“Salvation and Voters’ Rights”

“Salvation and Voters’ Rights”     August 28, 2022     Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

Election integrity need not be a euphemism for voter exclusion. Those who care about securing the right to vote and enhancing democracy in America care deeply about ensuring the honesty of elections, and avoiding misconduct. All who are eligible to vote should be able to do so in free and fair elections — but only those eligible to do so. It is vital that we protect voters from the real threats to the integrity of elections. 

https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/Election_Integrity.pdf   

 

I want to talk to you about a very important issue today but one that will seem to be sufficiently complicated that you may not have paid much attention to what little media attention it has received and more than that, it may strike a lot of people as not being a church topic, that is, it may seem to be far too deep into the weeds of politics to be an appropriate topic for churches. I want to talk about our nation’s many moves towards voter suppression. 

 

Now, in most black churches, this will not be an obscure topic but in majority white congregations, today’s message might be the first time that voters’ rights or voter suppression efforts may have ever even been mentioned. But before I launch into that topic, I feel a need to lay a foundation for why I, a minister, would bring this topic into the pulpit. To do that, I’m going to have to take you to seminary with me and do something you rarely hear me doing, which is to look at the minutia of New Testament gospel language and the use of a particular word, a word that is used all of the time in churches, but which is almost entirely misunderstood. That word is “salvation.”

 

If I were to ask you now, based on your experiences in churches, in Sunday School, or even in some college, and I fear seminary classes, what does “salvation” mean, what would you say? 

Based on how we hear it used in religious circles, we could predict that for most people, “being saved” means that they have been redeemed, they have been, as some say, “washed in the blood of Christ,” they have been forgiven of their sins and set on a path towards eternity in heaven. 

 

When you hear most evangelicals talking about how many people were saved at a certain revival or when they tell their own story about when and how that they were saved, or they are telling people how they can become saved, they are meaning that a person’s destiny has been suddenly and entirely shifted from an eternity in a burning hell into a path towards eternity in heaven when they die. Right? That’s what it almost universally means.

 

The word that is translated as “to save” or “to be saved” in the original Koine Greek of the New Testament is  (σωτηρία) “sotoria” or “sesOken.” It appears very often in the New Testament but it is not always translated the same way. 

 

Translation is an art form and not an exact science. Translators all have to try to render a phrase or a sentence in what they believe that the author meant to say and sometimes the translators are bringing their own religious prejudices to that conversation rather than really trying to understand what the original author’s intended meaning was.

 

About 25 years ago I was attending a world congress of preachers in Edinburg, Scotland where the famous homiletics professor, Dr. Will Willimon, was a keynote speaker. He kept talking about people being saved and he repeated the word so often that I held up my hand and said, “Dr. Willimon, you do realize that there is no past tense use of the word salvation in the Bible. No one in the Bible ever got saved, but it is a process verb. The Bible speaks of people being saved, a journey, a direction, a way of living but not something in the past tense.”

 

You can look it up in the New Testament. In Acts chapter 2, where the author describes the triumphant birth of the church as thousands are reported to have been baptized and joined the Christian movement, the author says in verse 48, “And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.” They didn’t get saved but Acts says that they began the journey, that they were being saved. 

 

It was a very awkward moment because Willimon was enough of a scholar to know that I was right, but he also knew his audience well enough to know that he couldn’t publicly agree with me without losing credibility with all of the evangelical pastors in the room. So, he said to the crowd, “Let me point out to you that Roger Ray said that and not me.” And from that point on, no one at the conference spoke to me again nor was I ever invited back to participate in the international congress of preachers. Which was fine with me because I never would have wasted my time and money to attend. 

 

The evangelical church thinks that salvation, in terms of not going to hell and getting to go to heaven, is the only product that they have to sell and if they had taken me seriously on this one obviously true point, their entire religion would crumble. But you don’t even have to wade into the nuances of translation to get this point. 

 

In the 14^th Chapter of Matthew, the author describes a miraculous event in which he says that Jesus was walking on the water. And never one to be left out, Peter wants to walk on the water too, and so he gets out of the boat and immediately 

starts to drown, and he cries out to Jesus, “Lord, save me!” Now, does anyone believe that what was on Peter’s mind as he was sinking in the waves was, “Jesus, please forgive my sins and come live in my heart so that I can go to heaven?” 

 

Obviously not. To be saved, when you are drowning, is to be pulled out of the water, which is what Matthew says that Jesus did. So, if being saved is not about a purely after-life spiritual transformation, you have reason to ask, “what does it mean?” I’m glad you asked:

On this slide, I have five instances in which the word, “sesoken” is used in the gospels of Mark and Luke. Both gospels give an account of a woman who had continuous menstrual flow who touched the hem of Jesus’ cloak and was healed. One was in the account of the healing of a man who had been blind from birth, another was the forgiveness of sins of a woman of “ill-repute,” and the last one was about a man who was healed of leprosy.

In each instance, the people are said to have received salvation but in only one case was there any mention of sins being forgiven. And, in each case, the translators gave themselves permission to translate the one word, “sesOken” differently. When the event described a person with a physical ailment being healed, the translators render “salvation” as “being healed,” or, more accurately, “being made whole,” but only in the case of the presumed sexually immoral woman do they translate Jesus as saying that she had been saved. 

 

But to the gospel writers, the woman whose menstrual flow was healed, the man whose sight was restored, the leper who was cured, were all said to have been “saved.” Let me be very specific, the gospels talk about being made whole, about being restored to wholeness and that is what it meant to be saved. 

 

Women were to separate themselves from society when they have their period, but if a woman had a constant vaginal hemorrhage, she was always separated from society. A man who was blind from birth, was separated from society by virtue of a serious physical handicap. People with leprosy were not even allowed to segregate within a village or town, they had to go away from all other people and live in isolation. And, of course, a woman with a reputation of immorality would be shunned by family and peers. 

 

Far from what you may have been told about salvation, at least in a more literate Biblical sense, was not about going to heaven when you die, it was about bringing marginalized people back into society . . . making them whole human beings again. If I may make a bit of an aside here . . . this was Christianity before Paul messed it up and turned it into a religion. Perhaps I’ll say more about that at another time.

 

That is why the Jesus of the gospels got a bad reputation for hanging out with sinners and tax collectors, for being a friend to prostitutes and the unclean. The people that the society wanted to dispose of, to marginalize, to push out of society, those are the very people that Jesus sought to save by bringing them back into the culture. 

 

Please don’t be mad at me if this is the first time that you have ever heard salvation talked about in this way. I learned this at Vanderbilt over 40 years ago. Any pastor educated in the past two generations at a decent school already knows this and if this is different than what they led you to believe, it isn’t my fault, it is their fault because they didn’t have the courage to speak up against the prevailing superstitious thinking that salvation was about getting a ticket for the soul train to heaven. The very suggestion of which is so preposterous, you should feel embarrassed that you ever believed it. 

 

We can blame the self-appointed apostle Paul for turning Jesus into a get-out-of-hell magical figure but if you look at the gospels through the critical lens of history, what he was, what he did, what his purpose was, was to teach compassion. I like the way that the late Marcus Borg worded it: Jesus was the teacher of radical compassion. That was his job description. 

 

The miracles of the New Testament might have been elaborately stated in order to convince people how great Jesus was but if you look behind miracles as publicity stunts, in each case, Jesus was restoring people to the kind of wholeness that reconnected them to the society, their culture, their people. And at that level, these events do not show us how amazing Jesus was, they are not to portray Jesus as a Marvel superhero, they were, and please do not miss this point, they were to show you what you can do. Can you hear this? 

 

Jesus was not to be worshipped, he was to be followed. He wasn’t a substitutionary sacrifice, not some God-on-a-stick to be covered in gold in cathedrals, he was a teacher, an example, he showed us what we can do. His job description was “teacher of radical compassion,” and in as much as people want to identify with him, then their job description is also “teacher of radical compassion.” This can also be said about the historical Buddha.

 

Now, I told you several minutes ago that I wanted to talk to you today about voter suppression and I took you to seminary on the way to that topic to make it clear, that pushing black, brown, and poor people to the margins . . . making it harder for minorities to participate in society, to be fully human, to have the same rights as everyone else, that is not a political issue . . . that is not just conservative Republicans trying to stay in power . . . that is the powerful trying to take away the humanity of the marginalized . . . trying to turn poverty into the equivalent of  first century leprosy. 

 

The reason that David and I so often talk about racism and poverty and sexual discrimination is because so much of the cultural influence of the powerful is used to make the vulnerable broken. Preaching then, if it is real prophetic preaching, is always about trying to restore wholeness to those who have been broken by the world. It is about salvation, though we don’t usually describe it that way because it would just confuse people who are still locked into twisted church-speak.

To illustrate what I am saying, allow me ask you this: everyone who owns a car and lives in a middle class neighborhood; how long did you stand in line to vote the last time you voted? Five minutes? A minute? 

In the 2020 election, in Georgia, in some predominantly minority voting places, people waited as long as 10 hours. 6 hours was not uncommon. This happened because, ever since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2012, the former slave holding states of the south have been reducing the number of polling places in minority districts even as the number of voters has grown by the millions. This is obviously an undeniable effort to undo the Civil Rights Movement. They cannot take away the right to vote from minorities, but they can make it so difficult that many will not be able to do it. This indefensible and horrible move on the part of Georgia didn’t keep enough black voters away from the polls so after that election, Georgia made it illegal to pass out water or food to people standing in line to vote. 

 

This, I submit, is not politics. This is racism. You see that don’t you?  I went to some lengths earlier to explain to you why David and I preach about racism and poverty. I hope that you can see that talking about voters’ rights is a spiritual issue more than it is a political issue because its root cause is evil, it is racist, and if other preachers are not talking about voters rights then I think that they have some “splainin” to do.

After we had record voter turn outs in 2020, 19 states passed legislation in 2021 to suppress votes. The worst of them were Florida, Georgia, Texas, Montana, Iowa, Arkansas, and Kansas. It is now almost as if Johnson’s landmark Voters Rights Act had never been passed and racism is making a solid return to these United States and yet, where, pray tell, is the voice of the religious community? Silence is assent. Is this ok with white church goers?

 

There were 25 million votes cast in the 2020 presidential election. After a year of investigations into potential fraudulent voting, there have been 475 possible cases of fraudulent voting identified, most of them were people fraudulently voting for deceased family members and they were Republicans voting for Trump. 

 

Still, 475 cases of fraud out of 25 million votes, that is one in every 53,000 votes. A statistically insignificant number. And yet many states are enacting laws, and Missouri is one of them, requiring that every voter show a government issued photo ID in order to vote. And a good friend of mine said to me, “Why would you object to that? Everyone has a drivers’ license or a passport?” Really, everyone? Who might not have a drivers’ license or a passport? People who are too poor to travel outside of the USA or to own a car. Or, let’s say, 11% of the people eligible to vote in the United States, 21 million people. 

 

This is what white privilege looks like. I have had a drivers’ license for so long, I can easily assume that everyone has one because, well, shoot, who doesn’t have a car? These states know that voter fraud is rare and not having a photo ID is common among minorities. Let’s not be stupid. This is not about voter fraud, this is about voter suppression, specifically suppressing the votes of the poor, most of whom are minorities. 

 

Trump cast doubts on mail-in votes because people who don’t own cars and the elderly often prefer to mail their votes in. Southern states have shortened the early voting period and cut out Sunday voting to stop black church from bussing voters from church to the polls in their popular “Souls to the Polls” programs. 

 

In every state, the Secretary of State oversees elections and since 2020, four states have elected Secretaries of State who claim that the 2020 election was rigged, even though it obviously wasn’t. Nevada, Alabama, New Mexico, and Indiana have all elected Republican Secretaries of State who say that they would have overturned their states’ elections in 2020. 

 

Folks, we have been too passive these past few years. We elected a dangerous sociopath to the Presidency in 2016 and even though he has been out of office for a year and a half, we still talk about him every day because his fascist influence is still alive and well in this country. We have endured the unethical and illegal appointment of unqualified right wing lunatics to the Supreme Court, changing the nature of our Judiciary for at least a generation. And now, especially in Texas, even minimum wage part time election judges are made to fear for their lives, just for safeguarding the election process. 

 

I’m an election judge in my voting precinct and I can tell you that I hate doing it. You have to go for boring training session and then put in a 16-hour day on election days which are just tedious but, I can tell you, in the course of a 16 hour day, I find it necessary to remind the other judges of what the laws are about asking for photo IDs or helping voters to mark their ballots. There are people all around us who no longer believe in democracy and are willing to tilt towards the kind of fascism that will take humanity away from the poor and from minorities and the only thing that will stop that is if persons of good conscience and courage will step up and get involved. So, people, please. Never fail to vote. Be involved in voter registration drives. Give people a ride to the polls. Be an election judge. And if you possibly can, run for office yourself. 

As Ellie Wiesel said, “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

“When Innocence is Not Enough”

“When Innocence is Not Enough”     August 21, 2022    Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-supreme-court-just-said-in-in-shinn-v-ramirez-that-evidence-of-innocence-is-not-enough

After losing in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Arizona’s attorney general appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. During those oral arguments, state prosecutors repeatedly argued that “innocence isn’t enough” of a reason to throw out Jones’ conviction.

On Monday morning, by a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court concurred: Barry Jones’ innocence is not enough to keep him off of death row. The state of Arizona can still kill Jones, even if there exists a preponderance of evidence that he committed no crime.

Most Americans have watched with a sense of sadness and rage as the women’s basketball star, Brittany Griner, has been put through a mock trial in Russia, having been charged with possession of a small amount of marijuana. 

It has been painfully obvious to us that Griner is being used as a political pawn in a renewed cold war between Russia and the United States as Russia’s President Putin attempts to claim Ukraine, in whole or in part, as a part of Russia, and the United States is arming the Ukraine army with sophisticated weapons, allowing them to fight a virtual proxy war for us against Russia. 

 

So, Russia has played a cruel publicity game, daily dangling this innocent athlete in front of TV cameras to make the American government beg for her release, and finally to trade a truly dangerous criminal in order to buy her way out of jail. It has been a despicable affair and we are justly outraged by it.

 

What has been missing from the media coverage, in my estimation, has been any sense of self-awareness of just how hypocritical it is of Americans to be upset about Russia giving a 9-year-sentence to this basketball star for marijuana possession when we have thousands of Americans in county jails and state and federal prisons for marijuana violations. 

 

Even as marijuana has become increasingly decriminalized or legalized in state after state, we never seem to be able to meaningfully review our current incarcerated population to give early release and, just as importantly, to purge criminal records for these generally harmless violations.

 

Granted, Russia’s judicial system is a sham, a hoax, it is uncivilized and unjust but the truth remains that the United States incarcerates a larger percentage of our population than Russia does and that our judicial system is not the global example of fairness and equality under the law that we have been brainwashed to believe:  Far from it!

 

I absolutely hate the way people make arguments from false equivalencies in any conversation about ethics. “What-about-isms” are typically a logical fallacy we call “tu quoque,” which literally translates “and you too” or more colloquially translates as “I am rubber, and you are glue, what you say bounces off of me and sticks to you.” 

 

This may seem to be a bit off topic but I can’t help pointing out that for six months now we have been filling the airways with comparisons of Putin to Hitler with every manner of condemnations of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And, granted, Russia is guilty as charged . . . even though there have been break away regions on the border where most people wanted to be a part of Russia and even though Russia, as a nation, was really born in Kiev and not in Moscow . . . there are historical and cultural reasons for Putin’s claim, just not sufficient to justify invasion, not to mention all of the war crimes: rape, targeting civilians, and stealing children and shipping them to Russia. Putin is, if not a Hitler, he is at least a Hitler-wannabe. 

 

But it continues to be ironic to me that Russia’s sins are so easy to see from this distance, but we still refuse to admit that our invasion of Iraq was an even more egregious and illegal war than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and I can’t seem to   find anyone else who will admit the obvious truth that Bush, Cheney, and even Colin Powell, were war criminals. They lied to the American people, they lied to the world at the United Nations. They destroyed a country, killing hundreds of thousands of people and plunging them into poverty without any plausible excuse. And they wasted American resources that could have more easily provided universal healthcare and tuition free education for everyone. 

 

Look, I’m not the only person who knows this. In 2015, the counter-terrorism czar in the Bush administration, Richard Clark, told Amy Goodwin in an interview on Democracy now, that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, his former bosses, were all war criminals. And we let Bush retire to his Texas bathtub where he paints pictures 

of his favorite pets and old friends, like Vladimir Putin . . . you recall that he said of Putin, "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country." 

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a35397/bush-cheney-war-crimes/

 

I’m not saying that the USA and Russia are the same, but I am saying that there are so many similarities that the hypocrisy should shame us into getting our own house in order before we get too self-righteous about Russia’s clay feet. I cannot think of any good reason why Bush, Cheney, Powell, and Rumsfeld were not put on trial as war criminals. . . but I digress.

 

Back to Brittany Griner and America’s hypocrisy about marijuana: One of the biggest disappointments I continue to have about the Obama administration is that he never granted pardons to people charged with marijuana offenses, especially in light of the fact that Obama had been a marijuana user himself, he just didn’t get caught or charged. I literally waited out the closing weeks of his administration, fully expecting him to grant pardons to tens of thousands of people suffering unemployment, homelessness, and a host of other issues because of a marijuana charge on their record but, sadly, he never rose to the decency of showing mercy to these unjustly judged Americans. 

 

Again, Republican politicians have been worse on this issue, but Democrats have yet to impress me with their moral vision. This is low hanging fruit, and it is just inexcusable that our country remains blind to the obvious truth of our excessive incarceration around drug use. Even for harder drugs, addiction is a medical and/or a mental health issue and it simply should not be treated as being a criminal issue in most cases. 

 

Most of western Europe has come to terms with this and there is no reason for the United States to hold onto an antiquated and mis-informed perspective on drugs. We are not, after all, trying to follow in the footsteps of Iran and Russia . . . even though we are. Folks, the answer is treatment, not incarceration. Most of the western world has known this for years. There is no excuse for the fact that we are still using incarceration to punish rather than treatment to help addicts.

 

This is not the first time that I have spoken to this topic and it certainly will not be the last time that you will hear me say that the United States does not so much have a justice system as we have a legal system.

 

I can think of no case that illustrates this fact more clearly than the case of Barry Jones, who was charged by the state of Arizona with having caused the 1995 death of his girlfriend’s 4-year-old daughter, Rachel Gray, who was determined to have died because of a punch in the stomach. Shoddy police work, junk science in the forensic report, and horrendous legal representation in court, resulted in Jones being convicted of the child’s death and he was sentenced to death. 

 

I have no doubt that Barry Jones was not a likeable character in court, and I wouldn’t have wanted my sister to date him, but he didn’t kill the kid. He was found guilty based on circumstantial evidence and his defense attorney didn’t even review the medical evidence. When he finally managed to have his case re-tried, it was made evident that he was innocent of the murder and a lower court judge said that he should be immediately released. But the state of Arizona took it to the Supreme Court where, just two months ago, in a 6-3 decision, that merely being innocent of the crime would not prevent the state of Arizona from executing an innocent man. 

Did you hear what I just said? The Supreme Court, the panicle of our “justice” system, ruled that merely being innocent of the charges does not prevent the state from executing an innocent man. 

It will not likely surprise you to learn that Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the decision, saying that it put an unreasonable expectation on the states to be expected to provide an adequate defense and that the federal government should not be reviewing state decisions. 

 

It will probably also not surprise you to learn that Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that Thomas’ opinion was “perverse” and “illogical.” 

https://theintercept.com/2022/05/28/barry-jones-supreme-court-arizona-shinn-martinez/

 

Which, of course, it was! I didn’t go to law school and that is obvious to me, what might be less obvious is any claim that Clarence Thomas went to law school, but sadly, deference to “rule of law” decisions is not only commonly taught in law school but even Justice Sotomayor has typically defended it because it keeps a judge’s personal opinion out of decision making and makes the law a standard which is supposed to be applied equally . . . even though, in almost every case, consciously or unconsciously, race, class, religion, and location play major roles in how cases are decided. 

I have, in fact, been arguing for years that Trump, along with most of his family and his administration, do not end up in prison, that we cannot say that we have equal justice under the law. And I was saying that before the January 6, 2021 failed attempt at overthrowing America’s government and installing himself as a dictator. His criminal self-dealing, using the office of the President for personal gain, emoluments, in his first year was enough for me. 

 

Trying to use military aid to Ukraine to blackmail President Volodymyr Zelensky into producing fake evidence against Joe Biden was certainly enough. But after January 6, for Trump to still be walking around, a free man? It isn’t that it is a legal matter for me. 

 

For me it is about justice, but in this case, a septic tank stinks just as much, no matter whether you call it sewage or a rose. Trump is a sociopath who has delusional beliefs that he should somehow be an emperor. He is a sad little man who thinks that he is important, and that the laws do not apply to him. And, it would seem that Justice Clarence Thomas agrees with him… Trump, in spite of being the epitome of guilty of many crimes, should be president, and Barry Jones should be executed even though he is innocent, because it is easier for Arizona to just kill him than it would be to face the embarrassment of being shown to have wrongly convicted him. And that, I submit, is what is wrong with our justice system. 

 

As of this writing, Brittany Griner is still in prison in Russia, awaiting some miracle of diplomacy to be set free from an absurd conviction for a victimless crime. Also, thousands of Americans who do not play professional sports, also languish in American prisons and jails on equally absurd drug charges.

What is much worse, at least in my mind, Barry Jones, a man who is innocent of the murder  for which he was convicted, remains on death row awaiting execution in Arizona. . . because, as Justice Clarence Thomas has clearly said, “innocence is not enough.” Whereas, for the rich and powerful in America’s judicial system, guilt is often not enough to even merit a criminal charge, and so… at this writing, Donald Trump, his family, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, and many others who attempted to overthrow our government and install Trump as a dictator are still free, living the lives of millionaires. 

 

I, at least, will not gift these injustices with my silent assent and I hope that you will not either. 

 

 

Guns, Race, and Public Health

"Guns, Race, and Public Health" by David Ketchum August 14, 2022 Watch the video HERE

As a native Missourian, I have been around gun culture most of my life. We never had guns in my home, but I still took the hunter education gun safety course and learned to shoot. That seemed to be the bare minimum, and many of my friends and family hunted, shot for sport, had a rifle rack in their pickup truck, or carried a pistol in the glove compartment of their car. Eventually, both concealed and open carry became increasingly popular and common. You probably know the stats: in the 2018 Small Arms Survey, the US outpaced the world in the “estimated number of firearms per 100 residents,” with 120.5 civilian-owned guns for every 100 people. For comparison, Yemen had 52.8 and Canada 34.7 guns per 100 people. (“America's gun culture - in seven charts”)

       But from 1997 to 2010, I moved around a lot: from northern California to rural Missouri to Cambodia, with short-term jobs in Russia, Indonesia, the UK, and Guatemala peppered throughout those years. In most of those places, people lived with memories of violence, often of recent violence. Yet though state-sanctioned violence remained, I can’t remember a single friend who wanted a gun, unless you count Vladislav, who was a member of the militsia and more the exception that proved the rule. These were people with clear memories of violence that could inspire the type of self-defense, gun-obsessed rhetoric that fills so much of American culture. But, for the most part, it did not.

Unfathomable Statistics, Lingering Questions

        I wanted to test my personal experience by comparing it to available statistics. Data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington allowed me to compare the age-standardized mortality rate due to gun violence per 100,000 people in the nations I worked in over the years. The UK and Indonesia had lower rates, at .3 and .4 gun deaths per 100,000 people. Cambodia was at 1.5, followed by Russia at 2.6. We then jump to the USA at 10.6. Tragically, Guatemala has followed its region’s trend toward the worst gun violence in the world, with 32.3 gun deaths per 100,000. (“Global Mortality From Firearms, 1990-2016”)  In fact, the study showed half of the world’s gun deaths in 2016 occurred in just six nations in the Americas: Brazil (43,200), the USA (37,200), Mexico (15,400), Colombia (13,300), Venezuela (12,800) and Guatemala (5,090). 

None of this is new, which is another layer of the tragedy. Why do the news stories about gun violence keep returning, week after week? Why do we have to keep having this discussion? Many people I know have even become somewhat resigned, accustomed to watching the gun deaths pile up, year after year, matched only by the increased enthusiasm to continue to own or even stockpile weapons designed for no other purpose than to take human life. Other friends have bought their own guns, especially those who belong to marginalized communities, in resistance to the injustices and lack of safety we experience. But in whatever way we relate to the unfathomable number of gun deaths each year - with boredom, resignation, outrage, grief, determination, or something else, we still face the common question: why?

“The Deeper Structure”

When a society continues to embrace an ideology or action that undermines its overall wellbeing, especially when it resists change that would make things healthier and better, it’s often a good idea to try to get underneath that ideology. What is driving us to behave in ways that make things worse? The challenge is that, when it comes to guns, there is not a simple answer. Guns are woven into our culture in so many ways, it is difficult to untangle all those strands. Not long ago, Henry Giroux made an impassioned and important plea for us “to change the deeper structure of life in the US” in order “to end mass shootings.” He described “a culture awash in guns and violence, a society that nourishes and rewards the gun industries, and values the accumulation of profits over human needs,” connecting that economic interest with the priorities of neoliberal economics. And it is no joke; the largest 100 weapons and miliary service companies in the world recorded $531 billion dollars in sales in 2020. Giroux makes the case that:

“Even as specific policies are debated, what is ignored is a neoliberal economic system that feeds on self-interest, inequality, cruelty, punishment, precarity and loneliness. Neoliberal society fuels a criminogenic system that celebrates violence both as a source of pleasure and as an organizing principle of governance.” (“To End Mass Shootings, We Need to Change the Deeper Structure of Life in the US”) 

This deep structure of neoliberal violence has other consequences, not least of which is preventing meaningful action on climate change while profiting off the destruction of the very planet that is a home to us all. But the economic interest alone doesn’t account for why it is so difficult to transform this nation’s violence and its morbid and deadly fascination with guns. As Giroux pointed out, neoliberalism “feeds on self-interest, inequality, cruelty, punishment, precarity and loneliness,” which, in turn, it helps to perpetuate and uses to protect its interests. But neoliberalism also inherited these qualities, and it relies on pre-existing injustices. Untangling all the threads isn’t something to be completed quickly, if ever. But some of the threads are more like ropes or chains, and chief among them is the role of white supremacy and racism in the development of the United States’ gun culture.

Beautiful, Addictive Objects

Dr. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz knows this both as an historian and as someone who grew up immersed in gun culture in rural Oklahoma. For a time, she belonged to “an armed radical-left group that amassed a huge arsenal” of weapons: “A firearm slung over your shoulder or a 9 mm Browning tucked under your belt creates a sense of amplified power, without which you feel naked and vulnerable,” she said. “Guns are awesome. They are also beautiful objects that are addictive.” (“Taking Aim at the Cult of the Gun”) Her honesty about that power is an important aspect of an oft-hidden side of gun ownership: the relationship of communities excluded from access to power and justice to guns.

It is this experience, however, that gives Dunbar-Ortiz such a powerful perspective on gun culture and violence in the USA. And she rightly insists that we “cannot make sense of gun hoarding and the cult of the gun if we don’t deal with white nationalism … . And we can’t deal with white nationalism without dealing with United States history.” Guns were there from the beginning, then codified in the young nation through the Second Amendment. The context of that amendment’s “well-regulated militia” was simple: it enshrined into law the right of white settlers to violently displace Indigenous peoples and to violently maintain race-based slavery, such as through slave patrols. Dunbar-Ortiz explains that this “long, intergenerational, violent struggle to take the land is why descendants of those mostly Anglo and Scots-Irish settlers today believe they are the authentic lords of the United States and should govern — a kind of blood right”. (“Taking Aim at the Cult of the Gun”)

This history may be unknown to many people, but it is no secret. Long form essays and entire books have been written on it, from Dr. Dunbar-Ortiz’s recent Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment to Clayton Cramer’s "The Racist Roots of Gun Control", Cottrol and Diamond’s "The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration", and Richard Slotkin’s trilogy on the evolution of gun culture: Regeneration Through Violence, The Fatal Environment, and Gunfighter Nation. Slotkin’s work on the historical mythology is especially helpful, charting out how the “glorification of social,” historical, and political violence was individualized. In the historical context of racism and white supremacy, such as the Jim Crow era, almost any kind of violence could be enacted by a white person towards a black person. A white man could shoot a black man, for instance, who refused to share the sidewalk, without fear of consequences, “because no jury will convict.” In a real world example, Slotkin described how a successful Black farmer refused to sell a crop in South Carolina, and was ultimately lynched for it. “So,” Slotkin observed, “we granted to private citizens the right to police the racial boundary and the social boundary.” (“Richard Slotkin on Guns and Violence”) 

Those rights were both symbolic and literal. Early gun laws focused on outlawing Black people, free or enslaved, from possessing or carrying guns. An 1825 law in Florida gave white people the right to enter any and “all Negro houses” and seize weapons and ammunition they found there. The infamous, overtly racist decision in the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford case, included the argument that Black people could not be granted citizenship in any circumstance, because that would also give them the right to own guns. In the post-Civil War, Jim Crow south, Black Codes commonly made it illegal for Black people to have guns. The spirit and enforcement of these laws persisted, even as times changed; officials denied a concealed carry permit to Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, even after the family home was firebombed. This history continues to impact the present day. As Adam Winkler wrote in the Harvard Law Review:

“For example, some scholars have argued that modern laws that deny the right to keep and bear arms to people with felony convictions are constitutional in part because the Founding generation had laws disarming people thought to be unusually dangerous or unvirtuous, such as Black people, Native Americans, and enslaved persons. Although clear that legislatures no longer have the power to adopt racially discriminatory gun laws, these scholars argue that the racist gun laws nonetheless reflect a legitimate and constitutional power by legislatures to disarm people who are deemed either dangerous or lacking in virtue. … the legislation of the past is hardly neutral; the racism embedded in so many gun laws reminds us that such legislation was enacted not out of a solemn attempt to police the boundaries of the Second Amendment but in an effort to abuse the law to protect racial privilege and hierarchy.” (“Racist Gun Laws and the Second Amendment”)

Cultural and Psychological Dynamics

But the observations by Dunbar-Ortiz, Slotkin, and others point to another reality of this deep structure, underneath the legal aspects. Culturally and psychologically, the association of guns with racial privilege and hierarchy is alive and well. Understanding this helps us understand why opposition to sensible gun laws can be so aggressive and often illogical. It also helps us distinguish between the experiences of people who have historically and currently benefitted from access to guns, such as white people, and marginalized communities whose access to guns has been most controlled even while suffering the most violence.

     In 2013, Kerry O’Brien, Walter Forrest, Dermot Lynott, and Michael Daly published a study on “Racism, Gun Ownership and Gun Control: Biased Attitudes in US Whites May Influence Policy Decisions” that gives us a glimpse into how this deep structure lives inside of us, especially for white people in the context of anti-black bias. The whole study is worth your time, but the heart of the findings is this:

“After adjusting for all explanatory variables in the model, symbolic racism was significantly related to having a gun in the home. Specifically, for each 1 point increase in symbolic racism, there was a 50% greater odds of having a gun in the home, and there was a 28% increase in the odds of supporting permits to carry concealed handguns.” (“Racism, Gun Ownership and Gun Control”)

         To put it another way, there are plenty of gun owners who are not necessarily racist, but the more racist a person is, the more likely it is that they will own a gun and oppose life-saving laws. The researchers noted that, if we were simply operating according to logic, it should be reasonably easy to convince US citizens to take action to address gun violence, because it would benefit their and the nation’s wellbeing.

“Yet, US whites oppose strong gun reform more than all other racial groups, despite a much greater likelihood that whites will kill themselves with their guns (suicide), than be killed by someone else. Black-on-black homicide rates would benefit most from gun reform, and, quite logically, blacks support these reforms even if whites do not. Symbolic racism appears to play a role in explaining gun ownership and paradoxical attitudes to gun control in US whites. In other words, despite certain policy changes potentially benefitting whites, anti-black prejudice leads people to oppose their implementation. This finding is consistent with previous research showing that symbolic racism is associated with opposition to US policies that may benefit blacks, and support for policies that disadvantage blacks, and critically, goes beyond what is explained by other important confounders.” (ibid)

“Dying for a Cause” 

This is consistent with the studies of Dr. Jonathan Metzl, a psychiatrist and sociologist at Vanderbilt University, who has documented both the history and the symbolic meanings of guns. In particular, he investigated how publicly carrying a gun was entwined with and “coded as white privilege.” Today, “Advertisers have literally used words like ‘restoring your manly privilege’ as a way of selling assault weapons to white men.” Drawing on that history of expanding borders (violent displacement of Indigenous people) and exploiting labor (violent enslavement of Black people), Metzl pointed out that:

“John Brown’s raid was about weapons. Scholars have written about how the Ku Klux Klan was aimed at disarming African Americans. When African Americans started to carry guns in public – think about Malcolm X during the civil rights era – all of a sudden, the second amendment didn’t apply in many white Americans’ minds. When Huey Newton and the Black Panthers tried to arm themselves, everyone suddenly said, ‘We need gun control.’ … Who gets to carry a gun in public? Who is coded as a patriot? Who is coded as a threat, or a terrorist or a gangster? What it means to carry a gun or own a gun or buy a gun – those questions are not neutral. We have 200 years of history, or more, defining that in very racial terms” (“'Dying of whiteness': why racism is at the heart of America's gun inaction”)

This is making a diagnostic point, rather than a prescriptive one.  Metzl even acknowledges that he came to respect some “gun ownership traditions,” and that many gun owners are deeply committed to gun safety and heartbroken about gun deaths and mass shootings. But those gun owners are not the whole story, and they can’t be used as an excuse to avoid healing a terrible history that continues to spill into the present, killing tens of thousands of people each year in the USA alone. That is, understanding why it is so difficult to make progress on gun violence includes understanding the racial tensions underlying the gun debate. The deeply polarized opinions about gun politics have emerged in the context of race, and guns came to symbolize those deep wounds. This is why Metzl insists that, “When we’re talking about guns, we’re also talking about race.” (“‘Dying of whiteness’”)

Gun Violence, Public Health, and Personal Responsibility

It also means that, if we want to make progress on preventing gun violence, we will likely have to do it without waiting for public opinion about guns to align with our society’s needs. We’ve done this before, on issues like tobacco and seatbelts, but those issues were not as deeply rooted in our history and psychology, or infused with such violence. But those successes can still give us some hope that, over time, changing policies can help us change attitudes and behaviors.
 

       One of the most promising directions for this is the movement toward addressing gun violence as a public health issue, moving the conversation into a different context and giving us a chance to look at these questions with fresh eyes and a commitment to our shared social wellbeing. For anyone interested in this, an easy starting point for learning more can be found at the Johns Hopkins’ Center for Gun Violence Solutions. Far from the panicked fear that many gun owners have expressed about the government “coming for your guns,” the policy recommendations are oriented around safety. Based on the successes of reducing car accident related fatalities, they advocate for increased funding for gun violence research, firearm registration and renewable licenses, and more rigorous safety standards and accountability for manufacturers. 

While we are working toward these policy changes, we can also be doing our part personally and relationally. First, because guns are inherently dangerous, literally designed to kill, if you do own a gun, prioritize gun safety. Appropriate, locked storage, regular maintenance, and continued training must be the standard, while encouraging others to do the same. And if you need any further motivation, please take seriously the fact that, in the USA in 2020, 54% of all gun deaths were suicides, and over half of suicides in the USA involved a gun. 

Second, center and support marginalized communities and others who are most vulnerable to suffering from gun violence. Listen to them, learn from them, and support them in solidarity with their efforts to create communities where they are safe. Ultimately, we are all only as safe as our must vulnerable members. This especially includes our attention and commitment to antiracism. For fellow white people in particular, we need to be intentional about rooting out our internalized dominance and encouraging other white folks to do the same. 

The world is witness that gun violence does not have to be the norm. But until the United States is willing to reckon with the deep structure and enduring legacy of our gun culture, we will not escape it. Gratefully, for all of us who long for healing, and the peace that comes from belonging to a place without the constant threat of violence and death, we have a way forward. Let’s go there, together. 

From Conspiracy Theories to Reimagining Community

From Conspiracy Theories to Reimagining Community

David Ketchum
August 7, 2022
Click HERE to see the video

        During the last weeks, my mailbox was flooded by political campaign ads. As best as I could tell, most were funded by dark money, and most were intent on telling me why a particular conservative Republican candidate was actually a flaming liberal Democractic candidate. During this same time, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene came out as a Christian nationalist, and encouraged everyone else to do so, too. "We need to be the party of nationalism and I'm a Christian, and I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists," she proclaimed at an event in Florida, building on her previous remarks that Christian nationalism was “nothing to be afraid of” and, in fact, would offer solutions to school shootings and “sexual immorality”.  

Taken together, these kinds of things demonstrate how fertile a field the USA has become for growing not only disinformation, but conspiracy theories. A conspiracy theory is characterized not just by an outlandish claim that cannot be substantiated, but by “the assumption that a group of people colludes together in secret to attain evil goals.” It creates an in-group being attacked by an out-group, naming enemies and usually dehumanizing them in the process. But this violence is justified because it is self-defense; it promises to protect the in-group and make them safe from these otherwise hidden and malicious threats. 

My Personal Roots

This is not new for me and, I suspect, for many of you. To give one example, I grew up in the 1980s in a Southern Baptist church, home, and community, but I was not exposed to creationism until my sophomore year of high school. And it was not at church. It was in my AP Biology 2 class at a public school. Our teacher had announced that, to avoid arguments about evolution, we would just be skipping that topic – you know, a topic essential to understanding biology. However, a few students saw an opportunity and brought creationist literature from home. They talked about them during breaks, loaned them out, and encouraged us to go to events and book studies at their churches.

        Honestly, the most appealing draw was not the books themselves, but that the students promoting these ideas happened to be a year older than me and people I looked up to. They were bright and clever; they excelled at speech and debate and had been mentors on the debate team. So I visited one of their churches once, and I read the books. And while I never became a young-earther, I played with the idea and wasted time and money investigating something that should never have been given my serious consideration. I had similar experiences with other hot button issues. And while I managed to avoid getting caught over the long term, I cannot say they did not influence me, and I have my own personal  collection of embarrassing moments. I did not finally and fully break from that tradition until 2007, when I was 30 years old. Looking back, that feels impossible, especially in contrast to how deep and wonderful my life has become. It is strange to remember how compelling some of those arguments and conspiracies felt to me back then. And that has inspired my curiosity. What was it that made me susceptible to those traps? And what enabled me to get free?

Our Evolutionary Roots

By and large, we humans like to be right. We like to believe we have it all figured out. In general, it feels better to us if others are wrong. We can also reinforce our beliefs, or comfort ourselves in uncertainty, by convincing others to agree with us. Moreover, we tend to identify with our views and defend them, and it feels embarrassing to realize we’ve fallen prey to a scam. We also like to belong, so we may embrace certain views, even conspiracy theories, as an expression of loyalty to our group. These kinds of factors have pushed our evolution as a species in the direction of preserving cognitive biases. After all, in the survival of a species, adaptability is often prioritized over truth.

        In 2009, a team of researchers led by Martie Haselton (with Gregory Bryant, Andreas Wilke, David Frederick, Andrew Galperin, Willem Frankenhuis, and Tyler Moore) explored “Adaptive Rationality: An Evolutionary Perspective on Cognitive Bias.” They pointed out that, while we often like to think of ourselves as uniquely “gifted with a propensity to uncover and strive for truth, or some version of it,” the reality is that natural selection may favor sacrificing “costly truth-seeking in favor of fast approximations.” This includes our social lives:

“The conviction that one's own social group is somehow special, or even better than other comparable groups …, or the belief that one's current partner is the most amazing and irreplaceable person in the world … could lead the believer to behave in ways that might contribute to his or her social success … .” (https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1053&context=psychology_articles )

This is not very flattering, which becomes another reason that humans try to avoid looking at it honestly. I see that looking back at my own childhood denomination, with our insistence on being the best and most faithful of all Christian traditions. Any evidence that pointed otherwise was a threat, and treated as such, which hurt people like me but helped keep alive what would surely have been a failing denomination. Similarly, there’s nothing romantic about realizing your belief that your sexual partner is the most amazing person in the world is one of the ways our brains convince our species to reproduce. Realizing this may help us cultivate healthier, longer-lasting relationships, but it can come as a shock in a society built around these romantic images. And this is part of the point: the capacity for these beliefs persists because, at least in some way, they have served some psychosocial purpose. Sometimes, poor reasoning, fallible assumptions, and false beliefs are wrong about reality, but can still be right when it comes to evolutionary success. There are limits to this, and no organism or species can thrive while always making poor judgments or false inferences. But, as Haselton’s team explained, “this is quite different from claiming that the brain essentially strives for truth, as if it were evolutionarily optimized for arriving at truthful judgments and logical inference.” (ibid) No, these are things we have to do on purpose, intentionally learning and practicing those skills.

From Hostile Coalitions to Conspiracy Theories

        To better understand this, researchers have turned their attention to the role of cooperative alliances and hostile coalitions in human evolution. If you are familiar with humanity’s negativity bias, you’ll notice some similarities in this table from a 2018 study by Jan-Willem van Prooijen and Mark van Vugt, “Conspiracy Theories: Evolved Functions and Psychological Mechanisms”:

        In terms of human evolution, the cost of a false positive – to believe in a conspiracy that does not exist – is much lower than the cost of a false negative – to not believe in a conspiracy that turns out to be true. In the former, any of our conspiracy-loving ancestors were probably unhappier, but they managed to stay alive. In the latter case, a failure to act on an actual threat could easily result in death. Van Prooijen and van Vugt explained that both the tendency to form cooperative alliances, and the ability to recognize when others when others are forming alliances that may be hostile, has been a common human characteristic for over two million years:

“Given the realistic dangers of hostile coalitions in an ancestral environment, along with the life-saving functionality of detecting conspiracies before they strike, conspiracy beliefs are likely to have been adaptive among ancient hunter-gatherers.” (ibid)

        In discussions about our negativity bias, it’s common to observe that “Evolution doesn’t care if you’re happy.” When it comes to hostile coalitions and conspiracies, a similar idea could be expressed: “Evolution doesn’t care if you’re right.” In the end, truth often took a back seat to whatever helped an organism survive long enough to successfully reproduce. And that means we’ve inherited a vulnerability to believe the outrageous, outlandish, and the dangerous – especially if we believe it will help our in-group succeed. 

Doing the Math

As disturbing as this may be, it helps us make sense of the some of the contradictions inside and around us. We humans love to think of ourselves as rational, all the while being susceptible to a host of irrational behaviors. And we like to think of ourselves as exceptions to the rule. If you disagree with me, there is always the temptation for me to fall back to the assumption that your view is wrong simply because you thought of it, instead of me. You can glimpse the convincing un-logic lurking here: 1) I am a critical thinker; 2) I believe this statement; 3) therefore, I arrived at this conclusion through critical thinking.

        Especially over the last decade, this tendency has repeated itself in conversations with and studies about conspiracy theorists. I watched as people toyed with believing, or even aggressively defending, the most outlandish and dangerous beliefs while asserting that their belief in a conspiracy theory was the result of their own critical thinking. With ignorance armed with such overconfidence, those who went along with the scientific consensus were just “sheeple,” while the true defenders of rationality and liberty were those brave enough to believe the conspiracy. In fact, if I brought evidence from scientists or other experts into the conversation, they simply took this as confirmation of how the establishment was hiding the truth that they had discovered.

        In 2016, Jaron Harambam and Stef Aupers studied a similar phenomenon in the Netherlands (“‘I Am Not a Conspiracy Theorist’: Relational Identifications in the Dutch Conspiracy Milieu”). They found that people tried to “actively resist their stigmatization as ‘conspiracy theorists’ by distinguishing themselves from the mainstream as ‘critical freethinkers’” and then attempt to “reclaim rationality” by applying the conspiracy theorist labels to others. This all felt disturbingly familiar, and I realized it was eerily similar to my own experiences in conservative religious communities. The drift among evangelical Christians toward embracing conspiracy theories, for example, has not been hidden. This has been a very public strategy for decades, capitalizing on our biases so they could amass a powerful empire of pseudo-scientific institutions, think-tanks, and true believers.

You can see it clearly in my AP Biology II course. Students brought in books that were published by presses specifically created to print and distribute anti-evolution materials. Their authors, like the creationist movement they belonged to, insisted that their views should be given the same weight and authority that peer-reviewed research was given. They further insisted that members of the scientific community were actively persecuting creationists in order to suppress the truth. Linking their anti-evolutionary teachings to their conservative theologies, they upped the stakes of rejecting their conspiratorial claims. The version I most often heard was that the reason scientists rejected creationist ideas was because they rejected God. The implication was that if I accepted the fact of evolution, I would also be rejecting God.

        If you have already accepted that kind of religious worldview, the math is very easy here. The risk of being wrong about evolution is inconsequential compared to the risk of being wrong about God. In the evolution versus creationism conspiracy, the false positive (you believed in creationism but evolution turned out to be true) is a risk worth taking, because you have to do everything you can to avoid the possibility of the false negative (you rejected creationism and, in turn, rejected God and, by extension, salvation from being tortured forever in hell). And here is where the anti-evolution claims veered toward conspiracy theories. Our in-group (the true believers, faithful to God) were being attacked and corrupted by an out-group (the evil scientists who rejected God and came up with evolution as a way of deceiving the masses).

Repeating the Pattern

This type of choice has been repeated for other issues, including issues related to abortion and reproductive justice, gender and sexuality, and anti-vaccination claims. For decades, people have been taught to distrust scientists, medical care providers, and public health officials, in favor of trusting these pseudoscientific institutions and think-tanks. And one essential factor in their success is that they appeal to that in-group identity, that human tendency to form and then to protect their alliance against the enemies they perceive as hostile coalitions. For every one of those issues, someone, usually a marginalized group, has been identified and made an enemy. The claims are easier to swallow, it turns out, when you can do so out of a protective instinct to save your group.

        It should not come as a surprise, either, that there is a lot of overlap in these conspiracy theory movements. For example, much of the outrage over Critical Race Theory was sparked when someone leaked materials from a training in my home town's public schools to the Discovery Institute. For those of you lucky enough to be unfamiliar, the Discovery Institute is one of those pseudoscientific think-tanks that has specialized in promoting intelligent design and opposing instruction about evolution. They were famous for the slogan, “Teach the Controversy,” a classic attempt to make their claims seem legitimate by creating a debate where no debate actually existed.

        What would such a place have to do with Critical Race Theory? What they have in common is their alliance against those they’ve deemed as hostile coalitions, those “others” they believe threaten their way of life. Fellows of the Discovery Institute have been branching out, embracing more conspiracies along the way, from denying climate change to criticizing mask mandates during the pandemic to promoting the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. And it is no accident that a former employee at the Discovery Institute became a spokesperson for opposing Critical Race Theory. A group that feels threatened is more vulnerable to promoting conspiracy theories, and its members have heightened reasons to risk believing. 

Those decades of hard work to build alliances and identify hostile coalitions has made our society fertile ground for conspiracy theories. And while the capacity to believe in conspiracies may have been adaptive for our ancestors, our situation has changed in many ways, making conspiracy theories increasingly dangerous and harmful. In a time when we need to be mobilizing all our attention and efforts to address the real and urgent problems we are facing, such as climate change, masses of us are instead busily obsessed with disinformation and conspiracies, from the normalization of Christian nationalism, signaled by folks like Marjorie Taylor Greene, to the whitewashing of our history in deference to fragile pseudo-patriotic egos, to the politicization of life-saving vaccinations, and more. Especially when adopted on such a large scale, this is another disastrous consequence of conspiracy theories: they distract us from the dangers that actually exist. 

A Way Forward?

I understand this is gloomy, but it is also hopeful. Understanding some of the reasons why our society has been spiraling around so many conspiracy theories helps us become more strategic about how to work for change. Many of the responses to conspiracy theories that I’ve seen emphasize either 1) correcting the false assumptions and lies and 2) teaching critical thinking skills. I support both tactics, both personally and socially. All of us can take steps to be better informed, and picking up a book on critical thinking is a great way to take care for the mind. We can also support policies, such as holding social media companies accountable for disinformation, or supporting teaching critical thinking in our education system. All of these are worthwhile and important. 

But the emerging research on conspiracy theories also reveals that his is not a wound we can heal mainly by winning arguments. Not even having solid evidence is enough. Because the roots of our vulnerabilities are in the social and psychological factors, those factors must be addressed. For example, a 2021 study of conspiracy theories related to covid-19 by Tianru Guan, Tianyang Liu, and Randong Yuan showed that human-centered methods were most effective at reducing acceptance of conspiracy theories. Two examples stood out. The first focused on “decoding the myth of conspiracy theory,” rather than tackling the conspiracy head-on. This meant uncovering how conspiracy theories work, such as the psychological drive to seek certainty during particularly chaotic and stressful times. The focus is on helping people:

“understand their own cognitive vulnerability in the face of conspiracy narratives [more] than criticizing the processes of media content production. … The ‘decoding’ approach can clarify the nonsensical status of these false propositions, showing that they only ‘make sense’ as a result of misguided use of language and a biased cognitive process of information-processing.” (“Facing disinformation: Five methods to counter conspiracy theories amid the Covid-19 pandemic”)

Practically speaking, this means creating and sharing resources about how and why humans are susceptible to conspiracy theories. 

Second, the study affirmed the effectiveness of “reimagining intergroup relations.” We need to center and protect marginalized communities, especially ones that become the focus of conspiracy theories. Though they are always at risk, those risks are heightened when they are made the face of the enemy. Remember that conspiracy theories require believing that a secret, hostile coalition is planning to harm you. There is probably not a better argument against a conspiracy theory in the long term than to demonstrate that a dehumanized out-group is a vibrant, essential part of our society, instead of a threat. There are policies to pursue here, and we talk about these social justice issues a lot. But this is also liberating at a personal level. Instead of getting caught in an endless loop of opposing disinformation, we can listen to marginalized voices and learn to live in solidarity. Instead of getting lost in arguments, we can make friends. And instead of standing by helplessly while conspiracy theorists run amok, we can cultivate the types of communities where not only are conspiracy theories less likely, but where we actually enjoy living.