Conspiracy Belief and Religion: The Need for an Explanation

As this is being written, we are less than a week past the invasion of the US Capital building on January 6, 2021 by a collection of right-wing groups.  On the surface, the motivation of the attackers was to invalidate the election that Trump claimed had been stolen from him, but with various other themes driving the actions of the attackers.  Fundamentally, this was a large group of believers in conspiracy theories who wished to destroy something that they found personally threatening, assisted by the ever-present white supremacists and anti-Semites.  Particularly troubling is the fraction of our society who believe in such conspiracies.  Why are people so susceptible to claims for which there seems to be no supporting proof? 

The most startling and seemingly the most incredible of these conspiracies goes by the name QAnon.  From Wikipedia one obtains this description of the associated beliefs.

“QAnon is a disproven and discredited far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of Satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against U.S. president Donald Trump who is fighting the cabal.”

This seems to be the fever dream of a very disturbed mind, but nevertheless an astonishing number of people either believe it is true or that it might be true.  An NPR/Ipsos poll (12/30/2020) taken just before the insurrection is summarized by Joel Rose in Even If It’s ‘Bonkers,’ Poll Finds Many Believe QAnon And Other Conspiracy Theories.  When asked if “A group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media,” 17% of the public said it was true, 37% said they didn’t know, and only 47% said the statement was false.  If you look at the breakdown by political party of responses to the statement “There is a deep state working to undermine President Trump,” 71% of Republicans agreed with the claim, against 37% for independents, and 15% for Democrats.  And as for Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, the majority of Republicans believe him. 

“The NPR/Ipsos poll suggests those claims are having an impact. Two-thirds of Republicans surveyed said they believe that voter fraud helped Biden win the election, and fewer than half of Republicans said they accept the outcome of the election.”

“In contrast, only 11% of Democrats think voter fraud helped Biden win the election, and 93% accept the outcome.” 

How can this happen?  In an article for the London Review of Books, Red Pill, Blue Pill: James Meek on the conspiracist mind, James Meek sought to address this question.  He begins by telling US readers that they have not cornered the market on crazies.

“In the spring​ of 2020, while the world stayed indoors to suppress Covid-19, arsonists attacked mobile phone masts in Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand. They set fire to nearly a hundred masts in the UK, or tried to; there were twenty attacks over the Easter weekend alone, including one on a mast serving a Birmingham hospital. The arsonists believed that the latest mobile phone technology, 5G, was the real cause of the pandemic. They imagined a worldwide conspiracy: either the unexpectedly genocidal effects of the 5G rollout were being covered up by faking a pandemic, or 5G was being used deliberately to kill huge numbers of people and help enslave whoever was left.”

The arrival of the Covid virus and the often confusing but always intrusive responses demanded by governments to contain it activated a range of conspiracists to claim that whatever secret forces were at work are finally showing their hand.

“Now that its existence, nature and power have been proved to us, why shouldn’t we believe that the members of this group arranged 9/11? Or that Bill Gates is planning to kill us with vaccines, or inject us with nanochips hidden in vaccines, or both? Why shouldn’t the entire course of world events have been planned by a group of elite families hundreds, even thousands, of years ago? Why shouldn’t there be a link between the bounds to individual freedoms that governments have drawn up to slow climate change and the restrictions they’re carrying out in the name of beating Covid? Surely these two hoaxes are cooked up by the same firm, with the same agenda? Why, as followers of the American conspiracy theory known as QAnon insist, shouldn’t a group of politicians, tycoons and celebrities be kidnapping and torturing children on a massive scale?”

And QAnon is not just a US insanity.

“There’s​ a danger that in writing about QAnon – a social phenomenon not just in the US but in Britain, Germany and many other countries, and endorsed by a number of Republican candidates – you make it sound more interesting and mysterious than it is. It is interesting, but in the way hitting yourself in the face with a hammer is interesting: novel, painful and incredibly stupid.”

It is important to realize that the large number of believers in conspiracy theories exist in other countries as well.  One must consider that the current situation is telling us something fundamental about human nature. 

“A large survey in May conducted by researchers in Oxford found that only about half of English adults were free of what they termed ‘conspiracy thinking.’ Three-quarters of the population have doubts about the official explanations of the cause of the pandemic; most people think there’s at least a chance it was man-made. Almost half think it may have been deliberately engineered by China against ‘the West’. Between a fifth and a quarter are ready to blame Jews, Muslims or Bill Gates, or to give credence to the idea that ‘the elite have created the virus in order to establish a one-world government’; 21 per cent believe – a little, moderately, a lot or definitely – that 5G is to blame, about the same number who think it is ‘an alien weapon to destroy humanity’. Conspiracy beliefs, the researchers concluded, were ‘likely to be both indexes and drivers of societal corrosion … Fringe beliefs may now be mainstream. A previously defining element that the beliefs are typically only held by a minority may require revision … Healthy scepticism may have tipped over into a breakdown of trust’.” 

What exactly is it that we should take away from all this?  Meek makes an intriguing suggestion but then chooses not to follow up on it. 

“Karl Popper​ coined the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ in 1952, in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies.” 

“Popper saw conspiracy theory as something very old, connected to the religious impulse. ‘The belief in the Homeric gods whose conspiracies explain the history of the Trojan War is gone,’ he writes. ‘The gods are abandoned. But their place is filled by powerful men or groups – sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from – such as the Learned Elders of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists’.”  

The evolution of religion is an aspect of the evolution of society.  Humans have a need to try and understand why things happen, and they have an understandable desire to be able to control what happens.  The earliest societies were totally dependent on nature for sustenance.  It is natural that they would try to understand why a tree might bear more or less fruit by assigning a capricious spirit to that tree.  They might consider providing gifts or offerings to the spirit in hope that it will behave.  As humans learned more about nature and the behavior of trees, there was less need for a spirit to explain behavior.  The next step might be to assign a spirit, or god, to control the entire forest, and maybe one for rivers and another for the sky.  As cultures became more complicated a hierarchical social structure would evolve.  The gods would need a leader, just as people would need a leader.  

The most serviceable form of religion in complex societies appears to be monotheism: societies with a strong leader supported by a strong God.  The constraints God imposes on human action tend to be those that support a stable society.  Religious obedience then will tend to produce beneficial results for society, helping to reinforce the necessity for its existence.  And when good things happen to bad people or bad things happen to good people or some catastrophe occurs, the explanation “It was God’s will” always seems to provide solace.

One can, with no malice intended, describe a religion as a belief system in which members are asked to believe things for which no objective proof can be provided.  It is merely necessary that the acceptance of these beliefs provides comfort to its members.  One can, with malice intended, describe a conspiracy theory as one which asks believers to participate according to those beliefs even though there is no objective proof to support them.  This suggests that belief in conspiracy theories and religious belief rely on the same human characteristics.  And if belief in a given conspiracy theory provides comfort in the form of a needed explanation, the hold on the believer could be as strong as the hold provided by religious belief.  Meek spends much of his article describing interactions with those who have succumbed to conspiracy theories.  Arguing with them is no more fruitful than trying to convince a religious person that his or her beliefs make no sense. 

There are likely a number of reasons why conspiracy theories have become so widespread.  We are compelled to figure out the causes and eliminate them—if possible—because a resort to reason will not work.  Given that the conspiracists are becoming organized and violent, our near future seems fraught with peril. 

You can learn a little about a lot of things or you can learn a lot about a very few things. Guess which is the most fun.