Conspiracy Theory or Religion: What's the Difference?
What do you think?
A couple of days ago a friend of mine sent me a message saying that she needed a philosopher. Happy to rise to the occasion, I asked her what she was curious about. Then she hit me with this question:
What’s the difference between a religion and a conspiracy theory?
With excitement, I replied that my friend and philosopher Jenny Saul was going to be teaching a class on Conspiracy Theories starting in January, and that while I couldn’t promise an answer like that she might give, I would take a stab at it.
Before I explain how I see the difference between the two, I need to clear up two definitions.
Misinformation is information is generally considered to be false information that was shared with a general public without the knowledge or intention that it was false information. Most people who share 'aliens built the pyramids' stuff are sharing disinformation - someone, somewhere made an ‘observation,’ which got out of control in the telling and retelling of a story. The important thing here is that there is no intention on the part of the sharer to share false information - in cases of misinformation, the sharer typically believes what they are sharing to be the nature of reality.
Disinformation, on the other hand, is the deliberate seeding of false information to the general public, often with political, economic, or social engineering motives. This is often but not always generated by state actors. Russian bot farms that push content on Twitter for unsuspecting conservatives in Canada and the United States is the classic example of disinformation. Non state actors of this type might be folks who persist in sharing false knowledge for some perceived gain despite knowing that the information they are sharing is false. This would include pseudo-archaeologists like Graham Hancock or purveyors of Indigenous Aryanism, which falsely posits that Indo-Aryans are native to northern India, rather than having migrated there from the Eurasian steppe.
I'd argue that the difference between religion and conspiracy theories is similar to the difference between misinformation and disinformation - in one case people are simply duped by false information, while in the other, false information is intentionally seeded.
Conspiracies, as I understand them, are generally not formally taught to someone; they develop through osmosis of a certain kinds of information and educational material. They're more like subjective misinformation. While the creators of the material may or may not have had nefarious intentions, those who internalize it generally don't do so for nefarious reasons. Instead they convince themselves that the truth is being hidden from them by 'The Powers That Be' and so they consider themselves to be special, in that they have access to knowledge that the rest of us aren't supposed to have.
Religion is a lot like disinformation. There are actors with power who use that power to create communities centered around information or knowledge that the powerbrokers deem to be important. I've been deeply influenced by Karl Marx's critique of religion, which is that it was a tool of the capitalist class to keep the proletariat under foot, to keep them satiated by promising them rewards in the afterlife. While I don't think that religion exists solely as a tool of the capitalist class, I do think it serves as a tool of the power brokers of a particular culture or society in order to keep the broader culture ‘in line.’
Conspiracy theories, then, are an inverse of religious beliefs. Where religious beliefs are typically handed down from above and rely on an established structure, history, and individuals as a pillar of authority, conspiracy theorists seem to distrust broader claims of authority, suggesting instead that the information they have is being deliberately suppressed by traditional authority figures.
Obviously my analogy isn't perfect, but I think that's part of the difference anyway.
That said, I've always said that the anti-vax movement is best understood as a global, leaderless cult, so who knows?
This last remark, of course, brings about a further question: what is the difference between a cult and a religion?