Ministry leader and influencer Dave Hayes spoke on his monthly “Supernatural Saturday” livestream a few days after the Trump administration announced that it would not release a promised cache of files on Jeffrey Epstein, the alleged sex trafficker who died in prison in 2019.
On the livestream, Hayes—known by hundreds of thousands of followers as the Praying Medic—listened to viewers’ prayer requests, personal dilemmas, and political questions. He said his goal was to help people “step into a deeper relationship with Jesus.”
Then someone asked about the Epstein decision.
“I don’t think we’re going to see anything further on Epstein. It’s over,” Hayes said. “[President Donald] Trump clearly signaled to people it’s time to move on. I think there are other reasons why Trump can’t allow the DOJ [Department of Justice] to prosecute people related to Epstein.”
If Epstein’s client list included wealthy and powerful people around the world, Hayes suggested, perhaps bringing them up on charges of pedophilia would “start a war with those countries.”
“I know, it’s terrible optics for the people who are seriously interested in ending child trafficking and seeing accountability,” Hayes continued. “This is a very bitter pill to swallow. I get it. However, … Trump has to focus on other things.”
The current administration promised as recently as March to release thousands of pages of documents from law enforcement records about Epstein.
“We believe in transparency, and America has the right to know,” said US attorney general Pam Bondi on Fox News at the time. “It’s a new day, it’s a new administration, and everything is going to come out to the public.”
While plenty of Trump’s supporters are upset about the DOJ’s decision not to release the files, some Christian influencers like Hayes have faith that it’s all part of the plan.
Hayes is part of the QAnon internet movement, which emerged in 2017 with anonymous posts (“Q drops”) purportedly from a leader in US military intelligence known as Q.
QAnon ideas spread widely during the pandemic lockdowns. The movement is based on the belief that a “cabal” of elites run the world, and followers refer to such people in the government as the “deep state.”
They blame government corruption on the cabal, which includes satanic pedophiles. The movement aims to purge the deep state and oust traffickers in a reckoning known as “the storm.”
QAnon adherents saw Epstein’s case as evidence of a secret elite world of child trafficking. In their worldview, Trump serves as the hero to fight the elites, and his survival of an assassination attempt only reinforced this image. Opposing Trump makes someone part of the deep state, followers often argue.
Major social media platforms banned many QAnon influencers at the peak of the movement, and the influencers migrated to alternative sites like Rumble and Telegram. Figures like the Praying Medic were less visible but maintained significant followings.
QAnon uses religious language: A “great awakening” would lead to a national reckoning. One of Q’s catch phrases was “God wins.”
“There’s a strong Christian segment of QAnon,” said Elizabeth Neumann, a Christian and an expert on extremism who was a top counterterrorism official in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the first Trump administration. “You’re already open to the idea that things happen that you can’t see.”
In 2021, half of US pastors in a Lifeway Research survey reported that they frequently heard conspiracy theories in their congregations. And research from the American Enterprise Institute that same year showed a quarter of white evangelicals affirmed some part of QAnon theories.
In recent decades, American Christians have been steeped in apocalyptic rhetoric, Neumann added, with “the idea that maybe we’re the hero in the story.”
“You are told there is this deep state. You quickly connect it to what you read in the ’80s about how the end times happen,” she said. “People like to connect dots, and they like to see patterns even when patterns don’t exist.”
When Trump lost reelection in 2020, it seemed as if the prophesied reckoning had not come, and the movement dwindled. Q stopped posting in December 2020, and large social media platforms banned many QAnon influencers for spreading conspiracy theories.
But for some adherents, the story just shifted “who the hero is and what’s the solution set,” said Neumann.
A group of QAnon supporters, for example, rallied in Dallas four years ago to await the return of John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in a plane crash in 1999. And QAnon was still influencing people even after the end of Q posts. A man was recently sentenced to three years for threatening public officials after being drawn into QAnon conspiracy theories on alternative social media sites like Rumble in 2021 and 2022.
Then Trump’s reelection last year brought many of these internet figures back to the fore.
The new director of the FBI, attorney Kash Patel, used to be a regular guest on QAnon podcasts, has used QAnon language, was himself mentioned in a Q-drop, and once bragged about meeting Q—though at his confirmation hearing he denied that he was a follower of QAnon. His book Government Gangsters is about the deep state, which the book describes as “a sinister cabal of corrupt law enforcement personnel, intelligence agents, and military officials.”
Others who have promoted ideas from the movement also have roles in the administration, like Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who pushed the Q theory that the US was funding bioweapons labs in Ukraine, a narrative implicitly justifying Russia’s invasion.
Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin recently said Americans had been “vilified” for “good faith” questions about contrails and geoengineering, terms often used in relation to an internet theory embraced by QAnon that the government is controlling the weather. (The EPA’s resource pages on the topics debunks the idea that the government controls the weather.)
“The conspiracy theorists now have power,” said Neumann. “In the first Trump administration … most of the cabinet secretaries were pretty normie in terms of what they said publicly.”
Art Jipson, an associate sociology professor at the University of Dayton, a Catholic college, has studied the QAnon movement and its ties to Christianity.
“An awful lot of QAnon ideas have become mainstream, particularly in the Republican Party and certainly in some Christian circles,” Jipson said.
QAnon ideas are “flexible,” he said, adding that Christians who adhere to the movement “adapt in a remarkable way” when faced with contradictions.
Because QAnon functions as a decentralized network based around key individuals and texts, sociologists struggle to fit its followers into neat categories.
Some people who clearly advocate for the ideas of QAnon deny that they believe it or that it is a real movement. Some adherents of the movement have said QAnon is “manufactured by the left-wing media.”
Jipson has a document with ten different descriptors he’s tried out to describe followers fairly: phrases like “supporters of QAnon narratives” or “proponents of Q-linked conspiracy theories.”
He knows from research that Christian QAnon followers place more importance on their faith than on the Q theories and that the concern they have about evil in their community is “deeply felt.”
“A search for understanding of those problems might lead them to far-right communities and networks, some of which might be a part of QAnon,” he said. “QAnon has these ideas that promise certainty, which is very appealing to humans.”
With people like Patel in high-level government roles, Q followers trust their explanations for not releasing the files.
“They’re trying to avoid cognitive dissonance,” said Jipson.
A woman who goes by Mary Grace online—a self-described independent journalist and Christian with a large media following—dismissed recent Wall Street Journal reporting on Trump and Epstein.
She called the claims “fake” and shared a post on X saying that Trump had never promised to release a list of Epstein’s clients: “He’s one of the few people who have told you the truth about the Epstein story from the beginning.”
Mary Grace has 104,000 followers on Facebook, and some of her podcast episodes on Rumble draw 20,000 listens, a high performance for podcasts. On her show, she discusses Q ideas and has interviewed Patel.
In general, these Christian media figures consider the Epstein controversy a distraction from what they see as the massive success of Trump’s second term so far.
“While everyone is looking at that shiny thing … ‘the EPSTEIN FILES’— Trump is quietly draining the swamp!” tweeted Steve Shultz, a Christian influencer who founded the Elijah Streams (191,000 followers on Rumble), which shares Q theories about the deep state and the purge of corrupt elite.
“It’s crazy what Trump is getting done,” said Hayes in a February podcast with Mary Grace, talking about Trump “going through agencies in Washington and lighting them on fire.”
“It’s amazing,” chimed in Mary Grace.
“The deep state knew what Trump had planned for his first term in office,” Hayes continued. “They did a pretty good job of derailing his plans.”
Neumann, the former DHS official, said that Q followers see Trump’s dismantling of federal agencies as tied to the narrative about a deep state.
“It’s a conspiracy theory. [Federal workers] are scapegoats—normal, good people who have sacrificed a lot for their country,” she said. QAnon followers “have presented no evidence of a deep state. There are no examples they can point to.” After Trump being in power for a full term and now an additional six months, there’s “no evidence of a cabal that sacrifices children.”
Of QAnon influencers, Hayes stands out for sounding more reasonable. Though he explores conspiracy theories, he is skeptical of some of the wilder parts of the movement (for example, that Joe Biden winning the presidency was scripted to lead to Trump’s return).
When Patel posted on Truth Social that he was in the middle of having a beer with Q, Hayes was doubtful and said it was likely that Patel was just trying to market Truth Social as a platform.
Hayes did not return a request for comment.
After losing his X account, Hayes has now been reinstated and has 380,000 followers. He has a Telegram account with 116,000 followers, mostly for prayer requests and reports of dreams and miraculous healings. And he advertises Q books he wrote that are for sale on Amazon. In one post on X, Hayes described a dream about Elon Musk becoming a Christian.
Now Hayes and others are even hopeful that Q might return.
“I think there’s a 50-50 chance that Q might come back,” he said on his recent livestream. Q hasn’t posted regularly since 2020. “Q could help people understand.”
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