Dragons, Conspiracies, and the Suspension of Disbelief

What happens when believing in the unbelievable goes haywire?

Credit: Carlos Amato/New Frame

About a year before we moved to the island where we currently reside, we lived in Fuquay Varina, a small town outside Raleigh, North Carolina. I’d recently started writing for a capital markets research firm, and my wife had a “real job” managing a Williams Sonoma in Raleigh. 

We got lucky — we found a lovely house on a quiet street. Our neighbors had children the same age as ours — one family even had a backyard trampoline. My wife and I carpooled our kids to school with the family across the street. But unlike the neighborhood we left behind in Edgewater, New Jersey, filled with people from around the world, our biracial family was the only non-white family on the block. 

Despite the homogeneity, our kids made new friends, and our adult neighbors seemed friendly. But after a few weeks, we realized we lived in an entire neighborhood of evangelical Christians. Our first clue was when the guy across the street invited me to his church within a couple of minutes of meeting me. 

Most of our neighbors homeschooled their children, injecting a dose of religion into their children’s educational curriculum. Their religious schooling led to spats with our kids over basic science. Once, several neighborhood kids ganged up on our two children for believing the Big Bang Theory. 

Few, if any, adults on our block drank alcohol. My wife and I discovered this at the first neighborhood cookout we attended. When we popped out the alcoholic beverages in our cooler, we got side-eyed looks as though we were a pair of skid row bums. 

Strange as it may seem, my wife and I liked where we lived. The quality of life was excellent. A neighborhood of no-drinking, homeschooling, church-going conservatives was a trade-off we were willing to make. Then something crazy happened. 

I worked from home, so I got to attend a neighborhood birthday party now and then. Most of the time, I was the only dad there. On one of these occasions, as I enjoyed a slice of pizza and Diet Coke, I overheard the following exchange between two moms:

MOM #1: “The other day Tommy (not his real name) asked me where dragons came from.”

MOM #2: “Oh really, what did you tell him?”

My ears perked up, honing in on the conversation. But what should’ve been a simple reply, something like, “I explained to Tommy that dragons aren’t real,” went in a direction I didn’t anticipate. 

MOM #1: “I didn’t know what to tell him, so I got in touch with my pastor and asked him what I should say.”

I’d never heard anything like this before. Why would a childish question about dragons require a religious consultation? Using all the self-control I could muster, I listened covertly as the two women continued their conversation:

MOM #1: “He (her pastor) said I should just explain to Tommy that a long, long time ago, when people saw dinosaurs, that’s where the stories about dragons came from. They were just trying to understand what they were seeing.” 

MOM #2: “Good answer.”

I was shook. I’d just heard a grown-ass parent connect dragons, which do not exist, to a bonkers world in which dinosaurs coexisted with people. Even more bananas, she got this theory from her pastor. It was as if she could not explain the non-existence of dragons to her child. And what about the pastor? Either he did not know dinosaurs were extinct sixty-five million years before humans walked the earth, or he knew this fact and didn’t accept the science. 

As I listened to this back and forth, I wondered if I was the target of one of those practical joke reality shows. I spent the next several hours trying to wrap my mind around what I’d overheard. How, I asked myself, could anyone believe something so objectively false? I didn’t know it at the time, but this incident was a sign of things to come. 

Last December, a month before the 1/6 insurrection, I wrote about how Trump’s coup attempt used many of the same techniques found in professional wrestling. Wrestling insiders refer to this phenomenon as kayfabe. 

Trump's Coup Attempt is Ripped Straight from Pro-Wrestling's Playbook

In pro wrestling, kayfabe relies on what is known as “the suspension of disbelief,” which Merriam-Webster defines as allowing “oneself to believe that something is true even though it seems impossible,” or believing “things that cannot be true.” It’s what causes some people to convince themselves pro wrestling is real. 

In everyday life, we deploy the abandonment of critical thinking when reading George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones or watching a movie from Marvel’s cinematic universe. We let our imaginations run free, but we know the plotline isn’t reality. On the other hand, suspension of disbelief accounts for why white evangelicals, 84 percent of whom supported Trump in 2020, buy into election fraud claims so easily or embrace anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary.

Source: Public Religion Research Institute

According to an analysis published by the Public Religion Research Institute, over 60 percent of white evangelical Christians, more than any religious group surveyed, believe Joe Biden stole the 2020 presidential election. It should be no surprise that so many white evangelicals fell for Trump’s Big Lie. As Bobby Azarian, a cognitive neuroscientist and a science journalist affiliated with George Mason University, writes, their suppression of critical thinking begins at an early age:

For Christian fundamentalists, being taught to suppress critical thinking begins at a very early age. It is the combination of the brain’s vulnerability to believing unsupported facts and aggressive indoctrination that create the perfect storm for gullibility. Due to the brain’s neuroplasticity, or ability to be sculpted by lived experiences, evangelicals literally become hardwired to believe far-fetched statements. 

This wiring begins when they are first taught to accept Biblical stories not as metaphors for living life practically and purposefully, but as objective truth. Mystical explanations for natural events train young minds to not demand evidence for beliefs. As a result, the neural pathways that promote healthy skepticism and rational thought are not properly developed. This inevitably leads to a greater susceptibility to lying and gaslighting by manipulative politicians, and greater suggestibility in general.

Indeed, the inability to separate fact from fiction — or truth from lies — makes evangelicals susceptible to the lying and gaslighting that is the calling card of the MAGA movement. Their suspension of disbelief explains why as many as 45 percent of evangelicals have no intention of receiving a COVID-19 vaccination. It also explains why my neighbor listened to her pastor when he told her dragons were really dinosaurs, and dinosaurs walked the earth together with humans.