A few weeks ago, I was having breakfast at a hotel in Memphis when a woman spotted the mystery book I was reading and commented on it. She’d read it too.

But that was about the only thing we had in common. She told me how she was moving to Washington, DC, for medical care. She was retired—previously, she’d worked for the government. And she was convinced that when she got to DC, Donald Trump was going to have her assassinated.

I was surprised, because she seemed to be a brilliant, funny, healthy person—not someone I would’ve pegged to believe conspiracy theories. But I’m sure the news and social media circles she was caught in were feeding her information that scared her half to death.

As Christians, we know sin is threaded through every part of our world. We don’t want to be foolishly naive. Sometimes conspiracies are true.

But neither do we want to become what Sean DeMars calls “conspiracy thinkers,” looking for ulterior motives or secret messaging from every authority, including in the church.

“This is why healthy, transparent leadership matters so much,” he writes.

As far as it depends on us, let’s help create a culture—in the country and in our churches—where “conspiracy thinking fizzles out, like a fire starved of oxygen, unable to catch or spread.”