Belonging and Truth
A Christos Fellowship discussion essay on “Why Some People Will Believe Anything”
7 September 2026
Source Article: (When Belonging Becomes More Important Than Truth) by Cornell Overbeeke, MD, MS
The argument under discussion
The essay begins with a familiar puzzle. Intelligent, educated, decent people regularly defend propositions that look absurd, contradictory, or morally repugnant to anyone standing outside their circle. The author proposes that the puzzle dissolves once we drop a hidden assumption: that a belief’s main job is to describe reality. Beliefs do that, but they also do something else. They tell other people who we are. For some people, under some conditions, the second job crowds out the first.
The mechanism is built up in stages:
First, belief has a social function. Once a person cares about being accepted by a group, the question “Is this true?” is joined by “What must I believe to remain one of them?” The proposition becomes a badge. The author cites the conformity experiments in which participants gave obviously wrong answers about line lengths when everyone around them did, and he distinguishes following the crowd because the crowd may know something (informational influence) from following the crowd because dissent is costly (normative influence). The second kind does not require sincere agreement at the outset. It only requires that affirmation feel safer than questioning. Given time, the mind is skilled at manufacturing sincere reasons for conclusions it has strong incentives to reach.
Second, people differ in where their psychological authority sits. The inner-directed person carries something like a gyroscope; the other-directed person carries something like radar, constantly scanning for what is admired, what is embarrassing, what everyone thinks. Neither type is more intelligent than the other. Intelligence, in the author’s phrase, supplies the lawyer; it does not choose the client. The relevant variables are how much approval is worth, how painful rejection is, and how much of a person’s identity is drawn from membership.
Third, a group identity can become so central that it fuses with the self. At that point, a challenge to a group-defining belief is no longer heard as “your idea is wrong,” but as “your people are wrong,” and finally “you are wrong, you do not belong.” Evidence has acquired an enemy.
Fourth, and most striking, the beliefs that bind a group most tightly are often not its most plausible ones. Affirming something everyone already accepts proves nothing. Affirming something outsiders find hard to swallow is costly, and costly affirmation signals loyalty. The strange proposition works as a password. The author notes that creeds, oaths, initiations, and shared vocabularies are not inherently pathological; they are part of how any community is constructed. The danger begins when affirmation becomes the supreme virtue and questioning becomes treason.
Fifth, loyalty can capture moral perception itself. The same act is read differently depending on who performs it: an enemy’s failure proves incompetence, an ally’s failure proves impossible circumstances; an enemy’s cruelty proves wickedness, an ally’s cruelty was regrettable but necessary. The frightening possibility is not that such a person has no morality, but that loyalty has become the rule by which morality is applied.
Sixth, fanaticism is often a solution to doubt rather than an expression of certainty. Reality is ambiguous, and the honest answer to many questions is “I don’t know.” Tribal belief offers relief: approved explanations, approved vocabulary, trusted and distrusted authorities, and above all other people standing beside you. This is why refuting the fanatic’s argument so often fails. He is not defending an argument. He is defending his home.
The essay closes with a warning against the comfortable conclusion. Nearly everyone has tribal loyalties, wants approval, and reasons more generously about friends than enemies. Autonomy requires something more painful than intelligence: the willingness to lose. To lose a cherished opinion, to admit an enemy was right, to endure the disappointment of friends. The autonomous mind can tolerate loneliness, and that is its terrible advantage. The person who “will believe anything” believes something quite specific: whatever he must believe to remain one of us.
Why this belongs in a fellowship
A group of Christians reading this essay is in an awkward position, and the awkwardness is the point. The fellowship is a group. It has a creed. Its members affirm propositions that outsiders find hard to accept (the Bible is God’s inspired Word and speaks of the truth of the birth, righteous life, undeserved grace), and they draw comfort and identity from one another. Every mechanism the author describes is available to it. The question is not whether the fellowship is exposed to the dynamic but whether it has any resources against it.
It does, and they are older than the psychology.
The clearest statement of the author’s thesis in Scripture is not a warning against unbelief. It describes belief that stayed silent. John records that many among the rulers believed in Jesus, but because of the Pharisees they would not confess him, lest they be put out of the synagogue, because they loved the approval of men more than the approval of God. That is normative social influence, identity fusion, and the loyalty test in a single sentence, written about educated religious men nineteen centuries before the line-length experiments. The problem was not a lack of evidence. They had it. The problem was that confession carried a social cost, and they were unwilling to pay it.
The counter-example is just as clear. Micaiah stood before two kings and four hundred prophets who had unanimously prophesied victory, and when the messenger urged him to make his word agree with theirs, he answered that he would say what the Lord said to him. He was struck, imprisoned, and, as far as the record tells us, never vindicated in his own lifetime. That is the willingness to lose, exercised against the exact pressure the author describes: unanimity, authority, and the assurance that everyone like you already agrees.
Paul’s instruction not to be conformed to this world but transformed by the renewing of the mind is usually read as a warning against worldliness in the sense of vice. Read alongside this essay, it says something sharper. Conformity is a shape the mind takes, and the world will press that shape on it through the ordinary desire to belong. The alternative is not contrarianism, which is only conformity with the sign reversed, but a mind whose authority has been relocated. In the author’s metaphor, the gyroscope has to be set to something.
The creed problem
The author’s observation about costly beliefs deserves careful handling, because on its face it argues against creeds, and the fellowship has one.
The observation is that a hard-to-believe proposition makes an effective loyalty marker precisely because it is hard to believe. Christian confession includes propositions that outsiders find difficult: a crucified man raised bodily, a God who is three and one. Is the creed, then, a password?
Two things need to be separated. A proposition can be both hard for outsiders to accept and true. The difficulty of a claim is not evidence against it, any more than the ease of a claim is evidence for it. The author does not say otherwise; his point is about the social use a group makes of difficulty, not about the truth value of difficult claims. The test he proposes is whether questioning the proposition is treated as inquiry or as disloyalty.
That test can be applied. The apostolic writings themselves invite it. Paul tells the Corinthians that if Christ has not been raised, their faith is vain and they are of all men most to be pitied. That is not the language of a password. A password is not supposed to be falsifiable; it is supposed to be affirmed. A man who says “if this is false, we are fools” has staked the community on a truth claim and invited the question. The Bereans were commended for searching the Scriptures to see whether what Paul said was so. On the author’s own terms, the difference between a creed and a password is whether the community permits and honors the search.
The fellowship should therefore hold its confession the way the apostles held it: as a claim about what happened, open to the question “Is it true?”, and not as a badge whose function is to sort the faithful from the uncommitted. The moment “I believe this because I am one of you” replaces “I believe this because it is so,” the creed has become the thing the author warns about, and no amount of orthodoxy in its content will save it.
Loyalty and moral perception
The section on moral disengagement is the one most likely to be read as being about other people. That reading should be resisted.
The pattern the author describes, in which the same act is judged by who performs it, is not confined to political tribes. It appears wherever people take sides. A congregation can excuse in its own leadership what it condemns in another’s. A movement can describe its opponents’ methods as manipulation and its own identical methods as strategy. A fellowship can hold an outsider’s claim to a standard of evidence it never applies to a claim made from inside the circle.
The author’s diagnosis is asymmetry: microscopic suspicion toward the other tribe, scarcely a question toward one’s own. This is a usable test. A member can ask himself whether he would accept a given argument, or a given piece of evidence, if it came from someone he distrusted. If the answer is no, the belief is held on loyalty rather than truth, and the fact that the belief may happen to be correct does not change what holds it.
Scripture gives the same test in a harder form. Nathan told David a story about a rich man who took a poor man’s lamb, and David, judging the act with no idea who had performed it, pronounced the man worthy of death. Then Nathan told him who it was. The story works because David’s moral perception was intact right up to the moment loyalty, in this case to himself, would have engaged. The parable bypassed the loyalty. That is what the author means by the frightening possibility that loyalty becomes the principle by which morality is applied, and it is what the prophet meant by “thou art the man.”
Fanaticism and the tolerance of not knowing
The author’s account of fanaticism as relief from doubt bears on how a fellowship talks.
A community that cannot say “I don’t know” will manufacture certainty, and manufactured certainty has to be defended by volume and by solidarity rather than by evidence. The observation that the loudest voice is not necessarily the most certain is consistent with a good deal of pastoral experience. The person who cannot bear a question is often the person for whom the question has already gained a foothold.
The Christian faith does not require eliminating uncertainty. It requires trust in a person, and trust is what one exercises precisely where one does not have full sight. The father who said “I believe; help my unbelief” was not rebuked. Job’s friends, who had an approved explanation for everything, were. A fellowship in which members can say “I don’t know” without losing standing has removed one of the main pressures the author identifies, because it no longer needs the tribe to supply what honest inquiry cannot.
This also bears on how the fellowship treats the person who is wrong. If refuting an argument feels to its holder like an attack on his home, then argument alone will rarely move him, and this is true of members as much as of outsiders. What moves him, if anything does, is the discovery that he can change his mind and still have a home. A community that makes belonging contingent on affirmation has made itself unable to correct anyone, because correction and expulsion have become the same thing.
Autonomy and the willingness to lose
The essay’s conclusion, that autonomy requires the willingness to lose, is where it comes closest to the gospel without naming it.
The author lists what autonomy may cost: a cherished opinion, the satisfaction of having been right, the approval of friends, one’s place inside a circle one wished to remain in. He observes that the autonomous mind’s advantage is that it can tolerate loneliness. He does not say where such tolerance comes from, and the essay, being psychological, is not obliged to.
The Christian answer is that the willingness to lose is not a temperament some people happen to have. It is the condition of discipleship. Whoever would save his life will lose it. If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself. Jesus warned that a man’s enemies would be those of his own household and that his followers would be put out of the synagogues, and then go to a death in which he was abandoned by every human circle to which he belonged. The cross is, among other things, the willingness to lose belonging for the sake of truth carried to its limit.
This reframes the author’s loneliness. The autonomous mind, as he describes it, tolerates loneliness by strength of character. The disciple tolerates it because, in the final analysis, he is not alone; his gyroscope is set to a person who has already stood outside every circle. That is what allows a man to be inner-directed without being merely self-directed, which is the distinction the author’s metaphor leaves open. A gyroscope set to the self is only a smaller tribe.
The warning against contrarianism belongs here too. Standing alone is not a virtue in itself, and a person can make a badge of dissent as easily as of conformity. The author’s test still applies: is the dissenting belief being held because it is true, or because it identifies the dissenter as a certain kind of person? The contrarian who needs to be against the crowd is as other-directed as the conformist who needs to be with it. He has simply reversed the reading on his radar.
Questions for the fellowship
The essay leaves the fellowship with questions to ask itself rather than others.
Whether members are free to question the group’s shared views, including its views on matters outside the creed, without a cost to their standing. Whether the group applies the same evidentiary standard to claims made from inside as to claims made from outside. Whether members can say “I don’t know” and be left alone. Whether a member who changed his mind on a contested matter would still have a home. Whether the fellowship’s confession is a truth claim open to the Berean search or a marker of who belongs. Whether the group has any belief it would be unwilling to lose even if shown to be false, and if so, what that belief is doing.
None of these has an obvious answer. The author’s closing caution applies to the fellowship as much as to anyone: the temptation is to divide mankind into conformists and independent thinkers and place oneself among the latter. The better response is to accept that the dynamic he describes is operating on everyone in the room, and to build a community in which belonging does not require anyone to lie. That is a harder thing to build than a tribe, and it is the only kind of fellowship that can be trusted with the truth.