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Knights often conclude that the loss of one of the four light bulbs must be the result of an attack on the bulb by outside forces. Often Knights assert that these attacking outside forces are motivated by self-interest or have been deceived by Satan or a malevolent ideology designed to destroy society.

Knights conclude that nothing is wrong with the device—after all, God created it perfectly—therefore outside forces must have broken the bulb’s connection to its electrical power source. In response, some Knights remove the bulb and probe the socket with pliers. But since the divine “electricity” cannot be turned off, these efforts to restore the connection can shock the user and short out the rest of the bulbs—and the religion’s credibility.

For example, the two bulbs most important to Knights—the cosmological and societal—have largely gone dark in American Christianity today. As a result, fundamentalist Christian Knights have gone to great lengths to repair or defend those dead bulbs. Those efforts, however, can make Christians—and Christianity—appear ludicrous to secular American society.

• A group of fundamentalist Christian Knights, “Answers in Genesis,” resist American society’s use of the theory of evolution to understand natural history. The organization has founded the “Creation Museum” to argue that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. To do this, the museum includes displays of dinosaurs wearing saddles for human riders.

• Some conservative Christian Knights, in an effort to restore the societal bulb (or rather, the taboo on premarital sex) call on unmarried believers to resist all sexual urges, including toward masturbation, in books like Every Young Man’s Battle and programs like “True Love Waits” which requires a pledge of sexual abstinence until marriage.

• Some Christian Knights opposition to divorce and homosexual marriage are efforts to defend or revive the failing societal bulb that represented the heterosexual, nuclear family.