cyberdad wrote:
MaxE wrote:
cyberdad wrote:
goldfish21 wrote:
A better question might be why have so many of them been elected as public officials?
Cause and effect
In my experience, people in positions of authority are more likely to be religious than the average person. Hopefully I can say this without having to explain in detail.
Most of the people who fall for conspiracy theories (MAGA and QAnon for example) are proactively deciding to believe for their own personal agendas that have nothing to do with religion. There are millions who vote for leaders who espouse conspiracies that their guns will be taken away or that their neighborhoods will be over-run with blacks and Mexicans (the great replacement theory) or their children will be forced to learn to hate their race or think their kids will be influenced to change their gender or sexual identity

. Whether they believe these or not is irrelevant because they will never publicly admit their real motivations.
Actually, most people who hold those beliefs (MAGA, QAnon, etc.) ARE religious. There's an overlap between people who follow fundamentalist, evangelical Christianity in the US (30% of the population) and those who believe in conspiracy theories. I've seen it at work with my family members who are anti-vaxxers. If people are taught from a young age to not believe evidence if they think it conflicts with their holy book, they may be more likely to adhere to other nonsense and dismiss valid evidence that goes against their biases. They also might not even know how to think rationally because their most sacred teachings are irrational (such as a literal interpretation of the creation story in Genesis), and they often have to rely on logical fallacies to defend them. It's the perfect storm to believe just about any nonsense.
It's a very complex topic, but I think that belief in conspiracy theories is largely rooted in religion. As movements get bigger, they can attract people who aren't religious and who are poorly educated and/or disenfranchised in some way. Being a conspiracy theorist is like being in a cult in a lot of ways. Anyway, bigoted beliefs regarding race and sexual identity are almost always rooted in religion in the US.
Human behavior can usually be understood when it is taken in context.