My next book project is called Critique of Conspiracism, and its development was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship (2021-2023) in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. Under contract with the Routledge Conspiracy Theories series, the book extends ideas that I began developing in a course called “Religion and Conspiracy Theories” in the Arts First program at the University of Waterloo.
Preparatory Talks
Over the past few years I have presented my work on the project at the American Academy of Religion Meetings in San Antonio in November 2021 (“Violence, Religion, and Conspiratorial Thinking” ), in a talk called “Conspiracism and Critique: A Critical Theory and Political Theology of Conspiratorial Thinking” in the Department for the Study of Religion Colloquium Series at the University of Toronto on March 17, 2022, and in a talk for the Canadian Institute for Far-Right Studies on July 25, 2024 (“What is Conspiracism? What is Critique?: Conspiratorial Thinking and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion”).
Description
“If we look at the most sweeping conspiracy theories, they insist that nothing happens by accident; nothing is as it seems; and that everything is connected. Yet these salient characteristics are strikingly similar to the features of many religious belief systems. To be sure, this is not to say that religions are conspiracy theories, only that there are structural similarities that sometimes lead them to join hands.”
– Michael Barkun, Preface to the Brill Handbook of Conspiracy Theory and Contemporary Religion
What is the relationship between conspiratorial thinking and critique? How do conspiracy theories – albeit in distorted and blindered ways – mirror the hermeneutics of suspicion found elsewhere in critical theory and critical thinking? How can conspiracism as an all-encompassing epistemology be challenged and resisted without the simplistic use of forcible critique against another version of itself, and without false equivocations between conspiracism and critique? Critique of Conspiracism provides a detailed treatment of these questions without ceding ground to the oversimplifications of conspiratorial thinking and without taking up a patronizing distance from the very human desire to see the world in conspiratorial terms. In three chapters, this study argues that only by combining insights from three discourses and paradigms – Critical Theory, Political Theology, and Internal Family Systems – can conspiracism be successfully critiqued without falling into the numerous epistemological deadlocks that characterize this social pathology. Intervening simultaneously in the domains of reason (using contemporary critical theories in the tradition of the Frankfurt School), religion (using the scholarly study of religion and critical forms of political theology), and therapy (using the modality of Internal Family Systems), Critique of Conspiracism provides concrete suggestions for responding to conspiracy theorists that avoid the pitfalls of withdrawal into moral abstinence and the use of persuasive force in debunking.
Dr. Maxwell Kennel 