Conspirituality Reconsidered: How Surprising and How New is the Confluence of Spirituality and Conspiracy Theory?

Abstract

Those who have followed the development of online new religiosity over the past decade will not have failed to notice that conspiracy theories and ‘New Age’ ideas are thriving together. But how new and how surprising is the phenomenon of ‘conspirituality’? In the present article, we challenge the thesis put forward by Charlotte Ward and David Voas in their article of 2011, published in the Journal of Contemporary Religion, that a confluence of spirituality and conspiracism has emerged in the past two decades as a form of New Age theodicy. Instead, we argue, on theoretical grounds, that conspirituality can be viewed as a predictable result of structural elements in the cultic milieu and, on historical grounds, that its roots stretch deep into the history of Western esotericism. Together, these two considerations allow us not only to suggest that conspirituality is old and predictable, but also to identify a large potential for further research which will contribute to the study of conspiracy culture and enable a new line of comparative research in religious studies.

Notes

1. The Hofstadter school comprises those who follow in the footsteps of Richard Hofstadter’s highly influential essay of 1964, ”The Paranoid Style in American Politics”.

2. There is a much longer history to this mainstreaming process, as suggested by Massimo Introvigne.

3. Unfortunately, the only reference provided to this highly important historical moment is a Wikipedia entry.

4. The claim that Alice Bailey’s Lucis Trust (originally ‘Lucifer Trust’, as conspiracists love to point out) and her proto-New Age doctrines are at the heart of the United Nations system and the New World Order’s secret agenda has proliferated on the Internet, as a Google search will easily reveal. Examples are legion, but see e.g. ”Alice Bailey 10 points for NWO”, YouTube user russ wadell, 3 March 2010. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OVZcSWepR4, access date: 22 July 2014.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Egil Asprem

Egil Asprem is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara, USA. He is the author of The Problem of Disenchantment and Arguing with Angels and co-editor (with Kennet Granholm) of Contemporary Esotericism.

Asbjørn Dyrendal

Asbjørn Dyrendal is professor of History of Religion at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. His research interests focus on conspiracy culture, Satanism, and popular culture. He is presently co-editor of the International Journal for the Study of New Religions. CORRESPONDENCE: Egil Asprem, Department of Religious Studies, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3130, USA.