Why Do I See Conspiracies in This World?

Recently, someone I've known for over thirty years—and a pastor for roughly the same amount of time—asked me, “I do want to know, and still wonder why you find so many conspiracies in our world,” after he refused to even acknowledge in my comment Tower Seven at the World Trade Center and why it fell. It’s like that never even happened! A conspiracy! Tower Seven isn’t even real, Doug!

Still, to some degree, it’s a fair question, even if it deeply grieves me from a Christian point of view. Christians, much less pastors, should absolutely know better! Nevertheless, it is a question worth a brief public answer.

Why would I do that? Well, this was actually the focus of my 2020 book Conspiracy Theory: A Christian Evaluation of a Taboo Subject, which my friend obviously has not (and I’m pretty sure will never, for self-evident reasons) read. Let me give some brief answers.

First, historically speaking (from the Bible), conspiracies take place all the time—in the Bible!

• Ten brothers secretly plot to kill their younger brother and cover it up with a lie (Gen 37).

• A fallen angel conspires to deceive the first humans and murder the entire race (Gen 3; John 8:44).

• Two hundred heavenly watchers swear an oath on Mount Hermon to defy God’s order and corrupt humanity (Gen 6; 1 Enoch; Jude).

• King Saul’s court becomes a nest of paranoia and secret accusations (1 Sam 22).

• Absalom, Baasha, Zimri, Jehu, Shallum, Menahem, Pekah, Hoshea, and the servants of Amaziah and Amon all conspire to seize or keep thrones by murder.

• The religious and political elite of Jerusalem secretly plot to destroy Jesus (Matt 12:14; Ps 2).

• They lie about his body and their lie becomes the Main Stream Media (Legacy Media) official narrative.

• Forty Jewish leaders bind themselves with an oath to assassinate Paul (Acts 23).

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Oh, and you should see what the Rabbis did their own Scripture in the Second Century AD regarding several key texts surrounding the theology of the son(s) of God! Stay tuned for my book release on that one. It’s absolutely incredibly what they did. Mind blowing, really. Pure. Evil.

Simply speaking, Scripture does not treat conspiracies as rare or fringe events. They are normal fruit of a fallen world—both human and angelic. Where there is pride, envy, lust for power, and hatred of God or His image-bearers, secretive, malicious plots follow. Expecting conspiracies in a world that has rebelled against its Creator is not paranoia; refusing to expect any is, biblically speaking, naïveté. To be frank, it borders on the Pelagian heresy which insists that humans are all basically good. How is it that scholar Gordon S. Wood can be more on target than a Christian Evangelical pastor when he said, “Conspiratorial interpretations—attributing events to the concerted designs of willful individuals—became a major means by which educated men in the early modern period ordered and gave meaning to their political world. Far from being symptomatic of irrationality, this conspiratorial mode of explanation represented an enlightened stage in Western man’s long struggle to comprehend his social reality.”[1]

The second reason is simply history and human nature, especially as the Bible itself unfolds it theologically. Power attracts sinful people, and sinful people in power lie, scheme, stage events, and cover their tracks. We have documented cases from Nero’s burning of Rome (64 AD), to the Gunpowder Plot (1605), to the Reichstag fire (1933), to Pearl Harbor (1941, where foreknowledge was deliberately withheld), to the CIA’s own 1967 dispatch teaching agents how to discredit anyone questioning the lone-gunman story by labeling them “conspiracy theorists.” These are not theories; they are admitted, declassified, historical facts.

Add modern technology—consolidated media ownership, algorithmic suppression, astroturfing, 24-hour spin cycles—and the conditions for both real conspiracies and the theories that surround them are stronger than ever. Yet, Christians act like the American politic is St. Gabriel and the media is Mother Teressa and that nothing like what happened with Joseph Goebbels in Hitler’s propaganda machine could ever happen here! (That’s literally how WWII came to pass in Germany, by the way, as those Germans said to themselves, “How can you ever believe in any conspiracy theories?”)

So I “find” conspiracies because the Bible tells me to expect them, history repeatedly confirms them, and our fallen hearts are perfectly capable of producing them. And, we have a supernatural enemy called Satan who hates humanity that much that he will inspire and use whatever “useful idiots” he can find to perpetuate them.

Here’s the crucial Christian difference between me and a secular believer in human depravity: none of them ever surprise God or escape His sovereign purpose. Joseph’s brothers meant it for evil; God meant it for good (Gen 50:20). The princes of this world crucified the Lord of glory, but that was exactly how God ordained to crush the serpent’s head and save His people.

That is why I can look at dark things without despair. The worst conspiracy in history—Psalm 2’s raging of nations and rulers against the Lord and His Anointed (“why do they conspire…?”)—was overturned at an empty tomb. Every smaller conspiracy will meet the same fate on the day the King returns.

What’s truly depressing, however, is how many Christians refuse to acknowledge human depravity in practice, who even after a Tower Seven falling for absolute no reason back in 2001 or the insanity of 2020 and beyond refuse to see any conspiracies at all—oh, except of course the conspiracy that Donald Trump is literally the devil incarnate, which of course they will never admit is a conspiracy theory, since, you know, they don’t believe in those sorts of things.

So yes, I see conspiracies. But I see a greater King who rules over them all.

And that makes all the difference. Here’s to hoping that just one more liberal might read something like this post and start to actually think about the world that is front of them.

[1] Gordon S. Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” The William and Mary Quarterly 39:3 (July 1982), 411.

Douglas Van Dorn January 16, 2026