I am a product of the California public school system. No schooling method, setting, or institution is perfect, but as far as education goes, I feel like I received a pretty good one thanks in no small part to dozens of caring teachers who valued their students and filled our school days with quality learning experiences. As with all schools, though, ours had a few teachers whose presence was not entirely beneficial. My AP US History teacher was one of them.
Mr. B. may have been a good teacher once, but those days were long gone by the time I entered his classroom. Even though he was past retirement age, Mr. B. still taught full time in addition to moonlighting in a security role at Disneyland most nights. That second job left him with little energy for teaching, and he spent most of our class time camped out in front of a game of FreeCell at his desk while his students silently read from our textbooks. On days when he was too tired to “supervise” reading assignments, Mr. B. resorted to documentaries to fill the class time. By the spring, when our AP exams rolled around, few of us were prepared for the test, but we had logged more than our share of hours with The History Channel and PBS.
It was thanks to one of Mr. B.’s lazy-day documentaries that I was first introduced to the ins and outs of the JFK assassination. My parents were alive at the time of President Kennedy’s death, and I’d heard them reference that momentous day in history, but prior to my US History class, I knew none of the details surrounding the shooting. And it wasn’t until we watched a documentary in class that I learned about the many conspiracy theories surrounding the president’s demise. The documentary did not convince me that someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald was responsible for the shooting, but it did leave me open to the possibility of an alternate killer. More than that, it was one of the first times I realized that historical events are not always as black-and-white as the history books make them seem; sometimes (hopefully MOST times) the version we are taught is true, but it might not be. . . and often, the very notion of a solitary acceptable narrative can become controversial and subject to interpretation.
For years after learning about the various JFK theories, I remained intrigued by the JFK speculations in particular and by the concept of conspiracy theories in general. It was interesting to hear alternative ideas on popular narratives, and I was always a little impressed with individuals who searched beyond the proposed explanations to uncover different solutions to the same questions. Even when the ideas themselves were a little outlandish, there was something inspiring about these trailblazers who were willing to appear a little crazy in their pursuit of the truth.
Then COVID happened. It was a strange time when conspiracy theories were rampant and it grew harder and harder to sort truth from deception. Conspiracy theories stopped being fun diversions and started centering around literal life-and-death issues. The lines between fact and fiction and full-blown insanity were blurred, merging and overlapping so that it was impossible to know what to think or believe. When many of the wildest theories were eventually proven true, I started to question EVERYthing I’d been told. The government, the media, and religious leaders had all shown themselves to be unreliable authorities; how was I ever supposed to trust anyone again? I evolved from someone who dabbled with conspiracy theories to one of the growing number of people who were more likely to believe the theory than whatever “they” were telling us.
I think we all went a little crazy during that time. After 2020, sanity started to return as the world reopened and we all stopped spending quite as much time on our screens and more time touching grass. But none of us emerged from the Great Conspiracy Year unscathed. For my part, I was willing to start trusting again, no longer looking for deceptions and manipulation around every corner; in fact, I craved good-old-fashioned black-and-white attitudes and traditional hierarchies and trustworthy authorities. But the benign scales of naïveté had been removed from my eyes. I could no longer unquestioningly assume truthfulness or positive intent from the organizations and authorities that had once held my trust, and I found myself walking a fine line between hardened skepticism and conscientious acceptance.
In the past year or two, I’ve noticed the conspiracies starting to ramp back up to COVID-era levels. Maybe they never went away, or maybe the conspiratorial voices really have intensified. I never thought I would live in a time when wide swaths of our population believe that the moon landing was fake or that the earth is flat, that Jewish people are solely responsible for all of America’s woes or that Erika Kirk murdered her own husband. . . but here we are. Those ideas all seem utterly preposterous to me, and yet there are people who believe them. Part of me totally gets it: we all long for something to believe in and somewhere to belong; conspiracy theories bring both—that special allure that comes with believing in something that most people find hard to accept, as well as a sort of coolness associated with being part of the anti-establishment crowd. Bonus points when those theories are proven true and you get to be part of the group that knew something was up all along.
I find it interesting, though, that the same people who are highly skeptical of established narratives and resistant to mainstream ideologies would so easily accept alternative explanations. Why would a person be vehemently opposed to the commonly accepted facts, then blindly latch on to any and every proposed idea from some solitary podcaster who claims to have all the answers? I can understand and even relate to the struggle to believe that what we have been told is true; but shouldn’t that incredulity also invite distrust of the conspiracy-touters who claim everyone is lying but them? This sort of mental loopholing and conflicted allegiance from the skeptical-yet-suggestible crowd is something I can’t totally get my head around.
Standing back to view this internet landscape of conspiracies and conflicting narratives and obvious truths mashed up with murkier ones, it’s easy to grow overwhelmed. In this era when we have more access to information than any other time in history, it’s harder than ever to sort fact from fiction, reliable narrator from grifter, actual intelligence from artificial imposter. The devices we carry around in our pockets provide many answers, but with those answers come just as many questions; and because we CAN know so much about so many things, we start to feel like we SHOULD know far more than any mind could hold.
When the overwhelm gets a little TOO overwhelming, we can run to the conspiracies or to the facts or to our own duplicitous minds. . . or we can turn to the One who created all things, the originator of truth itself. He won’t always direct us to the whole truth of every situation, but He will help us find our way when we ask Him. Our Lord gifted us with beautiful minds that are capable of critical thinking, which means that we don’t have to blindly accept the narratives that have been handed down to us without first holding them to the light and inspecting them for holes. Our God does not traffic in lies and deception, and the pursuit of truth is a worthy endeavor.
At the same time, God did not create us to be all-knowing. Omniscience is a quality that God reserves for Himself, and we need to accept that there are some things we’ll never understand, some narratives we may not get right. I’m certain that when I get to Heaven, I’ll find out that many things I believed to be true actually weren’t. But I don’t want to become so obsessed with landing on the exact right perspective on every topic that I’m constantly tilting at windmills, wary of everyone and stirring up unnecessary controversy and strife. There are some areas—eternal ones—that I want to get right, and the answers to those subjects aren’t found in internet chatrooms or TikTok videos, but in the Bible that predates the online experts by millennia. Other topics—like dinosaurs and aliens and long-dead politicians—might be tougher to nail down, but I think it’s okay to simply accept that I don’t know the whole truth about these things and move on.
I doubt that I will ever strike the perfectly healthy skeptic’s balance between willful ignorance and conspiracy-minded cynicism. But I don’t think that I need to. I have full confidence and trust in the Author of Life, the Arbiter of Truth, the Keeper of History itself, and when I’m following Him, it’s hard to go too far astray.
