Scholars of religion have worked with the connections between conspiracy theories (and their accompanying conspiracist epistemologies) and religiosity, with various framing phrases from conspiracy theories about religions, to conspiracy theories in religions, to conspiracy theories as religions. But the critical paradigm of political theology has yet to be used – in detail – to analyze conspiracism and its structures and persuasive techniques. This presentation begins such a task by using Project 2025 as a case study in conspiracist political theology. Beginning from the premise that the intentional and ordered world posited by conspiracy theorists bears family resemblances to the teleological orders of Jewish and Christian messianisms and eschatologies, this presentation analyses the self-conscious rejection of conspiracism in Project 2025, treating its approach to trust-building as indicative of wider ecclesial-social conjugations in American society.
But beyond the signature move of political theology – showing how secular modern concepts have theological structures and religious histories – this presentation (as part of a larger book project under contract with the Routledge Conspiracy Theories series) shows how there is a reciprocal connection between conspiracism and political theology itself in that both desire and employ movements of revelation that proceed from concealing to revealing, but which retain the tensions of concealment and obscurity in order to fund their persuasive claims. As the document says: "For instance, many were quick to dismiss even the possibility that COVID-19 escaped from a Chinese research laboratory. The reality, however, is that the PRC’s actions often do sound like conspiracy theories—because they are conspiracies."
This presentation begins from the standpoint that it is not possible to reason one’s way out of conspiracism, both because - as exemplified in Project 2025 - conspiracism has religious characteristics (as a form of devotion, ritual, and piety), but also because the improvisational reasons and rhetorical tactics of conspiracism tap into social bonds of trust that were formed in the secularizing and differentiating tendencies of the secular-religious distinction. Drawing from both the social-scientific literature on conspiracism – from the Brill Handbook of Conspiracy Theory and Contemporary Religion to the Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories – and the few voices in political theology who have written on the topic (Erica Lagalisse, Occult Features of Anarchism and Angela Mitropolous, Contract & Contagion) or fallen victim to its seductive epistemology (Giorgio Agamben). Because political theology is ready to see secularized theological concepts everywhere and conspiracism is ready to see conspiracy everywhere, the analysis of their interrelation requires a steady hand that can admit that people conspire all the time, and that we are easily deceived into thinking that there is intentional conspiracy behind the scenes when stupidity and greed reign. This presentation provides a political theology of conspiracism wherein neither abstract noun is collapsed into the other (as if conspiracism could be claimed by theology, or conspiracism could claim theology).
Beyond the temptation to move cleanly from concealment to revelation and the tendency to retain the right to mystification, a political theology of conspiracism must account for how we all desire revelation, but we are all deceivable subjects. Our desire for revelation is highly manipulable, and yet there are meaningful and true things that remain hidden until critical and historical paradigms are mobilized to reveal them. Following Adam Kotsko’s conviction that what is most interesting in political theology is that “it rejects the religious/secular binary” and is best pursued “as the study of systems of legitimacy, of the ways that political, social, economic, and religious orders maintain their explanatory power and justify the loyalty of their adherents,” this presentation brings minor figures in political theology – Erica Lagalisse and Angela Mitropolous – into contact with Michael Barkun's three-part characterization of conspiracist epistemology: (1) nothing happens by accident, (2) nothing is as it seems, and (3) everything is connected. I argue that his threefold structure of conspiracism, wherein the world is ordered by particular uses and abuses of the past that ascribe intentionality and secrecy to events (like the pandemic) and institutions (like the state), is at least partially made up of secularized theological concepts, but is not reducible to the interpretive movement of political theology which uses theological structures to reveal what is hidden in secular modern concepts. The character of this secularizing tendency is complex, and my aim is to take a non-reductive approach to the problems of conspiratorial thinking while focusing on how temporal and historical terms are used for persuasive purposes, and questioning how conspiracism is related to the forms of political violence that continue to take their inspiration from Project 2025.
Lagalisse, for example, maintains a critique of capitalist domination and argues that “all politics involves ‘conspiracy,’ whether ‘from above’ or ‘from below,’” but this suspicion of wealth and power does not lead her to violent antisemitic fantasies or the projection of certainty and rigidity onto the often mysterious mechanisms of political power. Tracing a theological thread in anti-authoritarian thought, she surveys how heretics like the Anabaptists, Ranters, and Diggers, were precursors to modern anarchism, and deconstructs the hierarchical Hermetic notion of “as above, so below” as it is received in contemporary class struggle. By distinguishing between suspicion of capitalist exploitation and spurious suspicions that wonder “Is the world banking system run by Jewish lizards or aliens or both?” Lagalisse is sensitive to the fact that the term “conspiracy theorist” is used as a tool to “justify class exclusion within anarchist social movements,” as much as it names a paranoid style that funds violent political rhetoric of demonization and scapegoating. By following her conviction that those “involved in left politics have cared more about keeping their own hands respectably clean, scoffing at the ‘conspiracy theory’ from a distance, than about preventing damaging misinformation, including theories of history that inspire and justify the growing neofascist movements in North America today” this presentation shows how the critique of conspiracism across the political spectrum, and in documents related to Project 2025, needs the paradigm of political theology as much as it needs to move beyond all methodologies of revelation that mystify the relay between mystification and explanation.
Scholars of religion have worked with the connections between conspiracy theories (and their accompanying conspiracist epistemologies) and religiosity, with various framing phrases from conspiracy theories about religions, to conspiracy theories in religions, to conspiracy theories as religions. But the critical paradigm of political theology has yet to be used – in detail – to analyze conspiracism and its structures and persuasive techniques. This presentation begins such a task by using Project 2025 as a case study in conspiracist political theology. Beginning from the premise that the intentional and ordered world posited by conspiracy theorists bears family resemblances to the teleological orders of Jewish and Christian messianisms and eschatologies, this presentation analyses the self-conscious rejection of conspiracism in Project 2025, treating its approach to trust-building as indicative of wider ecclesial-social conjugations in American society.