# Why My Congregation Trusts the Illuminati More Than God A man in our church — sharp, employed, not obviously unwell — told me last year that the COVID vaccine rollout was coordinated by thirteen families who have controlled Western governments since the Napoleonic Wars. He said it with the quiet confidence of someone sharing a train timetable. I didn't know whether to argue, pray, or just order another coffee. What I did know was that his theory was, in its own strange way, a theology — and that it was answering a question the church had failed to answer first. I've thought about that conversation for months, and about the others like it. There's the woman in our small group who, gently and almost apologetically, mentioned that she didn't think Princess Diana's death was an accident. There's the lovely man on our prayer rota who sends me forwarded messages about central bankers. None of these people are stupid. Several have postgraduate degrees. And all of them, I have come to suspect, are doing a kind of religious work in their spare time — work that the church I serve is supposed to be doing on Sundays. This piece is an attempt to be honest about that. ## The Theory Has Better Narrative Than We Do If you have never sat down and read your way into a serious conspiracy theory, I recommend you try it once, for an hour, with a strong drink nearby. The Illuminati myth — like its cousins QAnon, the New World Order, the great reset — has a remarkable story structure. There are hidden villains operating across centuries. There are cosmic stakes: civilisational freedom, the soul of the West, the future of children. There is a corrupted mainstream from which one must be liberated. And there is an elect remnant — those who have done their research, watched the videos, joined the dots — who alone perceive what is really going on. That is, structurally, a religion. It has a fall, a hidden enemy, a revelation, a chosen people, and an eschatology of exposure in which the truth will eventually be made plain and the wicked judged. It has saints (the brave researchers), martyrs (the deplatformed), and a liturgy (the sharing of clips, the daily watch). It even has a doctrine of providence, of a kind — except the providence is malign, and it belongs to humans. Now compare that to the version of Christianity many of our congregants encounter on a Sunday morning. We talk about flourishing. We talk about mental health, which is good, and self-care, which is mostly good, and being our best selves, which is mostly nonsense. We rarely talk about principalities and powers. We seldom mention that history is being driven somewhere by someone. We have, in many of our churches, quietly stopped speaking about the devil — partly because we are embarrassed, and partly because we have absorbed the suspicion that grown-ups don't believe in such things. The result is that the conspiracy theorist offers our people a more thrilling cosmos than we do. He says: the world is not what it seems, hidden agents are at work, and you can be among those who see. Paul said something similar in Ephesians 6 — "our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness" — but most of our congregants have not heard a sermon on that verse in years. So they get their cosmology from YouTube instead. ## What Nietzsche and a Reddit Thread Have in Common Nietzsche, who was wrong about a lot of things but rarely about how human beings actually work, would have understood the appeal immediately. The conspiracy theorist is a will-to-power epistemologist. He has pierced the veil. He has overcome the herd. He stands in a clearing of true knowledge while the cattle around him chew on whatever CNN serves up. "You have your way," Nietzsche wrote. "I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist." The conspiracy mind would correct him only slightly: there is one way, but it is mine, and I have suffered to find it. That posture , the heroic discoverer of suppressed truth , is psychologically delicious, and nearly the exact opposite of the Christian intellectual posture, which is one of creaturely dependence and admitted partiality. "Now we see in a mirror, dimly," Paul writes. "Now I know in part." The Christian is the person who, on his best days, has surrendered the fantasy of total knowledge. We confess that God knows; we confess that we don't, mostly; we confess that what we do know we have received as a gift rather than earned by our cleverness. Here is the part that should sting. Nietzsche's critique of Christianity was that it bred mediocrity , that it made souls small, careful, resentful, dull. Whatever else we say to that, we have to admit it lands a glancing blow on the version of Christianity we have often offered. If our public face is therapeutic blandness, and the alternative on offer is cosmic adventure with you as the protagonist, of course people will defect. The conspiracy theory is exciting in exactly the way that creaturely dependence is not. It flatters the self, rewards the autodidact, and feels like waking up. We will not win that contest by being more entertaining. But we will lose it forever if we keep pretending that the Christian story is calmer than it actually is. The book of Revelation is not calm. The crucifixion is not calm. A real account of providence is, in fact, the most disturbing story going. ## Augustine on the Two Cities and the Paranoid Mind Augustine, writing as Rome was falling and people were demanding to know who was really to blame, gave us the framework we need here. There are two cities, he said, intermingled in history: the city of God, formed by love of God, and the city of man, formed by love of self. They are not two political entities you can map onto a diagram. They are two orientations of desire, threaded invisibly through every institution and every human heart. That is, on the surface, a conspiratorial claim. Augustine is telling us there is a hidden structure to history that the casual observer misses. He is telling us that worldly power is often demonic, that empires are organised theft, that the powers behind the powers are real. Read *The City of God* without context and you might suspect Augustine of being a fifth-century Alex Jones. But notice the differences, because they are everything. First, Augustine's hidden power is spiritual, not merely human. He is not naming thirteen families. He is naming sin, idolatry, the devil , adversaries which no exposé will satisfactorily catalogue, and which cannot be defeated by any political revelation. Second, the hidden power has already been defeated. The decisive battle is in the past, not the future. Christ has triumphed over the powers, "having disarmed the rulers and authorities, he made a public disclosure of them, triumphing over them in him" (Colossians 2:15). Third , and this is the part that matters pastorally , the city of God is not a small elect remnant cleverly distinguished from the masses. It is a vast multitude no one can count, gathered from every nation, full of people who do not know each other and who do not know their own membership. The conspiracy theorist's universe is, weirdly, less dark than Augustine's and also less hopeful. Less dark because the enemy is merely human and can in principle be exposed and arrested. Less hopeful because there is no triumph already accomplished , only the perpetual deferred hope of the next revelation, the next leak, the next dam-burst of truth which never quite comes. The faithful researcher is always almost there. He will be almost there until he dies. Christianity says: the worst is worse than you think, and it is already finished. ## The Pastoral Fact: Conspiracy Theories Thrive on Real Betrayal I want to be careful here, because it would be easy and cheap to mock people who believe these things, and I am not going to. The man who told me about the thirteen families is not a fool. He is a person who has lived through the financial crisis, in which a group of people did in fact collude to enrich themselves at catastrophic public cost, and were largely not punished. He has watched governments go to war on the basis of dossiers that turned out to be fabricated. He has read the Epstein documents. He has seen a pandemic in which official guidance shifted, was sometimes wrong, was occasionally dishonest, and was administered by officials who quietly broke their own rules at parties. Tell that man that powerful people do not conspire against the public interest, and he will laugh in your face , and he will be right to. The pastoral problem is not that he has noticed something false. The pastoral problem is that he has noticed something true and is now extrapolating it into a totalising metaphysics. Conspiracy theories grow in soil fertilised by genuine institutional failure. They are, in part, an entirely rational response to an irrational period. When the BBC, the Treasury, the Met, the church (let us not forget the church), and the universities have all in various ways been caught lying or covering up, asking people to extend the benefit of the doubt to "the experts" is asking a lot. The expert class has, in many cases, earned its distrust. So before the church can offer anything better than the Illuminati story, it has to reckon honestly with this. We cannot rebuke the conspiratorial imagination while defending the very institutions whose failures created it. We have to be willing to say that yes, the powerful do collude; yes, money does buy outcomes; yes, the official story is sometimes the lie; and yes, your scepticism is, in many specific cases, more Christian than the credulous loyalty of the well-educated. Micah saw this. "Her leaders judge for a bribe, her priests teach for a price, and her prophets tell fortunes for money" (Micah 3:11). The prophets were the original conspiracy theorists, in a sense , they kept insisting that the official story was a lie, and they were almost always killed for it. The difference is what they did next. ## Providence Is Not a Tidier Conspiracy This is the heart of the matter. When the church teaches providence , God's sovereign ordering of history toward his purposes , it can sound, to a modern ear, like just another conspiracy theory, only with a better PR department. There is a hidden plan. There are agents you cannot see. There is an outcome already determined. What's the difference? The difference is that providence is not secret management. It is open declaration. The conspiracy theory's whole grammar is concealment: the truth is hidden, the powerful are hidden, the plan is hidden, and only the initiated know. Christian providence works in the opposite direction. The plan has been announced. "He has made known to us the mystery of his will," Paul writes , known, not concealed. The decisive event happened in public, in daylight, outside a city wall, witnessed by enemies and friends alike. The scriptures are open. The gospel is preached on street corners. The church is, by design, the least secret society in human history. We meet weekly in marked buildings and sing about our beliefs at volume. Romans 8 gives us the shape of this providence, and it is worth noticing what it actually says. "We know that for those who love God all things work together for good." This is not the claim that everything is fine, or that nothing bad happens, or that there is no hidden suffering. It is the claim that suffering, betrayal, even the failure of institutions, is being woven into a purpose that will be fully visible at the end. And Micah 4, looking ahead, sees that end: the nations streaming up to the mountain of the Lord, swords beaten into ploughshares, every man under his vine and fig tree. That is not a leak. That is a public address from the throne. The conspiratorial imagination cannot reach that horizon, because it does not have a God in it , only humans behaving badly, in secret, indefinitely. Remove the thirteen families and you have another thirteen. There is no resolution available within the system. ## The Elect Remnant Problem (Or: Why the Theory Feels Like Church) One more thing I have to say, because it is the part that haunts me as a pastor. When I listen carefully to people who are deep into conspiracy thinking, what I hear is not just bad epistemology. I hear loneliness met. I hear a community that has welcomed them, a vocabulary that has given them purpose, a discipline of daily attention that orders their week, and a sense that they matter , that their reading and watching and arguing is part of something cosmically important. The forums where these theories grow are, in sociological terms, churches. They have catechumens and elders. They have heresies and excommunications. They have a shared eschatological hope. The reason this haunts me is that the actual church in much of the West is failing to provide most of those goods to most of its members. We have services that take an hour and ask very little. We have small groups that meet occasionally and rarely demand much intellectual seriousness. We have a vague sense of mission that is hard to articulate at a dinner party. And then we are surprised when our congregants find their sense of belonging and their sense of meaning somewhere else. A YouTube comment section ought not to be more catechetically formative than a parish. When it is, the failure is ours, not the YouTuber's. ## What a Pastor Actually Does on Monday Morning So what do I do about my friend in the coffee shop? I have, mostly, stopped trying to argue him out of it directly. I have tried that. It does not work, and worse, it confirms his suspicion that I am one of the credulous, captured by the official line, unable to think for myself. The minute the argument starts, the dynamic he wants , heroic researcher versus naive cleric , is the one he gets. What I try to do instead is slower and harder. I try to re-catechise him into a bigger story. I ask him what he hopes for. I ask him what he would do if all thirteen families were exposed tomorrow and arrested on live television , would the world be healed? I ask him whether the problem he sees in the world might be deeper than the people he is naming. I read the Psalms with him, particularly the ones where the wicked prosper and the righteous wait. I take him to Job, where the conspiracy turns out to be real, but is not the conspiracy Job had imagined, and where the answer is not a revelation of the plot but a revelation of God. And I keep showing up. Because the only thing that finally pulls a person out of a substitute theology is the slow, plausible presence of the real one , embodied in a community that is honest about institutional failure, serious about spiritual warfare, confident about providence, and patient with people who have, for entirely understandable reasons, started looking for God in the wrong places. The story does not end with the elites being exposed. It ends with them being judged, and with all things being made new. That is a darker story and a better one. It is the one I am paid to tell, and most weeks I do not tell it loudly enough. I am going to try to do better this Sunday.