Paranoia

A T-shirt that was popular in the early 1980s read “You’re not paranoid. Somebody really is out to get you!” I’ve always found that funny, even though there are plenty of people who don’t.

For some strange reason, Americans appear to have a high propensity for believing conspiracy theories. I don’t know if it is a product of their tough beginnings—they had to overthrow oppression. Ever since, they’ve been keenly guarding their hard-won liberty, ever vigilant against even small encroachments. It’s perfectly understandable, and admittedly, it takes a great deal of naivete to believe that nobody ever means you harm.

Our Need for Order

America was a nation born from chaos—war—and human brains are deeply unsatisfied with chaos. Our minds instinctively demand some sort of order, and when there is none to be found, we tend to generate it in order to preserve a sense of well-being. In a study conducted at the University of Amsterdam,[1] volunteers were asked to sit at a messy desk while viewing a computer that displayed a series of images composed of dots, some of which contained vague outlines of real objects, while others were completely random. Interestingly, when asked to find objects in the images, the volunteers who sat at messy desks tended to see things that simply weren’t there. Volunteers who first cleaned up their desk area, however, were far less prone to finding order in a random set of dots.

Our brains, in other words, are deeply dissatisfied with disorder. (If you have teenage children, you’ll be tempted to believe this is not true for your kids, but it is.) When bad, chaotic things happen for no discernible reason, we will often manufacture one because we cannot live with the thought that bad things happen indiscriminately.

Let me walk out on thin ice for a moment and mention the COVID-19 pandemic. It would be an illuminating exercise to collect and collate all the conspiracy theories that emerged on social media during the ordeal. From 5G cell towers causing the disease to secret Illuminati plots to reduce the human population by 80 percent or more. The proponents of each theory that surfaced were adamant that they (and they alone!) knew the truth, yet all of these adamant people seemed to regularly contradict each other. And because this largely played out on social media, they appeared to contradict each other by the minute.

It would be amusing if it didn’t result in real harm. Some people treated the pandemic as an outright hoax, refusing to take even the most basic of precautions. “It has a survival rate of more than 98 percent!” they insisted. That’s true . . . but it wasn’t true for the more vulnerable population. The idea that old people with weakened immune systems should be considered disposable was appalling; someone being near the finish line does not justify recklessly trimming that life by a year or two.

The pandemic pushed the Western propensity for conspiracy theories into the light: these theories can lead to strange behavior. Some also heap unnecessary pain on people who are already hurting, as demonstrated by one notorious radio host when he insisted that the children shot at the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting massacre didn’t actually exist.

Distraction Disguised as Insight

Conspiratorial thinking can be even more problematic when it emerges in a church. The Adventist message is breathtakingly beautiful; when my wife, Jean, and I discovered it, we were elated, because it was precisely what we’d been hoping for. The Adventist understanding of Scripture and prophecy answered many of the questions I’d been asking for years. It brings order out of seeming chaos. It explains why we suffer and why the world seems so tumultuous—and then it holds out incredible hope. The longer I study it, the better it gets.

But it wasn’t long into my life as an Adventist before I began hearing the conspiracy theories. “Did you know,” someone breathlessly explained to me, “that there are Jesuit spies working in the GC [General Conference] building?” I came from the political world, where infiltration actually happens, and I’ve got to say: If there are Jesuit spies sabotaging the General Conference, they are some of the worst agents in the world. They’re just not good at it.

“Did you know,” someone whispered to me at a church function, “that an Adventist has found the ark of the covenant? It is right under Golgotha, and the day that Jesus died, a single drop of His blood made its way down the cross, through a crack into the ground, and dripped right onto the mercy seat?”

An exciting tale, to be sure. But it made little sense to me: why would the typical ark require an antitypical atonement? Isn’t the antitypical ark in heaven? Even if the story happens to be true (I mean, it might be, but color me skeptical), the real question should be: Is it important?

More recently someone asked me if I was aware that the United States government was purchasing guillotines in bulk. “Why would they be doing that?” I asked, relatively certain that the world lacks a guillotine production facility large enough to meet that demand. “To behead the saints,” he bemoaned.

Really? I suppose Revelation 20 does mention those who were beheaded for their faith, and we do know that deadly persecution will eventually befall God’s people—but how do you get from there to government mass-produced guillotines? Again, even if it were true, how important would it be to obsess about it?

When the initial thrill of discovering the truth in the three angels’ messages wanes over time, some people appear to seek further “light” to keep the dopamine hits coming.

Then came the moment in the American election primaries that Donald Trump mentioned Seventh-day Adventists while taking a poke at rival Ben Carson.[2] Some people grew agitated, convinced that it was the beginning of the end. I’m not saying there were no prophetic implications, because maybe there were. I don’t really know for sure. But that’s the point, isn’t it? You don’t know that for sure, either. Other church members seemed to jump on the QAnon bandwagon,[3] and, sadly, some of them are still riding it, somehow convinced that people were eating babies at a Washington, D.C., pizza joint.

So What?

Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that all of it is true. It would still be a distraction—the kind that leads people to waste precious hours and days mapping out intricate webs of supposed connectivity instead of doing the one and only thing God has asked us to do. Ellen White reminded us late in her career that “[Seventh-day Adventists] have been given a work of the most solemn import—the proclamation of the first, second, and third angels’ messages. There is no other work of so great importance. They are to allow nothing else to absorb their attention.”[4]

Nothing. No matter how intriguing.

When someone insists that they are aware of a secret plot, perhaps the best question to ask yourself is: Why would this be important? Let’s suppose that the guillotine story is true. Your next question should be: So what? If there’s a possibility that I’m going to be executed for my faith someday, should I live the rest of my life in terror? Should I be pinning stories about the potential method on my wall and obsessing about it? Think about it: It’s guaranteed that you’re going to die someday, so what does it really matter if it’s a quick death by a blade or a lingering death in hospice? To be persecuted to death? It’s just a shift in the death timeline, if you think about it. I have to die sometime, after all.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m no happier about the prospect of dying than the next guy—the whole business seems rather unpleasant. But to live in constant fear of death is to radically misunderstand the gospel: “Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” (Heb. 2:14, 15).

Fear is not a fruit of the Spirit; it is not supposed to be part of our Christian lifestyle. Yes, you’re absolutely going to die if the Lord doesn’t come first, but why waste your days obsessing about how? It seems like a hard way to live, and a very poor use of a rather brief lifespan.
How do any of these conspiracy theories add to your enjoyment of Christ? How do they enrich your existence or bring power to your witness?

They don’t.

Maybe it’s time to start asking conspiracy theorists questions instead of enduring their obsessions quietly. Many of them aren’t used to being questioned; most of the time, other church members listen, nod their heads, and move on . . . because it just seems easier than engaging in a pointless debate. But perhaps it would be instructive to occasionally ask them to unpack the theories further, to the point where they can start to see the absurdity. An example: the flat-earthers. For some reason their numbers seem to be growing. To put it bluntly, flat earth is hands-down one of the silliest conspiracy theories I’ve heard.[5] When someone shares their flat-earth theories, you should ask: “Let’s say you’re right. Why would it matter? Are you planning a space voyage? Are you trying to launch a satellite?”

There is no value to the theory, even though some will insist that we need to correct our view of the planet’s shape because we’re all being deceived into doubting God’s Word. But the shape of the earth has precisely zero bearing on my relationship with God, and zero bearing on my plans for today. It does not affect our God-given task to preach the three angels’ messages. It’s a perfectly useless theory. Even if it is true that NASA has been manipulating photos for the past six decades, so what? The same thing holds true for the people measuring the Great Pyramid with special “pyramid inches,” combing the data for secret messages, and for the people who insist that the “godless” metric system was an invention of the devil. (Yes, that theory exists. I’ve received letters.)

Enough Light for the Journey

Maybe part of the problem is our understanding of prophecy. When I first sat in an evangelistic meeting and encountered the historicist school of interpretation (which used to be widely accepted among Christians), it rang absolutely true. I spent long hours in a university library, often until closing, to be sure that what Adventists were preaching was historically verifiable. It was, and it explained why the dispensationalism espoused by TV preachers always seemed silly to me. But historicists are now in the minority in Western Christianity, which can create the impression that only a few people are “in the know.”

I’ll be the first to admit: that can make you feel somewhat privileged. But when the initial thrill of discovering the truth in the three angels’ messages wanes over time, some people appear to seek further “light” to keep the dopamine hits coming. Never mind Ellen White’s counsel that we avoid the temptation of seeking novelty;[6] it generates a lot of buzz when someone appears to be uncovering even more truth. It can be really tempting.

In recent years, especially since the outbreak of the pandemic, I’ve seen some preachers go full bore on conspiracy. Suddenly the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Bilderbergers, and the World Economic Forum are rolled into the prophetic outline found in Revelation. And on the surface it makes sense: of course Rome has partners, and of course influential people like to make things happen. For some reason, however, John appears to have failed to mention them.

But yet again, let’s suppose it’s all true: members of the Illuminati are conspiring against God. What difference would that really make to your daily Christian experience? Have we been given the task of ferreting out every last bad actor on this planet, or the job of preaching Christ? Is our key message lifted from the pages of obscure online forums, or is it lifted from Revelation 13 and 14? And in light of Jesus’ repeated instruction to “fear not,” should we really be in the business of fear-mongering?

If we’re teaching this message correctly, there is really no need to embellish it. It doesn’t need our help. It is utterly magnificent as it stands, and the past three-plus decades have shown me that what we have been shown is enough. God knew what He was doing when He gave this movement its last-day message. And if we’re doing this right, we should be hearing people say, as a newly baptized member recently told me: “Revelation really isn’t all that scary!”

He was right. It’s not. In fact, Revelation is about the most liberating document I’ve ever read, and I’m resting in Christ because of it.

[1] Rob Brotherton, Suspicious Minds (London: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2015), p. 12.

[2] Vanessa Williams, “Donald Trump: No Apology for Questioning Ben Carson’s Seventh-day Adventist Faith,”WashingtonPost, Oct. 25, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/10/25/donald-trump-no-apology-for-questioning-ben-carsons-seventh-day-adventist-faith/, accessed Dec. 17, 2025.

[3] For a helpful overview of QAnon, see Mike Wendling, “QAnon: What Is It and Where Did It Come From?” BBC News, Jan. 6, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/53498434, accessed Dec. 17, 2025.

[4] Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1948), vol. 9, p. 19.

[5] I suppose calling it “silly” is bound to make someone upset. Don’t waste time writing, however; I won’t be reading any more of this stuff.

[6] See, for example, Ellen G. White, The Acts of the Apostles (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1911), p. 580.