Conspirituality

What it is

The overlap between New Age and wellness spirituality on one side and conspiracy theory on the other — a hybrid holding both that a covert group secretly controls world events and that humanity is undergoing a shift in consciousness that will overturn it.

The two look unrelated until you notice what they share structurally:

• A hidden truth available to the awake. Both offer knowledge the mainstream cannot see, and both divide the world into those who have seen it and those still asleep. The vocabulary is literally shared: awakening, waking up, the sleepers.
• Distrust of institutions and credentialed expertise, in favour of personal discernment.
• Intuition as an epistemology. "Do your own research" and "trust your body's wisdom" are the same move — the elevation of individual insight over collective verification.
• Suffering made meaningful. Both convert confusion and misfortune into a story in which events are intended and the believer is significant.

That last one is doing more work than it is usually credited with. A world run by a malevolent cabal is frightening, but it is not meaningless, and it is not random. For some people that is an improvement.

Where it came from

The term was coined by Charlotte Ward and David Voas in "The Emergence of Conspirituality" (Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2011), which described the convergence as a then-emerging web movement.

The convergence long predates the label. Theosophy carried hidden-master narratives in the nineteenth century; the New Age milieu of the 1970s absorbed suppressed-knowledge claims about Atlantis, ancient astronauts and cancer cures; and David Icke moved from spiritual teaching into full conspiracy theory across the 1990s.

COVID-19 made it unmissable. Wellness influencers, yoga teachers and alternative-health practitioners circulated pandemic conspiracy material at a volume that surprised nearly everyone, including researchers who had read Ward and Voas. The QAnon-adjacent aesthetic that spread through lifestyle-oriented social media in 2020 — softly designed, pastel, wellness- inflected — was documented extensively at the time and drew a large audience with no prior interest in politics.

The structural reason is not mysterious in retrospect. A pandemic delivered the exact conditions: fear, isolation, contested expertise, real institutional failures, and an audience already primed to distrust medicine and to treat personal intuition as authoritative.

How it is used

As an analytical term it is now standard in the study of new religious movements and online radicalisation, and it has been useful precisely because it names a convergence that practitioners on both sides deny.

It has also become a pejorative, applied loosely to any spiritual person who distrusts a mainstream position, which drains it of precision.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the convergence is documented, researched and consequential — with effects on vaccination behaviour, on public health messaging, and on the fracturing of wellness communities during the pandemic.

We can say the original framing has been criticised, and the criticism is fair. Ward and Voas characterised the hybrid as a fusion of a male-dominated conspiracy world and a female-dominated New Age one, and subsequent scholars have argued that this gendering is essentialist and does not survive contact with the evidence. The concept has outlived that particular framing.

We should say something that is easy to omit and matters. Institutional distrust is not always irrational. Pharmaceutical companies have concealed trial data. Medical institutions have dismissed women's pain, mistreated Indigenous patients, and run unethical studies. The Australian Royal Commission documented decades of institutional self-protection. A person whose symptoms were dismissed for years by doctors has evidence for their distrust — evidence a conspiracy narrative is then well positioned to exploit.

The failure mode is not distrust. It is the leap from institutions have failed people to a coordinated group is doing it on purpose, which converts a legitimate grievance into an unfalsifiable story with no remedy. Treating everyone who has arrived there as stupid or wicked reliably pushes them further in, because contempt from credentialed people is exactly what the narrative predicted.

We cannot say where a given person sits on this, and the label is a poor tool for individuals. Its value is in describing a milieu, not in sorting people.

Further reading

• Charlotte Ward and David Voas, "The Emergence of Conspirituality" (2011) — the paper that named it, worth reading with the gender critique in hand.
• Jules Evans and others on spiritual eugenics and the darker inheritances of the New Age milieu.
• Naomi Klein, Doppelganger (2023) — on the wellness-to-conspiracy pipeline, from someone who followed it closely and unusually generous to the people caught in it.