The proliferation of disinformation is getting out of hand. It’s not really new; in the United States, we’ve been dealing with fake news, suggestive alternative facts, and outright lies for nearly the past decade. Yes, it has infected politics forever (when was the last time you really believed a politician’s promise?), but something about the nexus of our particular political climate and introduction of certain information technologies (such as social media) has brought about the informational Wild West.
Over the past month, to take two recent examples, we have seen what amounts to mass hysteria over claims of Haitians eating pets. This was quickly followed by wild claims about governmental environmental engineering to bring about Helene, with the goal of demolishing part of North Carolina so they could mine lithium deposits.
Both claims are demonstrably false, and nothing more than wild conspiracy theories. But they found purchase in an increasingly wide swath of the American public—and among American evangelicals. Why this appetite for misinformation and conspiracy exists is an important question (and people like
are doing great work on this front). But in this brief post, I want to identify a pattern that I see among certain Christians on the right.Plausibility Structures and Legitimations
Peter Berger believed that the world was socially constructed. He doesn’t mean that we’re all living in the Matrix, or that we’re just brains in a vat. Instead, he looks around at the world and sees that our sense of what is reality is formed by human beings as we try to make sense of the world around us. As we make sense of the world, and it becomes a shared meaning, it starts to become its own thing independent of our creation, and what we made acts on us to form us.
There’s obviously a lot more to it (and I’d disagree with Berger’s analysis on some important points). But as social theory goes, it has a lot going for it—particularly in its explanatory power of how social reality operates.
What matters for us here, however, is what Berger calls “legitimations.” For this social world to be maintained, it has to employ legitimations, which reinforce the realness of reality. Legitimations are answers to the question, “why do we do this?”
Why do we believe that being rich is a sign of moral value?
Why do we think democracy is better than a monarchy?
Why do we believe in such a thing as private property?
And so on. Legitimations are the stories society tells to reinforce its sense of “the way things are.”
Berger goes on to identify something he calls “plausibility structures.” Plausibility structures are thick, deeply rooted and shared beliefs that reinforce the sense that this is just the way of things. In other words, the stronger the plausibility structures, the fewer legitimates required to maintain a sense of social reality. The weaker the plausibility structures, the more vigorous and aggressive the legitimations need to be.
He uses this concept to argue for the so-called “secularization thesis,” which held that religion is decreasing in the Western modern world precisely because the plausibility structures that allowed religion to remain a normal, unquestioned part of reality had diminished, and as a result, religion would no longer enjoy the privileged place as an assumed feature of reality (it’s a flawed theory; Berger himself renounced it later in life).
Anti-Plausibility Structures
All this to say, there seems to be an emergence of what I’m calling “anti-plausibility structures,” which seek not to offer an alternative vision of reality, but which seek to actively destroy the sense of what is real.
These structures exist and thrive through communication technologies—especially those decentralized technological worlds such as social media. They employ a hermeneutic of suspicion to simultaneously question everything, and offer a hyper-concrete vision of reality that is easily falsifiable, constantly shifting, but never abandoned (i.e., conspiracy theories). The point is never to arrive at truth, or to create a concrete, shareable reality that exists in competition with the “mainstream” one (for lack of a better word), but rather to deconstruct whatever appears to be the consensus vision for how the world works. They are inherently transgressive, and inherently destructive.
Perhaps we would do better to call this phenomena epistemological terrorism. Just as political or religious terrorists employ violence to exercise a kind of power through chaotic fear, these folks work to exercise power by actively tearing down plausibility structures. In doing so, they force the inhabitants and maintainers of the established social world to spend more time legitimating that world. As they continue in their attack of plausibility structures, the legitimation project grows more intense, more resource-consuming, and even more suspect (“boy they are defensive!”).
It is asymmetrical warfare. The epistemological terrorists are “just asking questions” or “noticing” after all, while the—let’s call them establishment maintainers—spend countless hours writing rebuttals, arguing online, and fretting over the number of people infected by this contagion of disinformation.
It becomes a war of attrition.
Pastor, Husband, Father…Terrorist?
The really discouraging thing is that this epistemological terrorism has been taken up by people who should be virulently opposed to it: Christians leaders, pastors, journalists, scholars.
Now don’t mis-hear me: I think every Christian needs to have a little holy deconstructionist streak in them. The way of Jesus is not the way of the world. And so we ought to be constantly asking whether what we assume about the way things are are the way they should be. We all have blind spots, and need all the help we can get to see things as they are, not as we assume.
I’m talking about something entirely different. I’m talking about Christians who have bought into this epistemological terrorism paradigm, who don’t just evaluate whether something is truly Christlike, but seek to undercut confidence writ large. Who throw into question institutional credibility to get attention, who peddle unfounded conspiracies to get clicks, who write ill-sourced books casting dubious aspersions on entire swaths of evangelicalism to confirm preexisting biases.
Assuming the best—that they truly are Christ-followers—this is a grand exercise at sawing at the branch upon which they sit. Eventually, they’ll cut all the way through (this suspicion will turn on them), and their fall will be tragic.
Hopefully they’ll get the hint before that happens. Hopefully.