Off the Edge by Kelly Weill

Author:Kelly Weill
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

6 | Alone in a Flat World

Something was wrong, and Nate Wolfe had a pretty good idea what. His sermon wasn’t until Sunday, but early on a Friday morning, he received a text summoning him to church. Immediately, please.

Wolfe, a pastor, lived only a mile from his church in the suburbs of Toledo, Ohio. He’d moved his whole family cross-country for the job seven years earlier. The insular church community was his world—his “fishbowl,” he described it. But minutes after arriving that Friday morning, Wolfe became a fish out of water. Church elders sat him down and summarily fired him.

“They didn’t want any discussion,” he told me. “They just slid a piece of paper across the table to me and said, ‘We can’t have a member with this kind of association.’ ”

That embarrassing association was Wolfe’s Flat Earth belief, which he’d kept under wraps in order to avoid this kind of situation. He’d been full-on Flat for a year, ever since he went to YouTube to research a sermon on the Great Flood and stumbled across YouTube videos promoting a “biblical” Flat Earth model. YouTube recommendations led him to Robbie Davidson’s channel, and eventually, in 2018, to Take On The World, a Christian Flat Earth conference an hour from Wolfe’s home. Wolfe left the conference with a new cohort of Flat Earth friends and a new conviction to live publicly as a Flat Earther. He made plans to broach the topic during an upcoming church leadership meeting. He was going to do it delicately, making a biblical argument for Flat Earth, in terms his fellow church leaders could understand, beginning with Genesis 1.

He never had a chance to perform his practiced lines. Church leadership discovered his Flat Earth belief when they learned he’d attended Take On The World.

A pastor giving an unexpected Flat Earth sermon would, without doubt, harm a congregation. The deeply polarizing theory has a way of setting people at odds with each other and drawing them into other fringe beliefs—no good for a house of worship. But often, as in Wolfe’s case, Flat Earthers are the biggest victims of their beliefs.

Wolfe’s sudden firing, he told me, was “traumatic.”

“My kids have grown up here,” he said. “The church was most of our family and close friends. When I got fired, there was only a handful, like literally four or five people out of two hundred, that reached out to us. Most of the other people, even those who didn’t reach out, had been our close friends at the church. It was just like, all of a sudden, we didn’t exist.”

Flat Earthers have divisions among themselves. Flat Earth Society members and the movement’s YouTube vanguard are at odds not just over outreach methods but also over differences in alternative gravitational theory. Some Flat Earthers believe the planet ends at an ice wall, while a smaller faction preaches an “infinite plane” model. Some Christian Flat Earthers will make antisemitic remarks about Jewish Flat Earthers completely unprompted. But almost universal in

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