Conspiracy theories function religiously to demonize and expel minorities.

Evidence

As Dyrendal et al. (2018, pp. 7–8) point out, conspiracy theories can be in, about, and as religion, in other words, the relation between conspiracy theories and religion is not straightforward, but often conspiracy theories join the dots between religion, politics, and terrorism and violence. Moreover, either secular or majority religious groups can recruit and mobilize conspiracies to demonize and cast out religious minorities, anti-Semitism being a paradigmatic example. — Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar, “They Love Death as We Love Life”, 687

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the reader’s interest in moral panics over identity signaling (see the immodesty article) and to scapegoating mechanisms in Things Fall Apart.
• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘in, about, and as religion’ triad reframes conspiracy thinking as a structural feature of belief systems rather than a fringe error.