But many of the most successful ones suggest the existence of another group: victims. By definition, conspiracy theories imply a coordinated plot by a hostile group. ![]() Flat-Earth and other conspiracy theories are community affairs, driven by a push and pull of simultaneous rejection from mainstream society and affirmation by a small cohort of fellow believers. Then you just have Jesus and the online flat-Earth community.” “But at the end of the day, you always have Jesus, the online flat-Earth community, and your family,” the girl says. One sequence shows the family “nicely, but not so nicely, being ousted from the Church,” as a young boy in a pastor’s outfit tapes a sign banning flat-Earthers to the door. In one YouTube video, an upbeat girl who appears to be in her early teens performs joking skits about the ostracization some families faced after going flat. Many flat-Earthers wear rejection as a badge of honor, although not all do it as literally as Gruender. She was reclaiming the title after it was given to her as an insult at a Church that she later quit, she told Colorado Community Media. She wore a Miss Flat Earth sash across her chest, like a pageant queen. “Flat-tard!”Ĭindy Gruender, a Colorado woman, didn’t need to yell. The responses I heard while attending the event sounded like a collective scream of catharsis. On both mornings of the 2018 Flat Earth International Conference, the emcee Rick Hummer asked audience members to yell out insults they’d heard since coming out as flat. Separated from loved ones, many then find themselves trapped inside the theory with the only other people who will believe them. The loss foregrounds practically every conversation at flat-Earth meetups, so common that some describe themselves with the language of persecuted minorities: Announcing one’s belief is referred to as “coming out,” a term most commonly associated with the LGBTQ community. Family members find somewhere else to spend Thanksgiving. Acquaintances unfriend adherents on Facebook, and in real life, after seeing one too many posts calling NASA a satanic psyop. Indeed, almost universal in the flat-Earth community is the experience of ridicule and social rejection. “It was just like, all of a sudden, we didn’t exist.” Still, almost no one reached out after he was fired. The Church was filled with his closest friends. Wolfe’s sudden firing, he told me, was “traumatic.” His kids had grown up in this community. But often, as in Wolfe’s case, flat-Earthers are the biggest victims of their convictions. The polarizing idea has a way of setting people at odds with one another and drawing them into other fringe conspiracy theories-no good for a house of worship. It’s not hard to see how a pastor giving an unexpected flat-Earth sermon could harm a congregation. He believes the leaders discovered his belief when they learned he’d attended the conference. He had planned to broach the topic delicately during an upcoming Church-leadership meeting, making a religious argument for the theory beginning with Genesis 1, but he never had a chance. Wolfe left the convention with a new group of friends and a new commitment to live publicly as a flat-Earther. By 2018 he’d decided to attend Take On the World, a Christian conference promoting flat-Earth theory, about an hour from his home. Wolfe had been full-on “flat,” as believers refer to themselves, for almost a year, ever since he stumbled across YouTube videos promoting a biblical flat-Earth model when researching a sermon on the Great Flood. Still, certain Christians, like Wolfe, preach that the idea is supported by a literal interpretation of the Bible. The deeply unpopular theory erroneously posits that the planet is flat as a pancake and (according to many) contained beneath a dome. Wolfe believes that association was his “flat Earth” belief, which he’d kept under wraps in order to avoid this kind of situation. This article was adapted from Kelly Weill’s recent book, Off the Edge.
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