Trust The Plan: Does Religion Drive Conspiratorial Thinking?
(ANALYSIS) Many religions feature prophets — figures claiming divine insight into the future.
When disasters like pandemics or civil wars strike, prophets often interpret these events as signs of the world's end, rallying followers around their visions. These leaders thrive by creating order from chaos, weaving seemingly random events into a divine plan that gives their followers meaning and purpose.
Similarly, conspiracy theorists offer narratives that impose structure on uncertainty. A recent example is the QAnon movement, sparked by cryptic posts from “Q,” a person who claimed insider knowledge of a secret plan.
Though predictions like Hillary Clinton’s arrest or Donald Trump remaining in office proved false, followers found solace in the idea of a hidden order guiding events — a belief captured in the phrase “Trust the Plan.”
Both prophets and conspiracy theorists fulfill a human need to find order in chaos. This overlap raises intriguing questions: Are religious belief and conspiratorial thinking positively linked, as both require imaginative leaps? Or do religious frameworks provide all the mental scaffolding needed, leaving no room for conspiracy theories? The relationship between religiosity and conspiratorial thinking is worth some real exploration.
Newspapers report the assassination of President JFK. (Creative Commons photo)
The Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) has a great dataset that includes a section about conspiracy theories. It’s called the Chapman Survey of American Fears and was fielded in 2021.
The question asks, “Please indicate your level of agreement with the following statements. The government is concealing what it knows about …” Then it includes a number of possibilities, including alien encounters, Sept. 11 and the JFK assassination.
They survey even included a completely fabricated one, “the South Dakota crash.” There are four response options ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. Here’s the share of the entire sample who agreed with each of the nine potential conspiracy theories.
The conspiracy theory that is the most embraced by the general public is about the assassination of John F. Kennedy — about 56% of folks believe that the government is covering that up. That’s followed closely by a belief that the government is not being forthcoming about global warming. The only other option that gets to a majority is alien encounters.
What scores low on this? Well, one is the completely fictitious South Dakota crash. It’s reassuring to see that only 32% of folks believed that the government was committing a cover up.
However, the moon landing scores the absolute lowest. Just 26% of this sample believes that there was something fishy going on there.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, please visit his Substack page.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.