Stupid Lawyer Tricks

People Who Believe In Literal Truth Of Bronze Age Fairy Tales More Likely To Spread Disinformation

So it's come to this: We have to actively state the fact that Hillary Clinton is not a cannibal.

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NPR put out a good series of pieces over the past few days about the role of the white evangelical movement in spreading political disinformation. Approximately three out of every five white evangelicals say Joe Biden was not legitimately elected, according to a recent survey from the conservative group American Enterprise Institute. And it’s not just coincidental overlap: many white evangelical churches have taken an active role in actually spreading antidemocratic conspiracy theories.

NPR is certainly not alone in probing the link between white Christian evangelism and disinformation. The Washington Post ran a story a few days ago detailing the efforts of certain Christian ministries to spread false claims about vaccines amongst their large social media followings. Speaking of vaccine denialism, a Reuters reporter wrote earlier this month of evangelical missionaries in the Amazon river basin trying to keep health teams from vaccinating Brazil’s remote indigenous villages against COVID-19, including by making claims to the villagers “that they will turn into an alligator” if they take the vaccine.

The connections between American Christendom and QAnon’s popularity are so robust and varied that it has almost become passé to write about them. Of course, the violent crowd at the January 6 Capitol riot was stuffed with white Christian fundamentalists — after ransacking the Senate chamber, a group was captured on video pausing to pray “in Christ’s holy name” as they stood on the raised platform where the president of the Senate is supposed to be.

A lot of this reporting is really good, it’s really compelling. But the tone does sound a bit artificially astounded, as though nobody could have possibly predicted this. Meanwhile, the rest of us are saying, not at all sarcastically, “The people whose whole worldview is based on believing in the literal truth of Bronze Age fairy tales are apt to embrace misinformation? Well, who’d have thought?”

According to the National Association of Evangelicals, to be categorized as an evangelical, a person must strongly agree with the statement, “The Bible is the highest authority for what I believe.” That does not mean that every evangelical believes every word of the Bible is literally true. But a lot of them do: in 2017, Gallup found 24 percent of Americans believe the Bible is “the actual word of God, and is to be taken literally, word for word.” That’s the lowest in Gallup’s 40-year history of asking the question. But 24 percent is still way too high.

Because, ya know, the Bible is obviously and provably not literally true. I have written about fossils, and have been to the Field Museum to visually confirm evolution in the fossil record — you can actually see it with your own eyes. On the other hand, a 600-year-old man did not literally herd millions of animals onto an ark (whose dimensions are laid out in intimate detail in the text) that would have been way too small to hold two individual specimens of even a small fraction of the species that existed on earth, in order to save said animals from a worldwide flood that didn’t happen. A dude didn’t live inside a whale for three days and three nights (or a “fish,” under the proper translation). Lot’s wife didn’t turn into salt. Snakes can’t talk. We have all pretty much agreed at this point that the tons of proslavery and super misogynistic stuff in the Bible was wrong. The Old Testament is no more literally true than the contemporaneous religion of Zeus and the Olympians.

Really, what is harder to believe though: that a guy lived inside the belly of a whale for three days without being digested, or that Hillary Clinton is a cannibal? If you have no trouble accepting the former as truthful, why question the latter, which doesn’t have any more evidence behind it, but is more believable in that it’s at least physically possible?

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In a democracy like ours, many people have many different faiths, and the majority of religious people don’t think any holy book is literally true. If religion gives meaning to your life, and you get something out of using religious stories as metaphor, great, more power to you. But as long as we have a substantial number of adherents to proselytizing religions that have as a central tenet denying any evidence which contradicts the literal truthfulness of provably fictitious stories, we’re going to have disinformation. We should start thinking of this problem, and addressing it, not as an anomaly, but as a natural and predictable consequence of that type of belief structure.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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