Bolin didn’t seem burdened knowing that so many people were relying upon him to do the heavy lifting of discernment of their behalf. Many of the backwater websites and podcasts to which the pastor attributed his commentaries were the same ones cited to me by people from his church. FloodGate had become a circular food chain of misinformation. In a sense, Christians have always lived a different epistemological existence than nonbelievers. But this was something new. Something decidedly nonessential.
At one point, I showed Bolin a Facebook post he had written months earlier: “I’m still wondering how 154,000,000 votes were counted in a country where there are only 133,000,000 registered voters.” This was posted to his page, I told him, well after the U.S. Census Bureau had published data showing that more than 168 million Americans were registered to vote in 202. A quick Google search would have given Bolin the accurate numbers.
“Yeah, that’s one I regret,” he said, explaining that he subsequently learned that the numbers he’d posted were incorrect. (The post was still active. Bolin texted me the following day saying he’d deleted it.)
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