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Conspiracy theory

25 April 2023

8 min read

The theological paranoia driving conspiracy theory among Christians

There are moral and political consequences to conspiracy theories, especially among Christians. Jared Stacy probes the theological paranoia that underpins many of them.

Jared Stacy

Jared holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

a group of protestors holding placards walk down a city street.

A QAnon placard held aloft at the 2020 Stand Up X Rally in London.

Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash.

From the very beginning, the church has contended with a conspiracy theory about its central claim – that Jesus rose from the dead. Philosopher MRX Dentith says a conspiracy theory can be any interpretation of an event which cites a conspiracy as a chief cause. Of course, it’s more complex than this. Conspiracy theories today have moral and political consequences. They also carry social stigma. But, at least in this limited way, you can see how Christianity and conspiracy theory have always related to one another.

The church’s earliest witness to the resurrection emerged alongside a counter-narrative that claimed his disciples stole the body. In other words, a conspiracy theory. Gospel writer Matthew explains how the chief priests paid off the Roman guards, who were keeping an eye on the tomb of Jesus, with a story. The story seemed legitimate because people trusted the authority of the priesthood. This proved to be a potent connection. Some 40-70 years later, Matthew tells his readers, “so they took the money and did as they were directed; and this story has been spread among the Jews to this day.” This dynamic repays careful consideration as conspiracy theories take root in Christian communities today.

Ceding the secular criticism

It’s not hard to sympathize with those who are critical about a perceived link between a Christian imagination and a commitment to conspiracism which, in turn, breeds political extremism. Sociologically, research continues to confirm this link. But I’ve also heard it expressed like this. “If you actually believe that Jesus of Nazareth is the resurrected Son of God” some say, “then why wouldn’t you also believe there’s a pedophilia ring operating out of a Washington D.C. pizza parlor?”

In this criticism, the resurrection of Jesus is implicated as being just as irrational as the QAnon conspiracy theory. In this sense, Q, the originator of the eponymous conspiracy theory, and Christ seem to hang together in their delusions. Is there anything which can separate them? Edgar Welch heard enough. He had just spent three days deep in the QAnon rabbit hole watching video after video. Now, he decided, was the time to act. Grabbing his AR-15, he drove to the DC pizza joint Q claimed (and he believed) was a front for a Democrat pedophilia ring. But he never found the pedophilia ring. The only thing he found was a four-year prison sentence.

Taking the claims of Jesus seriously invites us to consider an empty tomb in place of a pizza parlor. But, unlike Welch, this isn’t a place to which we can drive. I think David Bentley Hart is right when he observes there is something “positively absurd” in balancing the “whole edifice of eternal truth” on a “fleeting temporal episode” that occurred over the course of one weekend in Jerusalem. And without the fantasy of a time machine, without the possiblity of pure historical reconstruction, we stand looking across this void, wondering what exactly to make of the scandalous possibility of an empty tomb.

The church exists in this void.

The church, if it is anything, is a sustained witness over time to an event and its meaning. Both of these matter. The church continues to interpret an incredible event: Jewish women showed up that Easter morning expecting to find Jesus’ body, and didn’t. But this event, to which the church attests, that of an empty tomb, is nothing without its meaning. The historical record alone can’t provoke the crisis which invites us to consider Jesus as anything more than a Jewish itinerrant rabbi excecuted by Rome as an insurrectionist. But the church's witness exists to provoke this crisis. It’s the same crisis obscured in Matthew’s time, as he reminded his readers that many people still believed the narrative of the authorities.

Like the earliest witness to the resurrection, it is faith in the risen Lord that constitutes and determines the church, not merely the fact of an empty tomb. Many want to disrupt conspiracy theory in the church on rational grounds, without realizing that the central claim of the church itself can’t completely rest on this plot of land. This is why I so appreciated Alistair McGrath article on this site about the place of the Creeds in fuelling the Christian imagination.

The Christian faith can’t be judged solely in rational terms without ceasing to be faith. And so, Christians cannot cede the resurrection of Jesus to the standards of rationality or bare history. But they can admit the criticism of outsiders who note that the Christian imagination can get bound up in an extremism in which conspiracy theories play a significant part. This is a moral and theological problem. But it has a solution.

Whether the Salem Witch Trials of the early Americas, or communist conspiracy theories of the Cold War, a theological imagination lent these claims a potency which allowed them to persist within Christian community.

Many conspiracy theories find a home in Christian communities today because of a certain Christian view of the world, not despite it. I call this view “theological paranoia”. It’s not a clinical diagnosis but a descriptive characterization. It shows how Christians of all theological persuasions can become purveyors of political conspiracy theory. History tells us as much, and theology is bound up in this problem. Whether the Salem Witch Trials of the early Americas, or communist conspiracy theories of the Cold War, a theological imagination lent these claims a potency which allowed them to persist within Christian community. Perhaps the chief conspiracy of this Christian imagination is Satan’s war on the faithful in the world. It gives Satan too much power. But such is the imagination of theological paranoia.

Conspiracy theories become plausible in Christian communities where theological paranoia has been constructed upstream. This happens in a few ways. One way is seeing the conflict between the kingdoms of Christ and Satan underlying every argument, every distressing event. Another way is through uninterrogated institutional commitments, like the carousel of “threats” to the church.

In the US context for example, white evangelicals (the tradition I grew up in) now make up one of the largest religious demographic segments when analyzing belief in QAnon. Q is the self-given title to an anonymous user who posted cryptic messages on an online forum. Q claims (among other things) that there is a pedophilia ring operating at the highest levels of the Democratic Party and the global elites. Soon, according to Q, a “great storm” will come to wipe away these elites. This is the world of Q: battle between good and evil with Donald Trump as the hero. These political contests all largely conform to the theological imagination that is prominent in white evangelical churches, which we have inherited and innovated, in which we see the church’s task not as witness, but as warrior.

We seek certainty through developing alternative perspectives which keep our world controlled and comfortable.

This is theological paranoia, manifest. It is an imagination which forms people into this view of the world, and informs the practice of politics. It is a “split” world characterized by combat between Satan and Christ. Theologically, it’s as if Christ was given a tour of hell rather than bursting its gates. In theological paranoia, the resurrection of Jesus Christ functions merely as the ultimate “alternative take”. This is potent in digital ‘infostructure’ which produces information on a scale with which we have yet to grapple. Instead, we seek certainty through developing alternative perspectives which keep our world controlled and comfortable. Theological paranoia forms Christians who understand themselves as possessors of truth rather than humble participants in it.

Theology against theory

Despite all this, however, I think a richer Christian imagination can dispel and disrupt the theological paranoia which fuels the conspiracy theories in Christian communities. Where would we start this work of dismantling and divestment? I believe it starts fundamentally with how we think of God’s relation to creation, the universe and to us as human beings and some of us as Christians. Christians occupy the same place in this cosmos as non-Christians, we are not gifted with omniscience. Instead, all are invited into the church, the place and people built up and marked by faith. Here we aren’t met with anxiety so much as mystery, with a person not an index of answers. It is as theologian Brian Brock says, “the only thing the church knows that the world doesn’t, is who sustains it.” This observation isn’t meant to recast the church against the world. Quite the opposite, it’s an invitation to common ground. One which divests Christians of the claim that our faith is gnosis, some sort of secret knowledge which sets us on a higher plane, with wider vistas, that legitimizes our suspicions of clandestine evil, and perhaps most significantly, our justification for authority in political matters. No, to believe God controls the world is a claim conditioned by hope, not a claim to possession of or special access to knowledge.

Let me be clear: conspiracy does take place in our social and political world. But knowledge of these clandestine events is not the special prerogative of Christians, nor are such conspiracies as truly pervasive as the theories claim. At least not in a way which justifies developing our moral imagination by their claims

The Christian faith is not a “secret” Christians possess. Faith is not an omniscience that gives the ability to see behind closed doors or justify spurious claims. Rather, the church is a community whose wisdom is a scandal and whose meaning is a mystery. But this mystery is one which envelops the cosmos. This leads Christians to see the world not as paranoid people, a world “split” between opposing conspiratorial forces known by the names we give them, like sacred or secular, public or private, church or world. Rather, we can see the world and the church together in the process of being reconciled to God.

The possibility and hope for unity admittedly comes from different places for the non-Christian and the Christian. But I see no reason why either should give way to conspiratorial paranoia which seems to justify all manner of suspicion and accusation. This ought to be, but is often not, especially true among Christians.

If the root of conspiracy theory is anxiety over hidden evil, the Christian faith is rooted in joy over God’s manifested goodness. Theology can foster conspiracy theories when it allows this anxiety to outweigh its witness to joy. And while conspiracism does breed extremism made only more potent when it trades on theological authority, I hold out for the possibility that good theology itself can also dismantle the theological paranoia which has so determined the embrace of conspiracy theory by the Christian community.

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Conspiracy theory

Death & life

29 August 2024

4 min read

A Bayesian theory of death

The sinking of the superyacht displays the probability, and banality, of death.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Rescue workers look at the plan of a yacht.

The search for the Bayesian.

Vigili del Fuoco.

On any statistical calculation, the probability of dying by drowning when your luxury yacht suddenly and inexplicably sinks at anchor in the Mediterranean has to be extremely low.

So it’s the cruellest of ironies that tech tycoon Mike Lynch should so die, along with his daughter and five others, having devoted his commercial life to the application of such statistical probabilities. He had named his yacht Bayesian after the 18th-century theorem that introduced the idea that probability expresses a degree of belief in an event.

That doesn’t expressly mean religious belief. But, intriguingly, it doesn’t exclude it either. According to Thomas Bayes, who published his theorem in 1763, the calculable degree of belief may be based on prior knowledge about an event, such as the results of previous experiments, or on personal beliefs about it.

In essence, you don’t believe your yacht will capsize in the night and sink in seconds, because your experience tells you so. That belief can mathematically be included in the probability of it happening.

We can transfer the method into religious praxis. Christian belief in the event of resurrection, for instance, can be calculated in the probability that the deaths of the Lynches and others aboard the Bayesian are not the end of their existence.

It’s an intriguing legacy of Lynch’s work for theologians. But it’s the sheer lack of probability of the lethal event occurring at all that lends it its random banality. It’s that death visited those asleep on a yacht in the small hours that lends this news story such tireless legs, not just that these were super-rich masters and mistresses of the universe.

There have been bitter observations on social media that the Bayesian’s victims have commanded limitlessly greater attention than the many thousands of refugees who die in small-boat crossings of the Mediterranean every year.

This is a category mistake. And again, Bayesian theory can be deployed. Experience supports our belief that crossing the sea in overcrowded and unseaworthy vessels can all too often lead to tragically terminal events. The probability of death is plain. Again, it’s the sheer randomness of the Bayesian yacht event that sets it apart.

If death can visit at any time, there can be no difference in the valuation of long or short lives.

That randomness brings us back to the banality of sudden death among us, almost its ordinariness, something that just happens, often entirely out of the blue. The prayer book has the funeral words “in the midst of life we are in death”, meaning that death is our constant living companion. But that doesn’t quite cut it for me, because it tells us it’s there, but nothing of its true significance.

The tenets of Christian faith are regularly said to be those of a death cult; that it’s a deep-seated fear of death that leads us to avoid it with assurances of eternal life. But it’s the sheer banality of death, as displayed in the randomness of the Bayesian event, that seems to knock down that idea. In its randomness, death looks ridiculous rather than evil.

Conspiracy theories around the sinking of the Bayesian are a kind of denial of the reality of death too. We want there to be more to it than the utterly banal.

Author Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” when covering the trial of Nazi holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. I’d want to suggest that it’s that same banality, that basic human ordinariness, that is the real nature of the supposed grim reaper, rather than his evil.

None of this can comfort the Lynch family, who mourn the loss of a much-loved father and his young daughter, or the families of the others who lost their lives on the Bayesian. But it is meant to go some way towards an explanation of what we mean in Christian theology when we bandy about phrases such as “the defeat of death”. Because it’s not a wicked serpent that’s been defeated, more of a pointless clown.

There is something especially painful about the death of the young, such as that of 18-year-old Hannah Lynch on the Bayesian that night, a young woman on the threshold of life. And – God knows – the even younger lives we’ve read about being taken lately.

But the concept of banality may lead us to another tenet of faith: The completeness of every life. If death can visit at any time, there can be no difference in the valuation of long or short lives.

A poem, often ascribed to a former dean of St Paul’s cathedral, begins with the line: “Death is nothing at all.” That’s wrong, as an idea. Death is as significant an event as birth. But its defeat is in keeping it in its place.

The dignity in simplicity with which football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson greeted his final illness is a masterclass in this tactic for life. Death isn’t to be negotiated, it’s just there.

In the end, death isn’t a Bayesian probability, it’s a certainty, for all of us. The difference, in Bayesian theory, must be the belief we bring to our personal calculations of the probability of the event.