Conspiracy and Religious Doctrine: A Brief Essay
Douglas B. Olds
October 21, 2022
Dysfunction results when ethnicity or market economics rather than the ethics of grace plays a primary role in defining and structuring deliberative democracy. Polities mixed along ethnic and racial lines are morally united into a regional people by wise policy. Ethnic and gender identification are, by contrast, too often manipulated by ideologies and systems designed to create borders around these identities for political purposes. Increasingly, these ideologies are importing categories of religious propaganda and symbols, with the effect that nationalism, racism, economic populism, and tribalism are displacing or crowding out what is authentically messaged as Gospel.
Making a fetish of power--reducing all aspects of social relations to
those of control and submission—is the cognitive incubator of conspiracy theories and the doctrines that demonize opponents as totally depraved. Whenever such a reduction takes place, atavistic values of agon take hold, polarizing groups into a tribal “us” and everyone else, the depraved and treasonous. When ideology claims a monopoly on truth and assurance, only betrayal and obscure plots can explain a temporal loss of power. By their misplaced focus and compulsions to decipher the structures and operations of sin and evil, conspiracies come to crowd out truth and obscure the ongoing historical operations of providential grace. In what Pinker (2019, 358-359 emph. orig.) calls the Tragedy of the Belief Commons the misplaced focus of conspirators reject, misquote, and misapply “expertise, brainpower, and conscious reasoning,” instead to ingeniously and ruthlessly manipulate these for the purposes of generating in-group boundaries and demonizing opponents. This process advances and may be recognized in
blue lies. A
white lie is told for the benefit of the hearer; a blue lie is told for the
benefit of an in group (originally, fellow police officers). While some of the
conspiracy theorists may be genuinely misinformed, most express these beliefs
for the purpose of performance rather than truth: they are trying to antagonize
liberals and display solidarity with their blood brothers. The anthropologist
John Tooby adds that preposterous beliefs are more effective signals of
coalitional loyalty than reasonable ones.
By its defunding of
education and debasing political sovereignty and rationality to that of the
consumer and market alone, neoliberal capitalism has unloosed the critical
project, popularizing it, turning it against the very academies in which it was
developed, operationalizing its popular religious axioms of total depravity
attributed to the other, especially of elites. “Total depravity” as an
epistemic doctrine has destroyed social trust. In this, populist Christianity
foments conspiratorial and radically subjectivist post-modernism. Latour (2004,
228-230 emph. orig.) writes,
Now we have the benefit of what can be called instant
revisionism. The smoke of the event has not yet finished settling before
dozens of conspiracy theories begin revising the official account, adding even
more ruins to the ruins, adding even more smoke to the smoke. What has become
of critique when my neighbor in the little Bourbonnais village where I live
looks down on me as someone hopelessly naïve because I believe that the United
States had been attacked by terrorists? Remember the good old days when
university professors could look down on unsophisticated folks because those
hillbillies naïvely believed in church, motherhood, and apple pie? Things have
changed a lot, at least in my village. I am now the one who naïvely believes in
some facts because I am educated, while the other guys are too unsophisticated
to be gullible..[Y]ou have to learn to become suspicious of everything people
say because of course we all know that they live in the thralls of a complete illusio
of their real motives… “Everything is suspect . . . Everyone is for sale . . .
And nothing is what it seems.”
QAnon beliefs are
an example of post-modernist regress from modern norms of rationality. Adherents
believe, in part, that demons control American governing and secular elites. At
the same time QAnon adherents are more inclined to perceive the necessity of
violence to overturn political elections and roll back the cultural influence
of modernity’s elites, including their postcolonial and cosmopolitan identity,
toleration of racial diversity, and openness to social progress:
A significant majority of QAnon believers (81%) agree
with the statement that America is in danger of losing its culture and identity,
compared to significantly smaller shares of QAnon doubters (61%) and rejecters
(27%). About three in four QAnon believers (73%) agree that the American way of
life needs to be protected from foreign influence, compared to 33% of
rejecters.
These perceptions are associated with racial
prejudice: QAnon believers are more than five times as likely as rejecters to
agree with the statement that “the idea of America where most people are not
white bothers me” (32% vs. 6%)…
Americans are divided on whether American culture and
way of life have mostly changed for the better or for the worse since the 1950s
(47% vs. 52%). While a majority of QAnon rejecters (63%) say that the American
culture and way of life have mostly changed for the better, about a similar
percentage of QAnon believers say it changed for the worse (67%). Around eight
in ten QAnon believers (81%) agree with the statement that America is in danger
of losing its culture and identity, compared to significantly smaller shares of
QAnon doubters (61%) and rejecters (27%) (PRRI 2022).[1]
While ignorance has a baleful, charismatic
appeal to the resentful, political discourse as a deliberative program must be
truthful, diligent, fair, dignified, and reticent. It is to embody chivalry’s
noblesse oblige in unostentatious acts, lack of pomp, and humble accouterment
more than broadcast or ceremonial assertiveness (Prov. 12:23) and unneighborly
hastiness or ruthlessness. Cultural portrayals of hastiness counterfeit
quickness of mind (Prov. 19:2b, 6:18). Conspiracy is the hasty operationalization of the doctrine of "total depravity." It lacks the virtues of patience, intellectual generosity, and deliberative truth-seeking.
Note:
[1] For a brief outline of QAnon history and its mutating iterations, see Marc-André Argentino (@_MAArgentino 10/28/2022) https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1586009595469856768.html
Citations:
Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. New York: Penguin Books, 2019.
PRRI. “The Persistence of QAnon in the Post-Trump Era: An Analysis of Who Believes the Conspiracies.” Public Religion Research Institute, February 24, 2022. https://www.prri.org/research/the-persistence-of-qanon-in-the-post-trump-era-an-analysis-of-who-believes-the-conspiracies/.
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