...when you belong to a religion that tells you to dismiss logic and reason in favor of faith and obedience, it’s not that big of a leap for worshipers to accept a difference kind of mythology. If the members of your church are spreading QAnon memes online, then maybe you weren’t doing that great of a job teaching them how to think for themselves.
That’s not specific to evangelicals, obviously. But many of the factors that make a church grow and thrive — a sense of shared purpose, a feeling of knowing something others don’t understand, a desire for knowledge in any form — are the same weapons being used by online conspiracists. If those pastors, who rightly reject QAnon and just want their members back, don’t understand the role Christianity played in convincing people to adopt comforting myths that defy common sense, they have no chance of “saving” the people who need to be rescued.
Why stick with the same boring church when there's a hot new cult on the scene?
Some of these institutions have enough inertia to carry them into the future, but they can't keep up in the age of information warfare. These newer cults are designed to hijack your lizard brain in ways the old churches could only dream of.
Yea, I think it proves what some people are saying here. And in the article, it puts some blame on the pandemic, because there much less in person church now and more online searching. The church has a structural advantage because it has buildings, a history and mass of followers, and it has tax exempt status. It loses that advantage in these pandemic conditions. So now with an even playing field, it makes sense that the modern shit is more appealing than the ancient shit.