This was from a nice woman I met during the intermission of a concert last week. She’d mentioned that she had spent part of her afternoon at the Democratic Party call center. I told her that I was a lifelong Republican who was voting for Hillary Clinton, we got into a discussion of the horrors of the Trump candidacy, and then she said the above. And she’s right, unfortunately. But the Trump candidacy is not a stand-alone event. It is, as has been pointed out frequently, simply the end result of a whole list of ills. If those who truly understand the appreciate the conservative point of view don’t vigorously oppose those ills, then we don’t deserve to win elections—and we won’t.
What does the term “conspiracy theory” mean? I’m using it to mean the belief that world events are being manipulated behind the scenes; that some small, secretive group is actually running things and that the rest of us are just patsies. Dive into the alt-right echo chamber very far and you’ll start running into this idea. And guess what? Donald Trump specifically referred to this whole malarkey with his comments about the “vast global conspiracy” that was going to rob him of the Presidency and put Hillary Clinton in power. Do I need to point out the obvious here?
The really disturbing aspect of conspiracy theory is its attractiveness to a fairly large percentage of Christians, the one group of people who should know better. Our belief in Bible truth should be a hedge against this sort of cockeyed view of the world because we know what the truth really is. Christianity, that is, true biblical belief and not some nominal nonsense, is open and free. The pages of Scripture tell us the truth. When there are “mysteries,” we’re told that they exist and why we can’t understand them with our human minds. The message of the Gospel is “come and see.” Jesus taught openly. Paul commended the Bereans for “searching the Scriptures” to check out his own teaching:
Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true. (Acts 17:11 NIV)
And what’s the actual “vast global conspiracy”? Well, we know the answer to that:
We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one. (I John 5:19 NIV)
But of course Satan would much rather that we obsess about some nonsensical secret international banker cabal than arm ourselves against him. Part of his appeal to Eve was the promise of secret knowledge:
For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. (Genesis 3:5 NIV)
What was one of the great heresies that the early Church had to battle? It was Gnosticism, the idea that there was secret, esoteric knowledge that only the chosen few could achieve. While there were some specific aspects to those beliefs that don’t necessarily show up in modern conspiracy theories, the common ancestry is clear. We want to be privy to the stuff that nobody else knows.
Look at what happened with the recent classic conspiracy theory of Birtherism: the idea that Barack Obama had been foisted on the American people by some kind of behind-the-scenes puppetmasters who had, for some reason, plucked an African-born-and-therefore-non-citizen-of-the-US stooge to occupy the White House. (Wouldn’t it have been easier to have picked someone without all this baggage?) It’s fair to say that the Birther movement did nothing but harm the conservative cause and make Barack Obama look like a martyr. There was never any evidence that this theory was true and plenty that it wasn’t. But the lure of knowing a Big Secret was impossible, seemingly, for many to resist.
If I were a betting woman, I’d bet that when Barack Obama heard that the theory of his birth in Kenya was being seriously put out there, he went into the Oval Office, carefully locked the door, and then lay down on that beautiful, expensive rug and laughed till he cried. When Hillary (almost certainly) takes over in there, she’d better look for the tear marks. All that guff from her about how oppressed and depressed the President has been about this slur is just that: guff. He’s known all along that the whole Birther movement was a tremendous asset to him. Why? Well, think about it. He knew that it wasn’t true. But the longer it went on, the dumber its proponents looked. Hate to use that word, but . . . there it is. Obama could have ended the whole thing any old time he wanted to. But he didn’t. He just sat, and waited, and let his alt-right, racist opponents make fools of themselves. (Why do I say racist? Because everything the Birther movement claimed was true about Obama’s birth is true about Ted Cruz.) And then he staged that piece of theater with flying someone all the way to Hawaii to get evidence of his long-form birth certificate. (I think our tax dollars paid for that, but I’m not sure.) You can’t really blame the guy. Again, he’d been handed a gift. Why not use it?
It’s becoming pretty clear that the Republican Party, with all the pandering that’s been done to this type of thinking, is well nigh finished as any kind of force in American politics. Jennifer Rubin’s article today at the Right Turn blog lays out a possible new path. Anyone who wants to join the new conservative party is going to have to stay out of the echo chamber, though, and inhabit the real world.
”Sane Republicans Should Pack Their Bags and Flee the GOP”