ESSAY
Secrecy and Visibility
POSTED
August 28, 2025

In 2004, an article by Slavoj Žižek appeared in Psychoanalytic Review entitled, ‘What Can Psychoanalysis Tell Us About Cyberspace?’ One of the answers that Žižek offers is that cyberspace creates an environment within which the consumer gets to play in a world where there is no God. In his use of Lacanian terms, it is devoid of the Big Other. It is an environment within which one believes the illusion that the traces of one’s actions vanish soon after the action is completed.

The great benefit of all play is that, for the most part, it is consequence-less. What this illusion of consequence-less action breeds is a kind of epistemological voyeurism. The thrill connected with this newborn opportunity for inquiry is directly related to the structure of reality having “no-go zones.” Prohibition fuels a great deal of online activity, especially for those who believe that some rooms in the house are forbidden. This is why Žižek has elsewhere described pornography as a conservative genre. The so-called “fun of it” depends on its being out of bounds. It is stolen waters that are sweet to the rebel (Proverbs 9:17). This also helps us understand why conspiracy theories are primarily a conservative problem.

But the greater threat is not simply the consumption of sinful content or the viewing of things that ought not be placed before the eyes of the righteous. This is a problem, but the greater problem is the formative effect that epistemological voyeurism has on one’s hermeneutical ability to interpret reality. Thankfully, the Scriptures are not silent on this issue. In the end, public worship of the living God will be the greatest antidote available to the person disoriented by secret inquiry:

For the Lord spoke thus to me with a strong hand, and instructed me that I should not walk in the way of this people, saying: “Do not say, ‘A conspiracy,’ Concerning all that this people call a conspiracy, Nor be afraid of their threats, nor be troubled. The Lord of hosts, Him you shall hallow; Let Him be your fear, And let Him be your dread (Isaiah 8:11–13).

Etymologically speaking, a secretary is a keeper of secrets. In light of this, the online porn addict and conspiracy theorist is a kind of cyber-secretary. And of the formulating of conspiracies there will be no end. The first thing that Scripture shows us is that the whisperings of secrecy propel fear, a fear that is forbidden for the righteous. This is not to say that the conspiracies lack consistent correspondence to reality. Some conspiracies are truly afoot, but as soon as the righteous acknowledge the fear factor of the conspiracy, the faith of the believer is displaced. There is much more on the line than the mere threat of disinformation. The greatest threat is the relocation of faith. The cyber-secretary that has eaten the apple of conspiracy has come to believe that the threat is not only real but worth fearing.

The cyber-secretary is larping as a Marxist.

One of the most common things that takes place in the disorienting environment of cyberspace is that the cyber-secretary begins to disbelieve the validity of the God-ordained categories of reality. Žižek talks about it as the discovery that the forbidden should have never been taken as seriously as the forbiddance suggested. Once a person has the mystery of the forbidden revealed, the attraction disappears.1 For the conspiracy theorist, in a similar manner, it necessarily denigrates all visible points of authority and power. Since forbidden sexual pleasure becomes normal to the cyber-secretary and subsequently loses the mystique of the forbidden, so power and authority become stripped, in a way, and thereby lose the mystique of reverence.

What the cyber-secretary doesn’t understand is that, like our first parents, his acquisition of knowledge through disobedience rather than through obedience frames not only the knowledge acquired but the nature with which he receives the knowledge. All forbidden sex becomes normal over time, and all authority undergoes a similar strip-tease that reveals the authority as being something unworthy of the reverence required for it by God. Unbeknownst to him, the cyber-secretary has acquired something like a Marxist critique as his operating system. Give him 20 minutes on the internet and he can get the clothes off of any emperor and show you just how wrong the world has been to have ever treated him like a respectable lady. In many ways, these edges bleed not only into a Gnostic understanding of reality, but worse.

The cyber-secretary is larping as a Satanist.

At the heart of the problem of secrecy is the attack it brings on the sovereignty of God. A cartography of secondary principles becomes so elaborate that one is tempted to forget that there is anything above the map of all things secondary. Somewhere at the top of the genus and species chart, far above the Council on Foreign Relations, land patents, and Epstein’s island, perches the prime genus: the Prince of Darkness.

Listen to the words of Rousas Rushdoony:

Many people, who believe that they represent true righteousness, are still Satanists, because they firmly believe that the past, present, and future are controlled by a secret cabal of Jews, Germans, international bankers, secret societies, or other similar groups of conspirators. To recognize the existence of some conspiracies is one thing. To ascribe to conspiracies the power to determine history is another thing: it is blasphemy. The Biblical faith is that man’s conspiracies are a “vain thing” because God absolutely predestines and governs all history…All history, including its conspiracies, move entirely in terms of God’s purposes.2

Neither conspiracies nor cyberspace are going away, at least not yet. Thankfully, the Scriptures are clear that the Christian answer is to practice anti-secrecy in the pattern of Jesus’s public visibility. His critics expected him to have an esoteric core to his doctrine. Jesus responds with a reminder that His teaching has been public and accessible.

The high priest then asked Jesus of his disciples, and of his doctrine. Jesus answered him, I spake openly to the world; I ever taught in the synagogue, and in the temple, whither the Jews always resort; and in secret have I said nothing. Why askest thou me? ask them which heard me, what I have said unto them: behold, they know what I said (John 18:19–20).

Jesus’ “open ministry” means that what he does can be seen by all. Gary North sets out this simple but important principle:

Jesus’ answer to the Pharisees proclaimed a fundamental principle of biblical organization: the open ministry. Jesus presented His whole message publicly. He spoke in parables, of course, but these only illustrated general principles. The parables did not establish some sort of secret conspiracy. He gave His disciples no program of secret initiation, no recruiting system based on something other than profession of faith in Christ and service to others. His told His opponents that they would be wasting their time to go hunting for secret messages or hidden codes in His public proclamations. Every principle in His message came from the Old Testament, which was a public document in Israel. This organizational principle places the church in opposition to numerous secret societies.3

Public worship of the living God will be the greatest antidote available to the person disoriented by secret inquiry. A practiced and visible worship of God is the foundation for victory over an online porn addiction. A public liturgical presence is the undoing of secrecy’s power to bind. There is a way out of the Hotel California, but it is not furtively crawling through the air conditioning ducts on one’s own; it is in the great procession of the covenant people of God, marching in the clear light of day, visibly proclaiming the greatness of our God and of the Lamb while the walls of the Hotel collapse at the sounds of the trumpets. Openly worshipping the true King will not only re-orient the cyber-secretary into accordance with the God-ordained structures of reality; it will drop the scales from his eyes, allowing him to see that the secret things belong to God.


Garrett Soucy lives in Maine with his wife and nine children where he is the pastor of Christ the King Church. He is also a writer and musician.

  1. Slavoj Žižek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, directed by Sophie Fiennes (Zeitgeist Films, 2006), approx. 26:40–29:00. ↩︎
  2. Rousas John Rushdoony, The Politics of Guilt and Pity (Oregon City: Ross House Books, 1984). ↩︎
  3. Gary North, Conspiracy: A Biblical View (Oregon City: Dominion Press, 1996). ↩︎
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