Rise of QAnon provides an insight into how religions get started and grow

Like the most-devout religionist, QAnon believers believe that their beliefs are factual. They truly believe that a world-wide, baby-eating liberal cabal exists, often run out of the basements of pizza parlors, even when said parlors have no basements. The crazier the belief, the more believable to the adherents. Think talking snakes, people coming back from the dead, thousands of zombies strolling about Jerusalem, water changing into wine, religious icons riding a horse into the heavens, etc. Nutty stuff, but foundational to the religionist, and therefore necessarily assumed to be factual.

Every new defeat of QAnon belief only serves to strengthen the resolve and to deepen the belief of the believers. Lack of evidence only proves how deep the deception runs. Like the Hale Boppists getting the date wrong on the world’s end, the QAnonist simply moves the goalposts to excuse away that which proves the folly of their beliefs. The three hardest words one can utter as a human being are “I was wrong,” and the same is true in spades for conspiracy mongers like the QAnon crowd. What’s important to the religionist is the belief that that they are privy to hidden information and/or some greater truth that is unknown to the unwashed masses.

And now, they have been publicly embraced by the fantasist-in-chief, Donald T Rump. What’s next? Religious freedom protections being extended to their wacko, racist beliefs? Why not? It works for standard religions, which have no more basis in fact than does QAnon. Why not for the QAnonist, whose religious fervor burns hotter than that of the typical religionist?