QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories
Authors: Austin Michael W. 
Published: February 2025

QANON, CHAOS, AND THE CROSS: Christianity and Conspiracy Theories by Michael W. Austin and Gregory L. Bock, eds. Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2023. 286 pages. Paperback; $24.99. ISBN: 9780802882653. *This book is a collection of twenty-four short essays written mostly by Christian academics with a background in philosophy and/or theology. It examines the relationship between Christian believers--principally white American evangelicals--and conspiracy theories, particularly Covid-19 mandates, the QAnon movement, and the 2020 presidential election. Its stated goals are to shed light on the reasons why Christians get seduced by divisive conspiracy claims and to challenge followers of Jesus to think and communicate according to biblical teachings and the example of Christ. *In their introduction, the editors warn fellow believers that while conspiracy claims sometimes turn out to be true, a majority of them turn out to be false, unlikely, or unjustified. Belief in conspiracy claims is therefore problematic in a community that purports to be lovers of truth. Secondly, conspiracy beliefs often foster tribalistic attitudes and divisive exchanges, hindering the Christian's ability to properly love their neighbor and respect civil authorities, including those whom they suspect of conspiring against them. Thirdly, conspiracy thinking undermines the virtues of hope, forbearance, trust, and gratitude that Christians ought to reflect, provoking them to react impulsively out of fear and anger. American evangelicals are very politically active but also susceptible to having an "us versus them" mentality. Guarding hearts and minds against unproven conspiracy claims is urgent in this age of hyperpolarization (pp. ix-xi). The bulk of the essays in this book therefore promote the moral qualities that followers of Christ should manifest as ambassadors of the Kingdom of God. *Unfortunately, the essays in this book are presented in no particular order; this makes it hard for the reader to gain an overarching perspective. Nevertheless, the essays can be divided into three broad categories: (1) essays that discuss what conspiracy beliefs are and why some are particularly attractive to Christians; (2) essays that critique the evangelical proclivity to confuse civil religion with biblical doctrine, thereby blending their political convictions with their spiritual calling; and (3) essays that exhort Christians to adopt a Christ-like attitude when engaging in polarizing conspiracy talk. The distribution of essays among these categories is uneven. The third category is particularly overrepresented, and this leads to frequent repetition. *Furthermore, insufficient attention is given to unpacking the origins and contents of the conspiracy theories this book addresses. This makes it hard for uninformed readers to grasp the social and epistemic roots of evangelical conspiracism, such as the reasons evangelicals are, in general, more suspicious than the wider populace of public education, academic science, and government-funded social programs. The book also lacks historical, political, and sociological depth. Most of this book's contributing authors, who are almost exclusively drawn from philosophical and theological faculties, show little familiarity with the leading social science research, namely the works of Barkun,1 Uscinski and Parent,2 Dyrendal, Robertson, and Asprem,3 Douglas et al.,4 and Knight and Butter.5 *A few essays stand out as superior. Those by Scott Culpepper ("The Cost of Debunking Conspiracy Theories") and Chase Andre ("The Religious Rhetoric of QAnon") are the only contributions that adequately unpack a specific conspiracy theory--the 1980s Satanic Panic and QAnon, respectively. In each case, they demonstrate how Christians embraced attractive falsehoods that bolstered their moral outrage and sense of victimhood, carelessly empowered charlatans by failing to vet extravagant claims, and shut down thoughtful dissent. Essays by Rick Langer ("Testing Teachings and Torching Teachers") and Tim Muehlhoff ("Word Spoken at the Proper Time") rightly encourage Christians to be empathic and humble communicators, fair-minded toward ideological opponents, and aware of their own biases. *Several essays are of questionable merit and pertinence. The essays by Chad Bogosian ("Is It Always Wrong to Believe in A Conspiracy Theory?") and Christian B. Miller ("All Christians Are Conspiracy Theorists") fail to distinguish proven conspiracies (which tend to be simple criminal acts) from speculative conspiracy theories (which frequently resemble far-fetched movie scripts). They recycle the disputable argument of Charles Pigden (among others) that conspiracy theorizing is a legitimate and healthy form of public discourse, while ignoring a wealth of historical and sociological evidence to the contrary.6 Similarly, Bogosian and Miller work from vague and self-serving definitions of conspiracy, reducing the concept to "actions or plans undertaken by a small group [ ... ] to achieve shared goals" (p. 14), and "a small group of people acting in secret" (p. 99)--and not, as is widely understood, a secret plot whose goal is to deceive, manipulate, or harm others illegally and/or maliciously. Bogosian's and Miller's overly broad characterization of conspiracies could risibly include any number of legal, benevolent, and innocuous acts, such as confidentiality agreements, security clearances, surprise birthday parties, and the inscrutable will of a triune God--the latter used by Miller to argue that conspiracism is not in itself problematic since it is practiced daily by all believing Christians. But this is obviously not the sort of "conspiracy" that leads prominent Christian leaders to proffer angry and unfounded accusations in the public square. *Even more problematic are essays by Shawn and Marlena Graves ("Conspiracy Theories and Meaning in Life") and Susan Peppers-Bates ("The Greatest Conspiracy Ever"), which are mired in (left-leaning) political rhetoric, non-sequiturs, and a shallow understanding of the history of conspiracy thinking. Graves and Graves, for instance, attribute the popularity of conspiracy theories in America--including the recent QAnon panic--to the industrial revolution of the 19th- and 20th-century globalization of markets, both of which, they argue, caused dislocation of communities, "ubiquitous isolation and alienation," and an enduring crisis of meaninglessness (pp. 44-45). "In the grand context of an industrialized and predatory neoliberal society where communities are fractured and kinship ties are nearly non-existent ... where people feel invisible and unmoored, grand conspiracies can function as the gateway to satisfying the drive to find meaning" (p. 45). *Such conclusions smack of circular reasoning, in that any objective historian of conspiracism could easily summon many examples of conspiracy claims, witch hunts, and moral panics that long preceded industrialization and "predatory neoliberalism." The essay then roams off into a discussion on meaningful existence using Klansmen and Nazis as counterexamples, leaving the reader to wonder what any of this has to do with biblical doctrine or the political fears of American evangelicals. *Peppers-Bates's essay is the nadir of this collection. In her words, "the seemingly peculiar phenomenon of U.S. evangelical Christians accepting baseless conspiracy theories is grounded in a prior, deeper tendency of Judeo-Christianity in general to reduce God to a white male idol, and in particular to silence or ignore the voices of women, people of color, LGBTQI, and other marginalized groups. [ ... ] Once a group is demeaned, it becomes much easier to believe that they engage in paedophilia, drink blood, cause COVID, or any number of wild claims" (p. 145). *The logical and factual problems with this essay are legion. Not only is its accusatory tone and excessive use of Foucauldian jargon likely to make the book's target audience stop reading it altogether, it is filled with many misunderstandings of evangelical teachings and culture, often confusing them with those of mainstream Protestants, Catholics, and even white nationalists. It suffocates its reader in a word salad of cryptic terms like "othering," "patriarchization," "white-washing," "white supremacy," and "religious meaning-making." It ends with a misreading of the Parable of the Good Samaritan--the only scriptural reference offered in this essay and one she surprisingly argues is rarely taught in evangelical churches.7 Poorly researched and argued, it comes across as more paranoid than the conspiracy theories Peppers-Bates set out to debunk, undermining many of the thoughtful reflections offered elsewhere in this book. *While QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross contains some excellent and thought-provoking contributions, it falls short of serving a general church-going audience due to its lack of organization, insufficient reliance on the leading academic research, and the incongruity in quality and usefulness of its component parts. *Notes *1Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, 2nd ed. (University of California Press, 2013). *2Joseph E. Uscinski, ed., Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them (Oxford University Press, 2019); and Jospeh E. Uscinski and Joseph Parent, American Conspiracy Theories (Oxford University Press, 2014). *3Asbjørn Dyrendal, David G. Robertson, and Egil Asprem, eds., Handbook of Conspiracy Theory and Contemporary Religion (Brill, 2018). *4Karen M. Douglas et al., "Understanding Conspiracy Theories," Advances in Political Psychology 40, Sup. 1 (2019): 3-35; https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12568. *5Peter Knight and Michael Butter, eds., Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories (Routledge, 2020). *6See Peter Knight and Michael Butter, "The History of Conspiracy Theory Research," in Conspiracy Theories & the People Who Believe Them, ed. Joseph E. Uscinski, 33-46, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190844073.003.0002. *7For example, the wounded Jew in the parable--a victim of a violent robbery--is falsely described as a "leprous Samaritan" to turn the parable into a lesson about racist hatred instead of religious legalism. *Reviewed by Michel Jacques Gagné, historian and the author of Thinking Critically About the Kennedy Assassination: Debunking the Myths and Conspiracy Theories (Routledge, 2022). He teaches courses in critical thinking, political philosophy, and ethics at Champlain College, St. Lambert, QC.