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