Conversations about conspiracy theories are proverbially frustrating.  We sometimes feel, about our aggravants, that “You just can’t reason with people like that!”  And they repay the feeling.  But there are good reasons to think you can have some sensible discussions about conspiracy theories.  Or at least, you can have better conversations than you expect, and you can prevent many of the bad ones.

Having good conversations means finding common ground.  Minimally, that means recognising that conspiracy theories are not always wrong and do not always cause problems.  This should be self-evident, but acknowledging it may help to build some rapport at the start.

The main reason we know that conspiracy theories are not always wrong is that there are many historical examples of conspiracies being exposed.  Think of Watergate, the tobacco industry’s coverup of the effects of smoking, or lesser-known horrors like the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.  Because conspiracies do occur, we can’t assume that theories about them are always wrong or stupid.  But on the other hand, those that have been exposed have been more like crime, corruption, and the prejudicial abuse of power than the kind of international supervillainy that is proposed by the largest conspiracy theories.  Still, they establish a baseline for what’s possible.  They reinforce that we should be critical of powerful people and institutions and hold them to account.  That should be common ground for all of us.

We should also be able to agree that many or most conspiracy theories are wrong.  The theories are working with incomplete information and trying to connect the dots, so there will always be wrong guesses and ideas that don’t go anywhere.  The various theories disagree with each other about who’s pulling the strings and what they’re trying to accomplish, and they can’t all be correct.  Those who believe in conspiracy theories are often the first to say that some conspiracy ideas are crazy – the lizard people, the flat earth – because they resent being associated with them, and they think such ideas are used to discredit more sensible views.  This is not something that dismisses all conspiracy theories, so, again, it should be common ground.  We can’t suppose that all conspiracy theories are valuable, any more than we can assume that all are worthless.  They have to be considered case by case.

We can’t even assume that conspiracy theories will always cause problems.  This should be emphasised, because the usual reason we start talking or worrying about them is that some people are causing problems, whether in families, churches, communities, and in society at large.  Understanding the possible problems can help us identify badly behaved conspiracists, and can also help more conscientious people to set themselves apart from those stereotypes and gain a fairer hearing.

What problems do conspiracy theories commonly cause?

Conspiracy theories can cause problems regardless of whether they are true or false.  This happens in at least five major ways.  First of all, they can be bad for individuals.  A person’s isolation and anxiety can escalate, tendencies toward depression or paranoia can be triggered, and if they reject good health advice or try to attack public authorities there may be much more serious and lasting consequences.

Secondly, and relatedly, there’s damage to the individual’s character.  For some, including some Christians, conspiracism leads to making false accusations, issuing angry insults, and fanning social strife (see §4).  We should be exceedingly cautious about making these kinds of choices.

Thirdly, there’s disruption to relationships.  Conspiracism is notorious for stressing or breaking even lifelong connections with friends or family.  We cross an obvious line when we become willing to burn those relationships.  This can feel, to others, like a change in our character, especially if they feel that the person they knew would never have acted in that way.  This is why we often hear ‘cult’ analogies for conspiracies.  In fringe religious movements, dependence on the cult is sometimes reinforced by splitting off adherents from their other social networks.  Conspiracy theories can have a similar dynamic, whether intentionally or not, and we should be alert to this.

Fourthly, this disruption can expand to schools, community groups, and churches, undermining their positive purposes and driving people apart and away.

And fifthly, there’s damage to society and democracy.  All our public institutions rely to some degree on public trust in order to do good and run smoothly.  If criticism of democratic institutions turns quickly or carelessly toward conspiracy theories, this can corrode public trust.  When citizens feel less served and less protected by society they become less likely to act positively or generously toward others.  They may not feel that they can depend on their moral and social universe anymore.

While these problems are serious, they are not beyond solution.  Conspiracy theories can always be argued, discussed, and critiqued in ways that do not cause these problems.  Christians should be committed to truth, justice, community, and the common good – so we should be especially capable of overcoming these problems, whether we are arguing for or against any given conspiracy theories.

Even where these problems do occur, nobody starts out wanting them to happen.  People usually think of themselves as good people who are doing good – helping others – and we can connect over this understanding.  We may especially find common ground in wanting to preserve our relationships in the face of tensions.

Importantly, the problems that do occur are not always the fault of the conspiracy theorist.  Often other people can be at least as angry and provocative, particularly if they think all conspiracy ideas are stupid or contemptible.  They may see no way a good or honest person could believe what that person believes.  They might freeze or panic or explode when a seemingly racist conspiracy theory comes up in a group discussion.  We each must take responsibility for understanding and persuading each other, and do so as an alternative to conflict and division.

If, as Christians, we decide that we want to investigate a particular conspiracy theory, or advocate for it, we should also decide at the start that we will not contribute to these problems.  If we have done so, we should decide that we will stop acting in these ways and try to make amends.  We can model and teach better behaviour.  As we shall see in part four (below), there’s a lot in the Bible that’s relevant to our behaviour here, and to preventing these problems.  We can manage conspiracy theories as an ongoing phenomenon by expecting, not that Christians give up conspiracy theories, but that they do them better, and in more obviously Christian ways.

Where to start and what to ask?

What kind of questions will direct our conversations away from conflict, and toward more self-consciously Christian behaviour?  Try these seven for starters:

The best general concept for understanding conspiracy theories is fringe mistrust.  It is the best because it will resonate with conspiracy theorists themselves.  If you say that they are gullible, deluded, and fearful, they’ll just say no we’re not – you are!  Then they’ll add that you’re misrepresenting and unfairly dismissing them.  However, if you say that they mistrust mainstream experts and authorities, they will agree, and will say that the mistrust is justified.  That will go further in a conversation.

The mistrust is generally that of the fringe toward the mainstream.  These should be familiar ideas.  From the fringe side, the mainstream are the establishment, the status quo, the powers that be.  From the mainstream side, the fringe is everyone they consider strange, marginal, and suspect.  Fringe and mainstream are words we use for other people, rather than ourselves.

The fringe contains science or history deniers, alternative medicine, racists and nationalists, religious sects or cults, fundamentalists, and even extremists, that is, people who promote or resort to violence.  You might have seen a range of such groups show up at protests during the recent pandemic.  While fringe groups don’t agree on much, they are united in saying that there’s something wrong with the mainstream, especially with its understanding of the world.  They agree that the mainstream is mistreating critical free thinkers like themselves.

Most importantly, the fringe are in some way stigmatised for their beliefs.  Their ideas are not just considered wrong, but also unacceptable, so that people on the fringe experience rejection for them.  Being stigmatised gives them a common experience and identity, and another reason for rejecting the mainstream.  Not all fringe groups are equally suspect, of course.  Nazis are on the fringe, but conspiracy theorists are not as stigmatised as Nazis.  They just share the common dynamic of being alienated from ‘normal’ society by rejecting things the mainstream sees as good and important.

The mainstream of society is a big target and there are lots of ways to critique it.  The mainstream contains people who are powerful and might be corrupt.  It contains ‘elites’, meaning anyone who has an outsized influence on society, whether that is intellectual, financial, political, cultural, or any other kind.  It contains corporations who are motivated by profit and may be greedy, amoral, and exploitative, if not actively criminal.  It contains ordinary people with busy lives who don’t ask fringe questions, and so can be dismissed as unthinking ‘sheep’.  Most importantly, it contains thought leaders and officials who claim to have a consistent and factual view of the world, which can be attacked by claiming to find contradictions.

You will of course by now have noticed that conspiracy theories fit into the fringe, at least insofar as they reject mainstream experts and authorities.  Not all conspiracy theories do so.  Some, like many of the engineers who questioned the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers, make careful arguments and try to persuade the experts and authorities, as well as the general public.  But others feel antipathy toward a society that they think is unfairly rejecting and suppressing them.  Conspiracy theories can help them explain why they are on the fringe.

We can usefully define ‘conspiracy theories’ in terms of mainstream and fringe.  A conspiracy theory is any suspected conspiracy that is not recognized by mainstream experts and authorities.  A conspiracy theorist is someone who promotes such theories.  Conspiracists are the set of people who, other things being equal, tend to prefer conspiratorial explanations of public events.  Conspiracism is the larger movement of people who think in this way.

In these terms Watergate was a conspiracy, because it was exposed by newspapers and the police, and people went to jail for it.  On the other hand, the idea that NASA faked the moon landing is a conspiracy theory, because it hasn’t achieved such public confirmation.  Needless to say, many on the fringe disagree with the mainstream’s assessment of what is and is not a conspiracy.  That’s part of the mistrust.  It may be part of the conspiracy.

The mainstream and the fringe are divided by more than just differences of opinion.  In particular, conspiracy groups have a different approach to information than their mainstream opponents.  The UK philosopher Quassim Cassam has observed that they prefer sources that are speculative, contrarian, esoteric, and amateur.  (He adds premodern, but I’ll refer to modernity in a different way here.)

Mistrust explains a lot

The fringe actively mistrusts experts and authorities.  This means the establishment and its elites, the corporate military industrial complex, and Big Everything – the people who profit from The Way Things Are.  They look at qualified experts and they see ivory tower intellectuals who lack common sense, who have an agenda, are not accountable to the public, and look down on everybody else.  That’s why they think fringe sources are preferable; why the speculative and contrarian and esoteric and amateur really seem like heroic freethinkers taking a conscientious stand.  And much more so than their opposites: the published researchers, the accepted wisdom, the established science, the qualified experts.

Mistrust is a simple idea but it will take you a long long way toward understanding conspiracism and conspiracists.  Here are seven ways it influences conspiracism:

Two kinds of conspiracy theories

The theme of mistrust is nicely expressed in the Dutch researcher Jaron Harambam’s concept of postmodern conspiracy theories.  You might know what modern and postmodern mean, and specifically that ‘modern’ does not mean ‘now’, it means the period from 1650 to 1950.  The ‘modern’ era was the age of enlightenment and progress, exploration and discovery, industrialisation and trade, education and literacy, democracy, equality, and so on.  Postmodernism is the counter-reaction that asks whether all this progress mostly served established power interests through colonialism, racism, sexism, slavery, exploitation, and environmental destruction.  It is suspicious of power, and the stories that serve those who hold power.

Harambam writes that ‘modern’ conspiracism is a child of the Enlightenment: it believes that the world is rational, and that if you’re smart and diligent then you can do the work of figuring out what’s going on, and then persuading others of your findings.  Modern conspiracy theories are based on evidence; they want to get the evidence before the experts so that it can be confirmed.  In modern conspiracy theories, the enemies are typically opposing “our government”.  Harambam calls this secure paranoia, as it says the world is rational and people can come together against external threats.  This kind of paranoia soothes anxiety.

But ‘postmodern’ conspiracism assumes that much of public life is secretly opposed to the interests of the general public, so anything presented as official or authoritative is likely part of a gigantic program of deception.  Even if you can’t prove any of this to the degree that a court of law would require, deep down you know that something is not right.  In postmodern conspiracy theories there’s no point trying to persuade the experts, because they’re most likely part of the problem.  Likewise, “our government” is probably the enemy, or one of them, or under their control.  Harambam calls this ‘insecure paranoia’, as the world is not necessarily rational or reliable.  This kind of paranoia breeds anxiety, because it says our enemies are everywhere and reason will seldom suffice to defeat them.

Certainty has given way to doubt, and conspiracy has become the default assumption in an age which has learned to distrust everything and everyone.  (Peter Knight)

There’s all the difference in the world between a person who concludes, for rational reasons, that a conspiracy is happening, and a person who assumes it at the start.

If fringe mistrust is a useful idea for understanding conspiracy theories, what about the subject of that mistrust?  We can call this ‘mainstream knowledge’, which is to say, the knowledge that the mainstream of society produces and relies upon.  Nobody mistrusts all of it.  Almost everyone is happy to live at a time in history with medicine, technology, news media, democracy, the rule of law – a raft of institutions of public knowledge that are on their side.  So how should we think about this ‘mainstream knowledge’, the ways it is produced, and the things that can go wrong with it?

Many important facts are not obvious, and many important decisions are not simple, so we rely on experts to understand them.  Facts about the world come from the institutions that study the sciences, or from applied sciences like medicine, or from other organisations that undertake academic or commercial research.  Facts about human life and experience come from the humanities, especially the study of politics, society, and history.  Further, much knowledge is judged by public institutions like journalism, democratic government, and the courts.  Authorities will usually be expected to formulate policy or responses to events on the basis of agreed facts and expert judgements.

The mainstream of society mostly trusts these institutions of knowledge, or at least believes existing measures are sufficient to detect and deter abuses.  Conspiracy theorists disagree.  They say that things are not working like they should – that public understanding and decision-making has in some way been taken captive by private interests.  So we should ask why the mainstream of society considers these to be good sources of knowledge in general.

This means thinking about ‘liberal’ societies, which are societies that try to make individual freedoms serve the common good, whether economically, politically, or epistemologically.  By epistemologically, I mean in the way that we form and test our ideas about the world.  Three major aspects of such societies are 1) rights and toleration, 2) objectivity and fallibility, and 3) persuasion and disproof.  These principles have – supposedly – been gradually baked into our institutions of knowledge.

Rights and Toleration

Conspiracy theorists, perhaps more than most people, insist on their rights to speak freely and follow their consciences.  In this respect they are part of the western liberal tradition, which established these values in public life in the period between, roughly speaking, 1700 and 1900.  These ideas, especially as they were formulated by John Locke, arose partly out of Christian reflection on a partly Christian catastrophe.  After the Protestant Reformation, half of Europe was no longer politically subordinate to the Vatican, and in the new power vacuum, a series of major wars ran for nearly 150 years and, especially in the north, caused enormous devastation.  The wars were as much political as religious, but many of the partisans understood them primarily in religious terms.  By the end, nobody wanted to go through that again.  But could we find a better way to resolve our disagreements in public life?

In Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), John Locke brought together a set of solutions which will be immediately recognisable today.  He said that 1) people possess ‘natural rights’, which include things like life, liberty, and control of their bodies and property; 2) governments are created by ‘popular sovereignty’: the people appoint them to give them their natural rights; and 3) we have to tolerate dissenting views.  People must be free to argue for different beliefs, and also free to criticise them.  They must be argued out, so that we kill off bad ideas, rather than kill each other.

It might appear that religious truth, if it is agreed to be the most critically important of all truths, must not tolerate error, and that governments must be true to God and so, take proper and ultimate care of their people by preventing errors.  But Locke offers three essentially Christian arguments against this: 1) There is no use of force in the service of religious truth that could not equally well be used against it in a different situation.  2) The use of force does not change the heart, and so, does not achieve the fundamental purpose of religious truth in the first place.  And 3) governments are not competent to decide religious truth anyway.  Rather, we should tolerate even those ideas we believe to be seriously wrong, and ensure the freedom to persuade and argue over them, both for and against.  These ideas fit well with democracy.  A democratic system makes government accountable to the public by organising the regular non-violent transfer of power between differing political parties by public vote.  This is an ‘agonistic’ system: it recognises there will always be political conflict, but that some kinds of conflict are productive, and so, tries to put some rules around the conflict, and thereby channel it toward compromise and persuasion and away from violent solutions.  This also has some Christian foundations in the belief that no human being is fit to have unchecked power over others.

These kinds of rights – freedom of speech, freedom of conscience – should sound familiar to conspiracists, because they allow conspiracy theories to be freely discussed.  But these rights cut both ways: they also allow the free critique of conspiracy theories, and require conspiracy theories to invite and respond to correction if they wish to participate in the formation of public knowledge.  Liberal societies require this of everyone.  This brings us to the second pillar, objectivity and fallibility, and then to the third, persuasion and disproof.

Objectivity and Fallibility

When the Royal Society was formed in 1660, its approach to science reflected these developing ideas.  Its motto, Nullius in verba meant ‘Not taking anyone’s word for it’ – not when you can go and check.  But this suspicion of traditional authority does not mean that all ideas are equally good.  Liberal institutions aim to be tolerant of divergent views precisely in order to subject them to informed criticism, so that public truth is determined on its merits and is not subject to the biases or misconceptions of individuals.

“Good men are men still liable to mistakes and are sometimes warmly engaged in errors, which they take for divine truths, shining in their minds with the clearest light.”  (John Locke, 1690)

So if we look at our public institutions, we will notice that they all, over time, have developed rules and norms that aim to produce knowledge and filter out errors.  Ideally, as Jonathan Rauch puts it in The Constitution of Knowledge, they practise “open-ended, depersonalized checking by an error-seeking social network”.  This means they believe in objectivity and fallibility.

Knowledge we rely upon in public life must give the same result for anyone – at least to anyone competent to investigate it – and not be dependent on any private viewpoint or perspective.  It must be disprovable, and only knowledge that survives disproof should be accepted.  Such knowledge is only accepted provisionally, because there may always be a better understanding that arises in future.  And today, there’s too much knowledge to be held in any one person’s head, so human knowledge lives in networks of experts, and the sum of our public knowledge is the knowledge that has successfully persuaded these networks.  We aim for objectivity and disproof as grounds for persuasion.

Persuasion and Disproof

Consider how this works in science.  Not everybody is smart enough to become a scientist; many lack the required access to education; and it takes a long time.  Still, anyone with such good fortune can choose this career path.  The way it works is that you have to publish your ideas or discoveries, and so subject them to criticism and disproof.  You send these to academic journals, and perhaps your peers are persuaded by them.  Or perhaps they disagree and write a long critique.  Or perhaps they can’t replicate your results, and they publish that in reply.  Maybe no one is persuaded and your ideas die of neglect.  But if your ideas do persuade people, then they are accepted into the network of information, and the community of expertise, for that area of human knowledge.

Or consider journalism, which became generally self-correcting around the 1920s when journalistic codes of ethics were widely adopted.  Verification, independence, and accountability became professional obligations for anyone claiming to serve the public by reporting news of public interest.  So instead of talking about ‘fringe sources’ or ‘mainstream media’, we can talk about objective journalistic standards.  If a news source publishes an accusation, but does not give the accused a right of reply in that article, it’s not doing journalism.  If a news source doesn’t prominently distinguish between news and opinion, or disclose all possible conflicts of interest, they’re not doing journalism.  If a news source never publishes prominent corrections, then either they never make mistakes – which is unlikely when reporting on still-developing situations – or they’re not doing journalism.  And so on.  What are they doing if they’re not doing journalism?  If they’re not serving the public then who are they serving?

An idea is not right or wrong just because it is mainstream, nor for that matter because it is fringe.  But the process can be clearly right or wrong.  If it tries to be objective, publishes its best understanding and invites criticism from informed people, and takes pride in correcting itself when it makes a mistake, then it will tend toward true results.  These approaches to truth serve the public by improving public knowledge.  Rather than dismissing the mainstream or dismissing the fringe, we should distinguish good or bad science, good or bad journalism, and good or bad conspiracism, wherever we see it.  We should do this for all claims to public truth, whether from our public institutions or from self-styled independent researchers.  Mainstream institutions who act in these ways are good; those who do not are bad.  Likewise for fringe sources.

Of course there are plenty of problems with both science and journalism – and indeed all our public institutions.  All our liberal institutions are the product of hundreds of years of refinement – often gradual and piecemeal, but effective enough to have given us the real expectation that they can and should serve the common good.  They are fallible, and require active maintenance.  Powerful people can undermine them if we don’t take care, and conspiracy theories can be used for this purpose.  However, they have been built over time precisely to address some of the questions that conspiracy theories are asking: vested interests, personal biases, censorship and propaganda, and so on.

Public institutions can help hold each other to account.  Newspapers can report scandals in government, science, or journalism itself.  Governments can support good journalism and good science through legislating for transparency and accountability.  Legislative measures like freedom-of-information requests, or protection for whistleblowers, are how some historical conspiracies have been exposed.  This of course extends to other institutions like the courts, or public health, or regulatory policy.  Conspiracy theorists should be supporting these measures, which try to serve our common good by making people with power accountable to society at large.

So western society in general poses a challenge to conspiracism.  Are conspiracy theories successfully saying that its mechanisms for discovering and refining truth have collapsed beyond repair?  Can conspiracy theories integrate these institution’s strengths into their own investigations?  Can conspiracy theories publish their findings, invite criticism, and make public corrections of any mistakes?  And if they don’t, are they really doing any better than the mainstream?

A fourth useful idea for thinking through Christian belief in conspiracy theories is to focus on behaviour rather than beliefs.  Focusing on behaviour gives us ethical common ground and helps us have good conversations.

Conspiracy theorists will tell you they are seeking truth and justice.  Yet conspiracism is notorious for wild accusations and slander, strife and partiality, sometimes insincerity and pride, and often rage and insults too.  You don’t have to be a Christian to think these things are wrong, but there’s enough about them in the Bible that Christians ought to categorically reject them.  If we look at the way fools are described in the book of Proverbs, we’ll notice parallels with these kinds of behaviour: fools “believe anything,” are “quarrelsome,” are “wise in their own eyes,” are “mockers and scoffers.”  Any person can pursue conspiracy theories without behaving in these ways, and Christian conspiracists must ensure they do not.  Each of these problems is worth thinking through.

For each of these points we can spell out Christian ethics that will quickly settle the question of whether a person’s involvement in conspiracism – or politics – is undermining their day-to-day faith and behaviour.  Are they willing to follow Christ in their conspiracism?  Are their fellow Christians willing to when they discuss these issues with them?  Will we respect each other’s freedom of conscience, but at the same time work to “agree” – to find agreement and understanding – with each other?  If conspiracy theory disputes were causing a fracture in our churches, communities, or relationships, could we trust a third party to arbitrate for us?

Innoculation

If we find conspiracy theories are causing problems in our churches and communities, we might ask several different questions about the best way to respond.  “How do we fix this?” is the most obvious.  Or if that doesn’t work, and no quick fix is apparent: “How do we manage this in an ongoing way?”  These are obvious questions that need answering.  But we could also ask ahead of time: “What can we do to prevent these problems before they occur?”  Everyone we’ve read seems to agree that it’s difficult to displace a conspiracist view of the world once it takes hold.  Conspiracism mistrusts any kind of expertise or authority that could be used to correct it.  The best established idea in conspiracy theory research is that inoculation is better than cure.

Inoculation says to get in first and give examples of conspiracist thinking and why it can be a problem.  This can make people more wary about conspiracist claims, and associated wrong behaviours, before they begin.  But there’s an important moral caution to mention here.  Inoculation is a way of taking power over others.  We’re getting in first in order to influence how they see other information and to stop others getting in first.  We should explain what we’re doing so that they can think about it for themselves and so that they know to recognise it.  Inoculation has to be about liberation, not control.

Here’s how inoculation might be applied to the four ideas I have already mentioned.  Recall that the ideas were: (1) Good Conversations; (2) Fringe Mistrust; (3) Mainstream Knowledge; and (4) Christian Behaviour.