The Great Con

Alexis Conran is a professional deceiver. Well, at least, he was - as a former magician and then a trained actor, he built his entire career off of making you believe something that wasn’t true. Today he works with organizations like IBM, VISA, Halifax, and others, with the express goal of helping leaders and employees protect themselves against scams and cons. In his training, he informs his clients that there are four main arenas in which cons are common: magic, scams, sales, and politics. And in every arena, the goal is always the same: sell a story. It can be the story that the card you placed back into the deck was in my own pocket all along; it can be the story that you really do need to wire money to a particular account in order to cover that last bit you owe in taxes; it can be the story that, with one more purchase of that shampoo or that beer or that car you will really be happy and content; or it can simply be the story that the opposing party hates you and they long to take away all your rights. It’s all about the story we believe, the pressure put on us to believe it, and the social compliance that compels us to do so - that is, if everyone else is falling in line, I guess I will too.

The result, Conran says, is a world that is constantly conning you. It’s as if the world, collectively, is in it together, formulating The Great Con: an elaborate and multifaceted story that convinces us that certain things are true about ourselves, our purpose, others, and God. Whether it’s the notion that God is indifferent, or that Free Speech Is Good Speech, or that The Ends Justify The Means - over and over again we are being conned into believing stories. But this isn’t a new dynamic - it’s been happening for as long as humans have been around. And James, our New Testament letter–likely written by the half-brother of Jesus Himself–was written to the earliest Christian communities to address all sorts of cons that their own culture sold them. Under the banner of The Great Con, we will explore James together through the rest of the Summer, examining the ways in which his words in the first century speak to our own cons today.