Evangelical Pastor Says He’s Concerned About Spread of QAnon in Churches
Rev. Russell Moore joined Erin Burnett Tuesday to express concern about the prevalence of QAnon conspiracy theories in the evangelical community.
“As a Christian,” said Moore, “I’m concerned about this because we’re a people of truth and we’re people who are supposed to be looking for truth as revealed in the word of God, not in conspiracy theories that are batted around social media.”
Moore told Axios in a report published Monday that he’s “talking literally every day to pastors, of virtually every denomination, who are exhausted by these theories blowing through their churches or communities.”
On CNN, he told Burnett he’s disturbed what he’s seeing and hearing about churchgoers.
There are some people who just hear something and are saying, “What do I believe?” And then there are others who are looking for kind of belonging that they’re finding on social media or somewhere else. And that can be really dangerous, and especially when pastors only have access to people for an hour, maybe three hours, maybe four hours in a week. That’s nothing compared to 24 hours of Facebook. And honestly, Erin, a lot of it is coming from pastors who are saying to me they’re having adult children who are coming and saying, “We’re worried about our parents,” which is an unusual situation. Pastors are accustomed to having parents coming and saying, “We’re worried about our children.” But these are children saying, “We’re worried about our parents and what they’ve become involved in.”
To underscore the reverend’s point, Burnett played a clip from a CNN report highlighting the case of young woman whose mother had been taken in by QAnon conspiracy theories.
“She puts Q’s posts on equal footing with her religious scripture,” she says of her mother, Ashley Vanderbilt.
Vanderbilt has now rejected QAnon. She explained the grip the conspiracy had on her.
“I’m going to these [QAnon websites] more than I’m going to–you know, I go to church once a week. I’m up here for two hours every single night, like committed to these. And I was like, that’s probably not right, and then I started thinking, am I putting even Trump above God?”
Watch above via CNN.
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