Christ, Country, and Conspiracies? Christian Nationalism, Biblical Literalism, and Belief in Conspiracy Theories

Abstract

When misinformation is rampant, "fake news" is rising, and conspiracy theories are widespread, social scientists have a vested interest in understanding who is most susceptible to these false narratives and why. Recent research suggests Christians are especially susceptible to belief in conspiracy theories in the United States, but scholars have yet to ascertain the role of religiopolitical identities and epistomological approaches, specifically Christian nationalism and biblical literalism, in generalized conspiracy thinking. Because Christian nationalists sense that the nation is under cultural threat and biblical literalism provides an alternative (often anti-elite) source of information, we predict that both will amplify conspiracy thinking. We find that Christian nationalism and biblical literalism independently predict conspiracy thinking, but that the effect of Christian nationalism increases with literalism. Our results point to the contingent effects of Christian nationalism and the need for the religious variables in understanding conspiracy thinking.

Religion, spirituality, and susceptibility to conspiracy theories: examining the role of analytic thinking and post-critical beliefs

“…Most studies use singleitem measures of self-reported religiosity (e.g., Galliford and Furnham, 2017), of the importance of religion or God in one's life (e.g., Mancosu et al, 2017), or of the frequency of church attendance (e.g., Lobato and Zimmerman, 2019). Studies using more extensive multiple-item measures of religiosity tend to report stronger associations (Jasinskaja-Lahti and Jetten, 2019;Łowicki et al, 2022;Yendell and Herbert, 2022;Frenken et al, 2023;Walker and Vegter, 2023). Only one study distinguishes different religious attitudes, finding positive effects of religious fundamentalism but not of centrality of religious beliefs on conspiracism (Łowicki et al, 2022).…”