QAnon and the religious right (grace, America, churches, atheist)

[Tired of the Nonsense]

How QAnon uses religion to lure unsuspecting Christians
By Daniel Burke, CNN Religion Editor

Updated 1:05 PM ET, Thu October 15, 2020

"Right now QAnon is still on the fringes of evangelicalism," said Ed Stetzer, an evangelical pastor and dean at Wheaton College in Illinois who wrote a recent column warning Christians about QAnon. "But we have a pretty big fringe.
"Pastors need to be more aware of the danger and they need tools to address it," he told CNN. "People are being misled by social media."

Pastors who preach QAnon-aligned ideas Some Christian pastors are actually leading their followers to QAnon, or at least introducing them to its dubious conspiracy theories.

To cite a few examples:
During services in July, Rock Urban Church in Grandville, Michigan, played a discredited video that supports QAnon conspiracy theories. "The country is being torn apart by the biggest political hoax and coordinated mass media disinformation campaign in living history — you may know it as COVID-19," the video says. The church did not answer requests for comment and has removed the video from its YouTube channel.

Danny Silk, a leader at Bethel Church, a Pentecostal megachurch in Redding, California, has posted QAnon-related ideas and hashtags on his Instagram account. Silk did not respond to requests for comment.
Bethel Church in Redding, California. One of its leaders has shared QAnon ideas on social media.

Bethel Church in Redding, California. One of its leaders has shared QAnon ideas on social media.

Pastor John MacArthur of California, an influential evangelical who is battling county officials over the right to continue indoor services at his Grace Community Church, espoused a theme popular in QAnon circles when he misinterpreted CDC data and informed his congregation that "there is no pandemic." MacArthur declined CNN's request for comment.

There's even a movement, led by the Indiana-based Omega Kingdom Ministry, to merge QAnon and Christianity -- with texts from both the Bible and Q read at church services.

"If you are just learning about QAnon and The Great Awakening, this is the right spot for you," reads the ministry's website. Representatives from the ministry did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/15/us/qa...hes/index.html

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Wikipedia
Pizzagate
On December 4, 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch, a 28-year-old man from Salisbury, North Carolina, arrived at Comet Ping Pong (A D.C. pizza parlor) and fired three shots from an AR-15-style rifle that struck the restaurant's walls, a desk, and a door. Welch later told police that he had planned to "self-investigate" the conspiracy theory. Welch saw himself as the potential hero of the story—a rescuer of children. He surrendered after officers surrounded the restaurant and was arrested without incident. No one was injured.

Welch told police he had read online the Comet restaurant was harboring child sex slaves and that he wanted to see for himself if they were there. In an interview with The New York Times, Welch later said that he regretted how he had handled the situation but did not dismiss the conspiracy theory, and rejected the description of it as "fake News."

Pizzagate is generally considered a predecessor to the QAnon conspiracy theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzag...spiracy_theory

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Religion is currently in the process of dying in the west. It's evaporating away. In the U.S. the percentage of people that consider themselves Christians has dropped from 90% at the turn of this century, to 70% today. About a quarter of Americans currently indicate that they do not hold religious beliefs. Europe is already at 50% secular nonbelievers or less, depending on the country.

QAnon is a growing response by the religious right to the abrupt erosion of religious belief in America. The creeping demise of religion is the inevitable result of the increase in direct knowledge concerning the natural operation of the physical universe. As direct observational knowledge increases, the end of ancient superstition is an unavoidable result.


I reached the conclusion that religious claims were too silly to be true when I was thirteen years old. That was in 1961. When that occurred, I was an atheist by definition. Even though I had never met another openly avowed atheist.

I was simply ahead of the curve.

[mensaguy]

This isn't the Politics forum.