Red-Pilling on Patmos: A Quick and Dirty Hermeneutic for the Evangelical–QAnon Connection

On February 28,2022, Pat Robertson came out of retirement to do what he does best: offer a pettifogging yet cohesive explanation for troubling world events, this time the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

According to Robertson, what we failed to understand was that, though Putin may seem "mad," the invasion of Ukraine was a divinely mandated push to establish a "staging ground" to seize a land bridge to Turkey so that Russia could invade Israel without cause. The key takeaway? All these events were compelled by God, so the good need only "read [their] Bible because it's coming to pass." Those familiar with premillennial dispensationalism, the evangelical belief that the apocalypse of Revelation is imminent and that believers must organize their faith around this fact, will have found this obtuse explanation familiar: among holders of this worldview, Russia has long played the role of Magog, a key figure in catalyzing the end-of-times tribulation. Robertson simply practiced the world-decoding hermeneutic he and other evangelical leaders have been teaching their flocks for decades and repeating in the face of every new crisis, a hermeneutic of certainty rather than suspicion. But even Americans with little knowledge of evangelicalism likely found this style of interpretation familiar, as it is also shared by popular conspiracies like QAnon.

The premillennialist interpretative method sketched here is, I think, key to understanding the structure and success of the QAnon movement, especially among evangelical audiences.2 While many factors play into QAnon's mass appeal, I agree with evangelical leader Ed Stetzer that "QAnon is a train that runs on the tracks that religion has already put in place." Of the many ideational tracks which are outlined in Ken Paradis' piece elsewhere in this cluster, one runs through the Book of Revelation and relentless evangelical efforts to understand it in personal and contemporary contexts.3 Revelation's mixture of explicit and inscrutable allegory not only invites interpretative digging — an understanding that there is a particular meaning behind these metaphoric images — but also offers an ever-repurposable, puzzle-like source that can be reinterpreted over and over again. Such a hermeneutic, I think, offers a particular way of perceiving truth in the world, where a flexible style of interpretation that evolves to fit the times is generated out of a foundational, passive certainty in the truth of a world-order or authority — a hermeneutic evangelical pastor and author Tim LaHaye identified as politically invigorating.4 The QAnon movement employs a similar method of reading texts, events, and the world at large, and ultimately offers to a broad online audience what Revelation-based apocalypticism offers evangelicals: a singular, determinate, and ordered world-picture in an otherwise volatile world.

Revelation's "purely elegant starbursts of writing," the "semantically and semiotically saturated" imagery made irresistibly meaningful by eschatological significance, are allegories shorn of their referents by time.5 The text signals this to us by integrating allegorical images like the four horsemen that carry their interpretations alongside images that remain uninterpreted.6 Some are invitations we can assess with the help of the historical horizon, for example the number of the beast that "anyone with understanding [can] calculate" is likely a use of gematria to signal Nero's name.7 Others brim with significance without clear assurance of their significance, like the cavalry released by the sixth trumpet, whose horses had heads "like that of lions' heads, and fire and smoke and sulfur came out of their mouths" and tails "like serpents, having heads and with them inflict harm."8 Between the explicit and inscrutable allegory, readers are invited to excavate a specific hidden meaning for each imaginative creature or event; yet, without easy access to these meanings, they remain illimitable puzzles.

Pair that impenetrability with the necessary truth that defines apocalypse, and Revelation promises a knowable, discernible future and world — but only if you can break the code. By "necessary truth," I mean the philosophical definition that things "could not be otherwise," or that these truths are immutably entrenched in the world itself. Revelation begins with the "must" of this necessity: "The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what soon must take place."9 Adhering to ancient literary convention, the author "John" begins by stating the contents of the composition: parsed by clause, it is firstly a revelation, secondly sent by God, and thirdly what "must soon take place" ("ἃ δεῖ γενέσθαι"). This "must" is an assertion about what is undeniable to the structure of the world, specifically the predetermined and designed nature of both happenings and nature itself. This concept of intended design is replicated throughout Revelation in the repeated use of divine numbers to convey the promise that, despite its seeming disorder, the world was created by design and will operate according to it, regardless of our perception. For example, the heavenly throne room conveys numeric perfection through its ornate design, containing "twenty-four thrones, and seated on the thrones are twenty-four elders" and "seven flaming torches which are the seven spirits of God."10 Each of these numbers contains sacred significance: twenty-four, a doubling of twelve, suggests a combination of the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve apostles, while seven, the number of days it took God to make the world in Genesis and used fifty-seven times in Revelation alone, symbolizes divine pattern "evident in both the universe and history."11 Just as numbers point to an intended symmetry, world events are explicitly prescribed and restricted via the image of opening the end-times scroll, a written record of the world's design.12 Interlaced in its imagery, the Book of Revelation promises a world running on a predefined blueprint. Feeling uncertain? Trust the plan.

Between these poles —  impenetrably ambiguous allegory on the one hand, the inescapable determinism of world order on the other — we find the familiar hermeneutic that took root in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American premillennial dispensationalism: a flexible, ever-evolving style of interpretation grounded on trust in a single world-ordering truth or power, which continually reorients the reader's position towards the world. Premillennialists see Revelation as "history written in advance," where "the Bible's many historical layers can always be about current events" when interpreted through arcane codebreaking.13 This style of reading provides readers not only with a sense of a hidden meaning they "alone underst[and]," dividing them from everyday knowledges and communities, but also with the certainty that there is a profound unified truth just beyond their grasp that will redefine everyday experiences.14 Because reading with such purposes in mind is both difficult and urgent, it supports a class of interpreters whose role is to explain the true meaning of the text — often abstracting that which is difficult or resistant into a single, clear truth. That truth can then be used to read the world (as Saunders warns), whether everyday interactions, political and world events, or leaked emails. If you are premillennialist in your thinking, you'll likely practice this hermeneutic over and over again through a variety of media as you wait and watch for the rapture that will come in your lifetime, as did Tim LaHaye, Hal Lindsay, Ronald Reagan, and 20% of US Christians polled by Pew Research in 2006.15 New troubling or confusing events arise? Don't worry: "read your Bible," do your research.

We can see this hermeneutic at work in the vastly popular Left Behind series, co-written by LaHaye.16 In the first novel, all three protagonists follow the same cycle: acceptance of the necessity of Revelation, introduction to the practice of decoding the future, and recognition of the need to organize around this necessary (and yet somehow largely rejected) truth. Rayford, the first to convert, is moved to faith by a sense of necessity, thinking "there was only one course of action."17 Even as the fictional world comes to resemble a direct depiction of Revelation, the characters are still required to accept Revelation's truth and learn how to decode the text to make sense of their new world. They too are dependent on a class of interpreters who will make sense of the world for them, either relying on left over material created by the now-departed faithful (Rayford is converted by a videotape prepared for the rapture) or the previously "phony" clergy who did not truly "have the mind of Christ."18 In the process, the reader is introduced to this interpretation practice. They learn to read Biblical topography in contemporary nation-states, to be wary of secret alliances between Russia, Ethiopia, and Libya or politicians from Romania promising peace through unity.19 Once the characters have accepted this truth and practiced this reading, they are empowered by their certainty to do something with that knowledge, particularly converting others and "fight[ing] the enemies of God."20

What strikes me as notable about this hermeneutic is that its frenetic efforts to crack the code divert interpreters from examining the certainty in the belief driving it, that there is necessary, determinate truth — knowable, verifiable, cohering, even undeniable — at the bottom. The reader is ever fallible, the inscrutable text and its truth-bearing foundations are not. Rayford must go "beyond" himself to access this truth because it is not his to own or tend.21 As another protagonist, Chloe, puts it before converting, "you have to start with that as a foundation. Then it all works neatly."22 The characters all eventually accept this necessity, neatly, but never grapple with it. It remains "more," "beyond," a happenstance: "most people are blind and deaf to the truth until they find it; then it makes all the sense in the world."23 Decoding empowers them, but it is their certainty in the ultimate meaning that compels them. The more they read, the deeper the belief is entrenched by practice. When prophecy fails or no longer offers a compelling lens for viewing the world, they can chalk up previous interpretations to their own mistakes and begin again, not questioning why it was inscrutable in the first place.

If we take this to be a fair assessment of the hermeneutic central to the U.S. evangelical imagination throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the politics of the Christian Right, it is no wonder that right-wing evangelicals found a familiar resonance in QAnon. Q "drops" (followers' names for Q's posts) play on a concept of finding and validating truth already familiar to evangelical culture and experience. Q communicates in "crumbs," shorn references and cryptic puzzles waiting to be supplied with meaning, all ripped out of context and devoid of explanation yet promising something more if followers (dubbed "bakers" in a remarkable misunderstanding of either metaphors or bread-baking) could read it right. The more amputated, reference-laden, and enigmatic they become, the more these messages speak to their readers' desire for a definitive truth, their common reading practices, and the preexisting belief-dispositions (and associated narratives) that framed their worlds. Key QAnon narratives have familiar cultural precedents, often fictional and/or religious, that help them ring true. When Q implied that Hillary Clinton is orchestrating the sexual abuse of children (in a post linking the Clinton emails Wikileaks release, "Why are the children in Haiti in high demand?"), followers no doubt heard familiar echoes from the 1990s rightwing political sphere, which blended feminism, prochoice politics, and sexual misconduct into one concept and embodied it in Clinton. When Q suggested that powerful Satanists torture children, ("the child abductions for Satanic rituals [i.e. Haiti and other 3^rd world countries] are paused"), bakers reprised storytelling roles from the Satanic Panic. When Q prophesized that something big is coming in accordance with a plan ("Patriots are in control. Sit back and enjoy the show"), believers recited the promise and waited in not-so-secret anticipation.24 But because the drops had no context and were intentionally enigmatic, followers empowered a class of interpreters (some of whom were explicitly evangelical in their approach, for example Praying Medic, a popular interpreter who ran a nonprofit ministry and sold books and classes on divine healing prior to focusing on QAnon decodes in 2017), who were in turn empowered by a hungry, extremity-driven YouTube algorithm.25

This expansion of content and reach created a new movement of "secret knowers," with a determinate, steadfast picture of the world from which they could interpret and act.26 Of course, it isn't about knowing, but believing. Q believers received the fulfillment of the old apocalyptic promise that Americans have always found compelling: certainty. As with American evangelicals throughout the twentieth century, in place of worldly fears and confusion believers were offered certainty. They were offered the certainty of a future full of planned events: "Nothing can stop what is coming," Q declared, and followers repeated as mantra. They were offered certainty that the world coheres to the truth of that plan: "Do you believe in coincidences? / Mathematically impossible?" Q asked. They were offered certainty in a powerful force driving them: "the Storm is upon us," Q affirmed. They were offered certainty in a coming new, uncorrupted world: "the world will be a different place," Q promised. They were offered certainty that the rest of us will eventually see them proven right: "SHOW THE WORLD the TRUTH. / OPEN THEIR EYES," Q exhorted.27 This is the tradeoff of revelation; it is taken as given, it's epistemically submissive. Certainty comes at the cost of an initial giving over of trust to a power beyond oneself, a sense of meaning and truth outside one's own interpretive efforts. Instead, all the activity is directed to reinterpreting, reassessing, trying to pin revelation to the ever-changing topography of the now — which proves empowering.28 Because this picture is built on passive acceptance of an ultimate truth and order always beyond one's own experience or construction, always read onto the world rather than from within it, the only hope for the supposedly universal truth to be realized is for others to accept it. In the face of a multitude of interpretations, believers must plant the seeds of revelation: they must red-pill the world.

And this is what the QAnon movement largely did. Yes, they stormed the Capitol and continue to effectively organize through more diffuse political events. (QAnon also seems to have what has made right-wing evangelicalism in America so enduring: "a successful alliance with wealthy benefactors."29) But mainly, they went online to convert with an apocalyptic prophecy of a newer sort. Where the uncertainty of seemingly catastrophic times shakes up peoples' deep-set beliefs about the world, movements like QAnon find fertile ground across wide swathes of people, just like religious revivals of the past. However, its revelatory hermeneutic is now powered by a media more extensive in its reach than ever before, and better equipped to rip meaning out of context and distribute it as clicks to those most desperately looking for it. What before was a more confined and local community-centric practice of revelatory evangelization is connecting to new communities online and spreading to more massive groups. So, when we ask whither the Christian right, I say follow these two forces: the promise of apocalyptic certainty and the media that best spreads it. I think Paradis is right in identifying a new affect of decline, a "politics of cultural despair" among evangelical communities that may only make them more susceptible to media that plays the old narrative hits of revelation and divine justice that marked their political ascendancy. If Matthew Sutton is correct that some twenty-first-century evangelical megachurches are turning from an "emphasis on the second coming of Christ" in favor of "therapeutic solutions to life's mundane problems," we should expect an exodus from pews to Tim Pool and podcasts, from Bakker to "bakers," from televangelism to targeted algorithms — whatever media can offer familiar paths to those deeper certainties.30

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Jenny Van Houdt is an instructor at North Idaho College and an assessment designer for Washington State University's College of Medicine. Her work is interested in how apocalyptic thought reorients beliefs about the world.

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