I blame Jacques Derrida.
I blame Derrida for President Trump and QAnon.
Let me explain myself. Derrida is one of the leading thinkers whose writings helped develop postmodernism. He is often considered the founder of deconstruction.
To simplify, deconstruction (and post-modernism) denies that there is an absolute signifier that allows for a connection between a sign and its referent. To put it in other terms, there is no truth out there to be found and language is insufficient to describe it.
But rather than despairing about this state of things (like the existentialists of the 60’s did-remember Sartre’s book Nausea), postmodern thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, and others relished the idea because meaning could not be imposed on them by others, but rather meaning could be constructed by themselves.
Now it is interesting that those in the lines of Derrida and Foucault often constructed meaning in a progressive direction, resisting forces that sought to impose authority structures on them. But critics of deconstruction warned that it would be equally possible to construct meaning in a different direction, say a misogynist or racist direction.
Some of my academic friends might remember that probably twenty years ago, a leading deconstructionist, Paul de Man (who was at Yale when I was doing my doctoral work), was outed as a Fascist in his youth, thus in the minds of many confirming the problem with this post-modern mindset.
So what does this have to do with our President or QAnon? Well, I think most reasonable people recognize that he constructs the facts in whatever direction pleases him. I think it was KellyAnn Conway who spoke of “alternative facts.” These alternative facts often have absolutely no evidence and even have abundant evidence against it, but that does not deter people from believing him. I suspect because they want to believe him.
As for QAnon, the same is abundantly true. Biden is a pedophile? Please. There is no evidence for this (and remember PizzaGate). And don’t post memes of Biden giving grandfatherly kisses to his friends’ children.
Well, then, why is it so many Christians support our first post-modern president and give QAnon the time of day? It’s actually mind-blowing because we Christians do think there is an absolute signifier out there (God). Yes, getting at the truth is difficult and everyone has their ideological lenses, but even so that does not mean we get to construct our reality in the way we want to against the evidence. We don’t have to lock ourselves into our ideological biases but we need to expose ourselves to other interpretations and then consider which is the true understanding. If you listen to CNN turn to Fox once in a while and vice versa. When it comes to evaluating our president, listen to what he says in his speeches and on twitter.
I worry that many evangelical Christians have been conditioned against evidence and the truth when it seems to butt up against how they prefer to view reality. We can see this for instance in say those who affirm that the cosmos is only a few thousand years old. The evidence is overwhelming against this conclusion. But many people wrongly think that the Bible teaches otherwise, so they need to ignore or make up explanations of the evidence that are preposterous or, and here we are back to the mindset that accepts Trump’s misconstruals of the evidence or the conspiracy theories of QAnon.
I am not saying that everyone who supports Trump over against Biden are guilty of this kind of post-modern thinking, but I worry that many are (particularly based on some of the responses I receive on Facebook). I can think of no good reason though why anyone who is a Christian would turn to a source like QAnon to support their views.
