Introduction

Belief in one conspiracy, rightly attested, doesn’t mean you should believe in all the rest, falsely suggested. It's hard to know what to believe. Before surrendering reason to conspiracy's seductive whispers, the wise soul must first examine: Does this theory illuminate truth or merely appeal to the fallen desire to possess secret knowledge? Consider several categories that are part of the conspiracy mindset and why it’s wise to be cautious before believing conspiracy theories.

First, Skepticism

Conspiracy theorists often regard themselves as skeptics. The problem is that it’s a suspicion inconsistently applied. If there were as much skepticism of the conspiracy theory as there was about the conventional narrative, that would be skepticism. If someone wielded the same philosophical sword of doubt against conspiracy theories as they do against popular understanding, then they would learn what skepticism looks like, consistently applied. The practice of unbuilding the obvious is light on proof and details. It’s unwise to have promethium confidence about a creed made of question marks, which is why it would be edifying to apply at least as much skepticism to the conspiracy theory as to the approved account.

Second, Experts

Ordinary people now bristle at the “elites,” those people who seem to run the world, the institutions, and the government. The experts expect people’s deference without recognizing they’ve earned resentment. Many ordinary people look at politicians and technocrats as evil and untrustworthy. But distrust of the Davos Man doesn’t mean we should be lured into rash reactions.

Such reactions feel like an awakening from the corruption of groupthink. But they threaten to become echo-chamber thinking along the very same lines of that which is denounced. If we are merely contrarians to the experts, then we will only be accidentally right when the experts are accidentally wrong, which also means we will be accidentally wrong when the trends are accidentally right. It could be that by automatically reacting to the trends of the experts, you become as much of a stampeding, spooked herd as they are.

Third, Research

Speculating wildly is fun, even if there is no warrant, evidence, or good sense. And it’s the sort of fun that feels incomplete unless it's shared. That’s why conspiracy theorists search out a merry band of like-minded fellowship. These days, that takes them online to influencers. Every computer has a microphone. Every phone has a recording app. Anyone can hit record and start sharing their “research.”

The phrase “do your own research” has become something of a mantra among conspiracy theorists, especially in online spaces. As such, the phrase implies intellectual independence, critical thinking, and healthy skepticism. But in the conspiracy theory mindset, it means, “don’t trust the experts or institutions,” or “watch the same YouTuber I watch,” or “agree with my conclusion to prove you’ve researched rightly.” The problem is that while sometimes the experts are wrong, sometimes the obscure or dubious channels are wrong too. People should refuse to be brainwashed by mainstream sources, but not by scrubbing their minds with an equally fuliginous rag. The problem is when “doing your own research” turns into selectively choosing sources that confirm your bias. The man who says “do your own research” has often already done his own believing, which looks suspiciously like René Descartes, doubting everything except the preferred theory.

Fourth, Gnosticism

The world is full of voices, and every one of them is shouting that the others are mad. It’s hard to know the border between conjecture and evidence, especially when you’ve just acquired possession of secret “knowledge” that other people don’t have, a knowledge that doesn’t just explain an event or phenomenon but explains the broader political history of the United States. It’s seductively alluring to imagine a brilliantly sophisticated plot carried out by the CIA, working with the mafia, and forming a shadowy group of people who have been controlling the whole thing. It seems to explain so much. Even better, it's knowledge I have, but my neighbor doesn’t. It’s emotionally satisfying.

Why does Paul warn against devoting yourself to irreverent, silly myths (1 Tim. 4:7) which promote speculations (1 Tim. 1:4)? It’s because the human heart is inclined toward vain speculation rather than the truth of God’s Word or plain reason. Our nature delights in secret knowledge, as we learn from the first temptation in the Garden, “You shall be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). The problem is that when we believe the serpent, we compromise our ability to offer godly wisdom. When you see a conspiracy behind every manifestation of evil, then you are wrapping yourself tightly with the foolish controversy Paul commanded Christians to avoid (Titus 3:9), controversies that profit nothing and corrupt the mind. The conspiracy-prone soul seeks its prideful certainty rather than trusting in God’s sovereign governance and allowing for the manifold mysteries of a universe made by an eternal God that raises dead bones, turns water to wine, and exists as one God in three persons.

Fifth, Mystery

While the impulse to gain mastery through secret knowledge is indeed a symptom of intellectual pride, there is also a powerful social dynamic at work that makes conspiracy theories not just possible but seductive. That is, conspiracies are not simply about what happens in our heads; they reveal something about the structure of the world we inhabit. We are surrounded by economic models, sociological charts, and algorithmic recommendations—systems that claim to explain everything. These systems reduce reality to something far flatter than we actually experience. Conspiracies are compelling because they represent a heroic resistance to that flattening. They offer explanations that, while often false, feel truer to the deep intuition that the world is not ultimately legible. Our susceptibility to conspiracy, then, arises not primarily from a rejection of truth but from a starvation of mystery. In a society, allergic to transcendence and addicted to materialism, conspiracy rushes in to fill the vacuum.

While the arts used to fill that vacuum or (at least) provide an outlet to allow mystery a place in public life, conservatives long ago evacuated the institutions responsible for producing and supporting the arts. Thus, conspiracies are often popular on the Right side of the contemporary political spectrum because the arts, the God-given sources where the reality of mystery and the mystery of reality could be publicly acknowledged, have been largely abandoned to the Left.

Yet, the illusion of human omniscience grows daily. Glass rectangles in our pockets, dashboards full of metrics, charts tracking invisible processes—with every click and swipe, we are being catechized to believe that the world is simply a machine we can master. The world we have constructed is informationally rich but experientially thin. But underneath the gleam of our sleek interfaces lies a kind of metaphysical hollowness, a deep knowledge that the precision is not foolproof. So when the models fail, as they did in the 2008 crash or the incoherent tangles of pandemic protocols, the lie of control is exposed. And into this void steps the conspiracy: not as a glitch in the system, but as a kind of perverse realism, one that the machine refuses to admit—that the world is not so easily tamed, that hidden motives do in fact shape events, and that meaning still clings to the shadows. People gravitate to a given conspiracy, not because of irrationality, but because it’s a small apocalypse disclosing how the official story no longer fits the texture of their lives. And as the poet Christian Wiman somewhere says, if you starve your awe, you will feed your awful.

These theories, as malformed as they may be, offer something that the sterile machinery of our bureaucratic technocracy cannot: mystery. They answer the itch for the inexplicable, and in this sense, even the most outlandish theory is trying to tell the truth slant, as Dickinson would say. Conspiracies are appealing because they represent the reintroduction of drama into a world that has stripped itself of any significance beyond silicon. The conspiracy theorist may be mistaken, but he is rarely bored. He has agency, a story to live in, even if that story is counterfeit. In a world where everything is monitored and optimized, conspiracy is one of the last places a person can go to recover a sense of depth, a sense that reality is layered.

The conspiracy theory, then, is not just “an error.” It is a distorted attempt to remember what we have forgotten: the world was never ours to master in the first place.

Conclusion

Augustine taught that all sin is a disordered love. To delight in rumors and unfounded tales is playing footsie with falsehood. There is no wisdom in assenting to things lightly. Believing speculations, let alone spreading them, compromises not only your Christian witness but the church’s witness of the gospel. It’s a pratfall of prudence and proportion.

Self-glorifying podcasters are remarkably skilled at duping smart people. Their incendiary presentation, which should be off-putting, delights the mind with a thrill of novelty. The old and the young, the blue-collar and the lettered men are each susceptible to the deceit of provocateurs. It’s possible for a good person, a godly person, and a thoughtful person to be dragged by a deadly fascination with the novel idea simply because it is new, failing to see, as Chesterton once said, that the ingenious explanation is a little too ingenious.¹

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Jason Cherry is an elder at Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as a teacher and lecturer of literature, history, and economics at Providence Classical School in Huntsville. He graduated from Reformed Theological Seminary with an MA in Religion and is the author of the books The Culture of Conversionism and the History of the Altar Call and The Making of Evangelical Spirituality.

Gage Crowder is husband to Rachel and father to Kyper and Binx. A graduate of Birmingham Theological Seminary and the Theopolis Institute, Gage is assistant pastor at Trinity Reformed Church and a lecturer in philosophy at Providence Classical School in Huntsville. 

Footnotes

¹ G.K. Chesterton, In Defense of Sanity: The Best Essays of G.K. Chesterton (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), 150.