A Christian Take on Conspiracy Thought

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Introduction

The last few years have seen an explosion of jokes about conspiracy thinking. People are advertising for new conspiracy theories pretty regularly now because their old ones are useless . . . because all of them came true.

We should stop calling them conspiracy theories and start calling them spoiler alerts. What is the difference between a conspiracy theory and a real conspiracy? About six months. How many conspiracy theorists does it take to change a light bulb? Do your own research, man.

A conspiracy nutter died and went to Heaven. At the Pearly Gates, when Peter asked him if he had any questions, he said, “Yes. Do vaccines cause autism?” Peter replied in the negative, “No, no, they do not.” The gentleman scratched his chin sadly. “How far up does this go?”

The jokes are pretty even-handed, with the butt of the jokes varying—from the guy who finds absolutely everything suspicious to the guy who thinks that keeping Epstein’s client list secret really is a matter of national security.

And so what are Christians to make of conspiracy theories? Not surprisingly, it all depends on which theory it is, as well as depending on the worldview assumptions that lie behind it all and drive the analysis.

Biblical Orientation

In order to orient ourselves biblically, we need to begin with a broad theological point, and then move on to a few exegetical observations.

The theological point is that the triune God of Scripture is a personal God, not an impersonal force, and He is sovereign over everything that happens in human history. Jehovah God is the one who “worketh all things after the counsel of his own will” (Eph. 1:11). What this means is that the interplay of events down throughout history is the result of persons, created in the image of God—either fighting against Him as rebels or submitting to Him as sons. But all of it is personal. The Christian is therefore committed in principle to the idea of cosmic personalism. This is a key point, and I urge you to remember it.

This enables us to clarify our understanding of certain texts. In the Garden, God established a fundamental antithesis between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent.

Because of the first theological principle laid down, because of the fact that a personal God governs all things, this means that the struggle that defines all of human history is also personal. The antipathy between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent is personal. This is a personal struggle, and it extends upward to include the God who gave the determining word about this antithesis. There is the antithesis itself, between the two seeds, and then there is the war of the serpent against the sovereign Ruler who pronounced the antithesis.

Paul alludes to the Genesis promise in his encouragement of the Roman church. Not only did Jesus Christ crush the head of the serpent in His death and resurrection, but so also the church triumphs over Satan. As the body of Christ, we are His feet, and so we also trample the serpent under.

So this standing antipathy is how the apostles understood the culmination of history in the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus. This is something Peter pointed to in one of his early sermons, basing it off the prophecy of Psalm 2.

The crucifixion of Jesus happened as the result of a conspiracy. God had a declared purpose, which was the salvation of the world, and because of the truth contained in the words of Gen. 3:15, the kings of the earth had to conspire against that declared purpose. They thought they had succeeded once Jesus was buried, but God had His own purposes waiting in store. But because God is sovereign, their conspiracy was simply one of the instruments on His workbench that He picked up and used to accomplish His ultimate purposes. “To do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done.”

And so, in the long war against God, those who are children of the serpent necessarily conspire. They are fighting against God, remember, and so they must necessarily marshal their forces. They gather together. They do conspire. They must conspire, and they fool themselves into believing that they have a chance.

And so unbelievers conspire against the ways of God, of necessity. But all of it is vain, and God’s people are instructed not to worry themselves about it. Secular and unbelieving conspiracies are a very real thing in the world, but they will all of them come crashing down. The believer does not deny the existence of such conspiracies, but he should deny the possibility of their ultimate success. The unbelieving mind comes up with many devices, plots, machinations, imaginations, stratagems, tricks and traps. Any of them can look pretty scary for a time, but they always come to nothing.

We are told quite plainly that Jehovah is to be our dread . . . not the Illuminati, not the Tri-Lateral Commission, not the Jews, not Skull and Bones, and not the deep state. “Let Him be your fear, and let Him be your dread.” We are to come to Him as to a sanctuary, and there we are to take hold of the horns on the altar.

So, With All That Said . . .

Now given what the Scriptures teach us about conspiracies, there are three basic ways we can go. We can just flat out deny the reality of conspiracies, we can wildly speculate about what we think the conspiracies might be, or we can weigh the evidences for or against various conspiracies judiciously, being careful to use the weights and measures of the Temple. This route is the way we should go, and this folds nicely into the Lord God being our fear and our dread.

But what about the first two options?

Let us take the illustration of the relationship between the devil and a thunderstorm. The secular materialist doesn’t believe in the devil, and so he sums up the meaning of a thunderstorm by describing it as the build-up of an electrical charge in the clouds, which then needs to be discharged somehow. When the bolt lets fly, the air rapidly expands in shock waves, thus causing the thunderclap. For this man, the description suits him fine, as he confuses that description with an explanation, which has not been given at all.

The superstitious man simply tells his children that the thunder is the result of the devil beating his wife.

A third man, steeped in Scripture, says that God is revealing His majesty and power—“The voice of thy thunder was in the heaven: The lightnings lightened the world: The earth trembled and shook” (Psalm 77:18).

Views of History

The first man is a reductionist, a debunker. Nothing is going on up there in the clouds except natural forces colliding with each other. The second man is untethered from both reason and revelation. He just says whatever comes into his head, and nothing need ever be verified. And the third man has had his worldview shaped and molded by Scripture—he is a disciple.

It is similar when it comes to our attempts to explain history. The debunker believes that all of history is driven by impersonal forces. The Marxist believes them to be economic, the Freudian believes them to be sexual, the Darwinist believes them to be genetic, and so on. But all unbelieving sophisticates are committed to the idea of impersonal forces banging around. Because they believe that they understand the truth about these impersonal forces, they do not think of the actions that they take as being conspiratorial at all. Their cause is actually destiny.

They do allow for the existence of some conspiracies—cobbled together by those reactionaries “over there” who would try to thwart the purposes of destiny. All such people are enemies of the state, enemies of humanity. What they actually need is to be educated, meaning that they need to be taught how history is the confluence of various impersonal forces, driving everything in accordance with the current “impersonal forces” orthodoxy.

It is important to note that the destiny that they are counting on is an impersonal destiny, arising from forces within the material world. Their destiny is therefore an immanent destiny. This is distinguished from what the Christian believes, which is that history is shaped by a personal and transcendent will, the will of God, which is grounded in eternal times, and is entirely outside the world. Put another way, they are surfing the flux, while we are alive in the love of our Father.

What about the superstitious guy? This is where our caricature of a conspiracy nutter comes from. To use Churchill’s phrase, a fanatic is a man who can’t change his mind and who won’t change the subject. The superstitious man believes that life is personal, which is true enough, but then he simply assigns random explanations to events willy-nilly. So this is where unhinged conspiracy thinking comes in. The Illuminati did it. The Jews did it. The Federal Reserve did it. The devil is beating his wife.

The biblical thinker knows that all of human history has to be understood in personal terms. This is because the transcendent and triune God created the world, and He is personal. We are not supposed to study history in order to extract some sort of meaning from our mastery of the historical facts. Rather, we are supposed to study the Scriptures, while paying particular attention to our own individual responsibility before God, responding to His invitation to repent and believe the gospel, and His subsequent summons with regard to our sanctification to live in accordance with His law/word. As we do this, He is the one who is going to bring all of history to its appointed end. We may trust Him to do so.

A Substitute Devil

Following the observation of Gregor Sebba, the “bad guys” in much conspiracy thinking are a stand-in for the devil, and are very much like the medieval devil in many ways.

When you look at this description, you can see at once why a group like the Jews would be a favorite whipping boy. But there are plenty of others out there who can fit the bill as well . . . and over the centuries have fit the bill. Darn Freemasons. This is not to say that there are no Freemasons, or Jews for that matter, who are actually trying to do what the conspiracy theorists are claiming about them. But it is to say that to attribute the devilish characteristics of a universal and shadowy power is a lie.

When we make the mistake of thinking that the devil is God’s opposite, or God’s counterpart in some way, we are setting ourselves up to fall into the wrong kind of conspiracy theory. But God has no opposite. The devil’s opposite, such as he is, would be someone like the archangel Michael, and not God at all. The devil is a creature, and the distance between him and God is infinite, comparable to the distance between God and a glow worm.

When we assign the devil a role (or the devils of our various conspiracy fears) that is opposite to God, we are granting him (or them) far too important a place. We are setting ourselves up for the sin of letting someone or something other than Jehovah be our fear and our dread.

God is the one who throws down the mighty from their seats, and He has been doing this for six thousand years. How many Ozymandian kings have exalted themselves over the centuries, and how many of them have come to nothing? Absolutely all of them. We have seen this principle at work even in our own tumultuous times. Remember how afraid of the Clinton crime family many conservatives used to be? Just a few years ago? What are they now? A burnt out squib.