Conspiracies Exposed (Part III): The Secret about Conspiracy Theories

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I know a man who is an avid consumer of conspiracy theories. He keeps abreast of them all, from the most rabid rants of Alex Jones to the most erudite speculations about the proliferation of G5 technology. He is especially consumed with conspiracy theories of the biblical variety, and emails me periodically wondering where we are on the “timeline of biblical prophecy,” if I think some recent event or other in global politics might actually be the work of the Anti-Christ, or if this or that political leader may in fact be the Beast of Revelation. Often his emails are accompanied by videos from websites with titles like “bannedvideo.com,” which connect the dots between the Bible and world events more freely than a toddler with a crayon in an activity book.

If it sounds like I’m making fun, I am really not. I’ve shared in previous posts how harmful I think conspiracy theorizing (as distinguished from “conspiracy hypothesizing”) can be, how complex the issues are, and how high the stakes. As a pastor, I care about this man a great deal and have often wished we could have real dialogue about some of these ideas. The challenge, of course, is that conspiracy theories tend to be all-or-nothing ways of thinking, making real dialogue about them fraught with tension. If the evil-doers really have infiltrated the highest levels of the government and the furthest reaches of the news media, then anyone who offers any evidence to the contrary is either their dupe, their flunkey, or their instrument. The framework has animosity built into it.

Early on in my relationship with this man, I was really struggling to figure out how to respond to all this pastorally, so I reached out to one of my theological mentors for advice. We talked it all over, and before I knew it, we were theologically theorizing about conspiracy theories themselves. At one point, my mentor said something that completely recast what a conspiracy theory is, for me, and why we find them so compelling.

“A conspiracy theory,” he said, “has the same spiritual allure as the occult, and may actually be the opposite side of that coin.”

I asked him to explain. The person with a conspiracy theory believes they have acquired “hidden knowledge” about spiritual realities that are invisible to the average person, he said, that they have seen through reality, so to speak, and have accessed a deeper, darker reality on the other side. This is the same kind of thing that “occult knowledge” offers, the ability to “see through” the everyday and access an invisible reality lurking on the other side. And for both, the allure is the same: we want to access “hidden knowledge” because we believe it will give us power. In the case of occult knowledge, the offer of power is clear. Dr. Faustus summoned Mephistopheles because the devil offered to give him what he wanted. In the case of a conspiracy theory the offer of power is less obvious, but just as alluring. It promises us that if we just “trust the theory” we’ll have power over our enemies (because they won’t be able to take us in), the power to escape their manipulations.

I’m still trying to decide if this theory about conspiracy theories has something to it or not. The unconvinced would point out that, even if they share “hidden knowledge” in common, conspiracy theories and occult practices have opposite impulses. The one wants to align with evil, while the other wants to resist it.

Fair enough; but if there’s any connection at all, it would explain why so many conspiracy theories seem to offer such detailed, elaborate, even intimate knowledge about “what the devil’s up to.” It would also explain, possibly, why so many of the conversations I’ve had with bona fide conspiracy theorists, have had such an undercurrent of fear, anger, xenophobia, and often even glimmers of hatred to them. If you can know a tree by its fruit, the fruit of a full-on conspiracy theory does not seem to be peace, hope, joy or love; at least not in my experience it doesn’t.

Maybe “occult” is going too far though. There was a heresy that the early church rejected, way back in the early days of the faith, called Gnosticism. The term comes from the Greek word for knowledge, because the Gnostics believed that what would save you, in the end, was knowledge, especially hidden knowledge about spiritual things, knowledge the initiate had and the uninitiated didn’t. Gnosticism probably had a finger or two in the “occult pie” itself, but it was not an occult system per se; at least, it didn’t have to be. The Gnostics weren’t looking for magical power necessarily, they were after hidden knowledge, because they believed that salvation lay in knowing "the secret."

In their case, the "secret" involved ascending through an elaborate system of spiritual planes inhabited by all sorts of spiritual beings, but the key is that the world as it was—the world you could see and touch and love with the creator’s love—was to be rejected in favor of a “higher,” “better,” “more-real” world that was invisible, and immaterial, and attained only through secret knowledge.

I wonder if the worst of modern day conspiracy theories are really a form of Gnosticism, an offer of salvation—literal salvation from the machinations of the mysterious Beast of Revelation—not by trusting solely in the saving work of Jesus Christ, but by trusting in our own ability to figure out what lies “behind the veil.” Even if they’re not exactly a gnostic in nature, I’m wary of conspiracy theories for the same reason the early church was wary of Gnosticism: because they don’t teach us how to love the creation with the Creator’s love. Instead they teach us to suspect it, to distrust it, to reject it, in favor of something “more real” we think we can see going on behind the scenes.

The unconvinced would push back here, probably.

What could be more loving than to help people see “the truth?”

Possibly so; as a preacher, I’ve certainly committed my life to that end. But in the case of a conspiracy theory, I would suggest that because it’s always after some “hidden cause” for evil that must be lurking somewhere where no one can see it, it can distract us from addressing the very real, very obvious evil that we face in the “real world” every day: the pain of the exploited, the suffering of the oppressed, the need of the poor, the turmoil of the lost. These are things the Gospel wants to address literally, and it’s possible to become so consumed trying to work out the Number of the Beast, that we miss the million opportunities we face every day to come alongside the victims of the Beast with the grace, the love, and the healing power of the God.

After all, as Christians we possess the greatest secret of all—the Mystery of Divine Love as revealed in the Gospel—and this is, as the Apostle Paul reminds us in Colossains 1:26, an open secret, one that God has made fully public in the death and resurrection of his Son. According to Revelation 12:11, only this public declaration of the love of God in Christ has the power to overcome the Beast, and however much he may conspire, it alone will triumph, in the end.

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