Ben Shapiro recently gave a speech in which he issued a strong indictment against conspiracy theories and those who traffic in them. He warned,
[t]he conservative movement is also in danger from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty, who offer nothing but bile and despair, who seek to undermine fundamental principles of conservatism by championing enervation and grievance. These people are frauds, and they are grifters. And they are something worse: a danger to the only movement capable of stopping the left from wrecking the country wholesale.
Conspiracism is an interesting word. It signifies “the belief that an influential or controlling organization or group is secretly responsible for notable events or phenomena.”1 As I have been saying about this topic, there is no organization or group in the world secretly controlling things. The biblical and ecumenical Christian doctrine is that the God who is one in three persons is sovereignly ruling over all things.2
The Heidelberg Catechism (1563) represents the Christian consensus in its answer to the question, “What do you understand by the providence of God?”:
The almighty, everywhere present power of God, whereby, as it were by his hand, he upholds heaven and earth with all creatures, and so governs them that herbs and grass, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, meat and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, indeed, all things come not by chance, but by his Fatherly hand.3
When there are conspiracies, and they do happen, they are within the providence of God—that is, they are serving God’s purposes and achieving his ends. Nowhere in Scripture is that truth more clearly taught than in the words of Joseph about the evil plans of his brothers: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (Gen 50:20). Joseph’s brothers conspired against him, but all the time the Lord was operating through their evil plans.4 The Lord knows the end from the beginning (i.e., from all eternity). The Lord knows what is in corrupt human hearts (Jer 17:10; Ps 44:21; Luke 16:15; Acts 1:24).5
This was even true of the greatest attempted conspiracy of all time, the conspiracy to cover up the resurrection of Christ.
While they were going, behold, some of the guard went into the city and told the chief priests all that had taken place. And when they had assembled with the elders and taken counsel, they gave a sufficient sum of money to the soldiers and said, “Tell people, ‘His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ And if this comes to the governor’s ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” So they took the money and did as they were directed. And this story has been spread among the Jews to this day (Matt 28:11–15).6
This conspiracy is typical, and like other such conspiracies it failed. Conspiracies involve more than one person and thus the likelihood of a conspirator talking increases exponentially with every additional person involved for the simple reason that, as all detectives know, most people cannot keep their mouths shut. Someone always talks. This is prima facie evidence against elaborate conspiracy theories. If three criminals commit a crime, one of them will talk. If the gang is five in number, two of them are likely to talk. Someone will want to impress a girl or drink too much and spill the beans.
This is why lone criminal actors are more difficult to catch than are criminal groups. One person is relatively less likely to talk than a group of conspirators. Contrary to what you see on television and in movies, few criminals or conspirators are geniuses. Consider those who conspired in 2016 to link Donald Trump to the Russians. That high-powered conspiracy unraveled and became widely known rather quickly. Given those factors, how likely is it that sixty-two years ago, there was a massive conspiracy involving dozens and perhaps hundreds of people to murder a sitting president, and no one who was directly involved has talked?
Not only do most conspiracy theories implicitly deny the providence of God but they also implicitly replace God with a helpless incompetent idol, who cannot manage things without the help of an army of industrious knowers of the true secrets of the universe. How does this army do their work? The answer to this question is yet another fundamental weakness of conspiracism: it works deductively and not inductively.
What does this mean? When a competent scholar sets out to do his work he does not decide ahead of time what must be the case. Rather, he asks, what is the case? To assume the conclusion before the research is done is to commit the logical fallacy of begging the question. A competent scholar earns our attention by gathering evidence, sorting, sifting, and evaluating it, and thereby coming to a conclusion. This is inductive reasoning. Our word inductive comes from the Latin verb, induco, to lead. A competent scholar follows the evidence. Conspiracists, however, operate backwardly. They do not follow the evidence. They put a ring in its nose, and they lead it where it will gather the most attention—that is, they operate deductively.
A competent evaluation of evidence uses the word must sparingly because one does not know what the evidence must mean until all of it has been carefully evaluated and competing interpretations of the evidence weighed and compared, and that takes time. When he is done, a competent scholar is much more likely to use the word probably than he is to use the word must since the latter necessarily precludes other reasonable interpretations of the evidence.
The harsh truth is that the conspiracy theorist slings must at his audience because he has cut corners and his audience is not interested in sifting evidence and ambiguity. The conspiracy-guzzling American wants an executive summary to explain why his life is not going as he thinks it should. He knows a priori (i.e., before he has ever examined the evidence) that someone out there must be working against him and he just wants to know who it is. So, the conspiracy theorist offers clean, even slick-looking answers such as who did what to whom and to what nefarious purpose. In our social-media age this is the intellectual equivalent of meth. One hit and the user is hooked, buzzed, and busy. Like a roofing crew on meth, the work will be fast and furious. It will also be futile, and like the roof built by a meth-fueled crew it will need to be torn down and rebuilt because it was shoddy work. By contrast, good work is done slowly, methodically, by building a probable case brick by brick and board by board.
To be sure, professional research done inductively is usually presented deductively—that is, the research introduces the question, surveys the various opinions on the question, and presents his thesis (i.e., his conclusion) and the evidence for that conclusion. He is presenting the results of his research, not the inductive process by which the conclusion (the thesis) was reached. No one wants to read a blow-by-blow travelogue of a scholar’s travails: “Well, first I looked at this source but then I found a problem with the provenance of the text, which made it a dead end.” This would not be scintillating reading even for those who do this sort of work for a living. Sometimes amateurs confuse research presented for research conducted. These are not the same things.
Notes
- s.v. “Conspiracism,” in The New Oxford American Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2023).
- For more on this topic see, R. Scott Clark, “Conspiracies: The Temptation of Cultural Gnosticism,” R. Scott Clark, “The Real Conspiracy: Behind the Scenes,“ R. Scott Clark, “Conspiracy Theories Are Bunk,” R. Scott Clark, “QAnon, Evangelical Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and the Kingdom of the Cults.”
- Heidelberg Catechism 27.
- This is the Christian doctrine of concursus, that the Lord operates in and through created agents.
- The historian Luke tells us that forty Jews conspired to murder the Apostle Paul (Acts 23:12–13). That conspiracy failed and did not remain a secret, so Luke was able to report it.
- “The Jewish authorities knew him to be raised. The guards were silenced. Conspiracy theories usually fail, but that does not mean that there are no conspiracies to silence the truth (Matt 28:11–15).”
- R. Scott Clark, The Heidelberg Catechism: A Historical, Theological & Pastoral Commentary (Lexham Academic, 2025), 383.
©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.
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R. Scott Clark
R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.
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I think there is a lot that can be said for discernment. Your post didn’t seem to touch on that. Nor that it is ok not to know.
Outside of the Bible, are we to trust everything we read? Is every new source credible (mainstream, alternative, and independent)?
Is there a such thing as a healthy skeptic anymore?
Rick,
This essay is all about discernment. I’m trying to help Christians to exercise discernment regarding claims made without evidence that x or y is the result of a conspiracy. Discernment doesn’t simply mean pointing out alleged conspiracies.
Certainly we are not to be naive or to take a face value everything we read. We are to exercise our critical thinking skills. Again, in regard to conspiracy theories this is not always done. Take conspiratorial claims about chemtrails. I’ve seen conspiracists appeal to cloud seeding and ordinary contrails as evidence of a government or corporate conspiracy to control behavior via “chemtrails.”
When we think critically about such claims we find that contrails are not evidence of chemtrails. Contrails are the result of condensation and their number depends on a variety of factors including altitude, temperature, humidity, and the number of aircraft in a given area. Cloud seeding has been going on for decades and is an accepted way for farmers in dryland areas to try to generate moisture. Whether or not it works, it’s not evidence of chemtrails.
Critical thinking also makes us ask questions of chemtrails conspiracists: 1) is there any objective evidence, apart from videos produced by conspiracists that the government is trying to control our behavior/thinking via chemtrails? 2) To what end is the government doing this? 3) If the government is really doing this how is that no one who has been involved in the project ever talked?
So, yes, healthy skepticism is the order of the day! Much of what is published in our news media is agenda-driven junk but that’s not to give any credibility to conspiracy theories.
Oh man! Chrmtrails are the government trying to control our behavior?? I thought it was Bill Gates trying to lower men’s testosterone in order to feminize society! Who can you trust these days?
A great article, Dr. Clark. The only thing I think could be added is a few relevant warnings from Scripture and our confessions. First, that Christians should give careful thought to Paul’s warning against those who “devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God that is by faith.” – 1 Tim 1:4. In other words, Christians who know their limitations ought to focus on what has been concretely *revealed*, not grasp wildly for secret knowledge (also see Deut 29:29).
Second, Reformed Christians ought to consider what WLC 145 means by forbidding the following: “raising false rumors, receiving and countenancing evil reports, and stopping our ears against just defense; evil suspicion;”
Third, with respect to conspiracy theories involving Erika Kirk in particular (which I am sorry to say have been spread at my church), certain relevant passages of God’s revealed Law ought to come to our minds: “You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child. If you do mistreat them, and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry, and my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless.” – Exodus 22:22-24. See also Psalm 68:5, Proverbs 15:25, and many other similar passages. It seems clear to me that all the sins we are warning against in connection to conspiracism are vastly more egregious when they target a widow.
Thank you Mason,
I appreciate this.
Spot on, Mason, with regard to a grieving widow.
Some of what is circulating in Christian circles with regard to Mrs. Kirk is flat-out disgusting, and is deserving of the severest rebukes.
Now obviously no man is perfect, and that applies to widows, too.
I have no agenda to defend Mrs. Kirk. I don’t think I read or listened to a single thing she wrote or said before the assassination of her husband. But attacking a woman who recently lost her husband in a horrible way, with live video running and replayed hundreds of thousands of times all over the world?
Yes, she’s made some statements that weren’t the best. People criticizing her should walk in her shoes for a while and ask if they will always be thinking clearly.
If someone did that to me after the public assassination of my wife, God forbid that something like that would ever happen, I might be reaching for my gun. As an Italian saying goes, “You mess with my family, I mess with your face.”
Mrs. Kirk has better control of her anger than I do and deserves compliments for her composure under horrible circumstances.
Shame on the people in Christian circles who are acting like mocking pagans. We expect that from unbelievers. We expect, and should expect, better treatment of widows and orphans from those inside the church.
Why are so many American Christians drawn to conspiracy theories like moths to flame? The overlap between self-identified evangelicals and people who believed the core messages of QAnon was staggering. I have multiple QAnon adherents on my own church. And naturally, it was first at church where I was told that George Soros and the Clintons put tiny microchips in the Covid vaccine so they could control us through the 5G towers.
It’s a lateral step from The Late Great Planet Earth to microchips in vaccines, chemtrails, & 5G conspiracies.
Wonderful. You articulated so well mostly inchoate/intuitive thoughts I have had since the first wave of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories began to written about when I was a twelve years old, the biggest being that of course someone would have talked by now.
But Americans are self starters and lone wolves, and such books as Vincent Bugliosi’s “Reclaiming History,” Gerald Posner’s “Case Closed,” and the Jean Davison cruncher, “Oswald’s Game,” destroy any Oswald conspiracy ideas.
As an eleven years old kid living in Houston in 1963 I knew before nightfall on November 22 that a nasty punk with a mail order rifle had taken it upon himself for his own reasons to kill JFK. I invite anyone who doubts this to do one thing: look at the mugshots of Oswald made shortly after midnight on November 23. What do you see on that countenance?
Yet, it just gets worse. I have had conversations on Facebook with dimwits who insist splenetically that we never went to the moon ( an idea I myself came up with as sort of an ultimate exercise in idiocy when I was eighteen ), and, of course, now we are beset by Candace Owens, who is a sociopathic fabulist. I can’t help seeing our descent into the irrational and just plain stupid as one of God’s many judgments on the United States.
I disagree with the “descent” into the irrational and just plain stupid. I believe strands have been ever present in our country like any other