\n<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been a heck of a month for conspiracy theories. My social media feeds have been inundated by warnings about impending COVID lockdowns and mandates<\/a>, wild claims about 9\/11<\/a>, supposed revelations of alien corpses<\/a>, and, after Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman (D) debuted a new mustache, a fresh round of speculation<\/a> that he uses a body double to conceal ongoing health struggles.<\/p>\n Each outlandish story contributes to a broader ethos of conspiracism<\/a>: a cynical and fearful mindset which frames everything around the assumption that the world is beset by a grand, secret evil and only a few know what\u2019s \u201creally\u201d going on.<\/p>\n Neither conspiracist thinking nor belief in discrete conspiracy theories are anything new. But the social acceptability of such belief does seem to have grown in recent years. Some credit is due to the internet, of course, but I think there\u2019s a much more fundamental source: human search for meaning within our place in history.<\/p>\n We\u2019re living in a time when religion is in decline<\/a>, social bonds are weakening<\/a>, and the humanities are devalued<\/a>. This leaves us with a dwindling canon of stories\u2014shared histories, parables, myths, and folktales\u2014that bind us together and inform a common moral vision. To cope, we\u2019re retreating into ever-narrower interest groups, becoming more suspicious of one another, and searching for stories to make sense of evil, uncertainty, and suffering.<\/p>\n Conspiracism offers just such a story. Regardless of concrete evidence, conspiracy theories can cut through our sense of unease and ambiguity with a grandiose, black-and-white narrative. They flatter true believers that they\u2019re in on a secret and can change the world.<\/p>\n In decades past, we dismissed anyone who indulged in theories about alien encounters, cryptids, or vast government conspiracies as a kook, and that social censure led most people to resist conspiracism\u2019s appeal. But today, with prominent champions like former president Donald Trump<\/a> and Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.<\/a>, this thinking has gone mainstream.<\/p>\n Conspiracism is often cast as an irrational, pseudo-religious mindset. It\u2019s true that it can fill a hole left by religion and, as former CT contributing editor Ed Stetzer has said<\/a>, function as a \u201ctrain that runs on the tracks that religion has already put in place.\u201d But conspiracy theories as we know them are also fundamentally modern constructs, built on rigid logic and a linear view of history that depends on a post-Enlightenment spiritual imagination and is influenced by thinkers like Karl Marx.<\/p>\n A quick sketch of this intellectual lineage should begin with the successes of the Scientific Revolution, which recommended reason as the key to all sorts of social and political mysteries, just as it had unlocked mysteries of the natural world.<\/p>\n Then, in the early 19th century, philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel proposed that<\/a> history itself is a discernible process. Over generations, he said, society is progressing toward a utopian horizon, and humans can rationally perceive this pattern. After all, if we can map the courses of the planets and stars, why not the trajectories of nations?<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to overstate the influence of this idea, both for historians and would-be revolutionaries. Hegel is generally not<\/a> considered an orthodox Christian, but he identified<\/a> God as the author of history\u2019s plot. Marx\u2019s version, however, had no room<\/a> for God at all.<\/p>\n Taking up Hegel\u2019s challenge to uncover the patterns that shape history, Marx argued that<\/a> class struggle was visible at every inflection point. Treat class struggle like a mathematical constant, he contended, and not only did history make sense, so did the future. Time could be mapped with the rational certainty with which Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei had mapped the movements of the planets.<\/p>\n For Marx, though, it wasn\u2019t enough to discern the pattern of history; he wanted to actively accelerate historical progress toward his vision of freedom. \u201cPhilosophers have hitherto only interpreted<\/em> the world in various ways,\u201d Marx said<\/a>. \u201cThe point is to change<\/em> it.\u201d That included the use of force, which he called the<\/a> \u201cmidwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.\u201d<\/p>\n This idea that humans can discern, then manipulate, the course of history\u2014on our own, without God\u2014has influenced Western political thinking ever since. Other ideologies have swapped race for class or enshrined different economic systems as the path to utopia, but have kept the underlying architecture of certainty, secret knowledge, and a consuming logic that can incorporate every fact or event it encounters.<\/p>\n Conspiracism uses this architecture too. It assumes that conspirators are covertly working to change the world\u2014and that conspiracy theorists can uncover those plots and stop them with a plan of their own.<\/p>\n While conspiracy theories may appear absurd and superstitious, they\u2019re actually a hyper-rationalist way of seeing the world, a demand for simple, causal explanations of encounters with evil and suffering. The conspiracist is hunting for a mathematical constant, something that can both account for the unseen forces that make life feel unstable and promise a utopian ending\u2014even if it\u2019s not Marx\u2019s workers\u2019 paradise.<\/p>\n Ironically, this includes those on the far right who are convinced that only Trump can solve our problems, and the new Christian nationalists awaiting a \u201cChristian prince\u201d to inaugurate a national \u201ccity of God.\u201d In this sense, with their simplistic keys to history, ontological certainty, and iron logic, these elements of the modern American Right are every bit the \u201ccultural Marxists\u201d as those they struggle against. Only their premises are different.<\/p>\n And while this style of political ideology is a relatively recent phenomenon, the underlying desire to account for evil and suffering is not. It is the basic instinct of the Book of Job\u2014but Job\u2019s conception of history and humanity is very different from that of Marx and his unlikely heirs.<\/p>\n Job suffers not just uncertainty but tremendous loss. He insists on the injustice of his circumstances and demands his day in court before God, planning not only to defend himself but to put God in the dock for his alleged lack of concern for the suffering of the righteous:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n When a scourge brings sudden death,
\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Job\u2019s friends are sure he\u2019s wrong. Clearly, they say, he\u2019s done something<\/em> to bring this suffering upon himself, because he\u2019s merely a man, and God is a righteous God.<\/p>\n And yet, after God shows up and confronts Job, rejecting his accusations, he doesn\u2019t rebuke Job for speaking as he did. He rebukes Job\u2019s friends for not speaking the truth \u201cas my servant Job has\u201d (42:8).<\/p>\n Somehow, in his outcry, Job has managed to reach for things too great for him to grasp (42:3)\u2014and yet he also speaks the truth. Meanwhile, his friends, insisting on the rationality of the world, have made themselves liars. Their flattened conception of justice and simplistic assumption that they could discern what was happening made them wrong about Job\u2014and wrong about God.<\/p>\n As scholar Stephen Mitchell explains in the<\/a> introduction to his poetic translation of the book, in Jobs\u2019 friends\u2019 arguments, humanity becomes \u201c\u2018that vermin, who laps up filth like water,\u2019 and their god is revealed as a Stalinesque tyrant so pure that he \u2018mistrusts his angels \/ and heaven stinks in his nose.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cUltimately,\u201d Mitchell continues, \u201cthe dialogue is not about theological positions but human reactions. Afraid of any real contact with Job and his grief, the friends stay locked inside their own minds. The same arguments are recycled again and again, with more and more stridency.\u201d<\/p>\n At its end, the Book of Job preemptively rejects the Marxist impulse behind many modern political ideologies and conspiracy theories. Our attempts to reduce history into simple cause-and-effect stories all shatter before the whirlwind. The point isn\u2019t that God is irrational or lacks a plan for history; it\u2019s that we are limited in our capacity to make sense of what God is doing.<\/p>\n Job wanted to understand evil and suffering, and God revealed that he couldn\u2019t even comprehend an ostrich or a wild donkey (39:13, 5). As the Catholic theologian G. K. Chesterton put it<\/a>, \u201cInstead of proving to Job that it is an explicable world, [God] insists that it is a much stranger world than Job ever thought it was.\u201d<\/p>\n We aren\u2019t left without consolation, though. We have Job himself as a model of righteousness amid unexplained evil. Job picked a fight with God and demanded God answer his cry for justice. And God, in loving condescension, answered him\u2014by reducing Job to \u201cdust and ashes\u201d (42:6).<\/p>\n At the heart of this encounter is a remarkable grace. What Job longed for, and what his friends offered in their distorted vision of justice, was answers\u2014the very thing God refuses to give. And yet Job seems satisfied, humbled by the gap between what God knows and what he can know. It is a satisfaction that \u201canswers\u201d could never have provided\u2014one found only in the God of the whirlwind who showed a surprising grace when Job was drowning in his tears.<\/p>\n That grace still operates today, of course. While we crave ideologies and conspiracy theories that make sense of a dark world, God still shows up in bewildering ways. Encountering him, even when it lays us low, can satisfy us far more deeply than any well-told story about directing our own destiny.<\/p>\n Mike Cosper is the director of CT Media.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n
\n[God] mocks the despair of the innocent.
\nWhen a land falls into the hands of the wicked,
\nhe blindfolds its judges.
\nIf it is not he, then who is it? (Job 9:23\u201324)<\/p>\n