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[ by Charles Cameron — the Phoenix Field Office of the FBI has already suggested QAnon should be considered a terror threat — now two writers in quick succession suggest it qualifies as, or indeed contains, a new religious movement ]
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I’d like to draw the attention of my New Religious Movement (NRM) friends and those working on extremism to three recent posts concerning the QAnon conspiracy as a new religious movement:

Adrienne LaFrance, The Prophecies of Q

Marc-André Argentino, The Church of QAnon: Will conspiracy theories form the basis of a new religious movement?

Marc-André Argentino, There’s a lot that I couldn’t include so I will supplement with a thread

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The Atlantic article, by Adrienne LaFrance, is the most wide-angle of the three. Let’s start with her rough description of QAnon, pitched to its political side:

Nine years later, as reports of a fearsome new virus suddenly emerged, and with Trump now president, a series of ideas began burbling in the QAnon community: that the coronavirus might not be real; that if it was, it had been created by the “deep state,” the star chamber of government officials and other elite figures who secretly run the world; that the hysteria surrounding the pandemic was part of a plot to hurt Trump’s reelection chances; and that media elites were cheering the death toll. Some of these ideas would make their way onto Fox News and into the president’s public utterances. As of late last year, according to The New York Times, Trump had retweeted accounts often focused on conspiracy theories, including those of QAnon, on at least 145 occasions.

What’s interesting about this article, and will be missed by many analysts and other readers because they are blind to religion, is the religious emphasis present from the title, The Prophecies of Q, through the italicized intro, with its subhead “Genesis”, its talk of “adherents” and a “clash between good and evil” and “Great Awakening” that is coming — shades of the “Great Awakening” that Jonathan Edwards was associated with! Indeed, the eschatological (end times) content is even more explicit:

QAnon carries on a tradition of apocalyptic thinking that has spanned thousands of years. It offers a polemic to empower those who feel adrift.

and:

“There are QAnon followers out there,” Shelly said, “who suggest that what we’re going through now, in this crazy political realm we’re in now, with all of the things that are happening worldwide, is very biblical, and that this is Armageddon.”

Too, there’s the suggestion that QAnon effectively comprises a system of belief, enshrined in the closing, one line paragraph:

You know all this because you believe in Q.

And the next day, the Atlantic took things a declarative stage further, heading a note:

QAnon Is a New American Religion

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Okay, QAnon Is [according to the Atlantic] a New American Religion. But Marc-André Argentino‘s approach is more tight-focused: he actually attends “ekklesia” [roughly, here, “house church”] services with strong QAnon content over a period of a couple of years, and reports back:

What I’ve witnessed is an existing model of neo-charismatic home churches — the neo-charismatic movement is an offshoot of evangelical Protestant Christianity and is made up of thousands of independent organizations — where QAnon conspiracy theories are reinterpreted through the Bible. In turn, QAnon conspiracy theories serve as a lens to interpret the Bible itself.

Here are a couple of samples:

At a service held on April 26, Wagner and Bushey spoke about a QAnon theory, called Project Looking Glass, that the U.S. military has secretly developed a form of time-travel technology. Wagner suggested to e-congregants that time travel can be explained by certain passages in the Bible.

On May 3, the theme of the QAnon portion of the service was about COVID-19. Bushey spoke about a popular QAnon theory that the pandemic was planned. (There is no evidence of this.) And when an anti-vax conspiracy theory documentary called “Plandemic” went viral , the video was shared on the HCW websites as a way for e-congregants to consume the latest in a series of false theories about the coronavirus.

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The QAnon ekklesia Marc-André Argentino attended is called the Omega Kingdom Ministry, and quotes Q:

It’s going to be Biblical

— where Biblical is intended both literally and metaphorically — enormous!!

This is emphasized in large letters on a greenboard reproduced in Argentino’s subsequent twitter thread, which is also used for four panels explaining the parallels between the Biblical Passover and “Passover II” associated with QAnon, of which I’m reproducing on here:

The rhetoric here, “For as Benjamin Netanyahu is to Israel, so shall this man be” is nicely reminiscent of Romans 8:14, James 2:26, and [forgive me] I Corinthians 11:12, “For as the woman is of the man, even so is the man also by the woman>”

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Whether or not the entire QAnon movement as a whole can be considered a NRM [New Religious Movement], there certainly exists within it an ekklesia and ministry.

NRM scholars, as well as FBI agents and other terrorism analysts, should keep their eyes on the QAnon phenomenon.

[ by Charles Cameron — first, a taste of bach — then a superb paragraph from a friend on the east coast, describing the variant accounts of the coronavirus given by sources inside and outside the mainstream, and more ]
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Ah, for sheer pleasure while you read the rest:

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Our various explanations of the coronavirus:
From that friend on the east coast:

Concerning the coronavirus, the opinions of the experts I’ve read run the gamut: The coronavirus is exactly as the CDC and WHO have been telling us, is a genetically engineered bioweapon, is related to the 5G rollout, is the last precursor for a totalitarian world government, and is more deadly than we’ve been told or is less deadly than we’ve been told. It originated from horseshoe bats in Yunnan province, originated in a Wuhan biolab, originated in a wet market, or originated at Fort Detrick. Covid-19 is not one disease but a number of them incorrectly lumped together because they have similar symptoms which explains why there are such mixed success rates with various treatments. Viruses, including the coronavirus, are exosomes, which are secreted by exocytosis in most living cells, where their role is to render harmless toxic substances in the body. These exosomes/viruses are the result and not the cause of illness. Therefore, there is no proof that Covid-19 per se is contagious. Alternatively, it is highly contagious. And all of this doesn’t even touch upon the variety of expert opinions concerning how nation states should best handle this situation.

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And a head-grabbing headline:

I’ve run into many of these in my own explorations, and navigated them as best I can. One particular headline caught my attention by bringing the coronavirus, which presently preoccupies me, and terrorism, which I was similarly preoccupied with some time back:

That’s a pretty stunning headline about now — adding extreme human malice into the coronavirus mix. Let’s see where else hatred leads Tim Wilson — here are some of the other targets he’d discussed with an FBI informant / friend:

he was considering sites ranging from a nuclear plant and Islamic centers in Missouri to the Walmart headquarters or a synagogue in Arkansas

Oh — and:

at one point last year Wilson talked to an undercover FBI agent in graphic terms of an idea for shooting up a predominantly black elementary school

Islamic centers and a synagogue, a nuclear plant or Walmart HQ, or a prewdominantly black, get this, elementary school — quite a range of choices to point his hatred at — and then he choses a hospital.

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Variations everywhere!

[ by Charles Cameron — from tree-planting in the millions, via Tolkien’s ents in entmoot mode, to the Yukon, science-fiction time-travel, and a Greta Thunberg lookalike ]
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A couple, Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado and his wife, planted 20 million trees in 20 years. Some of their product is visible in this photographic DoubleQuote

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Simply and factually, two states of a hillside are connected by twenty years of planting, similarly but more personally, a photographer and his wife are connected by love and marriage nurtured by their lives together, more abstractly two nodes in a network are connected by edges, in each case, the connections in a network are the strength of that network..

And in this case, trees are the result of planting over time, and over time this marriage of two persons is no doubt deepened. They make a difference, and if a hundred thousand, scattered across the habitable globe, followed their example, the impact would be considerable.

Consider also that in the view of a German scientist whose ideas are, according to the Smithsonian, “shaking up the scientific world”. Anthropomorphosizing more than a little, the Smithsonian writer tells us:

Wise old mother trees feed their saplings with liquid sugar and warn the neighbors when danger approaches. Reckless youngsters take foolhardy risks with leaf-shedding, light-chasing and excessive drinking, and usually pay with their lives. Crown princes wait for the old monarchs to fall, so they can take their place in the full glory of sunlight. It’s all happening in the ultra-slow motion that is tree time, so that what we see is a freeze-frame of the action.

20,000 trees must have quite a conversation.

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Entmoot

Cue JRR Tolkien on the tree-like Ents, the ancient and wise guardians of trees and forests introduced in volume 2 of the Lord of the Rings:

Quickbeam, for example, guarded rowan trees and bore some resemblance to rowans: tall and slender, smooth-skinned, with ruddy lips and grey-green hair. Some ents, such as Treebeard, were like beech-trees or oaks. But there were other kinds. Some recalled the chestnut: brown-skinned Ents with large splayfingered hands, and short thick legs. Some recalled the ash: tall straight grey Ents with many-fingered hands and long legs; some the fir (the tallest Ents), and others the birch, … and the linden.

A gathering of the ents is called an Entmoot. Tolkien quotes Treebeard:

The ents have not troubled about the wars of men and wizards for a very long time. But now something is about to happen that has not happened for an age… Ent Moot. [ … ] Beech, oak, chestnut, ash… Good, good, good. Many have come. Now we must decide if the ents will go to war.

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By way of a bookend to this post, here’s a DoubleQuote in images of Greta Thunberg and a 1898 lookalike in a photo from the Yukon:

As usual, parallelisms promote speculation — in this case, the laughable, laudable conspiracy theory that Thunberg is a time traveler.

Conspiracy! Science fiction!

The suggestion is that Greta traveled back from our time, when she despaired of our efforts to reverse human-caused climate change, to the Yukon of 1898, where she set about reversing the problem at its time and place origin. Exactly why human-caused climate change should have started in the Yukon in 1898 is not clear, nor can we understand how, if she began her efforts at reversing the progressive wasting of earth by human impact back in 1898 and had had no notable impact on that process by now, as revealed in the 1898 and 2019 photos of Ms Thunberg.. that too is unclear.

Fabulation, however, is fabulpous by dedfinition — so we record this conspiracy here.

Readings:

HuffPost, Photo From 1898 Sparks Hilarious Theory That Greta Thunberg Is A Time-Traveler

Owen Sound Sun Times, Greta Thunberg look-alike in 1898 Yukon gold rush photo has sparked time-travel conspiracies

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Okay, here’s a suggestion:

Greta Thunberg — or the Entmoot , for that matter — might suggest we plant trees:

Plant for yourself:

But be warned

As we plant trees, we must avoid planting monocultures, and ensure we plant variety, as The Economist suggests.