How QAnon uses religion to lure unsuspecting Christians - CNN - 0 views
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It didn't take long for Neff to find the hashtag's meaning. "Where We Go One We Go All" is one of several mottoes of QAnon, a collective of online conspiracists.
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The pastor and his wife, who live in Arcola, Mississippi, began watching the vast collection of QAnon videos posted online by "researchers" who decipher the cryptic messages of "Q," an anonymous online persona who claims to have access to classified military and intelligence operations.
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Since its inception in 2017 QAnon has quickly metastasized, infiltrating American politics, internet culture and now -- religion.
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According to QAnon, President Donald Trump is secretly working to stop a child sex cabal run by Hollywood and political elites
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During the pandemic, QAnon-related content has exploded online, growing nearly 175% on Facebook and nearly 63% on Twitter, according a British think tank.
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The FBI has called QAnon a domestic terror threat and an internal FBI memo warned that "fringe conspiracy theories very likely motivate some domestic extremists, wholly or in part, to commit criminal and sometimes violent activity." Facebook finally pledged to ban QAnon content earlier this month.
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"I see this circulating through conservative and Charismatic churches and it breaks my heart," said Anleitner, who spent time in Pentecostal churches, where he says QAnon's influence is distressingly pervasive.
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Some Christian pastors are actually leading their followers to QAnon, or at least introducing them to its dubious conspiracy theories.
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During services in July, Rock Urban Church in Grandville, Michigan, played a discredited video that supports QAnon conspiracy theories.
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Danny Silk, a leader at Bethel Church, a Pentecostal megachurch in Redding, California, has posted QAnon-related ideas and hashtags on his Instagram account.
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"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.
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"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.
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Q himself (or herself, or themselves for that matter -- no one quite knows who Q is) has posted nearly 5,000 messages since 2017.
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QAnon is complex, said Brian Friedberg, a researcher at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government who has studied the movement.
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Earlier this year a young Christian friend of his recirculated QAnon ideas posted online by a national Christian leader, Anleitner said. (He declined to name the pastor on the record).
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In QAnon, some observers see a mass delusion, others see a political cult, and still others claim to see the sprouts of a new faith.
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If QAnon is a new religion, it bears the birthmarks of our truth-deprived time: Born on an obscure internet image board, it spreads through social media, preaches a perverted form of populism and is amplified by a president who has demonstrated little regard for facts.
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"It's kinda like checking Fox News or CNN," -- that is, a place to find the latest news, said Park Neff, who has a masters in divinity and a doctorate from New Orleans Baptist Seminary. "It just seemed to be good, solid conservative thought."
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"What resonated with me is the idea of moving toward a global government," she said, "and that actually goes along with the Christian belief about the End Times."
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It interprets world events through the lens of Scripture or Q posts. It's obsessed with a grand, apocalyptic reckoning that will separate good from evil, deeply distrusts the media and finds an unlikely champion -- and hero -- in President Trump.
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That's no accident, say experts who have studied QAnon. The group intentionally uses emotionally fraught topics, like suffering children, to draw Christians to their movement.
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"That's a recruiting tactic," said Travis View, a host of "QAnon Anonymous," a podcast that seeks to explain the movement. "It's their red pill." (Travis View is a pseudonym he uses for safety. )
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View compared it to a religion that proselytizes by offering potential converts seemingly mundane services before laying the hard sell on them."The 'Save the Children' messaging is very effective, because everyone wants to protect children."
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"People who start with 'saving the children' don't stay there -- and that's the problem," he said. "It's like Alice in Wonderland. They follow the rabbit and enter a totally different framework for reality."
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"This is an information operation that has gotten out of the direct control of whoever started it," he said. It's an operation, he added, that likely would not exist in a less polarized, confusing and frightening time.
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When Jesus didn't arrive, the Millerites were greatly disappointed, but they adjusted their apocalyptic timetables and soldiered on, eventually becoming the Seventh Day Adventist Church.
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These days, Q shies away from giving specific dates, View noted, suggesting a shift in tactics. Even so, believers attempt to explain away any contradictions between QAnon and reality, just as the Millerites did centuries ago.
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"Some of it seems like deliberate misinformation to throw off the other side," Neff said, "as should be apparent to anyone who watches the news. Sometimes he (Q) does it to rattle their cages, sometimes to keep them guessing. It seems to work."