December 29, 2024 • 33 mins
Drew McCoy, aka Genetically Modified Skeptic, is a fundamentalist Evangelical Christian turned agnostic/atheist. With John, Jerry and Adam, they explore the position of conspiracy theories throughout religion in general.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I was a
CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
This is mission implausible.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
So John and Jerry, I'm excited to introduce you to
my friend Drew McCoy.
Speaker 4 (00:35):
Hey, Drew, Hey, thanks for having me guys.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
So, Drew has a phenomenal YouTube channel, Genetically Modified Skeptic
where I think, Drew, it's fair to say you're one
of the most public voices of what's now known as
the ex evangelical movement, the movement of people who grew
up evangelical Christian no longer are evangelical Christians. None of
the three of us are particularly religious, and we're having
(00:58):
a chat about sure. See like there's a huge overlap
between conspiracy theories from QAnon to whatever the latest Trump
thing is and evangelical Christians. And we were like, why
is that.
Speaker 4 (01:12):
Well, hopefully my pain can help elucidate some of the
factors here, My childhood trauma might be able to help
you guys understand a little bit of this.
Speaker 5 (01:20):
I hope.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Oh great, Yes, we love childhood trauma. John Cipher, Well,
were you religious at all as a kid? Were your parents?
Did you go to church?
Speaker 2 (01:29):
So?
Speaker 1 (01:29):
My parents, my dad was a professor and mom was
a teacher. No, we didn't go to church. We weren't
really religious. They weren't trying to promote atheism or anything
like that. And it wasn't until I was out of college.
Once we were some function and somebody asked my father
what he was and he said, I don't. My friend
told me that they don't think I'm a Christian. Then
they explained what a Christian is. I guess that's right.
I just never grew up with much religion, and so
(01:50):
I'm intimidated about you guys.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
And Jerry, you grew up well, okay, last Dave's o'sha
one of ten kids? What do you think all Altra boy? Drew,
you had the Baptists, we had the Jesuits. They're just
as mind bending for me. And to bring Cia into it,
and conspiracy theories. When I was younger, I fifth sixth grade,
I started to question just logically, like this doesn't make
(02:13):
any sense to me, and I was basically told lovingly
shut up and accept it. And it's about faith. And
in Cia we dealt with faith a lot, surprisingly so
people had faith in communism, feefle had faith and jihadism,
people had faith in their own ethnic superiority like in
(02:34):
South Africa, and people did terrible atrocities based on faith
their faith. And with Drew, I was if I could
kick it off, I'd like to know what you think
faith is, because in Cia we've seen faith Shia and
Sunnis in Iraq where they slaughtered each other, and John
(02:55):
was in the killing fields of the former ex Yugoslavia
where people were murdering under each other for things we
couldn't understand, and it was all based on faith, not
just religious face, but also faith in a great leader
or an ideology so true. I was wondering if you
could tell us what you think faith is and how
we define it, because it's generally a positive word, but
(03:16):
I think in Ceeia we don't often tend not to
see it that way.
Speaker 4 (03:19):
It's a good question, and I think that the answer
that's existed in the atheist sphere for quite a while now,
originating with people like Christopher Higgins and Sam Harris, is
fundamentally flawed. The atheist fear likes to say faith is
just bad epistemology. It's just believing in things for which
there is no evidence. And that's not completely incorrect in
certain instances, it's just that's not the entirety of the picture.
(03:41):
So I see faith as strong affiliation and identity with something.
That can be a belief, but just as much it
can be a group, it can be an identity. It
can be like you said, affiliation with or love of
some kind of totalitarian leader. I don't think that faith
needs to be looked at just through a philosophical context,
(04:03):
thinking oh, it's just bad epistemology. It also needs to
be seen sociologically. What does faith do? Faith motivates people
to affiliate with certain groups, to do certain actions, And
that's how I prefer to think about faith.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
That lines up with my I didn't grow up particularly religious,
although Jewish, but I did major in history of religion
in college because I was always fascinated, like, how do
people have faith? And a Christian apologist or any kind
of religious apologists would say, oh, you have faith in
Darwinism and the Big Bang and stuff. So putting that
whole argument to one side, the kind of functional use
(04:39):
of faith the way you defined it makes a lot
of sense to me and also helps see like, oh,
that is a frame to look at conspiracy theories. We've
talked about on this show. How you know, if you
suddenly believe in whatever, QAnon, whatever it is, you have
a community, you have a shared frame of reference. One
way I think about it is like you know what
to think and feel in the more when you wake up,
(05:00):
like you have a purpose, you have a goal, you
have an enemy, you have good guys and bad guys,
and so in that sense, it almost makes me wonder like,
where is the line between you know, sort of traditional
religious faith and believing in conspiracy theories?
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (05:15):
Absolutely, And I actually have a little factoid here that
I wanted to make sure and bring up at the
beginning of this just so that hopefully we can all
be on the same page about what an evangelical is.
Per Ryan Burge, who is a political scientist at Eastern
Illinois University, I've had him on my channel. The identity
of evangelical is not something that is informed solely theologically,
(05:40):
and I think I would actually argue that it's informed
more by a certain kind of political action and identity.
So the evidence of this is that when surveyed in
twenty twenty two, twenty three percent of people who are
Orthodox Christians identified as evangelical. Orthodox Christians come from places
like Russia and Georgia. They're very much not in line
(06:01):
theologically with evangelical Christians in the US. Now, to go
in a more extreme direction, thirty nine percent of Republican
voting Muslims in the United States identify as evangelicals. Traditionally
the enemy of the religious right in the US right,
but now they are identifying with the religious rights so
(06:22):
long as they vote Republican. Now, among Buddhists, twenty five
percent of Republican Buddhists in the United States identify as
born again or evangelical. For Hindus it's thirty seven percent.
We're most definitely not seeing evangelicalism act as a solely
religious category. It's a political category and identity maybe more
than anything else.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Can I ask you why is that?
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Now?
Speaker 1 (06:44):
I know when I look back at my history, there
is a tie between what became evangelical religion and anti
intellectualism in this country. Right, the early Puritans are rigorous
scholars and revered learning, and they built Harvard University all
those kind of things, and then the Awakening the mid
eighteenth century, true was intellectually be subordinate to the soul.
More about spontaneity, a focus on the spirit, personal Bible,
(07:05):
people can find their own relationship with God and those
type of things, and it was often tied with moving
away from that focus on For the Puritans, it was
a scholarly clergy. But why did it become political? Whim
evangelicals now tied to politics in our minds.
Speaker 4 (07:21):
I'm glad that you brought up the Puritans and how
much they valued education within theology and authority as well.
The Puritans, the Congregational Church was one of the established
churches in the colonies before independence. And the thing that
kind of drove the advent of evangelicalism in the United
States we might recognize it today was the abolishment or
(07:44):
the abolition of state churches and the adoption of a
free market economy within the realm of religion. So I
think that points to a pretty clear overlap between just
an idea that free market values, free market approaches to culture,
to economics need to be valued, and this form of
(08:06):
Protestantism that we see today, evangelicalism is basically extreme libertarian,
free market Christianity, where the most inflammatory positions, where the
most eye catching rhetoric is going to be prized and
made into doctrine that gets repeated and spread.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
I enjoy disagreeing with John, so let me just take
my pet pee for a walk. So I think it's
within the Pilgrim ideology that the first religious forces that
came to the US from Europe. I think conspiracy theories
are embedded in that. Within two generations, there's the sale
in witchcraft trials, right, and in the sixteen nineties and
(08:46):
at one point ten percent of the entire population was
being accused of witchcraft. From a very small population, thirty
five people were brutally murdered, and scholars look back now
and say, well, actually, yeah, it was religious hysteria arc
but it was also politics, it was also class and
it was also arguably a conspiracy theory that got out
(09:08):
of hand. And I think there's a straight line between
the Salem witchcraft trials which were biblically based. There's the
thing in the Bible about suffer not which is to
live right, so that riches must be alive and you
must execute them to QAnon today and I'm throwing open
to the groups, what's the sense of politics, conspiracy theories
(09:29):
religion and what we have in the US.
Speaker 4 (09:32):
The peak of witch trials in all of religious history,
as far as I can tell, or at least in
Christian history as far as I can tell, is actually
happening in early modern Europe as a result of Protestants
and Catholics fighting for the first time, because Protestants actually
came onto the scene printing press and Protestantism had really
a hand in hand relationship. And what I see Protestantism
(09:55):
as is a move toward a free market approach to
create Ristianity rather than this kind of high church liturgical
approach to Christianity with everything is just based in authority,
and for better or worse, it seems like free market
approaches to religion breed ideas that can be very much
steeped in fear, in moral panic, and inflammatory rhetoric, simply
(10:19):
because this is the type of human communication that cashes
human attention. The most Martin Luther really stoked moral panic
in accusing the Catholic Church of a bunch of things
which were of course maybe necessary to call out, but
and effective. This is that people get really scared, really
riled up. They start looking for enemies everywhere, and they
(10:41):
eventually start accusing what today we would just consider to
be maybe more masculine women, religious minorities, gay people of witchcraft,
and then unlike with the Salem witch trials, killing a
lot of them, not just accusing a few hundred and
killing something like night eineteen, but killing hundreds of them.
Speaker 5 (11:03):
While I do.
Speaker 4 (11:04):
With my Protestant roots, tend to think that a free
market approach to things is good, I think when it
comes to religion, I can't deny that there's a serious
connection between a free market religious economy and moral panic.
And that means conspiracy theories.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
I mean we see in countries today that have established
religions parts of Europe, the United Kingdom, Christian religious practice
is much less right and self identified. I mean, we
are now catching up with Europe in our the percentage
of Americans who don't have a religious belief, but we're
still as I understand it, way higher than a lot
of European countries where they have. In fact, I believe
(11:43):
there's strong evidence that separation of church and state was
as much for the church as it was for the state,
that there was an understanding that having one state religion
would actually hurt religious practice.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
Absolutely.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
All right, we're going to get right back into that,
but first let's hear this.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Evangelicals. Now, I tend to think about them in the
political sphere, and they tend to be very focused on
right wing politics, and as such, oftentimes I think that
they look down on people like me who aren't believers.
And maybe that's wrong, but it seems that they think
that non believers sort of pretentious, are pompous intellectuals and
what have you. But is there an arrogance to being
(12:27):
a believer? It seems to me that it's the height
of arrogance to claim that you know there is one
truth and you have a relationship with God and someone
else doesn't.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
Now, there are a lot of religious traditions that do
stress kind of the death of the ego, thinking about
something like Sufi mysticism, even mysticism within the Orthodox Church.
To a certain degree, things like this things in New Age,
they very much lessen the esteem of the individual or
sense of identity of the individual and try to integrate
(12:55):
this self into a larger whole. But speaking specifically about
Evangelic Christianity, there absolutely is a strong identitarian attitude. The
way that I mean identitarian attitudes are strong ideas that
you and your group or a specific identity group culture
should control everything, should have at least far more power
(13:18):
than anyone else. Within the Evangelical Christian Church, within Protestant
churches generally, but especially when you start going very conservative,
there is a strong identitarian idea. When Jesus said to
go to the highways in the hedges, he was not
saying go to the highways and the hedges to make
sure that everybody goes to heaven. He was saying that,
(13:40):
but he was also saying, go to the highways and
the hedges and tell them that they need to basically
bow down before you and your control over politics, over culture,
over arguably economics, and so yes, I definitely think that
there is a form of arrogance and even narcissism within
a specific the type of Christian theology that is encapsulated
(14:03):
in evangelicalism right now.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
And I'd expand that beyond just Christianity. So I spent
a lot of time as his Adam in the Middle East,
and John has spent time in South Asia and dealing
with Muslims, right And it's not anti William, but this
is they have the same sort of thing. When I've
talked to al Qaeda people, we've captured al Qaeda fighters,
(14:26):
they have this religious not only just faith, but fervor
that they are not terrorists. We're the terrorists, but they
are actually the warriors of God. They are divinely ordained
to kill us. And as a CIAF are trying to
explain this to the US political establishment. It's not you're
(14:47):
not going to defeat them in Afghanistan. You're not going
to defeat them with bombs and bullets. What you're struggling
with here is faith and however you want to define it.
And I recall one particular instance when I was in
a rock just after Moses had fallen, and if you remember,
it was like three thousand Isis guys defeated fifty thousand
(15:10):
Iraqi troops and Washington is like, how could this possibly be?
It's because one side believes they actually believe they're from God,
and Washington just couldn't get it, like, no, no, they
can't be true. It's got to be they got more money,
They've got this. It's like, you can't pay these guys
like an extra three hundred dollars to blow themselves up.
(15:31):
And that's again, that's something we struggle within the national
security space is understanding the fervency of this outside of the.
Speaker 4 (15:39):
Beltleigh, Yeah, I think that I've witnessed this idea within
the atheist community, especially which very strongly exists with an
evangelical community of basically religious essentialism. There is some kind
of discernible fundamental essence of true religion that must exist
(15:59):
in order for something to be true religion. Religion in
its true form and its pure form, cannot be influenced
by outside factors. It just is as it is. And
so that means that people like Sam Harris have been
driven to say that what's fundamentally wrong with Islam is
the fundamentals of Islam. He does not factor in any
(16:20):
kind of outside influence into what he believes is true
Islam or true Christianity. These things are defined entirely through
a theological Lens.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
I want to just jump in to say, the people
we were using to fight isis were other Muslims, right,
So it's not like in Islam thing, it's what version
thereof or how you define faith and how it's exploited.
Speaker 4 (16:42):
Perhaps, Yeah, definitely. Now, religious scholars and sociologists in general
over the last ten years I think have been really
they've always stressed this, but strongly stressing as a response
to public ideas about religion, that religion is fundamentally malleable,
and these ideas of fundamentalism that are really popular in
(17:04):
atheist and Christian circles alike today are a reductionist. They're
essentialist the kind of Islam that you are describing here.
While maybe they can make theologically salient arguments for why
these things are linked to the Qoran, we like to
reduce the development of ideas like this to being oh,
(17:25):
they read the Koran and then they acted on it.
Whereas when we look in different contexts we see Islam
in somewhere like Indonesia, in places where people are a
bit wealthier, where it's very multicultural, where it's multi lingual,
we just don't see the same kind of radicalism and
fundamentalism popping up. To me, this means that there's got
(17:46):
to be some kind of other factor. There's got to
be economic factors, there's got to be social and cultural
factors going on. Maybe it's a bad idea for me
to pick a fight about foreign policy here with you
guys at all. That's not my expertise. You're a popular
American project has been to say that American foreign policy
does not have anything to do with the rise of Wahabism,
(18:08):
this kind of ultra fundamentalist and violent form of Islam.
While I wouldn't defend the idea that America created fundamentalist
is Lam, I think that's reductive too. I think that
we do need to look at social, economic, cultural political
factors when we're explaining why basically these fifteen year old
boys would go out and start murdering their fellow citizens
(18:31):
in the name of the same religion. Essentially.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
I did a story in two thousand and two for
The New York Times. I interviewed a group of guys
who wanted to be suicide bombers, and I interviewed three,
and two of them disappeared. I don't know what happened, yes,
but we can guess. And this was in Jordan in
two thousand and two. It was clear there was probably
(18:54):
going to be a war with Iraq. So there was
a handful of options and they were very aware of them.
There was Israel, which was their first choice, but the
hardest to access. There was Iraq coming up. They were
excited about that. The easiest, they said, was Chechhnia, which
at the time you just raised your hand and they
were in. At least that's what these kids told me.
(19:15):
You could be in Chech fairly quickly. They knew how
to get you in there. Kashmir, I was surprised to
hear was also a favorite spot they actually I witnessed
an interesting argument between them where two of them said
they might just stay in Jordan and kill Americans in Jordan,
and the other one saying, no, you can't in Jordan
(19:37):
because the Quran says, and I don't know the Korah,
I don't know if this is true, but says something
like you can kill an invading army, but not an
invited army. And since the King of Jordan had invited
the Americans, you couldn't kill them in Jordan. But the
second they cross into Iraq, it was fair game, and
that by this logic also anyone in Israel, it's fair
(19:58):
game because they see that the entire Israel as an invasion.
But one of these guys, who was by far the smartest,
and I will let you know, I'm still friends with him,
he actually gave up that way, and he lives in Texas.
Now he's a lovely guy, honestly, no joke, Drew, I
should introduce you sometime. But he's still a devout Muslim,
but not he rejects violence. Now that's good, Yes, that's good.
(20:20):
But he was explicit. He just walked me through. He's like,
I am a poor Palestinian kid from a bad family
in Jordan. Like not a bad family, just a poor,
unconnected family. I'm a really good computer programmer, but I
can't get ahead because everywhere I go to get a job,
like the nephew of the owner who's an idiot, gets
(20:42):
promoted above me. And I want to be proud, and
if I could get a job at Microsoft, I'd much
prefer that to being a suicide bomber. But I don't
know any other way to be proud. And he was explicit.
He said, if I get a good programming job. I'm
not going to do it. If I don't, I will.
He did, by the way, get a good programming job,
(21:02):
and that's what he does in Texas. I spent time
in Haiti where I mean, obviously, Haiti's a religious country,
but it's not a religious lent. The violence isn't religiously tinged.
And John and Jerry, you both have spent time in
countries where there is no gredible promise of an improved
life over time, and when you feel a fairly high
likelihood that the existing system, the existing real world, the
(21:26):
existing economic order, political order, is just going to continue
to suck. You start to understand how the vast majority
of people in those conditions don't become suicie pommers or
terrorists and don't turn to violence. But you can understand
how religious faith that it transports you out of those conditions,
that allows you to imagine other planes or other worlds
(21:46):
where there's an alternate, happier life, either happening now or
could happen in the future. It just feels obvious.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Let's take a break, we'll be right back.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
All right, back to mission implausible.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
I really want to jump in and say that, So
there's the doc Trinle, Right, so there's everybody's got everybody.
All cultures have a religion, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism. What happens, though,
is there's a narrative that goes with it can be interpreted,
and I'd call it a conspiracy theory. Right. So within
Islam there are people who are interpreting certain ways for
their own political power achieve a sense of aggrievement. John's
(22:23):
an expert on Yugoslavia, but they all got along fairly
well during the Yugoslav days. And yet when these conspiracy theories,
these narratives of Serb supremacy or of proat supremacy or
whatever it is, they get involved and it becomes violent,
and there's there's radical polarization. And I'm concerned because I'm
starting to see that we're beginning to see that in
(22:45):
the US much more than we've ever had the sort
of the politics of agreement, the narratives of a larger
conspiratorial view of life. How you look at things.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Du how would a real believer answer a question that
I often wonder, like why aren't Christian values enough? Why
isn't it okay just to lead a good, clean Christian life, love,
they neighbor, etc. Without having to believe in personal God
or God at all.
Speaker 4 (23:07):
First of all, the idea within evangelical Christianity is that
the ultimate basis for morality, the reason why human beings
have any sort of sense of morality whatsoever, is because
it was programmed into the human mind by God or
the human heart, actually, I should say by God. So
the only reason John, you are able to live a good,
clean life, as you say, is because you are borrowing
(23:30):
from God's plan, from God's design. If we want to
achieve a simulacra of or closeness to moral perfection, we
can't just trust our own moral nature. That is necessary.
We need to use our moral nature that God gave us.
But we also need to inform that moral nature every
(23:52):
day constantly by communing with God himself, and that can
be achieved through both prayer and specifically for evangelical Christians,
reading God's perfect, divinely inspired word in the Bible as
it is canonized for Protestants. At least, sure, most Evangelicals
actually wouldn't dispute that it's hypothetically possible to be a
(24:17):
quote good person in life as a non evangelical or
non Christian, but you're not going to be approximating moral perfection.
And maybe most importantly here, you're absolutely not going to
go to heaven. It doesn't matter if you are essentially sinless.
If you send one time, you're going to go to
(24:38):
Hell forever and burn for all of eternity. There's reasons
to want to get close to God, both in life
and for the sake of your afterlife.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
It seems you're screwed, John.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
I have a video.
Speaker 4 (24:48):
About how to go to Hell in every religion where
I get scholars to explain to me how you can
go to hell in the world's five major religions as
well as five life larger but minority religions. So if
you guys are interested in fleeing from moral perfection and
securing an afterlife of torment and terror, then you can
(25:10):
definitely like and subscribe.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
Don't go to Shintoism. That's a tough one for hell
is one thing I learned from your video. So, Drew,
I want to just switch to your Like, you grew
up in a would you say fundamentalists Christian home?
Speaker 4 (25:22):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Yeah. Talk a bit about the world you grew up
in and how conspiracy theories, like were they around, how
they played a role in your childhood.
Speaker 4 (25:30):
So I grew up in the independent Fundamental Baptist Church.
So you guys heard of the Scopes monkey trial. We
were rooting for the prosecution. We believed that God created
the world in six literal days, and on the seventh
day he rested. That's why we have the Sabbath. We
believed that the Grand Canyon and all other giant geological
(25:53):
features that obviously took a lot of time to make,
we're all created by the world wide flood that happened
about four thousand years ago or so. When we read
about the Tower of Babel and about how God confused
people to slow their efforts to approximate His godhood, that's
actually a story about where languages came from. The reason
(26:16):
why Sanskrit came into existence, the reason why Indo European
languages came into existence, the reason why Chinese eventually came
into existence, was all because God essentially created these languages
when he scattered people at the Tower of Babel. We
explained everything through a very hyper literalist Christian framework, where
every story in the Bible, even if it's a parable,
(26:40):
actually literally happened, it's actual history. And when you grow
up in that way, your community develops ways to basically
circle the wagons. It develops infrastructure to reinforce the idea
that all of this stuff is real science, real history,
in order to defend its ideology, and it's very identity.
(27:01):
So I grew up in private Christian schools and homeschool
co ops where we essentially consumed religious propaganda as if
it was scientific content. And this was driven not by
just an idea that creation science is real science, but
also by the fact that if we are not teaching
(27:23):
creation as science to children, then our entire identitarian project
of dominating the world will never reach fruition. So the
pseudoscience is really driven by identitarian ideas within these communities.
And what is that other than a conspiracy theory. We
essentially thrived on an infrastructure that was meant to protect
(27:47):
identity through the propagation of conspiracy theories. So it's really
no wonder that someone who was raised as I would
would go on to believe in anti vax ideas and
planandemic ideas and all sorts of things into having conspiratorial
notions about the deep state, believing in cabals of Satanic pedophiles,
(28:10):
draining children of a drenochrone. And when you're primed psychologically
to accept conspiracy theories in order to defend your identity,
then it's pretty easy to hear something on four Chan
from q and adopt that and not really think that
you're doing anything out of the ordinary.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
You're already like best case scenario if you see the
world that way. I mean, belief in creationism, rejection of evolution.
It's a hard thing to poll, and the surveys are
all over the place, but it's forty percent. I mean,
it's a lot of Americans we believe in some version
of creationism. Some of them are have some kind of
hybrid synthesis. God started the process, but Darwinism took over.
(28:50):
But if you believe that the government, all teachers, all universities,
all science, all textbooks, all TV shows, all documenties are
lying already just as a base, like how much harder
is it to then believe? And they're also lying about chemtruch.
But then on top of it, and I've spent some
time with devout fundamentalists, at least for some the presence
(29:15):
of demons, of forces of Satan is a sounds like
a very active, real part of their day to day experience.
If they slip on the ice and break their ankle,
that's Satan's work. If their cousin dies from a drug overdose,
that's because there was a demon. If Joe Biden wins
the President c in twenty twenty, that satanic. The very
(29:36):
narrative of the universe is a very clean, simple story
of entirely good fighting entirely evil, and for various complex reasons,
much of day to day life is dominated by entirely evil,
right am, I over.
Speaker 4 (29:52):
Oh, absolutely absolutely. The community that I grew up in
was very strongly dualistic. I was in a form of
Christianity that was against alcohol, and the roots of our
denomination is actually found in the movement of pro prohibition teetotalers.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
I'm sorry to interrupt. That always struck me as weird,
because Jesus did turn water into wine, which seems like
something of an endorsement.
Speaker 4 (30:18):
Well, Adam, you know what, does it say that he
got drunk? No, it does not, And do we know
that he wasn't drinking something that was a non alcoholic
grape beverage like Welsh's grape juice. This is a real argument.
By the way, we don't know that he actually had
alcohol within that and if he did, it was only
to basically cleanse the juice that he was drinking to
(30:41):
hydrate himself of harmful microbes. It had nothing to do
with getting drunk. Christians don't get drunk, and they never have.
Speaker 5 (30:49):
I've seen a few is they're not true Christians. John, Yeah,
but I cut you off. You were saying you grew
up in this world and was Satan and demons part
of the world you grew up in.
Speaker 4 (31:02):
Yeah, The reason why we were so against alcohol was
not because it was unhealthy or increased vices through some
psychological process. It was actually because it's a tool of
Satan to destroy God's kingdom. So I remember the first
time as an atheist going into a bar, being confronted
(31:25):
by the fact that I had been primed to be
afraid of this kind of place, and I found myself
almost you know the feeling when you watch a really
scary horror movie and then you walk around at night
at your house and you look over your shoulder and
look down the dark hallway and you're paranoid that the
Baba Duke is going to come and get you, even
though you know it's not going to. I would experience
that in a bar, thinking when this bottle moves across
(31:47):
the bar, there might be a spirit in the spirit right,
there might be a demon in the bottle. Quite literally,
it's a tool of the devil. And so there's demons
just infused in the these cocktails. Really wow. And yes,
you are looking over your shoulder constantly. You're looking for
the veil to be lifted, as they would say, constantly
(32:09):
they're trying to see behind the veil, the separation between
the natural and the supernatural, the spiritual and the natural.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
There's a demon in everclear. I'll tell you that from Kylege.
Speaker 6 (32:22):
We're gonna stop here for now and come back next
week with part two of our conversation with Drew McCoy.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Cipher,
and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission
Implausible It's a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures
(32:43):
for iHeart Podcasts.
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I was a
CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
This is mission implausible.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
So John and Jerry, I'm excited to introduce you to
my friend Drew McCoy.
Speaker 4 (00:35):
Hey, Drew, Hey, thanks for having me guys.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
So, Drew has a phenomenal YouTube channel, Genetically Modified Skeptic
where I think, Drew, it's fair to say you're one
of the most public voices of what's now known as
the ex evangelical movement, the movement of people who grew
up evangelical Christian no longer are evangelical Christians. None of
the three of us are particularly religious, and we're having
(00:58):
a chat about sure. See like there's a huge overlap
between conspiracy theories from QAnon to whatever the latest Trump
thing is and evangelical Christians. And we were like, why
is that.
Speaker 4 (01:12):
Well, hopefully my pain can help elucidate some of the
factors here, My childhood trauma might be able to help
you guys understand a little bit of this.
Speaker 5 (01:20):
I hope.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Oh great, Yes, we love childhood trauma. John Cipher, Well,
were you religious at all as a kid? Were your parents?
Did you go to church?
Speaker 2 (01:29):
So?
Speaker 1 (01:29):
My parents, my dad was a professor and mom was
a teacher. No, we didn't go to church. We weren't
really religious. They weren't trying to promote atheism or anything
like that. And it wasn't until I was out of college.
Once we were some function and somebody asked my father
what he was and he said, I don't. My friend
told me that they don't think I'm a Christian. Then
they explained what a Christian is. I guess that's right.
I just never grew up with much religion, and so
(01:50):
I'm intimidated about you guys.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
And Jerry, you grew up well, okay, last Dave's o'sha
one of ten kids? What do you think all Altra boy? Drew,
you had the Baptists, we had the Jesuits. They're just
as mind bending for me. And to bring Cia into it,
and conspiracy theories. When I was younger, I fifth sixth grade,
I started to question just logically, like this doesn't make
(02:13):
any sense to me, and I was basically told lovingly
shut up and accept it. And it's about faith. And
in Cia we dealt with faith a lot, surprisingly so
people had faith in communism, feefle had faith and jihadism,
people had faith in their own ethnic superiority like in
(02:34):
South Africa, and people did terrible atrocities based on faith
their faith. And with Drew, I was if I could
kick it off, I'd like to know what you think
faith is, because in Cia we've seen faith Shia and
Sunnis in Iraq where they slaughtered each other, and John
(02:55):
was in the killing fields of the former ex Yugoslavia
where people were murdering under each other for things we
couldn't understand, and it was all based on faith, not
just religious face, but also faith in a great leader
or an ideology so true. I was wondering if you
could tell us what you think faith is and how
we define it, because it's generally a positive word, but
(03:16):
I think in Ceeia we don't often tend not to
see it that way.
Speaker 4 (03:19):
It's a good question, and I think that the answer
that's existed in the atheist sphere for quite a while now,
originating with people like Christopher Higgins and Sam Harris, is
fundamentally flawed. The atheist fear likes to say faith is
just bad epistemology. It's just believing in things for which
there is no evidence. And that's not completely incorrect in
certain instances, it's just that's not the entirety of the picture.
(03:41):
So I see faith as strong affiliation and identity with something.
That can be a belief, but just as much it
can be a group, it can be an identity. It
can be like you said, affiliation with or love of
some kind of totalitarian leader. I don't think that faith
needs to be looked at just through a philosophical context,
(04:03):
thinking oh, it's just bad epistemology. It also needs to
be seen sociologically. What does faith do? Faith motivates people
to affiliate with certain groups, to do certain actions, And
that's how I prefer to think about faith.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
That lines up with my I didn't grow up particularly religious,
although Jewish, but I did major in history of religion
in college because I was always fascinated, like, how do
people have faith? And a Christian apologist or any kind
of religious apologists would say, oh, you have faith in
Darwinism and the Big Bang and stuff. So putting that
whole argument to one side, the kind of functional use
(04:39):
of faith the way you defined it makes a lot
of sense to me and also helps see like, oh,
that is a frame to look at conspiracy theories. We've
talked about on this show. How you know, if you
suddenly believe in whatever, QAnon, whatever it is, you have
a community, you have a shared frame of reference. One
way I think about it is like you know what
to think and feel in the more when you wake up,
(05:00):
like you have a purpose, you have a goal, you
have an enemy, you have good guys and bad guys,
and so in that sense, it almost makes me wonder like,
where is the line between you know, sort of traditional
religious faith and believing in conspiracy theories?
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (05:15):
Absolutely, And I actually have a little factoid here that
I wanted to make sure and bring up at the
beginning of this just so that hopefully we can all
be on the same page about what an evangelical is.
Per Ryan Burge, who is a political scientist at Eastern
Illinois University, I've had him on my channel. The identity
of evangelical is not something that is informed solely theologically,
(05:40):
and I think I would actually argue that it's informed
more by a certain kind of political action and identity.
So the evidence of this is that when surveyed in
twenty twenty two, twenty three percent of people who are
Orthodox Christians identified as evangelical. Orthodox Christians come from places
like Russia and Georgia. They're very much not in line
(06:01):
theologically with evangelical Christians in the US. Now, to go
in a more extreme direction, thirty nine percent of Republican
voting Muslims in the United States identify as evangelicals. Traditionally
the enemy of the religious right in the US right,
but now they are identifying with the religious rights so
(06:22):
long as they vote Republican. Now, among Buddhists, twenty five
percent of Republican Buddhists in the United States identify as
born again or evangelical. For Hindus it's thirty seven percent.
We're most definitely not seeing evangelicalism act as a solely
religious category. It's a political category and identity maybe more
than anything else.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Can I ask you why is that?
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Now?
Speaker 1 (06:44):
I know when I look back at my history, there
is a tie between what became evangelical religion and anti
intellectualism in this country. Right, the early Puritans are rigorous
scholars and revered learning, and they built Harvard University all
those kind of things, and then the Awakening the mid
eighteenth century, true was intellectually be subordinate to the soul.
More about spontaneity, a focus on the spirit, personal Bible,
(07:05):
people can find their own relationship with God and those
type of things, and it was often tied with moving
away from that focus on For the Puritans, it was
a scholarly clergy. But why did it become political? Whim
evangelicals now tied to politics in our minds.
Speaker 4 (07:21):
I'm glad that you brought up the Puritans and how
much they valued education within theology and authority as well.
The Puritans, the Congregational Church was one of the established
churches in the colonies before independence. And the thing that
kind of drove the advent of evangelicalism in the United
States we might recognize it today was the abolishment or
(07:44):
the abolition of state churches and the adoption of a
free market economy within the realm of religion. So I
think that points to a pretty clear overlap between just
an idea that free market values, free market approaches to culture,
to economics need to be valued, and this form of
(08:06):
Protestantism that we see today, evangelicalism is basically extreme libertarian,
free market Christianity, where the most inflammatory positions, where the
most eye catching rhetoric is going to be prized and
made into doctrine that gets repeated and spread.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
I enjoy disagreeing with John, so let me just take
my pet pee for a walk. So I think it's
within the Pilgrim ideology that the first religious forces that
came to the US from Europe. I think conspiracy theories
are embedded in that. Within two generations, there's the sale
in witchcraft trials, right, and in the sixteen nineties and
(08:46):
at one point ten percent of the entire population was
being accused of witchcraft. From a very small population, thirty
five people were brutally murdered, and scholars look back now
and say, well, actually, yeah, it was religious hysteria arc
but it was also politics, it was also class and
it was also arguably a conspiracy theory that got out
(09:08):
of hand. And I think there's a straight line between
the Salem witchcraft trials which were biblically based. There's the
thing in the Bible about suffer not which is to
live right, so that riches must be alive and you
must execute them to QAnon today and I'm throwing open
to the groups, what's the sense of politics, conspiracy theories
(09:29):
religion and what we have in the US.
Speaker 4 (09:32):
The peak of witch trials in all of religious history,
as far as I can tell, or at least in
Christian history as far as I can tell, is actually
happening in early modern Europe as a result of Protestants
and Catholics fighting for the first time, because Protestants actually
came onto the scene printing press and Protestantism had really
a hand in hand relationship. And what I see Protestantism
(09:55):
as is a move toward a free market approach to
create Ristianity rather than this kind of high church liturgical
approach to Christianity with everything is just based in authority,
and for better or worse, it seems like free market
approaches to religion breed ideas that can be very much
steeped in fear, in moral panic, and inflammatory rhetoric, simply
(10:19):
because this is the type of human communication that cashes
human attention. The most Martin Luther really stoked moral panic
in accusing the Catholic Church of a bunch of things
which were of course maybe necessary to call out, but
and effective. This is that people get really scared, really
riled up. They start looking for enemies everywhere, and they
(10:41):
eventually start accusing what today we would just consider to
be maybe more masculine women, religious minorities, gay people of witchcraft,
and then unlike with the Salem witch trials, killing a
lot of them, not just accusing a few hundred and
killing something like night eineteen, but killing hundreds of them.
Speaker 5 (11:03):
While I do.
Speaker 4 (11:04):
With my Protestant roots, tend to think that a free
market approach to things is good, I think when it
comes to religion, I can't deny that there's a serious
connection between a free market religious economy and moral panic.
And that means conspiracy theories.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
I mean we see in countries today that have established
religions parts of Europe, the United Kingdom, Christian religious practice
is much less right and self identified. I mean, we
are now catching up with Europe in our the percentage
of Americans who don't have a religious belief, but we're
still as I understand it, way higher than a lot
of European countries where they have. In fact, I believe
(11:43):
there's strong evidence that separation of church and state was
as much for the church as it was for the state,
that there was an understanding that having one state religion
would actually hurt religious practice.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
Absolutely.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
All right, we're going to get right back into that,
but first let's hear this.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Evangelicals. Now, I tend to think about them in the
political sphere, and they tend to be very focused on
right wing politics, and as such, oftentimes I think that
they look down on people like me who aren't believers.
And maybe that's wrong, but it seems that they think
that non believers sort of pretentious, are pompous intellectuals and
what have you. But is there an arrogance to being
(12:27):
a believer? It seems to me that it's the height
of arrogance to claim that you know there is one
truth and you have a relationship with God and someone
else doesn't.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
Now, there are a lot of religious traditions that do
stress kind of the death of the ego, thinking about
something like Sufi mysticism, even mysticism within the Orthodox Church.
To a certain degree, things like this things in New Age,
they very much lessen the esteem of the individual or
sense of identity of the individual and try to integrate
(12:55):
this self into a larger whole. But speaking specifically about
Evangelic Christianity, there absolutely is a strong identitarian attitude. The
way that I mean identitarian attitudes are strong ideas that
you and your group or a specific identity group culture
should control everything, should have at least far more power
(13:18):
than anyone else. Within the Evangelical Christian Church, within Protestant
churches generally, but especially when you start going very conservative,
there is a strong identitarian idea. When Jesus said to
go to the highways in the hedges, he was not
saying go to the highways and the hedges to make
sure that everybody goes to heaven. He was saying that,
(13:40):
but he was also saying, go to the highways and
the hedges and tell them that they need to basically
bow down before you and your control over politics, over culture,
over arguably economics, and so yes, I definitely think that
there is a form of arrogance and even narcissism within
a specific the type of Christian theology that is encapsulated
(14:03):
in evangelicalism right now.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
And I'd expand that beyond just Christianity. So I spent
a lot of time as his Adam in the Middle East,
and John has spent time in South Asia and dealing
with Muslims, right And it's not anti William, but this
is they have the same sort of thing. When I've
talked to al Qaeda people, we've captured al Qaeda fighters,
(14:26):
they have this religious not only just faith, but fervor
that they are not terrorists. We're the terrorists, but they
are actually the warriors of God. They are divinely ordained
to kill us. And as a CIAF are trying to
explain this to the US political establishment. It's not you're
(14:47):
not going to defeat them in Afghanistan. You're not going
to defeat them with bombs and bullets. What you're struggling
with here is faith and however you want to define it.
And I recall one particular instance when I was in
a rock just after Moses had fallen, and if you remember,
it was like three thousand Isis guys defeated fifty thousand
(15:10):
Iraqi troops and Washington is like, how could this possibly be?
It's because one side believes they actually believe they're from God,
and Washington just couldn't get it, like, no, no, they
can't be true. It's got to be they got more money,
They've got this. It's like, you can't pay these guys
like an extra three hundred dollars to blow themselves up.
(15:31):
And that's again, that's something we struggle within the national
security space is understanding the fervency of this outside of the.
Speaker 4 (15:39):
Beltleigh, Yeah, I think that I've witnessed this idea within
the atheist community, especially which very strongly exists with an
evangelical community of basically religious essentialism. There is some kind
of discernible fundamental essence of true religion that must exist
(15:59):
in order for something to be true religion. Religion in
its true form and its pure form, cannot be influenced
by outside factors. It just is as it is. And
so that means that people like Sam Harris have been
driven to say that what's fundamentally wrong with Islam is
the fundamentals of Islam. He does not factor in any
(16:20):
kind of outside influence into what he believes is true
Islam or true Christianity. These things are defined entirely through
a theological Lens.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
I want to just jump in to say, the people
we were using to fight isis were other Muslims, right,
So it's not like in Islam thing, it's what version
thereof or how you define faith and how it's exploited.
Speaker 4 (16:42):
Perhaps, Yeah, definitely. Now, religious scholars and sociologists in general
over the last ten years I think have been really
they've always stressed this, but strongly stressing as a response
to public ideas about religion, that religion is fundamentally malleable,
and these ideas of fundamentalism that are really popular in
(17:04):
atheist and Christian circles alike today are a reductionist. They're
essentialist the kind of Islam that you are describing here.
While maybe they can make theologically salient arguments for why
these things are linked to the Qoran, we like to
reduce the development of ideas like this to being oh,
(17:25):
they read the Koran and then they acted on it.
Whereas when we look in different contexts we see Islam
in somewhere like Indonesia, in places where people are a
bit wealthier, where it's very multicultural, where it's multi lingual,
we just don't see the same kind of radicalism and
fundamentalism popping up. To me, this means that there's got
(17:46):
to be some kind of other factor. There's got to
be economic factors, there's got to be social and cultural
factors going on. Maybe it's a bad idea for me
to pick a fight about foreign policy here with you
guys at all. That's not my expertise. You're a popular
American project has been to say that American foreign policy
does not have anything to do with the rise of Wahabism,
(18:08):
this kind of ultra fundamentalist and violent form of Islam.
While I wouldn't defend the idea that America created fundamentalist
is Lam, I think that's reductive too. I think that
we do need to look at social, economic, cultural political
factors when we're explaining why basically these fifteen year old
boys would go out and start murdering their fellow citizens
(18:31):
in the name of the same religion. Essentially.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
I did a story in two thousand and two for
The New York Times. I interviewed a group of guys
who wanted to be suicide bombers, and I interviewed three,
and two of them disappeared. I don't know what happened, yes,
but we can guess. And this was in Jordan in
two thousand and two. It was clear there was probably
(18:54):
going to be a war with Iraq. So there was
a handful of options and they were very aware of them.
There was Israel, which was their first choice, but the
hardest to access. There was Iraq coming up. They were
excited about that. The easiest, they said, was Chechhnia, which
at the time you just raised your hand and they
were in. At least that's what these kids told me.
(19:15):
You could be in Chech fairly quickly. They knew how
to get you in there. Kashmir, I was surprised to
hear was also a favorite spot they actually I witnessed
an interesting argument between them where two of them said
they might just stay in Jordan and kill Americans in Jordan,
and the other one saying, no, you can't in Jordan
(19:37):
because the Quran says, and I don't know the Korah,
I don't know if this is true, but says something
like you can kill an invading army, but not an
invited army. And since the King of Jordan had invited
the Americans, you couldn't kill them in Jordan. But the
second they cross into Iraq, it was fair game, and
that by this logic also anyone in Israel, it's fair
(19:58):
game because they see that the entire Israel as an invasion.
But one of these guys, who was by far the smartest,
and I will let you know, I'm still friends with him,
he actually gave up that way, and he lives in Texas.
Now he's a lovely guy, honestly, no joke, Drew, I
should introduce you sometime. But he's still a devout Muslim,
but not he rejects violence. Now that's good, Yes, that's good.
(20:20):
But he was explicit. He just walked me through. He's like,
I am a poor Palestinian kid from a bad family
in Jordan. Like not a bad family, just a poor,
unconnected family. I'm a really good computer programmer, but I
can't get ahead because everywhere I go to get a job,
like the nephew of the owner who's an idiot, gets
(20:42):
promoted above me. And I want to be proud, and
if I could get a job at Microsoft, I'd much
prefer that to being a suicide bomber. But I don't
know any other way to be proud. And he was explicit.
He said, if I get a good programming job. I'm
not going to do it. If I don't, I will.
He did, by the way, get a good programming job,
(21:02):
and that's what he does in Texas. I spent time
in Haiti where I mean, obviously, Haiti's a religious country,
but it's not a religious lent. The violence isn't religiously tinged.
And John and Jerry, you both have spent time in
countries where there is no gredible promise of an improved
life over time, and when you feel a fairly high
likelihood that the existing system, the existing real world, the
(21:26):
existing economic order, political order, is just going to continue
to suck. You start to understand how the vast majority
of people in those conditions don't become suicie pommers or
terrorists and don't turn to violence. But you can understand
how religious faith that it transports you out of those conditions,
that allows you to imagine other planes or other worlds
(21:46):
where there's an alternate, happier life, either happening now or
could happen in the future. It just feels obvious.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Let's take a break, we'll be right back.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
All right, back to mission implausible.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
I really want to jump in and say that, So
there's the doc Trinle, Right, so there's everybody's got everybody.
All cultures have a religion, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism. What happens, though,
is there's a narrative that goes with it can be interpreted,
and I'd call it a conspiracy theory. Right. So within
Islam there are people who are interpreting certain ways for
their own political power achieve a sense of aggrievement. John's
(22:23):
an expert on Yugoslavia, but they all got along fairly
well during the Yugoslav days. And yet when these conspiracy theories,
these narratives of Serb supremacy or of proat supremacy or
whatever it is, they get involved and it becomes violent,
and there's there's radical polarization. And I'm concerned because I'm
starting to see that we're beginning to see that in
(22:45):
the US much more than we've ever had the sort
of the politics of agreement, the narratives of a larger
conspiratorial view of life. How you look at things.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Du how would a real believer answer a question that
I often wonder, like why aren't Christian values enough? Why
isn't it okay just to lead a good, clean Christian life, love,
they neighbor, etc. Without having to believe in personal God
or God at all.
Speaker 4 (23:07):
First of all, the idea within evangelical Christianity is that
the ultimate basis for morality, the reason why human beings
have any sort of sense of morality whatsoever, is because
it was programmed into the human mind by God or
the human heart, actually, I should say by God. So
the only reason John, you are able to live a good,
clean life, as you say, is because you are borrowing
(23:30):
from God's plan, from God's design. If we want to
achieve a simulacra of or closeness to moral perfection, we
can't just trust our own moral nature. That is necessary.
We need to use our moral nature that God gave us.
But we also need to inform that moral nature every
(23:52):
day constantly by communing with God himself, and that can
be achieved through both prayer and specifically for evangelical Christians,
reading God's perfect, divinely inspired word in the Bible as
it is canonized for Protestants. At least, sure, most Evangelicals
actually wouldn't dispute that it's hypothetically possible to be a
(24:17):
quote good person in life as a non evangelical or
non Christian, but you're not going to be approximating moral perfection.
And maybe most importantly here, you're absolutely not going to
go to heaven. It doesn't matter if you are essentially sinless.
If you send one time, you're going to go to
(24:38):
Hell forever and burn for all of eternity. There's reasons
to want to get close to God, both in life
and for the sake of your afterlife.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
It seems you're screwed, John.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
I have a video.
Speaker 4 (24:48):
About how to go to Hell in every religion where
I get scholars to explain to me how you can
go to hell in the world's five major religions as
well as five life larger but minority religions. So if
you guys are interested in fleeing from moral perfection and
securing an afterlife of torment and terror, then you can
(25:10):
definitely like and subscribe.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
Don't go to Shintoism. That's a tough one for hell
is one thing I learned from your video. So, Drew,
I want to just switch to your Like, you grew
up in a would you say fundamentalists Christian home?
Speaker 4 (25:22):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Yeah. Talk a bit about the world you grew up
in and how conspiracy theories, like were they around, how
they played a role in your childhood.
Speaker 4 (25:30):
So I grew up in the independent Fundamental Baptist Church.
So you guys heard of the Scopes monkey trial. We
were rooting for the prosecution. We believed that God created
the world in six literal days, and on the seventh
day he rested. That's why we have the Sabbath. We
believed that the Grand Canyon and all other giant geological
(25:53):
features that obviously took a lot of time to make,
we're all created by the world wide flood that happened
about four thousand years ago or so. When we read
about the Tower of Babel and about how God confused
people to slow their efforts to approximate His godhood, that's
actually a story about where languages came from. The reason
(26:16):
why Sanskrit came into existence, the reason why Indo European
languages came into existence, the reason why Chinese eventually came
into existence, was all because God essentially created these languages
when he scattered people at the Tower of Babel. We
explained everything through a very hyper literalist Christian framework, where
every story in the Bible, even if it's a parable,
(26:40):
actually literally happened, it's actual history. And when you grow
up in that way, your community develops ways to basically
circle the wagons. It develops infrastructure to reinforce the idea
that all of this stuff is real science, real history,
in order to defend its ideology, and it's very identity.
(27:01):
So I grew up in private Christian schools and homeschool
co ops where we essentially consumed religious propaganda as if
it was scientific content. And this was driven not by
just an idea that creation science is real science, but
also by the fact that if we are not teaching
(27:23):
creation as science to children, then our entire identitarian project
of dominating the world will never reach fruition. So the
pseudoscience is really driven by identitarian ideas within these communities.
And what is that other than a conspiracy theory. We
essentially thrived on an infrastructure that was meant to protect
(27:47):
identity through the propagation of conspiracy theories. So it's really
no wonder that someone who was raised as I would
would go on to believe in anti vax ideas and
planandemic ideas and all sorts of things into having conspiratorial
notions about the deep state, believing in cabals of Satanic pedophiles,
(28:10):
draining children of a drenochrone. And when you're primed psychologically
to accept conspiracy theories in order to defend your identity,
then it's pretty easy to hear something on four Chan
from q and adopt that and not really think that
you're doing anything out of the ordinary.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
You're already like best case scenario if you see the
world that way. I mean, belief in creationism, rejection of evolution.
It's a hard thing to poll, and the surveys are
all over the place, but it's forty percent. I mean,
it's a lot of Americans we believe in some version
of creationism. Some of them are have some kind of
hybrid synthesis. God started the process, but Darwinism took over.
(28:50):
But if you believe that the government, all teachers, all universities,
all science, all textbooks, all TV shows, all documenties are
lying already just as a base, like how much harder
is it to then believe? And they're also lying about chemtruch.
But then on top of it, and I've spent some
time with devout fundamentalists, at least for some the presence
(29:15):
of demons, of forces of Satan is a sounds like
a very active, real part of their day to day experience.
If they slip on the ice and break their ankle,
that's Satan's work. If their cousin dies from a drug overdose,
that's because there was a demon. If Joe Biden wins
the President c in twenty twenty, that satanic. The very
(29:36):
narrative of the universe is a very clean, simple story
of entirely good fighting entirely evil, and for various complex reasons,
much of day to day life is dominated by entirely evil,
right am, I over.
Speaker 4 (29:52):
Oh, absolutely absolutely. The community that I grew up in
was very strongly dualistic. I was in a form of
Christianity that was against alcohol, and the roots of our
denomination is actually found in the movement of pro prohibition teetotalers.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
I'm sorry to interrupt. That always struck me as weird,
because Jesus did turn water into wine, which seems like
something of an endorsement.
Speaker 4 (30:18):
Well, Adam, you know what, does it say that he
got drunk? No, it does not, And do we know
that he wasn't drinking something that was a non alcoholic
grape beverage like Welsh's grape juice. This is a real argument.
By the way, we don't know that he actually had
alcohol within that and if he did, it was only
to basically cleanse the juice that he was drinking to
(30:41):
hydrate himself of harmful microbes. It had nothing to do
with getting drunk. Christians don't get drunk, and they never have.
Speaker 5 (30:49):
I've seen a few is they're not true Christians. John, Yeah,
but I cut you off. You were saying you grew
up in this world and was Satan and demons part
of the world you grew up in.
Speaker 4 (31:02):
Yeah, The reason why we were so against alcohol was
not because it was unhealthy or increased vices through some
psychological process. It was actually because it's a tool of
Satan to destroy God's kingdom. So I remember the first
time as an atheist going into a bar, being confronted
(31:25):
by the fact that I had been primed to be
afraid of this kind of place, and I found myself
almost you know the feeling when you watch a really
scary horror movie and then you walk around at night
at your house and you look over your shoulder and
look down the dark hallway and you're paranoid that the
Baba Duke is going to come and get you, even
though you know it's not going to. I would experience
that in a bar, thinking when this bottle moves across
(31:47):
the bar, there might be a spirit in the spirit right,
there might be a demon in the bottle. Quite literally,
it's a tool of the devil. And so there's demons
just infused in the these cocktails. Really wow. And yes,
you are looking over your shoulder constantly. You're looking for
the veil to be lifted, as they would say, constantly
(32:09):
they're trying to see behind the veil, the separation between
the natural and the supernatural, the spiritual and the natural.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
There's a demon in everclear. I'll tell you that from Kylege.
Speaker 6 (32:22):
We're gonna stop here for now and come back next
week with part two of our conversation with Drew McCoy.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Cipher,
and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission
Implausible It's a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures
(32:43):
for iHeart Podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Adam Davidson
John Sipher
Jerry O'Shea
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