The Failure of Facts and the Power of Story
Across the early primaries, I’ve watched two particular sets of data: self-identified white evangelicals and the stolen election narrative. After South Carolina this weekend, not much has changed:
- Self-Identified White Evangelicals continue to support Donald Trump
- A majority of GOP voters believe Biden is an illegitimate President
Now, some will say “which evangelicals?” and I address that question here.
Basically, questions about who is in/out of the evangelical movement are morally charged questions. Disputing who the “real” evangelical is creates all sorts of evasive and defensive maneuvers, which either create distance or defend/justify ourselves. These moves offer a level of protection and justification from those who want to avoid criticism, and ironically enough, responsibility.
White evangelicalism has always claimed a measure of responsibility for the moral and political state of the country, for better or worse. When public evangelicals dispute the bona fides of “self-identifying evangelicals” — labeling them as not “real” or “faithful” evangelicals — they’re denying the ascendancy of white evangelicalism in its current form by casting themselves as true evangelicals. This all has the effect of creating plausible deniability in terms of responsibility.
For those of us who have served in and contributed to the construction of white evangelical spaces: if, by our criticisms of white evangelicalism, we avoid implicating ourselves, then we are just using the “evangelical” label as a shelter from an encounter with God. For me, honesty is a way to express my experience of ongoing conversion.
White evangelicalism is culturally saturated and politically ascendant. This is a wildly successful movement, when you pay attention to its builders and brokers.Continuing to hold to “evangelical” as a synonym for “orthodox” while ascendant evangelical politics advocates for sedition is a retreat from responsibility into self-righteous piety.
Which brings me to the acute problem of the stolen election conspiracy. Why does the Big Lie gain such a hearing among white evangelicals? What role might churches play?
If you’re a regular reader, you know I’ve spent the last 3 years researching evangelicalism and conspiracy theory. It’s been a winding path, from history and politics to psychology and theology.
I’ve come to see the Big Lie as acute conspiracism. It’s a claim white evangelicals in America embrace in varying degrees because it reflects a chronic condition at the heart of white evangelicalism in America.
This isn’t pathological. It’s not to say that evangelicals are “crazy” or “clinical.” It’s not to suggest that conspiracy theory is the exclusive problem of evangelicalism or Christians.
I am talking, instead, about a theological condition where the stories preserved by white evangelicalism (about America and the people of God) create a certain sort of people who are uniquely drawn towards conspiracy theory.
In all this, disputing stolen election claims with raw facts isn’t enough. It certainly isn’t helpful to contest election fraud by suggesting it can never happen (See: Putin, Vladimir) Don’t get me wrong: we need information literacy and disinformation activisms. But we also need to see their limits, where they fall short of addressing the real problem.
Modernity holds that if we can just find the correct facts, then we’ll all be on the same page. But men and women don’t live by facts alone, but by stories which gives those facts meaning. Stories create societies, and direct our attention to which facts matter (or not). The power of stories is that they provide “alt-facts” intelligibility.
“This must be true” as a response to the Big Lie reflects all that someone already holds to be true. In other words, community notes are contending with stories of incredible power, and will fail.
Everyone has an idea of why people believe conspiracy theory. “They’re afraid. They’re crazy. They’re angry. They’re anxious.” And many of us develop these ideas not because of some intellectual curiosity but because of a personal reality, of trying to explain the pain and loss of a relationship fractured by conspiratorial beliefs. There’s a sense in which some of these items may be true. It’s a complex problem arising from our digital architecture, our Western embrace of individualism, the collapse of modernity, etc. etc.
But we must consistently raise this point: a world of “fake news” and “alt facts” can’t survive apart from being sustained by stories. MAGA didn’t create these stories, it seized on them. And the slogan of “Make America Great Again” draws these stories together like tinder and sets them on fire in the political world.
We cannot deny that the stories from which MAGA draws contain elements of the Christian story alongside stories about America.
And it’s been my work for the last few years to uncover why the Christian story told by a particular group of people in America is so hospitable to the stories of conspiracy and anxiety. And come to find out, this particular telling of the Christian story from a certain place in American society, creates a people who come to read their social and political worlds by conspiratorial plots—while calling it “biblical.”
The stolen election claim will continue to have power so long as it serves to preserve the stories passed down in white Christian America for generations. This is the crisis which disinformation activisms and causes to save democracy cannot quite reach, because it lies at the heart of a particular social world that goes by the name “biblical.” This social world can only be penetrated (and shattered) by the critical power of the Christian story on the lips of courageous prophets.
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Jared Stacy 