How to lead a ‘conspiracy theory’ session with your youth group (part 2)

Earlier this year my zoom-group ran a ‘conspiracy theory night’ with our young people. It was lots of fun!

If you’ve read Part 1 of this blog series, you’ll know that I’m concerned about the level of adult noise around conspiracy theories today, and just how unhelpful they are for our developing young people.

Not only can a session on conspiracy theories with your group be super fun, but it can also give them some tools to think critically, grow resilience, and provide some relief that not everyone is actually out to get them!

What do you want to get out of the session?

There are a number of ‘wins’ for a session like this. Here’s the few that I really wanted to happen:

• A safe place created for young people to bring up theories they have heard and are worried about.
• A chance to demonstrate how to think critically about things they see and read online, building resilient skills.
• A place to show how to love and respect someone (including parents) without agreeing with everything they say, building resilient relationships.
• A chance to differentiate between conspiracy and mystery – bringing it back to the gospel.

The tone

A night like this needs to begin light, informal, and fun, and it needs to move people through a feeling of safety and enjoyment, to sympathy, to eventually empathy, with the ability to look at issues more objectively.

As this is developing, we should hold in tension that some young people (or more likely people in their family) might believe in one or more of the theories we were going to talk about. Because of this we decided to use a few more short (<2min) video clips and ask more open questions than we might usually have done. This approach creates space, and provides more passive reflection times.

For us then, we began with lots a laughter and fun, but then tried to find common threads that show how even the most outlandish-seeming conspiracy theorists are real people needing love and grace – and might not be all that different to us. From this we looked at ideas of self-care, critical thinking, and bought it back to the gospel.

How we ran it

We had a group of maybe fifteen young people, a few adult leaders, and some student leaders. We advertised it in the week with some OTT videos and pictures. The point here was to start with conspiracy theories that were so ridiculous that no one was going to begin by getting offended. We put out videos and pictures saying Pixar, Disney, and Dreamworks were in cahoots to eat our souls! Here’s one of those pictures:

Here’s the order from the night:

• We began with a quick clip from the Simpsons and asked the big open question ‘what is a conspiracy theory?’
• We had a second funny clip from a British comedian on his favorite conspiracy theories, followed by the question, ‘what others have your heard / do you know about’?
• I gave a list of some of my favorite conspiracy theories including:
  • Paul McCartney died in 1966 – but the Beatles kept it a secret with a body double and sound-alike.
  • Medicine companies and trying to make you sick so you will… wait for it… buy more medicines!
  • Elvis Presley is still alive and is now 81 years old.
  • Aliens helped to build Stonehenge.
  • Prince Charles is a vampire.
  • Finland doesn’t actually exist – it’s a fictional country made up by Russia and Japan.
  • Megham Markle is actually a robot – because she doesn’t blink enough.
• Third clip, this time from a rocket builder who believes in the flat earth conspiracy. We asked what they knew and thought about that theory, what it would mean if true, and why is such a theory attractive.
• Final clip, from a TV physicist, talking about the moon landing conspiracy theory. This led us onto questions around what it would really take for some of these conspiracy theories to actually be true.
• We moved into what I like to call ‘moment of honesty’ time, asking two questions: 1) ‘Are there any conspiracy theories that you’d love to be true?’ 2) ‘If you were being super-honest, are there any that you kinda think might be true?’ I shared my secret soft spot for the existence of big foot and megladon!
• We then asked a few questions to generate discussion, such as ‘Why do people love them/want them/need them?’ I then shared some other reasons including:
  • Make people feel safe & in control.
  • We all love gossip a bit more than we should.
  • Gives them someone to blame/somewhere to redirect feelings of anger and hurt.
  • We all love a good mystery.
• Then came the big question – ‘don’t Christians sometimes look like conspiracy theorists? Why?’
• This was followed by a longer time in breakout groups brainstorming answers to the question – ‘How can we share Jesus without looking nuts?’
• We fed back then asked why is the gospel called ‘a mystery’? Looked at Eph. 3:1-6.
• I shared some final thoughts about the gospel being enough without needing padding, and how Christians often look weird simply because they try to pad the gospel.
• We had a camera off mediation to the song ‘Indescribable’ using this words-on-screen video.
• We ended with a mixture of Q&A, hanging out, and prayer

Photo by JOSHUA COLEMAN on Unsplash