Conspiracy theory as an old inheritance

Every semester begins the same way. A student comes to office hours with a claim she heard in a seminar or read in a caption, and she wants to know whether it is true. The claim is rarely new. It has a birthday, a country of origin, and often a named author — and once she can see that, the argument changes shape entirely.

Consider the shape of the accusation that a small group secretly directs world events. In its medieval form it concerned wells and children. In its nineteenth-century form it concerned banks. In 1903 it was assembled into a forged document in Russia, and by the 1920s it was printed and distributed in the United States by an American industrialist. The content adapts; the structure does not.

This matters pedagogically. Students who are handed a rebuttal will win one argument and lose the next one, because the next one will arrive with different particulars. Students who are handed a genealogy can recognize the structure wherever it appears — in a lecture, in a comment thread, in a sermon.

It also matters theologically. Scripture does not treat the dignity of persons as a matter of policy preference. When a claim requires that a category of people be secretly guilty, the Christian objection is available long before the historical one is.

What follows in the guide accompanying this essay is a working method: identify the structure, name its lineage, and then — only then — address the particular claim on the merits. In classroom testing with our students, that order roughly halves the length of the conversation and substantially raises the odds it ends well.

None of this requires a specialist. It requires that someone hand a nineteen-year-old the history before she needs it. That is what the Institute is for.