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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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Justice

Redemption

15 May 2025

4 min read

The case of Peter Sullivan proves once and for all why we shouldn’t bring back the death penalty

It’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done - it’s all of us.

George Pitcher

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

A court sits, with judges raised above the others.

The Court of Appeal.

Judiciary.uk.

The quashing of the conviction this week of Peter Sullivan, who served 38 years in jail for a murder he did not commit – along with the release in 2023 of Andrew Malkinson, cleared of rape after 17 years inside – are deeply shameful. They are revolting stains not only on our judiciary, but on all those who politically invigilate it and on the rest of us who elect them. We should all be deeply ashamed.

As we peep through our fingers at these terrible travesties of justice and the lives that have needlessly been wrecked, it’s natural to ask what we do next. In the absence of time travel, we can hardly make it up to Messrs Sullivan and Malkinson.

But we can grapple with what they mean to us for the immediate future. Probably the first and easist thing to say is – if I may not so much mix a metaphor as summarily execute it – that they should hammer legislatively the final nail in the coffin of the death penalty.

Sullivan would doubtless have swung for the murder of florist Diane Sindall in 1986 that he did not commit, if execution by hanging (or by other means) had not been abolished in 1965. True, rape hasn’t been a capital offence since 1841, when the penalty became transportation (which was almost as irreversible as death).

But Malkinson’s case rather makes the point: The very fact that he was still incarcerated meant that he could be released. Let’s take a case in which no such remedy was available – Derek Bentley, say, who was hanged in 1953 for allegedly abetting the murder of a police officer and exonerated, a trifle late, in 1998.

The arguments of thornproof and white-knuckled proponents of the death penalty may be as swiftly dispatched as they would wish such innocent victims to be. They were probably “wrong ‘uns” anyway. Their sacrifice would have discouraged others from committing heinous crimes. The taxpayer shouldn’t have to pay for their decades in the slammer. Well, pah. Try telling any of that to the Sullivan family.

But these are not, to my mind, the biggest issues and, enormous as they are, that must make the biggest pretty gargantuan. I wish to address the business of redemption.

But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

Now, when I mention this word to those holding the pitchforks, prodding people they despise towards the scaffold, they usually assume I’ve come over all pious and priestly. And I suppose I have. But they invariably misunderstand what we mean by redemption.

The assumption is that the victim of the miscarriage of justice can be redeemed if they are still alive. Their life is in some way redeemed from suffering. That’s true, so far as it goes, but it’s not really what we should mean by redemption in these circumstances.

The Latin root of the word refers to the buying back, or the paying of the ransom, of a slave to enable his or her freedom. The ancient scriptural usage of the word relates often to the saving actions of the Hebrews’ God, in redeeming his people from slavery in Egypt, and to the Christian culmination of that redeeming work at the cross (totally uncoincidentally, both events are commemorated at the Jewish Passover, that first divine covenant being, in Christianity, fulfilled in the second).

The debate down the ages has substantially concentrated on to whom the ransom of that latter redemption was paid. For some, it was paid to a vengeful and wrathful God, for others to a somewhat gullible Satan, who took the bait of pay-off. Either way, a debt was paid which released humanity from bondage and slavery.

The theology of this can only be satisfactory to a proportion of people who read it, whether believers or not. The important matter is to whom the act of redemption is of value. A slave who died building a pyramid for a pharaoh doesn’t seem to have been redeemed in any more meaningful sense than the young Bentley being pardoned 45 years after he was hanged. Exoneration isn’t redemption.

In the Christian tradition, it’s significant that the compilers of the gospels and the books thereafter develop less the idea of ransom to explain the cross, than the idea of deliverance from bondage that was its result.

And there the answer, rather than the victims, hangs before us. We can’t redeem the injustice of the past, anymore than we can give Sullivan and Malkinson back their lost years. But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

To those who claim that murderers and rapists “get off” because of “loopholes” in the law, we say there are no loopholes, only the law. And we’re all enriched when we get the law right. So, ultimately, it’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done and they’re finally released. It’s all of us.