Photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash, Algo-r-(h)-i-(y)-thms, 2018. Installation view at ON AIR, Tomás Saraceno’s solo exhibition at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2018.
I was in the online discussion group of an Australian political party sometime last year, when a guy asked if they were going to look into “illegal microchip implants.” This is the idea that tiny medical devices are being put into people’s bodies without their knowledge, for some underhanded purpose. It is not the most sophisticated conspiracy theory in the world, but this discussion brought up an important issue.
Your first thought about this idea may have been the same as mine. Chips are partly metal. Wouldn’t that stand out on X-rays, MRIs, and other common medical scans? It turns out that 25 million of those scans are done in Australia every year. Perhaps a hundred thousand people have jobs that might involve looking at them. Wouldn’t this have been discovered?
“You’re assuming,” the forum guy said, “they’re not in on it.”
Let’s pause that right there. What questions does that sentence raise for you? I find myself asking: Is there such a thing as legal microchip implants? Why would I have assumed all those doctors were in on it? Am I being asked to prove that they’re not? Is it common to defend conspiracy theories by just expanding them like this? Has this person really grasped how many people they are accusing of criminality and malpractice? Are there people who think that whole swathes of society are really this evil? How would they defend this claim if they were sued for slander? And are they just careless with their accusations?
If their accusations are true – and this applies to conspiracy theories in general – then big injustices are happening. That would be a public danger that good people should expose. Almost anyone would agree with this. But then, if their accusations are false, they are adding to the lies and injustices of the world by accusing the wrong people, to say nothing of undermining public health by sowing mistrust in doctors and medicine. In which case they themselves are a public danger that good people should expose.
This seems to be a reason why conspiracy theories are so disruptive in churches. Making public accusations guarantees that either one side or the other will be wrong at a moral level, whether through tolerance of evil conspiracies or by committing slander.
What’s So Bad About Slander?
Like any legal system, the Old Testament law had to deal with people “bearing false witness” (Ex 20:16), and it took a distinctly hard line. It said a false accuser should receive whatever penalty they had sought for the accused (Deut 19:15–21). So, for a false accusation of murder, or any capital crime, the accuser would be put to death (“show no pity: life for life…” v.21!). We don’t live under that law, of course, but imagine for a minute that we did. Are we taking enough care with what we say that we would commit to accepting such punishment if we could not prove our accusations to a court’s satisfaction?
The New Testament is no more tolerant. For Jesus, outward regulations don’t “defile a person,” since it is what comes from within them which has moral significance, and slander is one of those things (Matt 15:18-20, cf. Mark 7:21-23). Slander appears in numerous New Testament vice lists (Rom 1:30; 2 Cor 12:20; 1 Tim 6:4; 1 Tim 3:11; 2 Tim 3:3; Tit 2:3). It’s a common evil. A similar term, ‘reviler,’ appears twice in 1 Corinthians, where Paul says that a Christian should not even eat with a fellow Christian who acts in this way, and that such a person will not inherit God’s kingdom (1 Cor 5:11; 6:10). If you are a Christian, you must “rid yourself of all… slander” (Eph 4:31; Col 3:8; 1 Pet 2:1).
The primary problem with slander ought to be obvious. You can’t serve truth or justice by attacking the innocent, which is what slander does. It makes things more unjust, because it gets things wrong. “Whoever utters slander,” then, “is a fool” (Prov 10:18; see also Ps 15:3, 101:5). But why is slander so common? Partly because, like anger, it feels so good. It gives us the dopamine hit of exposing wrongdoers, putting them in their place, and denying them legitimacy in public life. At least, it feels that way, but in fact, it has done nothing of the sort.
It Doesn’t Feel Like Slander
It might seem that avoiding slander is the easiest thing in the world. Just be careful with our accusations and do the hard work of checking things out. What’s tricky, though, is that we seldom feel like we’re slandering people, even if our accusations do end up being false. There are two big reasons for this.
Firstly – and this is especially true of conspiracy theories – we’re seldom accusing anyone we know personally. The villains are distant elites, faceless bureaucrats, and unknown political actors. They’re off in the shadows. They’re not “real people”. But this defense doesn’t work for Christians, and not just because so many of us are so very well connected that some of us will know these people. The bigger problem is that, to God, every human being is a real person, known and loved. God will absolutely judge slander against them. Sins are no less sinful just because they target strangers. Slander is still slander even if we don’t know the accused. Slander is public false testimony, and whether the falsehood is willful or negligent is not the main issue. The important question is “Can you prove it?”
And secondly, conspiracy theories don’t feel like slander because we know ourselves to be sincere. We’ll say, “Well I believe it, and I’m entitled to my opinion.” But this changes the subject from accusations to opinions. An accusation is more serious than an opinion. We cross a line when we go public with a charge. Sincerity is no defence if we can’t justify it. There’s no “just asking questions” if we’re already making public accusations.
The Surprising Good News about Slander
Now that conspiracy theories have joined the political mainstream, and especially thrive on social media, we need constructive ways to talk about them in our churches. We need to know whether a person is able to have a sincere conversation, or act in good faith, in this area. The good news for us is that slander gives us at least a baseline test of goodwill.
If a person does not care that they might be making false accusations in public, does not take care to avoid them, or does not repent and make amends when they find that they have, then they are a slanderer, and an unrepentant one. There’s no assurance of good character that they could give us that would cancel out those actions.
More to the point, if a Christian does not care about being a slanderer – at least on these matters – then we may conclude that conspiracy theories now matter more to them than God does. If that is so, they have much bigger problems than believing some unpopular ideas. But if they do care about being a slanderer, then we can expect them to be conscientious with their public accusations, and several good results follow. We have common ground again in both faith and behaviour, and our churches and communities will be less polarised and divided by accusations.
There is good news for Christians seeking to publicly expose wrongdoing here too. Exposing evil is important. But we must do it better than most people manage to, and rejecting slander will help with that. When we care for the truth and accuracy of what we say, this will distinguish us from people just trolling or stirring up anger. And if there are merits in the ideas we’re advancing, we’ll be better placed to make convincing arguments for them.
Nigel Chapman lives in Melbourne, Australia. He has an MDiv from Morling College, and was the editor and lead author of Who to Trust? Christian Belief in Conspiracy Theories (ISCAST, 2022).
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