Thread by @mcjulie

It’s interesting how the more evidence accumulates that the antivax conspiracists are just plain WRONG, the more extreme and aggressive they get.

https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1441400631705489408

People will fight so hard just to hang onto a false narrative, it’s really something. The false story becomes more important to them than their own lives & the lives of their loved ones.

It’s a phenomenon we’re used to, sort of, in fringe cults like Jonestown, but it’s shocking to see it in something as huge and widespread as this.

But it touches on something I’ve been struggling to understand about evangelicals for 20 years or more — why do they do it in the first place? What are they getting out of it? And I think I understand, maybe, a little.

The great promise of the Christian faith is the idea of a heaven, an after-death salvation. Different Christian groups construe the path to heaven in wildly different ways, but the existence of heaven at all is one thing they mostly agree on.

Heaven is a nice idea, but it’s a bit of a hard sell. I mean, you can’t possibly prove it exists, right? It’s just a thing that can’t be known. This fact is also something different Christian groups approach very differently.

Evangelicals like to pretend that you CAN know, you CAN be sure. I know there’s the Bebbington Quadrangle and all that, but to me THE key element of the evangelical faith is “literal-minded certainty in that which cannot be known.”

And I believe a huge part of the evangelical faith, both theology and practice, is built AROUND that emotional experience of certainty. Creating it, sustaining it, defending it, protecting it, etc.

Evangelicals don’t want FAITH, they want CERTAINTY. I don’t believe they’re the same thing, mostly because I sometimes had one (faith) but I never managed certainty. Evangelicals make them the same thing. To an evangelical to “have faith” means to “feel certain”

This is why they are so intolerant of diversity, and have such a compulsion to dominate — the more they see their own message reflected back at them from the world, the more certain they feel.

Evangelicals like to follow authorities and turn off their minds, because one way to feel certain is to never think for yourself, never think deeply at all, just let someone else tell you what’s what.

And, of course, their proselytizing. Proselytizing is not for the benefit of the message receiver, it’s for the message giver. The act of trying to win someone else over is how they convince themselves.

Not only are all the apologetics they learn supposedly for YOU really for THEM, humans are quirky in one way — our thoughts and feelings mostly follow our actions. So it’s natural for me to feel more certain of something if I’m trying to convince you of it.

Everything you sacrifice for the sake of this belief becomes something else that works to convince YOU that you’re right. Hours of your time, years of your life, thousands of your dollars — of course it was worth it, right? RIGHT?

But that’s also how cults enter a death spiral, where the amount you sacrifice has to keep escalating — to give up now would be to admit that maybe you were wrong in the first place, and you can’t do THAT.

In general, I think the dedicated the Covid Cult is a subset of the Cult of Donald Trump. And every single time they get proven wrong (the pandemic really is a big deal, Trump loses the election, the Jan 6 coup fails) they get MORE determined.

Oh, this virus I said wasn’t real, I got sick with it?
It’s a plot!
Oh, the virus I said wasn’t a big deal is a big deal and I’m really sick?
It’s a plot!
Oh, I’m dead?
Well, at least I died without recanting my faith in Donald Trump!

Which means there’s something ironic and scary that takes over, where the more obvious it becomes that they’re just plain wrong, the MORE determined they become to prove they still believe.

Which of reminds me of that piece of apologetics that was given to me as a teenager: Who Moved the Stone?
Which attempts to prove the resurrection MUST have been literally true because people don’t sacrifice their lives for a lie.

… do they?