Trust the Plan - Does Religion Drive Conspiratorial Thinking?

This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below.

EDITORIAL NOTE: Somehow I messed up the first graph. I have no idea how it happened, but that’s why I always post my code. I have uploaded the new graph and altered the text to match the new findings. Deepest apologies.

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Many religions feature prophets—figures claiming divine insight into the future. When disasters like pandemics or civil wars strike, prophets often interpret these events as signs of the world's end, rallying followers around their visions. These leaders thrive by creating order from chaos, weaving seemingly random events into a divine plan that gives their followers meaning and purpose.

Similarly, conspiracy theorists offer narratives that impose structure on uncertainty. A recent example is the QAnon movement, sparked by cryptic posts from "Q," a person who claimed insider knowledge of a secret plan. Though predictions like Hillary Clinton's arrest or Donald Trump remaining in office proved false, followers found solace in the idea of a hidden order guiding events—a belief captured in the phrase “Trust the Plan.”

Both prophets and conspiracy theorists fulfill a human need to find order in chaos. This overlap raises intriguing questions: Are religious belief and conspiratorial thinking positively linked, as both require imaginative leaps? Or do religious frameworks provide all the mental scaffolding needed, leaving no room for conspiracy theories? The relationship between religiosity and conspiratorial thinking is worth some real exploration.

The Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) has a great dataset that includes a section about conspiracy theories. It’s called the Chapman Survey of American Fears and was fielded in 2021.

The question asks, “Please indicate your level of agreement with the following statements. The government is concealing what it knows about…” Then it includes a number of possibilities including: alien encounters, September 11th, and the JFK assassination.They even include a completely fabricated one, “The South Dakota crash.” There are four response options ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. Here’s the share of the entire sample who agreed with each of the nine potential conspiracy theories.

The conspiracy theory that is the most embraced by the general public is about the assassination of John F. Kennedy - about 56% of folks believe that the government is covering that up. That’s followed closely by a belief that the government is not being forthcoming about global warming. The only other option that gets to a majority is alien encounters.

What scores low on this? Well, one is the completely fictitious South Dakota Crash. It’s reassuring to see that only 32% of folks believed that the government was committing a cover up. However, the moon landing scores the absolute lowest. Just 26% of this sample believes that there was something fishy going on there.

But let’s throw religion into the mix. There’s a simple question that starts the survey, “How religious do you consider yourself to be?”

This is not what I would describe as a crystal clear result. For instance, the graph in the top left is the share who believed that the government was hiding what it knew about the 9/11 attacks. Among people who were not at all religious, just 37% agreed that the government was not being truthful. It was 45% of folks who were very religious. The middle part of the religiosity scale was the most conspiratorial minded. You can see that in a couple other examples too: the moon landing, alien encounters, and the South Dakota crash all fit this curvilinear pattern.

There are other questions that seem to not follow this exact template, though. For instance, belief in the New World Order clearly rises as religiosity increases. That’s also true with views of the Kennedy assassination, too. But then on things like global warming and Q-Anon, it’s hard to see a discernible trend line. The most honest assessment of this data is that if there’s a relationship between religiosity and conspiratorial thinking it’s not a strong one and it’s certainly not universally the case.

But let me simplify this into one graph. I took all nine scenarios and calculated the number that were agreed to by each respondent in the sample. Then I calculated the mean number for each level of religious importance.

You can clearly see that the people who score the lowest on this ‘conspiracy index’ are those who report that they are not at all religious. Among this group, the average person only agreed that the government was not forthcoming about 3.25 instances out of a possible 9. That jumps significantly among those in the middle of religiosity questions - rising by a full point on that scale. Then, among those who are the most religious, it drops down slightly but the difference is not statistically significant.

There are two takeaways from this. You can basically separate this sample into the “not at all” religious group and then everyone else. That’s the only difference that’s statistically significant. But it’s not like there’s a huge chasm between these two groups, either. On a scale from 0 to 9, the ‘not at all’ group scored about .9 points lower. Which means that they are about 10% less conspiracy minded than everyone else.

What about religious attendance?

I think this graph gives us more of the same that we witnessed in the prior analysis. The least conspiratorial group are those who never attend religious services. Then the conspiracy index rises among folks in the middle categories of religious attendance (special occasions, yearly, and monthly attendance). But then it drops again among those who attend religious services at least once a week.

This curvilinear relationship also occurs here. The conspiratorial mindset seems to be lower among people who never attend religious services or attend at least once a week. It’s the people in the middle of the spectrum who are more likely to believe that the government is not being completely transparent about controversial events.

But there are, of course, other factors that could lead to more (or less) conspiratorial thinking. So, I put together a regression model that used that conspiracy theory index as the dependent variable (the thing we are trying to predict). I’ve got some basic demographic factors like age, race, education, gender, and marital status. But I also included a question about religious attendance, view of the Bible, and identifying as a political conservative.

A handful of variables drive down the conspiracy index. That was the case for race (white people are less conspiracy minded than non-white respondents), education and being male. There were a few factors that weren’t predictive in either direction: age, being married, and church attendance. They didn’t make one more or less inclined to believe that the government was concealing the truth. Also, being politically conservative had no impact at all on belief in conspiracy theories.

I only found one variable that clearly drove up a belief in conspiracy theories - a respondent’s view of the Bible. For those who indicated that “The Bible means exactly what it says. It should be taken literally, word-for-word, on all subjects,” their conspiracy theory index score was about .75 points higher when holding all other factors constant like age, gender, race, education, and political ideology. That’s pretty surprising and marries nicely with the academic work here. A quick look at the recent academic literature finds that there has been published articles that concluded that both Christian nationalism and biblical literalism drive conspiratorial thinking.

To take this a step farther, I put together an interaction model of political ideology and views of the Bible, using the same controls that were included in the previous analysis.

There are two things that I want to point out from this graph. Among people who believed that the Bible was literally true, it didn’t matter if they were extremely liberal or extremely conservative - the model indicated the same level of conspiratorial thinking. The same was true for people who said that, “The Bible is perfectly true, but it should not be taken literally, word-for-word. We must interpret its meaning.” Their overall belief in conspiracies was slightly lower than the literalists, but ideology had no impact overall.

Among those who took the lowest view of the Bible, these were people who said that the “Bible contains some human error” or “the Bible is an ancient book of history and legends,” ideology played a significant role in conspiratorial thinking. Among those who believe that the Bible was a book of legends and were extremely liberal, their conspiracy index score was very low - just 2.5. However if a similar individual identified as very conservative their conspiracy score was 4. That was not statistically different from a very conservative biblical literalist.

In other words, if people have a fairly strongly religious framework - ideology doesn’t matter. If they don’t have a strong religious belief, then being more conservative drives up conspiratorial thinking in a pretty significant way.

Does religion promote conspiratorial thinking? Maybe, but it seems like political ideology can play a role too, in certain circumstances.

Code for this post can be found here.

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One more thing! I was on Tripp Fuller’s Homebrewed Christianity podcast last week. Just click the image below to listen to the first part of our conversation:

There’s also some bonus content that’s behind the paywall at this post. I think I actually talk about theology a little bit - which is scary.

Ryan Burge: Trust, Religion, & a Functioning Democracy