“Ekklēsia contra QAnon” or The Cults of Orthopraxy

1

On January 6, 2021, a large group gathered at the White House to hear then-President Donald Trump speak out in protest against the results of the previous year’s presidential election. President Trump had correctly identified that, in the election, he had received more votes than any sitting president in the history of the United States, and therefore declared that the result – his loss – could not be accepted. The election was, in his words, “stolen” through corrupt and surreptitious practices organized across the country with the single purpose of illegally ousting him from office. Trump’s itinerary for the morning rally included a lengthy presentation of information he alleged proved widespread irregularities and fraud in the election, a continuation of a months-long campaign challenging the integrity – and, thereby, the results – of the election. In the words of then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell – a Republican, like the President – addressing the Senate later that day:

“President Trump claims the election was stolen. The assertions range from specific local allegations to constitutional arguments, to sweeping conspiracy theories.”

The comments came in a joint session of Congress, on the same day, wherein Vice President Pence was to oversee the certification of the votes cast by the people of the United States in the election that Trump had spent the previous hours, days, weeks, and months upsetting the public’s faith in. Trump had put an enormous amount of pressure on the Vice President to, rather than formally “rubber stamp” the votes as he would ordinarily be expected to do, reject them as products of alleged corruption and declare Trump the rightful winner. 

Pence declined to accede to the President’s request. 

The joint Congressional hearing, finalizing the election in favour of Trump’s opponent, was interrupted when building security announced to the room that protesters had entered the building, putting the safety of its occupants in question. Members of Congress were shuffled to various safe rooms while the attendees of Trump’s morning rally pressed against the front doors shouting “Hang Mike Pence!”, their backs to a set of makeshift gallows erected earlier that day. 

Peppered in the mob of insurrectionists were various examples of stereotypical protest signage ranging from “Stop The Steal” to “Q sent me”, the latter a reference to this essay’s titular “cult.” Some footage shows a man beating a police officer in the mob with an American flag pole, while a video recorded by a protester from inside the Capitol building shows a woman being fatally shot. One security officer was bludgeoned to death by a protester with a fire extinguisher, and another invader was arrested in the Senate chambers itself, only to be found in possession of plastic zip-tie handcuffs, almost certainly intended to be used to restrain government officials. 

The scene brought me to tears as I watched from my family’s idyllic farmhouse in southern Ontario, and it continues to send goosebumps up my arms as I write. However, the transgression that provoked the comments to follow was the presence of a sign extended above the angry crowd as protesters poured inside: 

“Jesus Saves.”

2

Some clarifications, I think, are appropriate from the outset. For one thing, I have made the inadvisable decision to include several words in the title of this essay that will be unfamiliar to many of my readers. Accordingly, I have decided to include a brief “definitions” section below to help clarify some of what I’m communicating here. I also recognize that what I am about to canvas will dive headlong into what many leaders in my own community would denounce as unwise: I intend to highlight a grounds for division rather than seek to bring competing parties together. While I would ordinarily be quick to heed this wisdom, I – on an exceptional basis – believe the approach I’ve taken here to be appropriate in context. 

As a disclaimer, therefore, I want to communicate to all my readers that my writing comes from a place of heartache and grief for the health of the Church – the Ekklēsia, as defined below. I love the people of God, and I love Him Who is the Head, by Whom and for Whom all things were created and have their being – the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Who was offered for the propitiation of sins and by faith in Whom we are granted the sovereignly-bestowed gift of eternal life and fellowship with the Father through citizenship in the Kingdom of God. Nothing in this series is intended to disavow my faith as a follower of Jesus, and I expressly affirm every doctrinal point of the Nicene Creed. 

Finally, I want to address a few potential points of controversy in the narrative articulated in Chapter 1.  

Many of those who are – it seems – supportive of the cause that the rioters pursued on January 6, 2021 simultaneously are quick to assert that some members of an organization called “Antifa” were ultimately responsible for the assault on the Capitol. They do this in reply to the overwhelming condemnation that has befallen the former President and his government and civilian supporters in the aftermath of the riot, holding them responsible for the insurrection. While this has been demonstrated to be false, the theory continues to propagate, apparently believed in private by Donald Trump himself. I, as readers can see, have not accounted for that theory in my description of the events, because I believe the theory to be factually dubious and logically inconsistent. It is not reasonable to, on one hand, support the cause of the rioters and, on the other, attribute the actions of those rioters to one’s sworn ideological enemies. Yet, this has been the rhetorical tactic of those who maintain that view. For those looking to see that view represented in my summary of the events, here you have my stated bias: it is not included because I have not been persuaded of its merit. 

I also want to clarify that I am very aware that, of the tens of thousands of people who attended the protest on January 6, 2021, not all of them entered the building or even intended to. I am aware, therefore, of the possibility that some – maybe most – of the self-proclaimed Christians attending the protest did not perpetrate political violence and would not support it now. However, in reviewing social media responses to Christian publications on the subject, I am disheartened to be left in inexcusable doubt about that. 

With all of that, let’s begin with some definitions:

• Ekklēsia – Greek noun, “the whole body of Christians scattered throughout the earth”;
• Contra – Latin preposition, “against”;
• QAnon – a body of conspiracy theories alleging that a cabal of Satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring with an aim to remove former U.S. President Donald Trump, who is fighting the cabal;
• Cult (Christian) – a religious community predicated on unorthodox or individual interpretations of the Bible contrary to Nicene Christianity (e.g., Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.);
• Orthopraxy – In the study of religion, refers to correct conduct (as contrasted with “Orthodoxy”, which refers to correct doctrine);

3

To suggest that the Church – the Ekklēsia – should be contra anything is already to raise a contemporary ministry debate. I once invited a queer acquaintence of mine from law school to join me for church. When she arrived, I was on the stage behind the drum kit, and a slide roll played above the auditorium containing an advertisement for a seminar called “Is God Anti-Gay?” She asked me in the car as I drove her home afterwards how I thought the Church would answer that question, and I replied – I think, correctly – that “God is not anti-anyone.” Yet, the Church is instructed to use its discernment. We would be remiss to forget Jesus’ forceful cleansing of the temple, an apparent rejection of the practices of those present, or the lengthy behavioural corrections that characterize much of Paul’s letters. So, here, we have a tension: a truth that the love of God is indiscriminate, but that wisdom nonetheless requires a deliberate weighing – a judgement, if you will – of behaviours. The simplest articulation of this tension is the common adage “love the sinner, hate the sin” – a useful, if contested, proverb. 

We then arrive at passages like these:

“I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you.”

(1 Cor. 5: 9-13, ESV 2016)

The Bible is clear that the practice of righteousness is, in the main, a process of individual self-reflection and faithful surrender of one’s self to the Lord. This comports with relative ease with the modern Western preference for individualism over collectivism, a topic I have no intention of critiquing further in this exercise. However, when we arrive at this paragraph from Paul, we are left with an instruction to refuse to associate with those who bring two things together: 

1. A declaration of faith in Jesus; and 
2. Behaviour incommensurate with that faith. 

What are we to call this unholy marriage of Christian doctrine and unchristian behaviour? 

On an individual level, we might rightly call it hypocrisy, the individual and collective dangers of which are well documented. Most recently, a pastor of my church was expelled from his office very shortly after it was brought to light that he had engaged in an extramarital affair. He was rightly removed from his position of leadership, although the damage his actions have done to the faiths of so many individuals cannot likely be adequately assessed, still less the damage his failure has done to the reputation of his former church and the broader church network it belongs to. 

On a collective level, however, things become more complicated. When a community of self-proclaimed Christians begin organizing around a common set of unchristian practices, behaviours, and practical instructions, incorrectly declaring those practices, behaviours and instructions to be “true faith”, it is here that we arrive at what I have coined a “cult of orthopraxy.”

4

When Christians use the word “cult”, we are typically referring to one of three things. Christians sometimes pejoratively refer to mainline denominations that they don’t like as “cults”, because the manner in which these denominations gather is unfamiliar to them. Hillsong Church and Bethel commonly – and, in my view, unfairly – receive this distinction in popular discourse. Christians will also be familiar with the use of the word “cult” to refer to secretive spiritual communities who gather for malevolent purposes (e.g., a “satanic cult”). Most commonly, and most formally, however, we refer to “cults” as unorthodox denominations or practices of Christianity that deviate from Nicene Christianity in a fundamental way. Take, for example, Jehovah’s Witnesses, a religious community who reject the doctrines of the Triune Godhead and the divinity of Christ. These doctrines are fundamental to Biblical Christianity, and to reject them in favour of other doctrines is to simply create a new belief system or faith altogether. Thus, the Jehovah’s Witnesses may properly be called a “cult of Christianity”; they have a basis in orthodox Christianity that has been altered irreparably by the modifications they’ve introduced to traditional Christian teaching. In this case, the root of their disagreement with traditional Protestant or Catholic Christianity is fundamentally doctrinal. If you attended a Kingdom Hall service and a traditional Baptist or United Church service, many outsiders would find the outward practices of these gatherings to be marginally different, but not dramatically so. However, the doctrines and teaching, the “orthodoxy”, are profoundly different in a fundamental way. They are what Nicene Christianity would call a “cult of orthodoxy.” 
Cults of orthopraxy, by contrast, are derivative belief systems from Christianity that offer modified instructions on how one is to live, rather than how one is to think. I take as a prime example the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, a community I’ve spoken of before as being a legitimate reason for why Western civilization might be forgiven for desiring the elimination of Christianity altogether. The practices of Westboro Baptist Church typically involve antagonizing the public over its various perceived failures of morality or public policy, proudly proclaiming that “God Hates ________.” They’ll finish that sentence with whatever they like, but it most commonly concludes with a derogatory slur aimed at persons with same-sex attraction. This behaviour, of course, is not only reprehensible, but it’s Biblically indefensible – it makes a cruelly “loud and clanging” mockery of so many of the applicable Biblical teachings (1 Cor. 13:1). And herein lies the rub: Westboro Baptist Church believes their behaviour to be not only justified, but also necessary – loving, even. Their misuse of the latter vernacular borders on Orwellian. Whatever similarities the Westboro Baptist Church commune may share with the broader Evangelical church in doctrine – in orthodoxy – they differ critically in their understanding of right practice – in orthopraxy.

“True religion that is pure and undefiled before the Father is this: to visit the widow and the orphan in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” 

…

“But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!” 

(James 1:27, 2:18-20a, ESV 2016)

The danger in this shift cannot be overstated. James, the brother of Jesus, makes clear to us that the lifeblood of our faith is the way our faith is lived out – that “faith without works is dead” (James 2:17). No sensible scholar of the Scriptures would assume that James meant to communicate to us that any behaviour that we attribute to our faith would lead us to conclude that our faith was not dead. Rather, we are – as Paul reminds us – to “bear fruit in keeping with repentance” (Matt. 3:8) and to “live a life worthy of the call to which [we] have been called” (Eph. 4:1). If we were to render the poetry of the phrase “faith without works is dead” in a technical fashion, we might say “orthodoxy without orthopraxy is insufficient.”

On an individual level, orthodoxy without orthopraxy is hypocrisy. Furthermore, when one allows their understanding of orthodoxy to contort around their understanding of how else they think they should – or would prefer to – behave, most well-meaning Christians would conclude that that person has “left the faith.” The same ought to be said for communities who function this way. Communities that re-draft Christian doctrine to support unbiblical (read: “worldly”) behaviours or practices cannot be said to be Christian – they are cults, premised in Christianity, yet nonetheless having departed from “true religion” (James 1:27) in a fundamental and irreparable way. They are cults of orthopraxy.

5

It is here that we arrive at this essay’s title in full: Ekklēsia contra QAnon, or The Cults of Orthopraxy. We have defined all our terms but one, and I have saved it for last precisely because it is the most difficult to define. 

In Chapter 2, I included wikipedia’s brief definition of QAnon – a body of conspiracy theories premised on the belief that an international cabal of satan-worshipping pedophiles have infiltrated and now control various levels of government, and that former President Donald Trump was actively working to dismantle this group, met with resistance by various agents of the so-called Deep State. Many high-profile American politicians and celebrities are often targeted with accusations of belonging to this pedophelic trafficking cabal, including familiar names such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack and Michelle Obama, George Soros, Lady Gaga, Joe and Jill Biden, Mark Zuckerburg, Bill Gates, and so on. One thing that many of these people have in common, as will be readily apparent to the reader, is that they all – to varying degrees – can be said to support a left-wing political worldview. In fact, the pattern is so clear that many subscribers to the QAnon theory likely vet their belief that a particular individual belongs to this so-called Deep State on that basis alone: whether they maintain both a left-wing political worldview and a position of power or influence. If someone, anyone – whether a politician or a celebrity – meets those two criteria, it is highly likely that they will be accused by some member of the QAnon community to belong to this satan-worshipping, child-trafficking cabal. What’s more, it takes very little in the way of resistance to right-wing, conservative, so-called Christian political values for someone to earn themselves this damning indictment. 

By way of a brief example, consider Bill and Melinda Gates. In 2007, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation offered International Justice Mission (IJM) – the largest anti-slavery NGO in the world – a sizeable donation to support the implementation of IJM’s anti-slavery program in Cebu, Phillippines. The project in question was called Project Lantern, and, thanks in no small part to the generous gift from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in a matter of five years, IJM’s independent auditors found that there had been a 79% reduction of child trafficking in Cebu’s brothels due to the successful work of IJM. In light of this success, IJM has since moved on to other projects. 

One might read about this gift and assume that we – as Christians – should be grateful for the Lord’s provision through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, notwithstanding their secularity or otherwise progressive political bend. However, the QAnon community’s belief that Bill and Melinda Gates are high-ranking Deep-State malefactors would not only forbid them from recognizing the Gates’ charity as a gift from the Lord, but would cause them to question the work of IJM – perhaps even accusing IJM of being involved in the fictitious satanic child trafficking ring. Bill and Melinda Gates have been roundly criticized for their involvement in the development of a COVID-19 vaccine, which many QAnon subscribers believe is being designed for expressly malicious purposes and may even contain the “Mark of the Beast.” Bill Gates’ involvement in this and some pro-choice/pro-abortion advocacy over the course of his philanthropy might reasonably cause some pro-life or medically-cautious political dissidents to dismiss him as a danger to conservative values. Be that as it may – and one cannot be faulted for mere political critique – the QAnon community take this a step further, damning Gates as a proto-Antichrist and looking with intense suspicion on everyone who might have received a material benefit from him: like, for example, the eminently Christian International Justice Mission. 

This way of thinking goes beyond mere political critique; it runs deeply in the spirits of its adherents. I am not in the business of condemning political speech on the mere basis of my distaste for the content of that speech. An anonymous quote widely misattributed to Voltaire is well placed here: “I may disagree with everything you have to say, but I will defend with my life your right to say it.” This is not a question of politics; the Lord knows we have too many of those. No, this is a question of faith. 
The difficulty with defining QAnon, and with including it in the title, is that it superficially manifests as a fundamentally political position, rather than a theological one, and my concern here is with the health of the Church, not democracy. However, I submit that the nature of the worldview in question is one that requires one’s faith as a Christian to be read through the lens of certain ideological criteria. At the infamous Jericho March, organized late last year in the wake of Donald Trump’s attempt to upset the American election, one of the speakers addressed her audience with the admonition that “we have to align our spirituality to our politics.” However laughable that statement may seem to many well-meaning Christians, this is precisely the psychological – indeed, spiritual – tipping point between belonging to the Kingdom of God, over which Christ is the head, and belonging to a separate, worldly ideological “kingdom”, wherein Christ is declared Lord, but is not obeyed accordingly. It is the tipping point between following Jesus and joining the counterfeit cult.

6

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.” 

Matt. 7:15-20, ESV 2016

This passage, I think, ultimately addresses the problem at its core. The Way of Jesus, we’ll recall, requires both faith and works to be substantive. Not that works save us – as Paul reminds us in Ephesians – but, knowing that faith without works is dead, we know that “dead works” proceed from dead, absent, corrupt, or misplaced faith. We know what the fruits of our faith will be: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We know that “a servant is not greater than his master” – meaning that, if they persecuted Jesus, they will persecute His followers. We know that Jesus lived in submission to the governing authorities, including submission to an unjust conviction (“I find no guilt in this man”, Luke 23:4, ESV 2016) before submitting to a horrific sequence of torture and public execution. We know that the people of God are to “live in submission to the governing authorities, for those that exist are instituted by God” (Rom. 13:1-2, ESV 2016). 

We know these things; these are the hallmarks of one who is following Jesus successfully. 

What then are we to make of a worldview that not only permits, but justifies appearance at riots aimed at undermining American democracy in the name of ushering in some misguided, self-interested understanding of the “Kingdom of God”? What are we to make of false assertions that Christians have permission to disobey unjust laws on the mere basis that one regards them as unjust, substantiating their position with a series of de-contextualized Bible verses? What are we to do with so flagrant a rejection of the command to “love our enemies”, “pray for those who persecute you”, to “turn the other cheek”, to “bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse”, to be “regarded as sheep to be slaughtered”, to live a peaceful and dignified life? 

We are to regard, I think, these practices as beyond us. We are to reject them. And, insofar as a community of people seem to be developing around a pseudo-Biblical justification for these behaviours, we are to recognize that phenomena for what it is: an abandonment of the Way of Jesus on the individual level, and an orthopraxic cult on the community level – not saving faith. 

We will know them by their fruits, and they will know us by our love. Insofar as our love runs dry when faced with certain facts (or interpretations thereof) that provoke us to an unrighteous indignation towards specific peoples or communities, we – and the rest of the world – have evidence that the Love of God is not in us, and neither is His Spirit. In the absence of His Spirit, we lack the seal of our salvation, we are not in the Kingdom of God, and we are not walking on the narrow path to the gate that leads to life. We may have a principled structure for our belief system, and it may bear many of the doctrinal features of Christianity. What it lacks, however, is the capacity to spur us on to good works and be “imitators of Christ”. This heresy calls us to live differently from the way Jesus does, no matter what the major doctrines that underpin it may be.

I want to emphasize this final point. Many people who have gone down this road would proudly assert that Jesus is Lord, that God is Triune, that the Bible is the authoritative and comprehensive Word of God, and so on. Very few of these people would reject the Nicene Creed. The doctrine is all there; they know many of the right things. Thus, the basis of their belonging to a cult is not in the declaration of their faith, but rather  in the manifestation of their faith in their lives. Where the fruits of the Spirit are absent, so too is the Spirit of God, no matter what spiritual or Biblical facts the person may be able to accurately regurgitate. The cult of orthopraxy is the belief system that produces bad fruit – the one which calls for wrath and execution (“Hang Mike Pence!”) rather than grace and forgiveness; the one that prioritizes political successes over the advancement of the Gospel; the one that pursues the establishment of the Kingdom of Self in the institutions of government rather than the Kingdom of God in the self. 

In brief, this cult of orthopraxy is one that pays lip-service to Jesus in favour of one’s own self-defined ends, whereas the Way of Jesus calls us to seek to surrender our self-defined ends to Him and live as  “bondservants of Christ” until the end of one’s days, no matter where He takes us or how He calls us to live.

7

We’re left, then, with the passage we began with:

“Did we not prophesy in your name” that Donald Trump would be President? 

“Did we not cast out demons” like Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Mark Zuckerburg? 

“Did we not do many mighty works in your name”, such as our bold resistance to corruption and unbiblical public policy?

For the sake of those in my life who think this way, it is my heartfelt grief to worry that they are the ones who will be met with the horrifying phrase “depart from me, you workers of lawlessness, for I never knew you.” 

I am concerned for the salvation of my believing friends and family who have allowed their faith to be so tarnished by this cult-like belief system and set of behaviours. And, I am concerned for the salvation of those who depend on the Church to steward their ministry well before they will come to faith in Jesus. We are to be ambassadors of the Kingdom of God, and, when we fuse the name of Jesus with violence and vitriol and condemnation and hatred, we – and I use this word carefully – not only take His Name in vain, but we may blaspheme it as well. 

I said of Westboro Baptist Church in an earlier blog that “it’s as if the devil made a caricature of everything the Western world fears about the church and stuck it on our headlines right when it would be most damaging to the advancement of the Gospel.” It is with great sadness that I believe we’ve arrived at something very similar here. The results of this perversion of our faith is catastrophic on that basis alone. I love people, including those in my life who think this way. What I don’t love is what has become of their faith, and what becomes of our witness as the people of God when we allow these sorts of ideas and practices to misrepresent Jesus to the world.

If my understanding Paul’s instructions to the Corinthian church about not associating with those who “bear the name of brother” and continue in their sin is true, then it is incumbent on me to – with an abundance of caution – examine my life for ways that I have failed to honour this difficult instruction, and to encourage the broader North American church to do the same, if for no other reason than to “suffer everything rather than create a stumbling block for the Gospel.” 

Please, for the love of those He died for – in full view of the Love that God has for the World – guard your heart and mind in the Lord Jesus, seek His wisdom in understanding current events, and – like Jesus – love expensively until it puts you in the ground. 

May the name of Jesus be lifted high.

Soli Deo Gloria. 

Much Love,

kw

---