Among the troubling buzzwords forced into our pop culture vocabulary by the Covid-19 pandemic, one of most pertinent and perturbing is infodemic. As health experts struggled to assemble clear and trustworthy public health information about the disease, misinformation spread mouth-to-mouth with a speed rivalling the virus itself.
Many of the half-truths and untruths involved capitalized upon the already-thriving online market for conspiracy theories. About three in ten Americans, for example, apparently think the virus was created in a top-secret lab (including four in ten conservative Republicans). Almost half of Canadian respondents believe at least one conspiracy theory about Covid-19: the virus was spread to the West on purpose, it’s a cover story for the putative baleful effects of 5G wireless technology, etc.
This epistemologically and epidemiologically disastrous phenomenon has a dimension that most people would call “political.” The poll numbers just cited above rise to 1 in 4 on “the right,” among people who identify as “conservative Republicans.” In Canada, the divide is even more dramatic: supporters of the Conservative Party (as opposed to the Liberal Party or the New Democratic Party) are four times more likely to believe conspiracy theories about Covid-19.
The problem of the conspiracy-theory infodemic also has a dimension that most people would call distinctively “religious.” For many North Americans with Christian backgrounds, the global Covid conspiracy is a literally apocalyptic phenomenon. Agreeing to wear a face mask can amount to wearing the Mark of the Beast from the book of Revelation. The Covid-19 vaccine can contain a microchip branding people with the Mark of the Beast. By imposing such a vaccine on the world, Bill Gates can reveal himself as the Antichrist. On and on it goes.
The convergence and cross-pollination of paranoid worldviews is not a big surprise, from an academic point of view, and multiple studies have indicated in recent years that North Americans who identify as “highly religious” are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories than their non-religious neighbors.
The fact that so many conspiracy theories about Covid-19 are ostentatiously “apocalyptic” in character points to something still more specific at play, though: conspiracy-theory thinking is in fact, I suggest, a traditional hallmark of the Western apocalyptic worldview itself, including especially the kind of paranoid imagination that drives—and is driven by—the biblical book of Revelation.
Crisis
Apocalyptic literature has often been called “a literature of crisis,” because the work of “revelation” (apocalypsis) offered in the text of an Apocalypse like the book of Revelation commonly includes a vision of the proper way for a given community to understand and endure a given crisis. Real and perceived crises intermingle endlessly and effortlessly in the apocalyptic imagination: Are our minority communities suffering from socio-economic isolation, the audiences of Revelation are invited to ask, or are we being deliberately persecuted by the devil himself?
In the wake of a pandemic like Covid-19, the majoritarian crises of death and disease, unemployment, uncertainty, anxiety and isolation can be folded seamlessly into a perceived minoritarian crisis in which the faithful few are desperately, heroically besieged by the Beast and all his worldly co-conspirators.
Conspiracy
Conspiracy theories purport like Apocalypses to reveal the astonishing inner workings of the world to a faithful few. They allow people who feel powerless in some way to register their discontent with the status quo and their distrust of its authority figures. Conspiracy theories can in this way lend a dark but satisfyingly stark kind of meaning to confusing social problems, and make their proponents feel like members of a special group “in the know.”
The book of Revelation speaks to and for this kind of group self-definition. The book claims to reveal the true meaning of the Jewish scriptures, for example, and complains that Christians are being victimized by “those who say they are Jews, and are not, but are lying [because they belong to] the Synagogue of Satan” (i.e., the majority of Jews who do not see the Jewish scriptures as cryptic witnesses to Jesus).
In short, community insiders know a secret truth that’s directly opposed to the common-sense consensus, and outsider experts who disagree are the puppets of evil. This is textbook conspiracy-theory thinking. By this logic, Christian insiders are doubly ennobled as both victims and victors, by virtue of being “in the know.” This too is textbook conspiracy-theory thinking.
When Bible-quoting Covid-19 deniers proclaim themselves eager, therefore, to be condemned by the world for not conforming to basic health guidelines, they are rushing to join Revelation’s race to be both victim and victor, for the same self-defining and self-ennobling sociological reasons.
Community
I noted above that conspiracy theories are infamous for their polarizing insider/outsider logic. From a social-scientific point of view, it’s significant, then, that the apocalyptic imagination dependably constructs ideal community identity in contradistinction to the world “outside” the community of the elect. Are our communities unimportant and powerless due to isolation and isolationism, the audiences of Revelation are invited to ask, or are we being deliberately targeted by Satan precisely because we’re so powerful?
For the Covid-19 deniers of the modern world, who are likewise struggling to get by and/or struggling to define satisfying identities with the help of scriptural traditions, the paranoid insider-defining strategies of Revelation are custom-made for developing new choose-your-own-adventure conspiracy theories. Covid-19 applications are a plug and play game—practically effortless and potentially endless.
The “apocalyptic” attraction of Covid-19 conspiracy theories is neither unique nor hard to understand. The lessons learned in analyzing religious apocalyptic culture from a social-scientific point of view can be usefully brought to bear in clarifying how and why conspiracy-theory thinking naturally flourishes in moments of cultural crisis like the dawn of Covid-19—especially in Christian/post-Christian contexts where people are struggling to make sense of their situations and their identities with the help of scriptural traditions like Revelation. Stemming the flood of popular conspiracy theories—including in this case literally viral misinformation posing a serious threat to public health—may require paying more attention to the conspiracist character of their “religious” and “apocalyptic” cultural tributaries.
