In a world that worries about ‘Fake News’, ‘Alternative Facts,’ and the ‘Post-Truth’ era, recent years have also witnessed a rising interest in “conspiracy theories.” This growing trend of “conspiracism” has received considerable attention from political pundits, philosophers, and psychologists, but has attracted little attention from a Christian perspective.

However, it turns out that some notorious contemporary conspiracy theories have clear, if embarrassing, connections with Christian culture. Indeed over the last century, Christians have often spread conspiratorial ideas that were later found erroneous, in particular regarding the alleged diabolical machinations of small cabals of anti-Christian conspirators.

This lecture will trace the history of some of these major Christian contributions to what political scientist Michael Barkun called the “culture of conspiracy” from the nineteenth century to the present – from the Palladian Hoax to Pizzagate. It will offer suggestions about why these fringe ideas have continued to enter into the cultural mainstream. Dr Doherty will illustrate how a convergence of new media, popular culture, social networking, historical ignorance and a culture of forgetting merged to create a now-polarized epoch. He will point out Christians’ habits that could damage the credibility of the Christian message, and consider how we can respond better to what some secular commentators have called the “death of truth”.