When I hear “Q,” I think of Quelle. Quelle is the German word for “source.” Philologists in the early twentieth century who studied the Synoptic Gospels (the Gospel of St. John is obviously sui generis, but the Gospels of Sts. Matthew, Mark, and Luke often overlap) began to wonder whether there might not have been some collection of the teachings and actions of Jesus upon which the Gospel-writers drew. This collection, or source, for at least the Gospels of Sts. Matthew and Luke (Mark may have been written separately) was called, in the scholarly lingua franca of the time, “Quelle.”

Quelle has never been found, and no one really knows if it actually existed. It is hypothetical, and also anonymous. So, one might perhaps call it “QAnon.”

While I think of Quelle when I hear “Q,” I did not know what to think when I first read the term “QAnon” in the news a few months ago. Actually, I must have skimmed the term before that, because when I looked up “QAnon” I found it was the impetus behind the bizarre “Pizzagate” incident from 2016. Readers will recall that in that year a man from North Carolina went to a pizza restaurant in Washington, DC, and fired a weapon on the premises on the belief that the restaurant was a front for a child sex-trafficking ring. I remember when I read about that at the time some of the news coverage mentioned the man’s belief in something called “QAnon,” but the term meant nothing to me and I probably dismissed it as yet another lunatic lurch of the late Enlightenment. As Pieter Vree and I have chronicled in the pages of NOR, it seems that people these days will believe anything.

QAnon did not end with the shoot-up of the DC pizza joint, however. In the current election cycle there have been several candidates who espouse QAnon ideas, and so the issue is again in the news. What is this QAnon business anyway?

As near as I can tell, QAnon is a conspiracy theory according to which an anonymous (“Anon”) government official with a “Q” security clearance dribbles top-secret information to Q-followers via coded messages on 4chan and 8chan websites and elsewhere. The “information” runs the usual gamut of conspiracy theories. I won’t rehearse those here, but readers who are interested in the musings of “Q” can very easily read all about it in any number of news reports.

What is interesting for Christians about QAnon is that it is very quickly morphing into an apocalyptic religious cult that rolls many heresies into one. QAnon is gnostic, for example. It claims special knowledge exists and one must be attuned to the right mental wavelength in order to receive and understand it. QAnon also tends Manichaean, as its followers clearly see themselves as battling the dark force of a secret society of satanist child molesters who control world affairs. “Q” communicates using only the written word, and only when he or she deigns to — thus exhibiting a kind of sola scriptura and sola gratia combination. There is also a neo-Buddhist element, as QAnon-ers have argued that “Q” is the reincarnation of a famous figure, or a famous person who has faked his or her own death and been reborn as “Q.”

All of this is patent nonsense, of course.

Christians may note that QAnon preaches that sin is recondite, that the government is run by a secret cabal of sinners. But this basic Q claim is absurd on its face. Sin is not just in the Deep State. Sin is everywhere. And nobody is trying to hide sin. People are celebrating it. QAnon is rooted ultimately in a kind of wishful thinking according to which only some people do bad things and then try to hide them. Any glance at the world in 2020 will reveal, however, that many people do bad things and then post videos of those things to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. What is this moral rectitude that QAnon thinks exists in the USA? Have QAnon-ers not turned on a television in the past thirty years?

Looking at the “Q” charge that some government officials are satanists running a child sex-trafficking ring, we must recall that satanists are a dime a dozen nowadays and the sexualization of children is all the rage. “Cuties,” for example, a French film which director Maïmouna Doucouré touts as a “warning” about pedophilia, features girls in sexually-suggestive poses. “Drag Queen Story Hours” are popular coast to coast, and gender dysphoria is being actively promoted by education systems in the USA and Canada. Pedophilia, sex-trafficking, “grooming” of children for molestation, horrific sexual abuse—these are not the work of a secret cabal, but of whole cultures.

Readers may recall a TikTok video of a few months ago in which a young pregnant woman filmed herself procuring an abortion and later looking happily in the mirror at the flat stomach she had regained in time for bathing suit season. Planned Parenthood would not exist if enough Americans truly believed it is evil. Disregard for children is hardly limited to high-powered officials in Washington, DC.

As for satanism, in New Hampshire a self-styled “trans-sexual metalhead satan-worshipping anarchist” has won the Republican nomination for sheriff in Cheshire County. The aspiring sheriff’s campaign motto? “F*** the Police.” When the satanist won the primary, he expressed disbelief that voters had cast their ballots for an avowed “high priestess” in the satanic “church.” Across the US, satanists give opening “prayers” at city council meetings, “After School Satan Clubs” meet even in elementary schools, and statues of satan occupy the grounds of state capitols and other government buildings.

QAnon would have us believe that satanism and the sex-trafficking of minors are the glue holding together a devious cabal in government. The truth is infinitely worse: Satanism and the sexualization, and murder, of kids are part of the fabric of the USA now. QAnon is not them. QAnon is us.

Now might be a good time to ditch QAnon and return to the subject of the original hypothetical Q — the teachings and miracles of Our Lord, Jesus Christ.