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Notes -
There are simple ways to protect against this threat if the threat were plausible. You could mandate that everything must be judged exclusively by Christ’s words and deeds as handed down unchanged for many centuries in the Christian gospel (with the apostles in a very far second place, never overruling Christ). This means that the standard of behavior can’t be changed. You can enact a “majority rule” vote decision, if any teachings needed to be changed. You could mandate that they must be married with children and have their children attend the religious schooling — meaning anything that harms the religion now harms their children. And so on.
In real life, people’s behaviors are motivated by rewards. This sleeper agent needs a genuine compelling reason to “take over the community”, such that they bear the discomfort of helping members of the community selflessly for decades for a small chance of taking over the community. Every time he helps someone he hates, he will be demoralized, while his virtuous counterpart is moralized. The virtuous counterpart enjoys pure cognitive efficiency, whereas the vicious one needs to constantly double-think everything he does. At the same time, the sleeper agent will be spending many hours a week being propagandized into loving Christ, which may involve persuasive arguments. At best, all of those hours are spent in discomfort; at worst, he is persuaded into virtuous behavior.
This is kind of like saying that an evil person who hates SpaceX will join SpaceX in an attempt to subvert it. SpaceX easily filters for people who genuinely care about the mission: they are made to work on it with their whole mind and heart and strength, to participate in “all night vigils” where they work on their project. A hater is less likely to be able to do all of this, because every aspect of it lacks the feedback loop of motivating reinforcement. Yet unlike SpaceX, Christianity involves rituals for propagandizing the faith, with music and poetry and spectacle and drama and stories.
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