Through the examination of QAnon as a religious apocalyptic “digital cult,” this paper integrates individual psychological models regarding the espousal of conspiracy beliefs with sociological and anthropological models of religious cultism, particularly in the context of destructive and violent cults. This integrative model purports to reconcile the apparent contradiction between the extravagant irrationality of the QAnon belief-system with the otherwise normative demographics of its adherents and distinguish—as scholars of religion often do—between the creed, the practice, and the social identity aspects of the movement. Cultic studies (adapted to the digital age) are leveraged to discern the functions that different strata of adherents provide to the movement, and elucidate the mechanisms by which they coexist, collaborate, and avoid splitting along organizational or ideological fault-lines. The model also draws upon studies of apocalyptic cults and violent radicalization to caution against counter-productive over-generalization, over-sensationalizing, and over-pathologizing of QAnon believers.
While the horrific scenes of the invasion and occupation of the US Capitol building played out on television, I happened to be doing a radio interview for my recent book on religious terrorism (Juergensmeyer 2020). The reporter asked if there were similarities between the Trump-incited rioters and the terrorists I have studied. I quickly responded “yes.” It is true that the reasons for religious-inspired insurrections around the world are specific to their contexts—supporters of al Qaeda are not the same as militant Buddhists in Myanmar. Yet there are some striking similarities among the cosmic battles imagined in the apocalyptic scenarios that propel movements of religious of religious violence. This includes ISIS, Christian militia groups, Jewish extremists, and Hindu and Sikh militants. They all bear some common characteristics, and QAnon shares many similarities with them. To begin with, QAnon bears some relationship to religion. To be sure, the conspiracy theory at the heart of QAnon belief is this-worldly. It includes the notion that there is a secret design among liberal politicians and media figures to take over the world for their evil purposes, among which is ritual leeching the blood of innocent children for empowerment.
Debates over whether QAnon is a “religion” or a “cult” lack theoretical grounding; they depend on unacknowledged definitions and classificatory schemes and ultimately don’t prove useful as an analytical framework for sociological/historical scholarship. Instead, this article suggests we explore the ways one contemporary religious movement helped make widespread acceptance of QAnon possible by weaving their theological commitments to apocalypticism, conspiracies and persecution narratives into the larger American culture.
The presidency of Donald Trump saw the rise of a new kind of conspiracy in QAnon. The internet-assembled meta-conspiracy has grown to include elements of other growing conspiracies such as the anti-mask movement and anti-vaxxers. As it has grown, QAnon has attracted significant support for its beliefs from white evangelicals who also supported Trump in huge numbers in both 2016 and 2020. In this integrative review of literature, I explore the reasons that QAnon has performed so well so quickly, finding justification for conspiracy theory support among evangelicals in the theory of cognitive dissonance. QAnon has found a foothold in evangelical circles during worldwide pandemic, which has left many evangelicals unmoored from their spiritual family and susceptible to other realms of community online. The conspiracy theory has infiltrated evangelicalism by using the language and concerns of Christianity in its messaging and by attempting to justify evangelical support of Donald Trump. Although traditional media are quick to point out the theory’s inconsistencies and failed prophecies, this paper finds that the harm QAnon has done to the evangelical community may only be undone through spiritual connection and practice.
Religion and violence are both ambiguous categories but in the cultural mosaic that pits human against human, religion is a reoccurring justifier. There is no religion exempt from this tendency toward violence. Further, based on Milgram and Zimbardo’s experiments with students who were convinced that it was necessary to inflict torture on subjects for the greater good, it is apparent that ordinary people may commit heinous acts, given a sense of overarching emergency. Examples of religiously justified atrocities and violent rhetoric are summarized in this essay. In each case there is the mindset that violence is justified due to an extraordinary set of circumstances which require the suspension of behavioral norms.
In the civilizations of the classical West, as exemplified foremost by that of Greece, as well as in that of early imperial China, the idea that humans who excelled exceptionally in war could merit deification was an abiding operative assumption. Given this premise, unsurprising then is the fact that such individuals should be found to have exhibited certain defining traits in common, including exceptional bravery and skill in leadership as well as—at least up until the point of their own deaths—an outstanding record of battlefield success. In addition, whether in Greece or in China, we find that the elevation of the exemplary warrior to the status of a god occurred under religious auspices, or was abetted by a belief structure that at least exhibited many of the core customary functions of a conventional religion. However, if we must regard the normative Chinese paradigm of martial divinization as having consistently departed in conception from its counterpart in the West, then surely the determinative difference is the premium placed on the Chinese demonstration of loyalty. In China, inasmuch as there were credentials for deification, the individual warrior’s unfailing subscription to the virtue of loyalty seems to have superseded all else, and the pathway to immortality as a god was forever obstructed without it.
Correlates of militarism have been widely explored in the last twenty years. Since the shift in attention from Great Power Competition to the Global War on Terror, researchers have focused on religiosity’s role in the development of militant attitudes primarily in the context of Islamic extremism. Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of power has coincided with increased religious language and fervor—each quite antithetical to the Soviet ethos but useful in chastising Western decadence. Despite Russian elites’ desire to possess and partake in the trappings of cosmopolitan internationalism (again, contra communism), they have adopted the same critical, conservative outlook of Russian Orthodoxy. Using data from The Survey of Russian Elites, Moscow Russia, between 2012 and 2016 (https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR03724.v6), this paper explores the relationship between expressions of religious Orthodoxy and militant internationalism among Russian elites. Through multiple regression analysis, little evidence was found to support the relationship between religious measures and the militarism sub-dimension of militant internationalism. However, various religious measures were statistically significant in predicting the Anti-Americanism sub-dimension of Militant Internationalism. These results conflict somewhat with past research analyzing Islamic religiosity and militarism. Despite these inconsistencies, evidence suggests that the importance of God in an individual’s life and the cultural significance of Russian Orthodoxy predicts Anti-Americanism among Russian elites.
This article examines India’s uneven sex ratios (the ratio of women to men) and explores how religion may shape beliefs on gender, son preference, and femicide. Estimates vary, but at least 13.5 million females that should exist in India, do not. Extensive literature has discussed the wide range of potential factors that may influence India’s uneven sex ratio including education, socio-economic status, gender equality, and geographic region. Scholars have also examined the role religion has in shaping beliefs on gender and son-preference. Most religion-centered analyses have focused primarily on Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism. This article expands on previous research by providing a comparative religious approach that includes Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism in addition to Jainism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Animism. Religion is not monolithic and individual beliefs and practices vary significantly throughout India. However, understanding how key figures and texts from the religion contextualize this problem may help better understand India’s imbalanced sex ratio. This paper provides several insights on this topic. First, it maps the district-level sex ratio across India to demonstrate the geographical variation in sex ratios. Next, it discusses how factors such as dowry, joint family system, and inheritance practices are deeply embedded in a family’s preference for a male child, but manifest differently based on different factors, including religion and socio-economic status. Third, it provides a brief overview of each religion’s view on son preference and sex-selective abortion. Finally, it concludes by offering suggestions about how future research can expand on this work.
The growing internationalism of armed conflict in Yemen has presented challenges to Muslim reformers working to achieve social justice. This paper attends to the ethical dimensions of Islamic activism by exploring the use of hunger strikes to strengthen otherwise fractious political coalitions. Facing pressure from actors willing to evoke the most strident forms of sectarianism to explain, license and justify violence, hunger strikers and their supporters enlist what Abdulrabbuh al-Rubaidi (2018) has called a “new skepticism” toward conventional religious establishments that, for many Yemenis since 2011 especially, have become complicit with authoritarian oppression. With the aim of identifying new currents in Muslim reform across the Global South as sovereign state formations face unprecedented scrutiny, this paper considers hunger strike activists’ turn to what political theorist Achille Mbembé (2019) has called “the necropolitical.” In drawing attention to the relationship between hungry bodies and forms of living death exacted on populations through regimes of national and parastatal violence, Yemeni activists hail the value of older, anti-imperialist discourses for reconstituting Islamic solidarity. The ethical leverage of such activism inheres, it is argued, in manifestations of “the secular,” understood not as something opposed to, or outside of, religion but, pace anthropologist Khaled Furani (2015), as a recognition of finitude whose sensory dimensions, magnified against frailties of sovereignty, knowledge and certitude, guide believers toward otherwise unavailable modes of religious worldliness. Islamic fasting rituals help activists frame and stage finitude. Conducted in ordinary and domestic spaces and coordinated with hunger strikes, in practice as well as through literary and artistic representation, fasting rituals situate hunger strike activism as an exercise in Muslim sovereignty tethered to virtuous self-fashioning.
