When Tucker Carlson sat across from Nick Fuentes and let him speak without resistance, what followed was justifiable outrage, with all the predictable clips and think pieces that comprise another round of culture-war exhaustion.
Alongside the spectacle, something quieter was happening. Young men, those with no platform of their own, were listening—not because Fuentes is insightful (he isn’t), but because he speaks with the confidence of someone who claims to know the truth behind the curtain.
That’s the appeal. And the appeal isn’t unique to Fuentes. Spend five minutes on TikTok or Telegram, and you’ll hear young men swapping “hidden knowledge” about shadow elites, global cabals, secret networks, and World War III prophecies. You can even fall asleep to their murmurings.
Some of them are absurd. Some of them are wicked—especially the antisemitic sludge Christians must condemn without qualification. The deeper question is why any of it resonates at all.
The easy explanations are condescending: ignorance, gullibility, too much internet. These might comfort pundits, but they do nothing for pastors. The truth is more straightforward and, unfortunately, sadder. Young men are reaching for stories big enough to make sense of the world they inherited—a world where 9/11 shattered innocence, smartphones rewired childhood, institutions failed publicly, the pandemic disoriented everything, and politics turned into a circus of incompetence.
These men were raised inside a narrative vacuum. No shared history. No moral tradition thick enough to hold them in its embrace. No binding account of who we are, what we’re for, or why anything matters. When you take away the big story, people go searching for smaller ones.
And conspiracy theories offer a plot.
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Every conspiracy comes with the same cast: the villain (sometimes “the elites,” sometimes “the Jews”), the enlightened remnant who “really see,” and the prophet broadcasting from his bedroom at 2 a.m. It’s recycled Gnosticism with better microphones. Everyone else is asleep. You, however, are woke.
For young men who feel powerless, anonymous, and atomized, this lands like a revelation. The world feels hostile; conspiracies explain why. Life feels unfair; conspiracies tell you who to blame. Your private frustrations sharpen into purpose. You’re not drifting anymore; you’re decoding.
Oddly, this all gives me a bit of hope.
Not because conspiracies are good—they often aren’t—but because the longing beneath them is honest. Young men already assume the world is morally charged, spiritually contested, and shaped by invisible forces. They’re not materialists; they’re intuiting a dimension of reality that their inherited narratives never equipped them to name. They sense what Scripture has always said: The world is not purely material, not fully rational, and not finally explained by institutions or elections. Their mistake isn’t believing in a contested world. It’s misidentifying the villains.
“We do not wrestle against flesh and blood,” Paul writes, “but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness” (Eph. 6:12, ESV). Scripture names the real conspiracy—sin, death, and the Devil conspiring to deform creation—and then answers it with a counter-conspiracy stronger than darkness ever anticipated: God entering history in weakness to overthrow those enemies through love.
Isaiah lived in a version of the same uncertainty as ours. Surrounded by fear, rumor, and lies that masqueraded as clarity, he warned God’s people against mistaking the plot: “Do not call conspiracy everything this people calls a conspiracy. … [The Lord Almighty] is the one you are to fear” (Isa. 8:12–13). The prophet wasn’t denying invisible forces; he was redirecting trembling minds toward the only power actually steering history.
And the resolution arrives one chapter later, when Isaiah widens the lens and identifies the promised King: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given” (9:6). The Lord of Hosts, Isaiah suggests, isn’t a shadowy operator but a coming ruler whose authority is carried forward not through fear of hidden players but through trust in a publicly revealed ruler. The true threat was never hidden elites. The true King would never stay hidden.
C. S. Lewis wrote of Christianity as the true myth, the story that satisfies every human longing for meaning because it is—uniquely—both cosmic and concrete. You could just as easily call it the one true conspiracy theory—not because it trades in paranoia, but because it names both the unseen powers Scripture says are at work and the God who overrules them. It exposes evil without obsession and ends the plot not in resentment but in resurrection.
This is precisely where modern conspiracies collapse. They can reveal villains, but they cannot reveal a Savior. They sharpen suspicion, but they cannot bear the weight of hope. They hand you a plot with no path forward, no one to become. The Christmas story, by contrast, proves that God’s plot does move forward. And it moves you with it.
In A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Donald Miller describes his friend Jason, a father watching his teenage daughter drift toward a destructive crowd. Nothing worked—not rules, not lectures, not consequences. She wasn’t just disobedient; she had stepped into a story that felt thrilling, dramatic, and dangerous.
Jason figured he needed to give her a better one. So he signed their family up to help build an orphanage in Mexico. At first his daughter rolled her eyes. Then she asked questions. Then she started posting updates. Soon her bad-news boyfriend was gone, the habits loosened, and the old life simply fell away. Not because Jason confronted every issue but because his daughter had stepped into a bigger story, and the smaller one lost its power.
Zoomer men who are swept into conspiracies are living in a similar scenario. They’ve found a story buzzing with urgency that never asks them to become better men. They’ve inherited a cast of villains but never a calling. They’ve been handed a purpose-shaped emotion without a purpose-shaped life. What they need is what Jason’s daughter needed: a story that asks us to grow up and, subsequently, take up our cross.
That’s why we shouldn’t only despair over rising conspiracy thinking. We should also take heart. Jesus told us what to expect: “The harvest is plentiful.” (Matt. 9:37) Not hopeless. Not lost. Simply waiting for someone to sow better seeds and then reap what grows.
We won’t shepherd young men by mocking them out of conspiracies or coaxing them back into civility. We won’t fix this with better algorithms or more fact-checks. We won’t help by pretending the world is simple when they already know it isn’t.
Debunking alone won’t stop conspiracy theories. We have to out-story them.
Fortunately, Christians have been doing that for millennia. Ours is the only story bold enough to name the real enemies—sin, death, the Devil—and the only story strong enough to promise their defeat. It is the story where the King conquers by being crucified, where the grave isn’t the end, where resurrection is not a metaphor but a fact. It is the only narrative that doesn’t leave men in the dark but calls them into the light.
No basement broadcaster can match that. No “secret knowledge” guru can compete with a kingdom that has outlived empires. The gospel is still the biggest, truest, most demanding conspiracy theory on earth—and it remains the only one that can actually make men new.
Luke Simon is the codirector of student ministries at The Crossing in Columbia, Missouri, and an MDiv student at Covenant Theological Seminary. He has written on Gen Z, technology, masculinity, and the church. You can follow him on X.
