I think that’s kind of the true meaning of, “I didn’t say anything in secret,” that whatever I said in secret was exactly the same as what I said in public. It’s one message here.

Yeah, and he tells the apostles at one point, “Whatever you hear in secret, shout from the housetops. Whatever is hidden in the darkness is going to be brought to light. There’s nothing hidden that shall not come forth in the open.”

There are religions, and we can think of Mormonism as an obvious contemporary example, but there have been many, where they take you into dark rooms and they say secret words and take you through secret ceremonies, and you’re never supposed to tell anybody what goes on, but of course it always gets out and it generally sounds ridiculous when it does. We’ve all heard jokes about Mormons’ holy underwear and such things.

Backing up through all of this, the point is this idea of communing together and making somewhat secret plans and then bringing them to pass – that’s God, but unlike sinful men, God means this for good for his people and for his own glory, and each Person of the Trinity means it for good for the other Persons.

There’s no backstabbing. The Son is not going to turn on the Father. The Spirit’s not going to betray the Son. There is complete love and faithfulness and purity and honesty and truthfulness. But when we come to the Fall, then things change because when men, having fallen and making themselves god, a couple things immediately:

Man’s a really rotten god. He’s not very powerful. He’s not very smart. He doesn’t know the future, but he wants to be God, which means he wants to get ahead of everybody else who also wants to be God, so all these would-be Gods can and often do get together and make plans and schemes, because they realize, “I don’t have enough power to pull this off, but if I get together with him and him, then we can make this happen. But the thing is, of course, I’m in it for me,” which is the Achilles’ heel of conspiracies. They’re not friends. They don’t love each other. They don’t trust each other, and at a convenient moment they will stab each other in the back.

We can think here of C.S. Lewis’s picture of hell in Screwtape, where everybody is out to rat on everybody else and bring down everybody else.

Is that in The Great Divorce?

It’s in Screwtape for sure. I don’t remember it in The Great Divorce, but I may be forgetting something. And of course in That Hideous Strength where nobody trusts anybody, and one by one they cut each other’s throats, figuratively at first, but eventually almost literally.

Conspirators are not this unemotional somehow bound together group of disinterested people who have a set plan and they are loyal to the plan. “Blessed be the plan” and they’re going to do it, no matter what, and you can absolutely trust them to follow through. No, you can trust them to lie, steal, cheat on each other’s wives, whatever. You can also trust them not to be omniscient, omnipotent, or omnipresent, because they’re not God.

So when we come to Genesis 3, we witness the first conspiracy in human history. It’s not a happy one. Satan sets forth his proposition. “Eat the fruit. Be like God. Make your own rules.” Eve thinks it over and decides that she will be a god.

Now, is she thinking, “Yeah, me and the serpent, we’re going to be best buds.” I don’t think so. And Satan is not saying, “Oh, she’ll side with me and she will be my queen and we will reign together forever.” No, that’s fantasy and sci-fi. Satan is out to destroy Adam and Eve, but he’s putting on his happy face, but Eve is doing exactly the same thing, and then she turns to her husband.

The old poets had it wrong. Milton had it wrong. This is not Eve seducing Adam to “Come into this little clique with me because I love you so much and I need your help and value you.” And this is not Adam joining us because he loves his wife so much and can’t stand to be separated from her, even if it means giving up God. This is all three of these beings setting up the others for a fall and making sure that each one will come out clean in all this.

Satan figures, “I’m a super-powerful angel. What could they possibly do to me?”

Eve says, “Well, the serpent has my back. If I pull Adam in, I bet I could get him to do exactly what I want.”

Adam is saying, “Let’s see if she dies. Then I’ll decide whether or not this is a thing I want to get involved in.”

As I’ve said many times, sin is abusive, and these three are all abusing each other in no uncertain terms, but they’re all united in one thing – they’re rebelling against God. That’s the uniting factor, and the fact that each one individually wants to be God, but there’s not room for multiple Gods here.

So, does the Bible say that there are real conspiracies that ever really happened? Yeah, human history began with one. It’s the fellowship of the Trinity reflected through the fall of man into sinful would-be autonomous conspiring against God and therefore against one another.

Did it accomplish something? Well, it didn’t accomplish what they wanted. Did it accomplish anything at all? I mean God is sovereign. Obviously this could not change history, right? Well, it depends what you mean by change history. Did God include this in his decree and plan? Yes. Was God surprised? No. Did God somehow lose control here? Of course not. So what’s happening?

God is letting this happen to us it because he has a bigger plan than theirs. The plan of the Father, Son, and Spirit is much bigger than Satan’s little conspiracy with Eve and Adam, but in order for that to happen God has to let this one run through and, when it happens, then he steps in and proposes a plan of salvation. So for someone looking from the outside – “God had said they’re going to do this, but then sin came and God’s doing this instead. Isn’t that God changing his mind? Wasn’t God defeated?” No. God allows human conspiracies, even decrees them and includes them in his plan, but he doesn’t lose control of them.

He knows what they’re going to accomplish. He brings them about to accomplish his own purposes, to forward the kingdom of his Son, and when he’s done with them he will get rid of them. That doesn’t mean that he might not raise up another one right away for his own purposes, but that’s something else.

So we can look at the Bible, and we started there, but we can look to the whole Bible, and I’ll invite you two to help me with this. What conspiracies in scripture can you think of that actually were more or less at least temporarily successful?

There was the entire Pharisaical class paying off Judas in order to destroy Jesus. There’s one.

Okay, the Pharisees’ and Sadducees’ betrayal of our Lord using Judas. They conspired with him. The King James says they covenanted. The word actually isn’t covenanted, it’s a different word, but the translators of the King James thought, “Yeah, that’s about what’s going on here, so let’s just use that word,” because they understood. Wicked conspiracies are counterfeit covenants, so that’s for sure. What else do you remember?

The conspiracy where Absalom brought his sister’s rapist and had a big feast, and all his friends were there and they basically all let him murder him in cold blood.

So Absalom conspires against his older brother and murders him to avenge his sister’s purity, so there’s one. While we’re talking about Absalom, Absalom is involved in another conspiracy later. Do you remember?

The one where he tries to take over?

Yes, that one. He not only tries to take over the kingdom, he does. He succeeds. He’s in charge. That’s true for a little while, and yet as you compare scripture with scripture it becomes clear that this was God’s way of fulfilling his prophecy against David.

The sword will never depart from his house and, since he took one life, David owes God four as restitution. There was the baby and now there’s Absalom, Amnon (the brother who raped Tamar), and there will be one more. So God is in control of this whole thing, and yet yes, it is a true human conspiracy.

Bringing Joash to the throne was a conspiracy.

That’s a conspiracy of light, and that’s the other part of conspiracies I think we need to mention. Most of the conspiracies in scripture are evil. Evil people get together and secretly plot evil against God or against God’s people.

Very occasionally, very rarely, God’s people plot together to not be killed, and even possibly to do something unexpected, public, and very, very rarely even violent, to push the evil back. That’s not the primary way that God runs his kingdom. The primary thing is preaching, prayer, love, fellowship, and worship. But there was that one case you mentioned where the High Priest conspires with others, but they are legal authorities and they conspired to put the right king on the throne.

It kind of raises the question of how much you have to know or be planning for it to count as conspiracy, because we can think of Jochebed saving Moses against the will of the authorities of the time. We don’t know if she was thinking, “This is the guy that’s going to lead us out of bondage.” Maybe not, but she was definitely secreting him away, and then she orchestrated the plan for the princess to find him and that sort of thing.

It’s a rather small conspiracy. It probably involved her, her daughter, and presumably her husband, who doesn’t get mentioned at this point, but she’s plotting and it’s secret, but it’s a very tiny conspiracy, a conspiracy of light.

That’s the other thing. Sometimes God’s people do conspire to hang on, usually to save life, but it’s not the way Christians are to think normally. That’s not the normal way of business for the church or for individual Christians. It’s exceptionally unusual, but sometimes when life is at stake we do conspire for a little while to secret people away, to hide the Jews from the Nazis, things like that.

And it is a very small scale. It’s saving one child. It’s lowering Paul down the wall in a basket. It’s not grandiose delusions of running the world.

“Let’s take over the world together!”

“Let’s use the One Ring for good.”

Because that works.

The apostles in the early church, after the Pharisees and Sadducees had persecuted them before the Sanhedrin, come back to the church and they raise up a praise to God. This is Acts 4 –

And being let go, they went to their own company and reported all that the chief priests and elders had said unto them. And when they heard that, they lifted up their voice to God with one accord and said, Lord, thou art God, which hast made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all that in them is, who by the mouth of thy servant David hast said, Why did the heathen rage and the people imagine vain things? The kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord, and against his Christ.

They’re quoting Psalm 2 and we’re familiar with that –

Why do the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together against the LORD and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder and cast away their cords from us. He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh. The Lord shall have them in derision.

It’s easy to read that as just a generalization, which is true enough. Wicked people do plot to throw off God’s reign, God’s laws, and all that, but the early church said it has a very specific meaning, too, and this is how they understood it.

For of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the people of Israel, were gathered together for to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done.

If you went back and talked to Pilate right after he signed Jesus’ death warrant, and got him quietly away from others and said, “You realize that you just conspired against Jesus,” he almost certainly would have said, “Did not! I was under pressure. You don’t know how hard it is. These Jews are crazy. They would have gone after me!”

“I washed my hands of them afterward.”

“Yeah, I washed my hands. It was all on them. I was not a conspirator.”

How about Herod? Herod just said, “I don’t want nothing to do with this guy. Send him back to Pilate. Let him deal with it.” And yet from God’s perspective, since they were civil rulers and it was their responsibility to administer justice, their very failure to do something involved them in a conspiracy, however they looked at it.

So there are conspiracies and then there are conspiracies. There are things where people all agree, “Here’s the bottom line. Everybody sign in blood,” and there are things when some people get something moving, and other people turn a deaf ear, close a blind eye, and let it happen when they’re obligated to stop it.

God, under such circumstances, says, “Yeah, that’s not it. You can’t just passively let evil go by and claim that you’re not responsible, especially if you’re a civil ruler. You have a responsibility to step in and stop this thing.”

So again the two biggest conspiracies in scripture are the one in the garden with Satan, and that actually reaches outside of human reality to involve hell. That’s pretty big. You can think of That Hideous Strength in this context. And then the conspiracy to murder Christ. “Let’s go kill God.” That’s pretty huge.

With each of these we can say, “Did it really happen in time and space? Is it historical?” Yes, absolutely. “Did people actually plan to do certain things?” Some planned, some got swept along, but should have used their minds and their wills and done other things. “Did it affect the apparent course of history?” Well, yeah. The world would be a whole lot different if Jesus hadn’t died. “But was any of this beyond God’s control?” No. “Did God in fact will or decree this?” Yeah, “…for to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done.” So God not only knows there are conspiracies and allows them to function, he actually ordains them to bring about his purposes.

What if all the Pharisees and Sadducees and Romans had said, “I smell a trap. We’re not going anywhere near Jesus. We’ll arrange a hotel room for him and bring him food every day and flowers and do anything he wants. We just kind of feel that God’s setting us up, so we refuse to raise a hand against him.”

First, they’re wicked people so they’re not going to do that, but would that have changed things? Yeah, but it’s not going to happen because God puts people where they are and lets them act out their own character, and wicked conspirators act, oddly enough, act out their own character, and wicked conspirators act, oddly enough, like wicked conspirators. How successful they are is in God’s hands, but sin’s not terribly bright so it keeps failing.

Here's a side note. Again, growing up in a household where conspiracy theory was kind of the order of the day, my dad and people he hung out with would point to something that had really gone wrong in American society and say, “See? That’s the conspiracy. That’s what they’re doing to America.”

That kind of assumes that these conspirators actually planned this, that they actually executed it, and it’s actually what they wanted. That’s a huge assumption, because usually conspirators think they can get away with ignoring God’s laws. For instance, “I’ve got a great idea. Let’s create this institution that makes money out of nothing and we’ll be all-powerful. What could possibly go wrong with that?”

You’re playing God. You’re making money out of nothing, which you can’t do, and you’re wondering how this could possibly go wrong. Look at the American economy.

It’s funny you should mention that because there was historically a conspiracy there to create the Federal Reserve system.

There was a conspiracy, to be sure. The Creature from Jekyll Island is a good book on that subject. So there are real conspiracies, but to assume that that particular conspiracy accomplished exactly what those international bankers wanted is kind of a stretch, and that they knew that by doing that they would bring America to where it is now, and ha-ha, they are so there, laughing up their sleeve that they’ve been so successful destroying America. Mostly they wanted to get rich and have power.

Which they did.

Which they did for a time, and then you know what? They died, that whole generation of international bankers. They’re dead and most of them are burning in hell, so ha-ha, and the people left behind are even more incompetent.

We don’t really want to laugh at people burning in hell.

He that sits in the heavens shall laugh. For all of those dear souls who just tremble at evil conspiracies, and I’ve known some of them – my mom was one at times, where when she heard too much of this she just kind of got frozen; “I can’t move forward. I can’t see anything. I can’t do anything. I can’t live with this” – it’s a horrible kind of thing, and there are lots of people like that who are just convinced that the world is controlled by some evil conspiracy.

It may be the Freemasons or the Illuminati or the Council on Foreign Relations or green aliens or gray aliens or secret masters sequestered someplace in the Himalayas and, whoever it is, they almost certainly report to Satan, but this power group rules the world.

In my generation it was, “Well, they almost rule the world. If we can just tell everybody and get the information out, that’s our one hope,” but it’s not much of a hope. Well, you know what? It’s not any kind of a hope because people don’t care. We’ve seen the horrible things our federal government has done in the last 10, 20, 30 years, and people by and large don’t care until it touches their own pocketbooks or touches their children, and people are left in this paralyzing fear.

Christianity comes along and says, “Wait. Jesus bought the world. He owns it. He’s in control of it. He sits at the Father’s right hand. He has all power in heaven and earth, and he’s told us the solution. The solution is not fear, the solution is to go out and boldly preach the gospel wherever we can, and in the meanwhile live out our lives trusting that God’s got us covered and that our lives are significant.”

This may be a good place to go to, the passage in Isaiah that we’ve come to. We started last time with the first part of Isaiah’s Christmas sermon where he promises the virgin birth of Emmanuel, but as we move into the next chapter God goes further and begins to talk to his people and says, “Look, you people, you’re fascinated with this confederacy” – the word the King James uses – “between Assyria and northern Israel, and you’re afraid that they’re in charge and they’re controlling the future and there’s nothing you can do and it’s all up. The promise is lost and your homes and families and kids are all going to be lost, and you’re just terrified.”

It's in this vein that Isaiah says these words to Israel –

Associate yourselves, O ye people, and ye shall be broken in pieces; and give ear, all ye of far countries. Gird yourselves, and ye shall be broken in pieces. Take counsel together, and it shall come to nought. Speak the word, and it shall not stand, for God is with us. For the LORD spake thus to me with a strong hand, and instructed me that I should not walk in the way of this people, saying, Say ye not, a confederacy…

The New King James and most of the modern translations say a conspiracy, so “Don’t say conspiracy to all them to whom this people say a conspiracy.”

…to all them to whom this people shall say, a confederacy, neither fear ye their fear, nor be afraid.

Quit being afraid of conspiracies. Quit calling everything a conspiracy. They’re not all conspiracies. Sometimes wicked people just think like wicked people and do what wicked people would do, and there’s nothing behind it. There’s no secret organization. Sometimes there may be, but generally often not. They just do what wicked people do. They lie, they steal, they kill.

Rather than fearing conspirators and conspiracies –

Sanctify the LORD of hosts himself and let him be your fear and let him be your dread. And he shall be for you a sanctuary, but for a stone of stumbling and for a rock of offence to both the houses of Israel, for a gin and for a snare to the inhabitants of Jerusalem. And many among them shall stumble and fall, and be broken and be snared and be taken.

Then he goes on from there and tells them, “Listen to my word. Quit listening to the occult. Don’t listen to the ghost whisperers, the spirits, the mediums. Fear God. Quit fearing conspiracies.”

So what does the Bible think about conspiracy theory? Yeah, conspiracies are things. Sometimes they happen. Not everything that looks like a conspiracy is one, and we shouldn’t be terrified of them. God is sovereign. God’s in control. God has a plan.

He uses the conspiracies, and the conspiracies themselves, insofar as they’re ungodly, are inherently unstable. Conspirators will turn on one another. They’re out for themselves. Each one wants to be God and that doesn’t work. It barely works in hell when Satan is in charge and can presumably beat up all of his demons, but try to be in charge of an organization like hell run by demons, where all the demons are the moral equivalent of spoiled 3-year-olds with chainsaws. Satan has a horrible job. God can speak to angels and they delight to do his will and to love one another and work this thing out. Demons? They hate each other’s guts. They hate Satan and are just terrified of him. Conspiracies by nature are things that fail.

As we look at small Christian publishing houses, extreme conservative publishing houses, and occasionally Libertarian publishing houses, is there information to be gained? Yeah, there are some interesting things that might be interesting to know. Who planned what where with whom might be interesting to know. Was there another shooter on that grassy knoll that day in November? And yes, we did go to the moon. You can start thinking through these things, and some of it is useful to a point, but as I said I’ve known far too many people who just become obsessed with all this.

Here’s one for you. Some groups of people in your generation now have come so far to distrust the establishment and the mainstream media and the book publishers and scientific institutions that they’re willing to go the whole road and say – “By the way, not only did we not go to the moon, but the earth is flat,” and there is nothing you can do to convince them otherwise.

You guys believe in the moon?

[laughing]

It’s important to go there, because some of the things I know I say from time to time about historical issues do assume a certain amount of conspiracy theory, but it’s important to understand that if any of you out there have been challenged by this or led astray by this or been made fearful for this – put away all the conspiracy books. Lock them in the trunk. Maybe in 20 years your kids will find them and find them mildly amusing.

In the meantime, pull out your Bibles. Read about how God controls history, about God’s plans for history, and get rid of all of those books on prophecy and eschatology that tell you about how the anti-Christ is going to come and take over everything. You don’t need that.

First of all, the whole perspective is biblically wrong but, even if it were right, we’re to focus on Jesus and Christ, not on the anti-Christ. If you can pick up some book on prophecy and there are 500 references to the anti-Christ and two to Jesus, the book has a problem. Oftentimes the same books that warn against occult conspiracies are themselves guilty of worshiping the occult, of exalting Satan and his power, and pushing Jesus into the background. So we continue to assert that Jesus is Lord. He has all power in heaven and earth. He’s got us covered. Nothing surprises him. He’s not losing.

Just because history isn’t easy for us and because this is not the way we would have written the story doesn’t mean that God does not know exactly what he’s doing, and it doesn’t mean that Jesus is not now currently winning, or the kingdom of God is not growing exactly the way he wants it to grow.

We can think of Whittaker Chambers, having been part of an actual Communist conspiracy, who converts to Christianity and what does he do? He goes and lives with his family. That’s the counter to the globalist Communist conspiracy, is go live your life and honor God. I’m not pointing to Whittaker Chambers for theology, but as an example of a Christian life in this particular respect I think it’s illuminating.

Again, not the book I was going to recommend, but I would recommend it, Witness, the story of Whittaker Chambers. For those of you who have never heard of this because you had a public high school education, he was the one who blew the whistle on the Communist conspiracy back in the ‘50s.

He had been an active agent for Russia and came to Christ, and then blew the whistle on all of his friends, who the media rushed to defend, and the government and the State Department rushed to defend. They eventually were convicted and got off with slaps on the wrist, and Whittaker Chambers’ reputation was destroyed as the guy who got those nice people in trouble. He describes this in his autobiography Witness, but it set the Communist conspiracy in America back 20 years. It was a very devastating blow to what the Communists were doing in this country.

As I remember the story, it all began for him when he was sitting at the breakfast table with his little girl and she was eating some oatmeal and she splattered it all over the place. He takes a rag to wipe it off and he goes to her ear and wipes the ear and looks at the ear and says, “That is such a beautifully-formed ear. That is so perfect. It’s so functional. There is no way that happened by chance. Wait, what did I just say?”

He says, “That seed of a thought just percolated for years and years and years and years.”

It reminds me too of something that we should also address, which is the immediate kneejerk reaction to disbelieve anything that is called a conspiracy. Whittaker Chambers talks about the conservative response to what he did. These are people who are not Communist, but they think, “You think the Communists could actually do that? That’s hilarious. No. Go away. Get off our side. You’re ruining our reputation,” when he’s like, “No, I was there. This is happening.”

It just rings truer and truer as time goes on, and I think that kneejerk reaction has been hijacked and manipulated by the media in the past few years. “Oh, we don’t want people to think that? Just call it a conspiracy theory. No, of course the Covid-19 virus didn’t come from a lab. That’s a conspiracy. Oh, just kidding. Of course, the United States doesn’t have any biolabs in Ukraine on the Russian border. That’s a conspiracy theory. Just kidding, that’s also true.” It's thing after thing after thing, and it makes you wonder.

There was a sort of shift, I guess, in the last few years when they realized that people noticed what they were doing, so they started calling it misinformation and disinformation, which is a useful word because the word misinformation already existed. But instead of conspiracy theory they’re going to call it Russian disinformation. “You just don’t think people can actually see what you’re doing, do you?”

The sad thing is there are lots of people who can’t, because they’re so used to believing particular sources of information. It is beyond their psychic capacity to say, “I have been lied to my whole life, and everything these people have told me has been slanted, and an awful lot of it has been wrong, and I’ve been a sucker.” How many people really want to say that?

And that’s why people are in multilevel marketing schemes for years and years and years.

Yeah. Is Amway a conspiracy? Think about it. They’re not out to rule the world, as far as I know, but you know. What happens when you keep telling people the same lies and you’re getting rich off of it and they’re getting poorer and poorer?

Bryan, do you have anything you’d like to throw into the fire here?

Not in particular, but with parents who were involved with Amway, that was a funny example to choose, and an accurate one, I will jump to say.

Before we started recording I mentioned something I think was a tweet originally, and I couldn’t find it before we started recording either, so I feel bad not being able to give credit, but the guy says, “It’s crazy how the mainstream popular opinion is that sure, the FBI and CIA all did some pretty sketchy illegal kind of stuff in the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, and 2000s, and nobody went to jail for it or got in trouble, and there was no meaningful change in their organizational structure. But they’re the good guys now, and if you don’t believe that you’re a conspiracy theorist.”

There’s a certain level there of how political powerhouses have a lot of inertia and momentum. I think a lot of people just think – especially when they’re more committed to having a government that’s more involved, a federal government that has more oversight and control over what goes on within its borders – there’s a lot of, “Well, no, they can’t still be bad because they’re our guys. They’re our agency.”

All of my references are just some kind of comedic reference, but there’s a British comedy duo and they had a TV show. It’s not always appropriate so I’m not going to reference them by name, but they have a sketch that I imagine is kind of what it’s like to think about the CIA or FBI or other government agencies in that kind of light.

The two guys are playing Nazis. They’re in a trench and the Russians are over the border on one side and the Americans are on the other side and they’re stuck between the two of these people. At some point one of them just turns to the other one and goes, “Wilhelm, are we the baddies?”

“What? No, of course we’re not. We’re the good guys. We are fighting for the Reich, for the Fuhrer and for the Fatherland and everything’s great. We are the good guys.”

He goes, “Do you think the other side has skulls as their insignia?” And then they all look around and there’s a guy who’s got a skull insignia on his cap, the SS or whatever, and they look to somebody else and he’s drinking coffee from a mug that has a skull on it. Then it cuts to another Nazi and he’s in the corner knitting a scarf and it has a skull pattern, and they both go, “Right!” and they abandon their post immediately.

That kind of sense like, “Are we the baddies?” – nobody wants to believe that the government whose hands you want to put all the power into are the bad guys, because that would mean that your whole political philosophy that you’ve spent 10-15 years developing and building and inculcating into your being is no longer the good answer that it was.

Which is difficult because we are creatures meant to live in a civil government. We do have a national identity by virtue of being human. What’s the great quote from Good Omens? “Sooner or later you have to decide what gang you belong to.”

What you said about the inertia reminds me of the two facets of what I think would be successful conspiracy, with a limited definition of success. One is obscurity, where you have bureaucrats all along the line pushing the agenda, without any personal involvement in what that agenda is. You mentioned the FBI. Yeah, I think the FBI is pretty darn corrupt. I think that’s been demonstrated on several accounts within the last year alone.

On the other hand, I know somebody who works for the FBI, at least he suspects he works for the FBI. He hasn’t told me so in so many words, but he’s the law enforcement officer on the street and he’s a good guy. He’s doing his job. He’s keeping the city safe.

Then on the other hand, when you have people who do seem to have a lot of power and there’s a lot of power concentrated in few hands, as the Federalists would have put it, you think of Google, Facebook, and Twitter – I’d say YouTube but Google owns YouTube – ABC, MSNBC, you’ve got a handful of people who could all fit around one conference room who decide what the world is going to see that day.

So on the one hand you have to have a few people making the decisions, because only a few people can ever agree on something for any amount of time. And then on the other hand you have to have this huge mechanism of people who don’t actually care and who are just doing their jobs, which leaves you with a very narrow niche of things that can be done, but none of those things affect your actual life, like you can go to the store and buy your groceries.

Again, the answer is localism. I don’t know. This was a long ramble. I don’t know how I got here, but go back to farmer’s markets and raising families and letting the ducks in and all that good stuff.

I’ve got to go let the ducks in after this, so it’s all good.

On that note, perhaps we should go to recommendations.

Yeah, recommendations, let’s do that. Greg, you already had dibs on the best recommendation for today.

My recommendation is the movie Conspiracy Theory starring Mel Gibson. Mel Gibson plays, as he so often does, someone who is slightly psycho, and through the bulk of the movie the issue for the viewer is, “Is he really psycho?” I mean he looks like it, and every time he tries to prove something the evidence evaporates, because we haven’t seen it from anyone else’s point of view. We just see that he is paranoid. Of course, there’s the thing of just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

For myself the first time I saw it, I enjoyed watching what was set up in the background, for instance the books on his shelf, of which I had half. It’s a fun movie, and yes indeed there are black helicopters. There is a conspiracy, but you have to wait till the end to see why and how and what’s going on. It’s fun.

Cool. My first recommendation is to remember that my opinions are my own and you should not blame Bryan or Greg for anything that I’ve said.

I think it’s okay to let the ducks in.

I recommend farmer’s markets, local produce.

It’s often fresher and better tasting than the other stuff.

If you’re in the vicinity of Interstate 80 between Sacramento and Reno, you should go to Machado Orchards. They have delicious pies. That’s my reco.

My recommendation is going to be another movie that relates to at least a kind of conspiracy theory. It’s definitely in my top 10 favorite movies of all time, so you get that as well. That is the movie The Truman Show.

The reason I thought of it is because you were talking about, “Oh, all the evidence evaporates as soon as somebody else comes on the scene,” and I started to think, “Hmm, that sounds a lot like The Truman Show.”

Or Phineas and Ferb.

Oh, that’s another great conspiracy theory show. Anyway, it’s Jim Carey at his best, one of his handful of dramatic roles. It’s about a guy who is beginning to question everything around him, everything in his world, and you the viewer are basically just waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s wonderful, quite brilliant. Like I said, it’s in my top 10 movies so I recommend going and watching that.

If you’re going into it for the first time, it is about a child who grows into a man, and his entire life has been behind a television screen and he doesn’t know it. Everyone in his life are paid actors, even his wife, even his best friend, his job and everything you can think of. Everybody is in this created world in a dome somewhere in Los Angeles, and one day a skylight falls out of the clear blue sky and that’s where it all starts.

My favorite line there is, “Cue the sun.” Since everything’s fake, even the sun is fake, part of the dome. That’s a great movie and offers a good chance to talk about epistemological issues with your children, too. “How do you know what’s real, children?”

Cool. Thank you, guys, so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thanks so much to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in. If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can send us an email at [email protected].

A big thank you to our financial supporters. You help us keep the show rolling. If you’d like to join their number you can visit our website, anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion. It’s a forward slash, but everything’s a forward slash, so there’s no need to specify.

I feel called out.

[laughing] That wasn’t really directed at you. It was directed at someone I heard on the radio say “back slash” in a web address and I was like, “You’re wrong. You’re so wrong.” Anyway, I was mad but I don’t let stuff bother me.

Have a great night. See you next time.