A Quasi-Fideist Approach to QAnon

ABSTRACT

QAnon, the view that Donald Trump is the last line of defense against a secret group of Satanic child traffickers, has garnered a great deal of traction and attention. A growing number of people describe themselves as having lost friends and relatives to QAnon, and many of us are unsure of how to interact with QAnon adherents. Intuitively, QAnon is a conspiracy theory. This might suggest that the right strategy is to debunk QAnon, because conspiracy theories are generally considered epistemically flawed views. However, this perspective may leave us ill-prepared to appreciate just how committed QAnon adherents are. To interact with them, we must find a way to take QAnon seriously, rather than dismissively. In this spirit, I argue for an alternative framework: we should treat QAnon as a religion. I first show that QAnon can reasonably be thought of as a religion. This opens the door to using tools from philosophy of religion to understand the epistemology of QAnon adherents. I use a quasi-fideist account of religious epistemology to explain why QAnon is a particularly recalcitrant worldview, and to develop an account of how one might ‘convert’ a QAnon adherent to a different worldview.

KEYWORDS:

• Quasi-fideism
• QAnon
• conspiracy theory
• Wittgenstein
• hinge epistemology

Acknowledgments

The Author would like to thank Adam Chin, Charles Leitz, Shannah Linker, Kaite McKenna, Dylan Popowicz, Duncan Pritchard, Darby Vickers, and Felege-Selam Yirga for useful comments and discussion on earlier drafts.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See Barghouty (2021) and Cook (2021), and the Reddit board r/QanonCasualties.

2. There is no consensus definition of conspiracy theories. Readers interested in this approach to understanding QAnon should start with literature referenced in note 3. Conspiracy theories can be distinguished from more theories about conspiracies, which are not typically considered epistemically problematic (see e.g. Dentith 30–32 for discussion of this distinction). The Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up were surely a matter of conspiracy. Someone who currently holds the view that powerful government figures enacted clandestine plans to burglarize and wiretap the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters, and to cover up evidence of their involvement would, I think, be more naturally be described as having a theory about a conspiracy, than a conspiracy theory understood in the generally used pejorative sense. Still, one might reasonably call such a person a conspiracy theorist, as long as all one means is that they have an explanation for some events which involves a conspiracy. It has also been suggested to me by an anonymous reviewer that there may be a strong connection between conspiracy theories and certain kinds of fundamentalism. This is an intriguing avenue for further work, though exploring it in this piece would take me too far afield.

3. See, Cassam (2019), Clarke (2002) parts of Keely (1999), Napolitano (forthcoming) O’Connor and Weatherall (2019), and Sunstein and Vermeule (2009), among many others for discussion of the epistemic problems with conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists. For analysis of the dangers of thinking of conspiracy theories as irrational, see Coady (2019), Pigden (2007), and Robertson (2015a). See Dentith (2014) for a qualified defense of the permissibility of accepting some conspiracy theories, some of the time.

4. See Keeley (2007), Robertson (2015a, 2015b), and Bezalel (2019) among many others.

5. I don’t argue that all conspiracy theories ought to be thought of as religions. For example, the ‘Paul is Dead’ conspiracy theory, according to which Paul McCartney died in a car crash and was replaced by a doppelganger, does not seem to call for such an explanation. Further, I don’t argue for a particular way of demarcating between conspiracies that are and are not usefully conceived of as religions. Still, there may be some rules of thumb. First, if a conspiracy theory possesses many of the parallels with religion that I outline in this section, it is worth considering what might be gained by exploring it from the point of view of philosophy of religion. Second, some epistemologists (e.g. Keeley (2003) and Raikka (2009) suggest a taxonomy of conspiracy theories according to which some are ‘total’ conspiracy theories, which purport to explain all or nearly all major events in the world across a large swathe of time. QAnon would seem to be one such conspiracy theory, and it may be that other theories in this category can also be usefully conceived of as religions.

6. QAnon is astoundingly convoluted. In describing QAnon, I restrict myself to reputable academic and journalistic sources, rather than sifting through the purported leaks from ‘Q’. A different approach to my question would involve creating a comprehensive picture of QAnon by combing through the primary sources. For general overviews, see Amarasingam and Argentino (2020) and LaFrance (2020). Miller (2021) and Aliapoulios et al. (2021) offer empirical analyses of QAnon internet content.

7. While QAnon’s connections with evangelical Christianity and the Republican party are likely its most notable demographic features, a few other demographic features of QAnon are intriguing (with the caveat that polling and survey data on these matters is limited, and subject to all of the usual epistemological problems with surveys). First, many people just aren’t that familiar with QAnon at all (though, given the volume of QAdherents and the fact that several of them are in positions of fairly substantial political power, this is no reason not to take QAnon seriously). Second, many, perhaps most, QAdherents do not believe the complete array of claims associated with QAnon. Third, at least some people who do not identify themselves as QAdherents nonetheless believe at least some of the claims associated with QAnon. Fourth, many of the most ardent QAdherents are aware of the fact that their commitment to QAnon has damaged their social and familial relationships. Fifth, those under 45 are more likely to believe at least some of the core QAnon claims than those over 45. See (Schaffner 2020) for survey information on this matter, (Edelman 2020) for an accessible overview of QAdherent demographics, and (Chang 2018) for an analysis of the posting habits of QAdherents on various Reddit pages.

8. Connections between QAnon and religion extend beyond structural parallels and QAnon’s incorporation of religious elements. Describing the time before The Storm as a Great Awakening echoes religious revivals. The First Great Awakening was a period of renewed religious fervor in Britain and its American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. The Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s swept through large chunks of the United States. Several religious denominations have their origin in this period, including Adventists and Latter-Day Saints. The Adventist movement provides an interesting parallel. A 19th century Christian group, the Millerites, was committed to Christ’s second coming occurring sometime around 1844. This did not happen, leading to the Millerite movement fracturing into several further Adventist denominations. This failed prediction is known as the Great Disappointment. QAnon is in a similar circumstance. Trump lost the election and no mass arrests occurred. There was no grand clash between good and evil or full revelation of Trump as a salvific figure. This is QAnon’s Great Disappointment. For the basics of Adventist history, see, among others, (Burton 2015; Land 1986). I thank Felege-Selam Yirga for suggesting this parallel. See also Moss (2021).

9. The closest QAnon comes is its connection to the Pizzagate conspiracy. See LaFrance (2020), and Amarasingam and Argentino (2020).

10. One might understand the evil-doers as Satanic in that they are exceptionally evil, or have constructed their image using conventional satanic tropes despite there being no actual Satan. Note that the actual existence of non-Christian QAdherents is inconsequential. I am concerned with the logical space of QAdherence. Nothing in the QAnon worldview entails that one be Christian. For whatever it is worth, the author is personally acquainted with several non-Christian QAdherents. See also Meltzer (2021) and Nelson (2021) for reporting on the connections between QAnon and new-age spirituality.

11. Jones was the founder and leader of the Peoples Temple.

12. Argentino (2020b) interprets QAnon as a ‘hyper-real religion’ While interesting conclusions may be drawn from treating QAnon as a distinctly hyper-real religion, all that matter for my purposes is that QAnon is plausibly some kind of religion. Franks, Bangerter, and Bauer (2013) argue that conspiracy theories involve a ‘quasi-religious’ mentality because conspiracy theory adherence involves a psychology similar to religious belief, despite conspiracy theories lacking the institutional structure of religion. I am primarily interested in the epistemological payoff of treating QAnon as a religion rather than the psychological mechanisms behind conspiracy theories, though I take my view of QAnon to be congenial to the conclusions of Franks et al. However, I reserve judgment regarding conspiracy theories in general, in no small part because of the lack of consensus as to the correct definition of both ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘religion.’ Further, the distinction between religion and quasi-religion is ultimately unclear. I suspect that Franks et al. have failed to appreciate the diversity of both religious and conspiracy theoretic institutional structures. Finding definitions of ‘religion’ and ‘conspiracy theory’ that maintain the distinction between the two groupings in a non-question-begging way, while also recognizing the immense heterogeneity of institutional structures that underlie religions and conspiracy theories is, I suspect, impossible.

13. I have claimed that atheists can be QAdherents. Strictly speaking, this would make atheist QAdherents religious. I see nothing amiss; not all religions are theistic. Further, one might hesitate to accept QAnon as a religion because it is hard to find a definition of religion that includes paradigmatic instances of religion, as well as QAnon, without including far too many things. Smith (1998, 281–282) offers a remedy. Finding a single definition of religion was a losing battle well before introducing QAnon into the mix. Rather, different questions about religion may demand different definitions. Any definition of religion that includes everything we’d want to include may not allow us to exclude QAnon. On a similar note, it is worth distinguishing between conceiving of QAnon as a religion and treating it as one for the sake of philosophical analysis. While I am, given my very expansive view of the definition of ‘religion’ amenable to the former. It seems to me that QAnon is a religion, albeit one that doesn’t preclude its adherents from adhering to other traditions. Those who lean towards more restrictive definitions of religion maybe more inclined to the latter view, according to which QAnon shares so many features with religion that it can usefully be thought of one for the sake of argument. Either conceiving of QAnon as a religion or treating it as one for the sake of argument is sufficient for my argument here, and I will bracket upstream questions about the definition of ‘religion’.

14. There are numerous views under the umbrella of hinge epistemology. Interested readers should consult Coliva (2015), Coliva and Moyal Sharrock (2017), Moyal-Sharrock (2004) Pritchard (2016), and Schönbaumsfeld (2016). A particular point of contention is whether hinges are, strictly speaking, beliefs. Because Pritchard’s work is central to recent work in quasi-fideism, I am inclined to follow Pritchard’s lead in treating hinges as some kind of non-belief commitment. Hinges are not merely very strong beliefs one must have in order to have other beliefs, but commitments that comprise the framework within which, among other things, beliefs are formed and defended. Still, readers inclined towards a different structure for their hinge epistemology can take the basic structure of my argument and translate it into their preferred approach.

15. All references are given as (Wittgenstein 1969, aphorism number).

16. Pritchard (2000, 2011, 2017; 2018a) has been central to the recent revival of work in quasi-fideism.

17. This shouldn’t be interpreted as letting religious belief off the rational hook. A religious believer lacking an appropriate hinge is irrational because their religious beliefs rest on nothing. Hinges should not be conflated with beliefs which just happen to be more particularly difficult to dislodge. Beliefs can be deeply held without being the sort of thing which, were we to lose our grasp on them, we would be unable to engage in normal epistemic activity.

18. One might find QHinge an unappealing candidate for making sense of QAnon within a quasi-fideist framework because it leaves QAnon disconnected from other religions. This hinge does not ground the religious beliefs of anything outside QAnon, while a hinge like ‘There is one God, and Moses was a prophet’ may ground the beliefs of may religions. The narrowness of QHinge isn’t a problem. Section 1 gives independent reason for thinking of QAnon as a religion. The case for that position doesn’t rest on there being a peculiarly religious hinge for QAnon. What matters for the quasi-fideist analysis of QAnon is that some hinge can be found. See Smith (2021) for detailed analysis of hinge selection for quasi-fideism.

19. Other hinges may work as well. For example, an optimally certain commitment to the existence of Q, or an optimally certain commitment to Trump’s role as a bulwark against evil might be plausible hinges for QAdherents as well, though I won’t pursue this here. One might also hold these alongside QHinge, though it doesn’t seem necessary to do so in order to be a genuine QAdherent. I follow Smith (2021) in seeking hinges for religious belief that leave extensive space for rational disagreement. If too many of a religion’s commitments are characterized as hinges, one is forced to reclassify seemingly rational disagreements among religious believers as instead disagreements over hinges that cannot be rationally resolved. While it’s certainly a matter of psychological possibility that some particular QAdherent’s commitment to QAnon involves many optimally certain commitments, exactly which commitments any QAdherent has is an empirical question best answered on a case-by-case basis. The counter-QAnon persuasive strategy I outline below will still apply to a QAdherent with multiple QHinges, it will just be harder to manage as one must in some way attack several certainties, rather than one.

20. Or at least some QHinge, see note 19 above.

21. Wong (20212021) gives accounts of those who left QAnon, as well as those who remained, after Biden’s inauguration.

22. Similarly, were QHinge not a hinge, one would expect to see a precipitous drop in QAdherence in the wake of things like reporting on the possible identity of Q, which makes clear that Q is almost certainly not a government insider with high clearance, but the operators of the 8kun message board. (Gilbert 2021; Mak 2021) Clearly, commitment to QHinge and QAdherence is not something that changes simply because new empirical information comes to light.

23. At least, the consequences of abandoning QHinge without having some hinge ready to take its place.

24. Or, if one has had serious medical problems, ‘I have less than two hands.’

25. At the least, one would expect QHinge to be replaced with the negation of QHinge, a commitment to the falsity of there being a secret collective of Satanic child traffickers in positions of political power.

26. One may, of course, couple rational attacks on the fringe beliefs of QAdherents with persuasive approaches as well. Begging, pleading, shunning, bribing, and all sorts of social sanctions and emotional appeals may be used to great effect on the right QAdherent, enhancing the affective force of rational argument or providing an additional angle of attack. Some affective strategies will be explored in more detail below.

27. There is good anecdotal evidence that this sort of doubling down occurs on the part of QAdherents. See Barghouty (2021) for accounts of engagements that ended when romantic partners confronted each other about QAnon, and Cornish (2021) for accounts of the same involving children and parents. See also (Dalgaard-Nielsen 2013).

28. Deradicalization is the process of removing people from ideologically radical (and often violent) groups, or preventing them from joining in the first place. To understand possible useful mechanisms for converting QAdherents, one might also look to empirical research on religious conversion, cult deprogramming, and so on. I approach QAdherents from the perspective of deradicalization first because QAdherence has been connected to violence of the sort that those interested in the deradicalization are concerned to prevent, and second because, as Koehler puts it, the study of deradicalization has incorporated insights from ‘Practical and theoretical knowledge from disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programs, criminological research about reintegration of multiple offenders, research focusing on joining and leaving cults or youth gangs, and many other fields’. (Koehler 2017, 2) Readers interested in deradicalization should see (Bjorgo and Horgan 2009; Demant et al. 2008; Koehler 2017) for thorough surveys covering both general theoretical matters and particular radical groups.

29. Methods one can use to possibly induce someone to leave an extremist group stand in contrast to features of the group which might cause a member to reconsider their membership. Some people might leave an extremist group because they disagree with the tactics of the group, find themselves unsupported by the group in various ways, or are abused by the groups. (Koehler 2017, 17–18) While being abused by other QAdherents might cause some QAdherent to question their adherence to QAnon, for example, one couldn’t cause this to happen ‘from the outside’ or in dialogue with a QAdherent, so I’ll bracket these methods. Note, though, that part of a successful strategy for converting a QAdherent might involve trying to help the QAdherent realize that they have been abused or unsupported, or persuading them that they have been so treated and thereby prompting them to consider their own allegiances. I will also bracket more extreme methods sometimes used in the process of deradicalizing violent extremists, such as vocational training or providing someone with a new identity in the way that witness protection programs do. While this sort of service would certainly be useful to a QAdherent who feared violent retribution from other QAdherents or needed to relocate in order to effectively leave QAnon, this doesn’t seem to be representative of the normal issues involving QAdherents.

30. Preventing QAdherent grandparents from seeing grandchildren has been a topic of discussion in the public sphere. See, (Herman 2021)

31. There is evidence that a desire to return to a normal family life can be a powerfull pull factor (see, e.g. Koehler 2017, 19; Bjorgo 2009)

32. For a fairly well-established, popular example, of positive contacts with outsiders aiding into deradicalization, interested readers should consult the biography of Daryl Davis, a black musician who befreinded dozens of Ku Klux Klan members and used his friendship to help them leave the Klan. Brief, accessible introductions to his work can be found in (Davis 2017; Friedersdorf 2015). See also Demant et al. 2008, 117. Note also that the distinction between push and pull factors is somewhat fuzzy, and how one categorizes any particular factor seems to be a matter of the details of the particular situation. A push in the form of shunning may be, in another light, a pull in the form of an opportunity to return to a normal social life. What matters more, at least for my purposes, than accepting any particular taxonomy of factors that influence deradicalization is that these factors can be identified and used to inform our thinking about the practical aspects of converting QAdherents.

33. There is a different, non-epistemic concern about the psychology of abandoning deeply held commitments. There may be non-epistemic pressures that induce a QAdherent to retain QHinge. Identifying oneself as part of QAnon may provide a much-needed feeling of membership, or the sense of being a part of something larger than oneself. These issues are fascinating, but outside of the scope of my analysis.

Additional information

Funding

This work was not funded by any grant.

Notes on contributors

Nicholas Smith

Nicholas Smith is a Mellon Humanities Faculty Fellow at University of California, Irvine.