Conspiracy thinking and the church

[Reuben]

Alas brought up this Wheat & Tares blog post in the "Intellectual malleability" thread:

https://wheatandtares.org/2020/05/06/mo ... -theories/

The author, hawkgrrrl, stops just short of saying what I think: Mormonism itself is a conspiracy theory. I don't know how you would remove the conspiracy elements from it without fundamentally changing what it is.

I think it would be interesting to try, though. Here are some common conspiracy beliefs in Mormonism. (Have I forgotten any?)

It's us versus the wicked world.

We have special knowledge.

We're surrounded by evil spirits that try to drag us down.

We're God's favorites and destined to be vindicated.

This doesn't cover all of Mormonism's core beliefs - it doesn't say much about God, Jesus, sin, the prophet can't lead us astray, etc. - but it covers a lot of them.

I had given up almost all conspiracy beliefs before my faith crisis, and I wonder if that's partly what caused it.

Can there be a Mormonism without conspiracy thinking that retains its identity? Are beliefs about God, Jesus, sin and following the prophet sufficient to distinguish it from other religions? What might it look like? The Community of Christ? Something else?

[Corsair]

Yes, this is accurate. The Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists feel the same way. I have had the chance to speak with members of those faiths and see some of their missionary and "new member" religious instruction. And I'm pretty sure that many or most other faiths feel similarly. Joseph Smith infused a special kind of animosity against "the powers of this world" into the foundational beliefs of the LDS church.

Having a pet conspiracy theory feels good. It makes your efforts and sacrifice feel both warranted and worth doing. God will reward you for stoically standing your ground in the face of disconfirming evidence and cognitive dissonance.

[Hagoth]

Any religion that has its members preparing for a Book of Revelation style apocalypse and imminent return of Jesus is promoting a conspiracy theory, particularly those that have words like Latter-Day in their name. The worst part of this is that it requires a special brand of arrogance and pessimism in the belief that everyone else in the world is evil and getting more evil every day.

[Not Buying It]

That's one of the Church's secrets to keeping members - make them feel special, make them feel like they know things no one else knows, they have a privileged status no one else has. Being a Church member is a huge ego rush. I remember being alone in a major airport when I was younger thinking I might be the only one out of these hundreds of people who know the Truth (there were probably dozens of other Church members there that day, but such is the power of elitist thinking).

The Church makes you feel better than everyone else. So do conspiracy theories - you've figured out something few other people have figured out. You know stuff few other people know. All those other dummies might be sheltering at home, but COVID is just a vast conspiracy, everyone else is fooled and I'm not. But be logical for a moment and apply Occam's Razor - is it more likely that there really is a disease that is killing lots of people like you see on the news and on the internet and once in a while are told by someone who has lost a loved one? Or is it more likely that somehow literally thousands of people have all conspired to create the appearance of a pandemic when there isn't one? Which explanation is most parsimonious and entails fewer assumptions? Sometimes Occam's Razor is your greatest friend.

Few can resist the allure of being better than other people. The Church exploits that. And it is what ensures there will always be conspiracy theories in the face of mountains of evidence against them.

[blazerb]

Don't forget that wicked persons removed plain and precious parts of the scriptures helping to cause the apostasy. Every indication from the oldest manuscripts shows that for 2500 years, scribes kept the Old Testament pretty faithfully, from what I understand. We can see where persons added things to New Testament scriptures, but JS completely failed at identifying them.