Conspiracy Theories and Religion: Christian Nationalism and the Rise of North American Populism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
eligion and conspiracy theories intertwine with disinformation campaigns to create political movements online and have become an offline issue for society to deal with.Religious leaders in Canada such as Pastor Artur Pawlowski are working closely with Christian nationalists in America such as Lance Wallnau, the Black Robe Regiment, and the Patriot Pastors movement in an attempt to create a Christian Nationalist Political movement which is not constrained by national borders but is mobilized through conspiracy theories.The religious leaders' public speeches and sermons are laced with disinformation and conspiracy theories, as are their online presentations and social media.In fact, this movement is calling for a New Great Awakening in America which is being spread through a new church tent revival, mixing recognizable religious history with politics, conspiracy, and attacks on progressives/woke political rivals.Creating a religio-political movement based upon fear, perceived injustices, and tropes of prosecution and persecution, these religious leaders are manipulating their adherents through conspiracy and disinformation to create a North American Christian Nationalist state.Political populist leaders in Canada have utilized these ideas of Christian persecution, conspiracy theories, and disinformation campaigns as political platforms.In America, tropes of Donald Trump as Cyrus or the God Emperor of the United States fuel the movement while progressive and liberal politicians are referred to as demons, tyrants, and dictators.Far more than an us-versus-them positioning, the religious leaders create a vision of good vs. evil in the ultimate battle for God, country, and family through moral panics, conspiracies, and a borderless nationalism.Analyzing the religious leaders' social media, podcasts, and tent revival sermons, we will argue that the interconnections and relationships created by these individuals, and their dependence on conspiracy theories and disinformation, is creating a borderless North American Christian Nationalist populist political movement that depends upon fear and moral panics spread through disinformation and conspiracy theories to mobilize.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".