Why So Many QAnon Believers Are Evangelical Christians
April 5, 2021
The Politics of Love in an Age of Qanon
by R.E. Slater
The Qanonny mess hasn't left the evangelical church. Listening to Fox News 14 hours a day vs. the local church pastor speaking for 1 hour a week doesn't begin to compensate for the disinformation Fox is broadcasting into the ears of the willing believer. Which is a shame because many good pastors have attempted to re-right Christian messaging but cannot succeed given the daily orations of lies and propaganda by rightwing media.
I grew up inside of Christian fundamentalism familiar with the Scottish theologian John Darby's bible hermeneutic, Dispensationalism. Had read about all America's past reformational movements over the years. And understood how this socio-religious form of church history would later captivate church audiences under the Billy Graham era and become popularised in books like Hal Lindsey's "Late Great Planet Earth," and Tim LaHaye's "Left Behind Series."
In my university years I had joined Campus Crusade for a few years. Here to was another evangelical organization preaching "End Times" watch-and-wait jargon. The better chapters, like my own campus group, wrapped it in God's Love. But even the Evangelical Christian church which I began going to had matriculated from Johnathan Edward's phrase "sinner's in the hands of an angry God" to John Piper's "the end of the world has come and all is doomed" phraseology.
Which, at this point, left me needing a newer Christian message made all-the-more-true based upon the love of God - and against all the wrongheaded teachings of an angry God waiting to wipe us out. I also needed a bible and a Christian gospel pointing to loving one another by reclaiming this earth and human society by active socio-economic messaging of healing, equality, and justice. Where God's love could be visualized through new human relationships with one another.
Another Christian message I longed to hear was to lean into this world to redeem it in some fashion rather than to wait outside of it, hating it, fearing it, and praying for its destruction by God's end times judgment. Nietzsche in many ways had it right when saying "We have killed God." Whenever we chose to hate (or do nothing) rather than to love one another by our words and deeds, God is made dead to those needing God's love.
Bad preachers and bad politicians have picked up on this alt-message of the church using the Lord's congregations shamelessly for their own ends as well as to the end of a civil American democracy. They are false preachers, wolves in sheep's clothing, and anti-christs all. And they are to be removed from our hearts and ears by simply turning of their unloving, unChristian libel.
So let bad evangelicalism die... and with it the church's errant theologies speaking doom and judgment rather than love and beauty. The church must be at the vanguard of expressing an open and expanding democracy to its fullest. By embracing the love of God in all that it can mean to a society. By driving forward in embracing ecological civilizations centered in social and environmental justice.
This actions are necessary now. We cannot wait around for the Lord's coming to do what is right. God has already come in Christ... what more needs to be done but to take God's atoning redemption and apply it right quick into the lives of men and women??
These, among other humanitarian movements, are much better end-time theologies to be believed and promoted and wrapped around the love of God. And why? Because the church has reoriented its beliefs and preachings around the love of God rather than the doom of God.
Moreover, as a more proper evangelical gospel emphasizing God's love over doom we may now speak into the meaning and purpose of individual lives. Why one might get out of bed everyday and have a purpose to make the world a better place against all the awfulness it seems to dwell upon.
Love is a patient, powerful force. How do I know? Because of God's portrayal of Himself in Jesus on this earth as God served and taught. And because of the loving sacrifice of God's Self upon the Cross of Calvary. His one real opponent other than sin and the devil were religious people with religious beliefs obscuring God's love by religious codes, rites, and dictum. I'm afraid today's Christian Church has been doing the same - to which Jesus was none too kind when speaking to the religious leaders and beliefs of His day.
The judgment of God is that we have taken His love and buried it in the ground rather than to internalize it and broadcast it out as a farmer would his purchased seed in order to raise new crops.
The Christian church is thereby judged for its ill-usage of the gospel of God. NOT the world for which God came to serve and to save.
God loves in all ways... think on these things and foreswear the duplicity of any politician or preacher not working for the good of humanity. Even as God is loving the world through His Holy Spirit and is working ever-and-always to redeem the world in everyway possible.
Peace, my friends,
R.E. Slater
April 9, 2021
1 John 3 (the literal bible)1See what love the Father has given to us, that we may be called children of God; because of this the world does not know us, because it did not know Him. 2Beloved, now, we are children of God, and it was not yet revealed what we will be. We have known that if He may have appeared, we will be like Him, because we will see Him as He is; 3and everyone who is having this hope on Him, purifies himself, even as He is pure.4Everyone who is doing sin, he also does lawlessness, and sin is lawlessness, 5and you have known that He appeared that He may take away our sins, and sin is not in Him; 6everyone who is remaining in Him does not sin; everyone who is sinning, has not seen Him, nor known Him. 7Little children, let no one lead you astray; he who is doing righteousness is righteous, even as He is righteous, 8he who is doing sin, he is of the Devil, because the Devil sins from the beginning; for this [reason] the Son of God appeared, that He may undo the works of the Devil; 9everyone who has been begotten of God, he does not sin, because His seed remains in him, and he is not able to sin, because he has been begotten of God. 10In this are revealed the children of God, and the children of the Devil; everyone who is not doing righteousness, is not of God, and he who is not loving his brother,11because this is the message that you heard from the beginning, that we may love one another, 12not as Cain—he was of the evil one, and he slew his brother. And for [what] reason did he slay him? Because his works were evil, and those of his brother [were] righteous.13Do not wonder, my brothers, if the world hates you; 14we have known that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers; he who is not loving [his] brother remains in death. 15Everyone who is hating his brother is a manslayer, and you have known that no manslayer has continuous life remaining in him; 16in this we have known love, because He laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down [our] lives for the brothers; 17and whoever may have the goods of the world, and may view his brother having need, and may shut up his yearnings from him—how does the love of God remain in him? 18My little children, may we not love in word nor in tongue, but in work and in truth! 19And in this we know that we are of the truth, and before Him we will assure our hearts, 20because if our heart may condemn—because greater is God than our heart, and He knows all things. 21Beloved, if our heart may not condemn us, we have boldness toward God, 22and whatever we may ask, we receive from Him, because we keep His commands, and we do the things pleasing before Him,23and this is His command, that we may believe in the Name of His Son Jesus Christ, and may love one another, even as He gave command to us, 24and he who is keeping His commands, remains in Him, and He in him; and in this we know that He remains in us, from the Spirit that He gave us.
