Apocalyptic Conspiracism

A new study of American evangelicalism that shows how the logic of Apocalypticism and counter-cultural arguments feed into climate denial and anti-Covid viewpoints.

In the USA, politically conservative and right-wing apocalyptic evangelicals hold that climate change science and Covid-19 are fabrications governed by manifest evil. How do these groups generate and distribute these truth-claims and why? Using a sociological methodology informed by Bourdieu and Foucault, this book offers tools for scholars and students to better understand the logic of climate denial within the context of American conservative evangelicalism and apocalypticism. Tom Albrecht and Tristan Sturm coin and employ the term apocalyptic conspiracism to analyse the increasingly powerful confluence of apocalyptic and conspiracist discourses. These dialogues create a holistic belief system, which claims that the world will profoundly change for the worse due to a global network of interconnected conspiracies. This book focuses on and expands the literature on the discursive practices of anthropogenic climate change and Covid-19 denialism. Exploring religious, apocalyptic, and conspiracist belief systems, the authors demonstrate how these affect geopolitical imaginations, the perception of global crises, as well as the environmentally relevant behaviour of American Evangelical Christians.