“It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you!”

Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts

In 1997 Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts starred in a movie titled “Conspiracy Theory”.  Gibson played a paranoid cab driver named Jerry who believed in a host of conspiracies and was constantly reading and warning people about them.  Then one day he suddenly realized someone was trying to kill him.  Apparently one of his pet conspiracies was actually true and they really were out to get him.  His problem was, however, he didn’t know which one. Well, if the theorists are correct, he would have a lot to choose from.

I can’t begin to tell you how many times I have gotten letters and emails warning of some new (or recycled) theory.  For example in the mid 1970s a petition circulated in churches warning that atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair was conspiring to get all religious broadcasting banned from the nation’s airwaves. The petition was a hoax but still shows up even now nearly forty years later on websites and emails (even though O’Hair has been dead since 1995).

Here is the short list of some of the various global cabals that I am aware of supposedly plotting to rule the world, control the international economy, corrupt our national morals, or promote hate, etc. There is the World Communist Conspiracy, the World Jewish Conspiracy, the World Neo-Nazi Conspiracy, the World Satanist Conspiracy, the World Government Conspiracy, the World Bank Conspiracy, the World New Age Conspiracy, the World Illuminati Conspiracy, the World Masonic Conspiracy, the World Catholic Conspiracy, the World Humanist Conspiracy, the World Atheist Conspiracy, the World Skull and Bones Conspiracy, the World Tri-Lateral Commission Conspiracy, the World UFO Conspiracy, the World (oops)…the North American Union Conspiracy, etc.

Now, no doubt there are people in this country and around the world that espouse many of the goals of the above movements and may even hatch plans to do devious things. However, in most cases the numbers of adherents are so small, or the plotters so unorganized, that they truly present no real threat to anyone.  In fact, sometimes those claiming to expose such conspiracies are the ones posing the greater danger believing their paranoid delusions justify bad behavior done to constrain their imagined foes.

There is an old saying, “A conspiracy is very hard prove and impossible to disprove.”  Or as Gibson’s character Jerry says,   “A good conspiracy is unprovable. I mean, if you can prove it, it means they screwed up somewhere along the line.”   The conspirators who really do pose threats (radical Islamic terrorists for example) are not secret at all.  They are well known to the world’s governmental agencies who work constantly to monitor their actions to prevent their violent attacks.    Unfortunately, too many people, even some Christians, are busy  jousting with windmills rather than focusing on the country’s real spiritual issues.  The way to solve our nation’s problems is not by blaming them on some invisible human entity but by proclaiming the truth of Jesus Christ and getting involved on local and national levels.