What do you think? Is this whole QAnon conspiracy thing important or not? And should mainstream evangelical leaders be concerned?

That was the messy topic that “Crossroads” host Todd Wilken and I discussed in this week’s podcast (click here to tune that in). Looming in the background were some Twitter debates in which several people criticized my recent GetReligion post that ran with this headline: “The Atlantic probes QAnon sect and finds (#shocking) another evangelical-ish conspiracy.”

Let’s review a few things that I said in that earlier post. For starters, I do plead guilty to saying that some folks on the cultural left are a bit too fond of conspiracy theories involving scary evangelicals. Here’s how I stated that, while taking a shot at fringe folks on the right, as well:

It’s almost as if evangelicals are playing, for some strategic minds on the left, the same sick, oversized role in American life that some evangelicals assign to Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Bill Gates and all those liberal Southern Baptist intellectuals who love Johnny Cash and Jane Austen.

I was reacting to that recent “The Prophecies of Q” at The Atlantic, part of a larger “Shadowland” package about the growing importance of conspiracy theories in American politics.

Now, I think this Atlantic material is must reading, in part because the QAnon phenomenon isn’t well known in the evangelical mainstream. There are run-of-the-mill evangelical leaders who need to know more about this dark-web stuff, just as they needed to know about the twisted religious elements in the larger alt-right. When it comes to technology and politics, this “Shadowlands” package breaks new ground.

Did I attack The Atlantic — a publication frequently praised at GetReligion — and tell people to ignore this topic? Did I say QAnon has nothing to do with the big, complex world of evangelicalism? Let’s see. Here is the end of my earlier piece.

Some 15 years ago I wrote a piece on anti-Semitism for an online Jewish publication that began as follows: “It is an irony of Jewish life that it took the Holocaust to give anti-Semitism a bad name. So widespread was international revulsion over the annihilation of six million Jews that following World War II anti-Semitism, even of the polite variety, became the hatred one dared not publicly express. But only for a time.”

Saturday’s synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh underscored how anti-Semitism is no longer the hatred one dares not publicly express — though that’s been obvious for some time to all who cared to recognize it. I've tried to make the point in numerous GetReligion posts.

The details of what happened in Pittsburg, on the Jewish Sabbath, are by now well known, thanks to the wall-to-wall coverage, much of it sympathetic, detailed and excellent — including their understanding of the Jewish religious and communal aspects.

The extensive coverage is entirely appropriate, I’d say. Because more than just a display of vicious anti-Semitism, what happened in Pittsburg was an American tragedy. It underscored how threatened the nation is today by our corrosive political environment.

That’s likely to continue, if not intensify, regardless of the outcome of next week’s midterm elections.

The coverage I’ve found most worthwhile has not been the breaking news stories, though the facts of the story are certainly critical. Instead, it's the "explainers" that have actually repeated what I've read over and over in Jewish, Israeli and even mainstream American and European media for years now. And which I believe is what the vast majority of self-aware diaspora Jews have long known and feared — that Pittsburgh was only a matter of time.

I highlight them here to underscore what I believe is a critical point. That Jews or any other minority can only be safe in a pluralistic society that tolerates — no, embraces — diversity, be it religious, ethnic, racial or opinion (the last within broad reason; no yelling fire in crowded theaters).

One news backgrounder I liked is this comprehensive story from The Washington Post that ran Sunday. Here’s its lede:

This is what they had long been fearing. As the threats increased, as the online abuse grew increasingly vicious, as the defacing of synagogues and community centers with swastikas became more commonplace, the possibility of a violent attack loomed over America’s Jewish communities.