Who’s Making Your Kool-Aid?
Some of this blog’s readers have known me for many years, but I’m quite sure you didn’t know this: I was once a secret agent for the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA). You see, FEMA developed a program called the ‘Clergy Response Team’ (CRT) to enlist ministers in calming the populace in the event of an emergency (like Hurricane Katrina in 2005) and I was approached to train for the CRT. In March of 2010 I spent five days in Washington D.C. to attend the course though, obviously, I could not tell my congregation that was the purpose of my trip since it was a covert assignment. It was the church’s understanding that I would be attending a pastor’s conference in the area.
Unfortunately, I proved to be a woefully incompetent collaborator and my cover was easily blown. An astute (former) church member-sleuth at the time was able to put the pieces together and expose my clandestine activities. Those pieces included my teaching on Romans 13 about submission to government, which CRT requires pastors to emphasize to create a compliant mindset amongst the masses. This is necessary because FEMA is planning to institute martial law in the future, and needs a willing citizenry to accomplish it without bloodshed. The submission teaching, trip to Washington, and the fact that our church has 501c3 status with the government made it all too obvious.
Now, everything I said above is true, but only in the mind of the one who ‘outed’ me. No, I have never been trained by FEMA for CRT or anything else. No, my trip to Washington was not for martial law training; I attended a 5-day pastors conference at Capitol Hill Baptist Church. No, I have never been approached by the government to do anything whatsoever on its behalf in my role as a pastor, or as representing our church in its tax-exempt charitable (501c3) capacity. I am not now, nor have I ever been, an agent of the United States Government (or any other, just to cover all bases). Yet at least a few people were taken in by this false narrative, even if only briefly (thankfully). But what causes otherwise intelligent people to fall for such concoctions? What ingredients go into the Kool-Aid1 before it is willingly imbibed?
The Anatomy of Deception
How does one take the above set of facts – teaching Romans 13, making a trip to D.C., and the church’s tax-exempt status (which all churches have) – and conclude that his pastor is preparing to participate in martial law? Similarly, how do so many otherwise good people get caught up in the fictions spun on the internet and cable TV? The experience with my FEMA-hating friend, observing the mass production of deception, and a little reading, lead me to the following warnings:
They really are watching you. That may seem strange to say on a blog that’s obviously warning against conspiracies, but it appears that one sure way to manipulate people into believing what is false is to track their behavior, create a profile, and then feed what they like in more intense doses. While I make no claim to knowing the technical aspects of the internet, I do know this: Our web presence is being tracked and that information is sent to companies and organizations who gladly pay for it because it tells them what we like, so that they can market it to us. It’s why you get that creepy feeling after you’ve talked about or searched for a product and you suddenly start seeing ads for it showing up on your screen. Every time you click on a ‘free’ offering, you have provided information about stuff you like. Remember, when something online is ‘free’, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
But this applies not only to material items, but to ideologies as well. Your internet traffic reveals much about what you believe, politically and religiously and in other ways. In turn, you will see ads and information targeted to you, based on that profile. The more you take the ‘click bait’ the more bait that is put out there, and the more hooked you can become. You begin reading stories that in isolation may seem unbelievable, but you believe them because they build on facts you’ve read previously and …
We Tend to Engage in Motivated Reasoning. That is, we tend to uncritically accept what we want to be true. “It takes more information to make you believe something you don’t want to believe than something you do. Research shows we interpret facts differently if they challenge our personal beliefs, group identity or moral values. In modern media terms, that might mean a person is quick to share a political article on social media if it supports their beliefs, but is more likely to fact-check the story if it doesn’t.” (see here)
If your ‘news’ sources know what you believe and like (and they do) and you believe what you like to hear, then it should be no surprise that you are presented with more of it, magnified and deepened. The result is a rabbit hole that takes you further and further into places you never thought you’d go. You find yourself at your computer, sometimes in the wee hours, mouth agape, as you read about Antifa setting wild fires in the west, the Democrats’ pedophile ring, the Deep State, the Clintons’ serial murders, China’s deliberate manufacture of the coronavirus, the next Jade Helm exercise, and on it goes.2 If you don’t know what any of that is, consider yourself blessed, and keep it that way.
A Higher Standard
God’s Word places a high bar on truth claims. The Old Testament law required ample evidence to convict one of a crime, and the New Testament uses the same standard before conclusions can be drawn:
One witness is not enough to convict anyone accused of any crime or offense they may have committed. A matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. If a malicious witness takes the stand to accuse someone of a crime … and if the witness proves to be a liar, giving false testimony against a fellow Israelite, then do to the false witness as that witness intended to do to the other party. You must purge the evil from among you. (Deuteronomy 19:15-19)
If your brother or sister sins … take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ (Matthew 18:15-16)
We live in a day in which so-called truths are manufactured and made available based on individual profiling. It means the more you dabble in unreality, the more of it you’ll have placed in front of you. The antidote is to demand that all truth claims be rigorously verified. News sources that do not meet that standard should be discarded, immediately. You can then build a better profile, and be presented with better options.
Long before concluding that I was a FEMA tool, the brother described above had started down the road of conspiratorial thinking, and simply traveled further and further along. He and I had an email discussion about what Romans 13 means when it says we are to be “subject to the governing authorities” (Hint: We are to obey the government unless it demands that we sin, and any other exceptions, if any, are vanishingly few – see Acts 5:29). In the course of our interaction I became aware of some of his information sources, which consisted of one conspiracy after another. I warned him about his ‘news’ choices but to no avail. It’s my hope that any who need this message will heed it now, and avoid the damage to self and others that is caused by light regard for the truth.
Ken Brown is the pastor of Community Bible Church in Trenton, MI. We republish his article by permission.
Photo by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash
- “Drinking the Kool-Aid” is a common metaphor for being all in, based on the horrific event in 1978 when hundreds of people willingly took cyanide-laced colored drink at the command of cult leader Jim Jones. [↩]
- I recognize that the left-leaning sites can and probably do pull people further in their chosen direction, but my examples are for the benefit of my mostly conservative readers who, like me, are most likely to be lured further to the right. [↩]