Peace, love AND misunderstanding
‘Conspirituality’ is an apparently paradoxical alliance between conspiracy theorists and New Agers. It’s spreading disinformation like wildfire in the U.S. and beyond
Yolande Norris-Clark has left the country.
She made the announcement on her website, on YouTube and on Instagram, where she posts a regular stream of videos and writings, mostly about giving birth without use of the medical system, a practice she calls “free” or “wild” birth.
Her family, she tells her followers, no longer felt physically safe in Canada, because of the trolls who were coming after her.
Though she’s attracted criticism for her birth content — including from a mother who blamed her son’s stillbirth on her own reading into the “free birth” movement — the threats that Norris-Clark says led to her exodus were about something else.
Over the past year, she’s taken up a message that’s exploded among those in NewAge, spiritual and wellness circles. It’s about the coronavirus. More specifically, that pandemic “drama” has been “designed” by shadowy corporate elites working behind the scenes to wrest control from individuals through pandemicrelated restrictions.
“This is not about a virus. Those who are organizing this are far, far, far above the level of politics,” NorrisClark says in one video. “The objective is to manufacture a feeding frenzy of fear and to not only permit, but to encourage venomous hatred and estrangement between each other.”
That people have loudly disagreed with her, calling her out online and even at her home in Fredericton, N.B., has been, to Norris-Clark, further evidence that such a shadow plan is taking place.
So, she’s fled to the tropics, she said, with her husband and children. Norris-Clark did not respond to the Star’s requests for comment, but posted a copy of the Star’s email to her Instagram story with the caption: “No thank you. Nope.” (She has 29,000 followers on the platform.)
Though she claims no direct connection, NorrisClark’s videos borrow one of the messages that also underpins QAnon — the conspiracy theory that asserts a corrupt global cabal runs the world.
In the time of the coronavirus, many self-professed spiritual people, in fact, are promoting pieces of conspiracy theories cafeteria-style, amplifying the bits that mesh with their own messages.
It’s allowed disinformation that is traditionally the domain of right-wing conspiracy theorists to spread with abandon in these other circles.
That counterintuitive alliance — between people some might call hippies and right-wing political disenchantment — was first described a decade ago, by a pair of academics who described the emergence of what they called “conspirituality.”
Their prediction? That it could gain political influence over time and even lead to violence.
Conspirituality (a portmanteau combining “conspiracy” and “spirituality”) combines two powerful components. Conspiracy theories provide content for an ideology that says horrible things are happening in the world; and spirituality offers a prescription: a requirement to “be the change you wish to see in the world,”
In the time of the coronavirus, many self-professed spiritual people, in fact, are promoting pieces of conspiracy theories cafeteria-style
to call on the oft-used Gandhi quotation, as many within these circles do.
It’s sprawling philosophical territory with real-world consequences: There are those defying public health measures in the midst of a pandemic that has killed two million people worldwide (Norris-Clark has referred to refusing to mask in public, pretending to apply hand sanitizer with her family as they go to a restaurant). And there are others who have taken more extreme actions, such as joining groups that have been labelled cults — or storming the U.S. Capitol.
David Voas has been following the news of the vaccination rollout in London, England, hoping his home country will find its way out of the pandemic and that the people participating in a phenomenon he helped identify won’t ruin the whole thing.
Conspirituality, as he and Charlotte Ward defined it in a 2011 paper in the Journal of Contemporary Religion, contains two key convictions.
One comes from the maledominated, political field of conspiracy theories — that a secret group covertly controls the political and social order.
The other comes from the female-dominated, self-improvement field of spiritual New Age — that “humanity is undergoing a paradigm shift in consciousness or awareness” that will allow enlightened people to overthrow the covert, corrupt group.
The researchers noted that the two had come together.
Conspiracy theory communities such as 9/11 truthers dangled entertainment and the thrill of learning “insider” knowledge about corruption and imaginary shadowy actors. Voas and Ward, however, found it was an added spiritual component that turned conspiracy theorists into activists or foot soldiers for their cause.
Instead of just self-appointed internet sleuths looking to expose corruption, those falling into these camps were now starting to think about the ways in which the corrupt leadership could be kicked out, too.
The authors saw 9/11 conspiracy theories spread in communities traditionally thought to belong to new age, such as “lightworkers” and “indigo children” (both describing people with abilities to sense human energies on some kind of spiritual dimension). Terminology such as “awakening” was used to describe both spiritual practices, such as meditation and using healing crystals, and getting in the “know” about conspiracy theories.
Reflecting on the 2011 paper, Voas said it has perhaps never been more relevant then in the present moment, when people as powerful as the former president of the United States have seen, and arguably encouraged, conspiritualists’ world views.
It could help explain how an eclectic group: evangelical Christians, anti-vaxxers, NewAge, vegan, self-appointed “shamans,” and white supremacist Proud Boys (recently declared a terrorist group by the Canadian government) ended up gathered together in front of the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, with a shared, imagined goal of fighting for “freedom” and “truth.”
They may not share identical causes, but they shared a language about what was wrong with the world, and the belief that they had a sacred duty to fix it.
On Jan. 6, before the storming
of the capital, Trump made a speech that referenced democratic politicians and election officials as “corrupt” a total of 10 times, before telling the crowd that included people decked out in QAnon clothing to “fight like hell.”
Then there’s the pandemic, which has created hardship and suffering — conditions that have always been rife for conspiratorial speculation.
“Today’s society is odd, because it’s given us democracy, which puts us on an even playing field, but it’s also created new forms of authority based on expert knowledge (and) other things that make us influential,” Voas said. “So if you don’t have those things, you may tend to feel resentment and want to fight against the elitist forces that tend to be in control.”
Conspiritualists share a conviction that enlightenment exists in a dimension that is separate and above politics, science and everything as banal as “three dimensional” human concerns (a common spirituality
trope is reaching five-dimensional consciousness). Once you experience it — and it’s a subjective, private experience — you can’t relate anymore in “3D.”
All you can do — all you are fundamentally, spiritually, called to do — is resist the evil you have uncovered. Whatever it takes.
Voas questions the motivations of some of those pushing conspirituality in practice if not in name.
“I don’t want to be cynical, but I think one danger with our very web-based culture is the influencers have a big incentive to do things that are interesting and attention grabbing. Bold,” Voas said, speaking generally.
“So I can imagine that if you’re just an ordinary yoga instructor or something online and then suddenly you tweet about or write about something that is a bit bigger and maybe Q-inspired, you’re probably going to get more attention, more hits and that’s tempting.”
Like all web movements, conspirituality has levels: A person
can be as involved or not involved in its theories and communities as they choose to be. At its worst, getting into the depths of conspirituality thinking can lead to frightening outcomes.
It wasn’t quite one year ago that Amanda first heard of the group that would become the focus of her crusade.
The Florida woman was on the phone with her brother. The married father of two had never had much interest in God or spirituality, so Amanda was initially pleased to hear him talk about holistic products and healing crystals — things she’s interested in, too.
But the hairs on the back of her neck went up, she says, when she heard that a group based in Colorado was pushing her brother to take part in what it called an “etheric surgery” over the phone. She told her brother it sounded like a nefarious use of a spiritual message. Like brainwashing.
“Once he had that session, that
was it, he was hooked,” said Amanda, who asked that her last name not be used to protect her brother’s identity. “He went from mid-March telling me, ‘I don’t believe in God,’ to two weeks later saying: ‘I have found God, it’s Amy Carlson.’”
Amanda’s brother packed up, and left his family to go join the group Love Has Won in Colorado, which considers a woman, Carlson, God and promotes a number of recycled spiritual and conspiratorial messages.
On long, daily livestreams shared to dozens of spiritual and conspiracy-theory-related Facebook groups, group members speak overtly about QAnon theories as though they are fact, and provide centuries of backstory on how “Mother God” has been reincarnated as Jesus, Cleopatra and Marilyn Monroe.
In one livestream this month, members railed against the imagined cabal for being “annoying” by criticizing football player Tom Brady for not wearing a mask in public. The criticism was nonsensical, they said, because Brady “eats only tomatoes,” and “his immune system is golden.”
They also speculated that their prophesied ascension of Mother God (and the Earth) may be coming soon, because big things happen after the Super Bowl.
At other times, the message was much more ominous: claiming that, for example, all followers of Carlson are “contracted” to die if and when she does.
One group member, Lauryn Suarez, recently shared a post on social media that read: “Make no mistake. This is spiritual warfare.” She explained the post further in a followup private message to the Star.
“The short story is that this planet was overtaken by darker species thousands of years ago and we are just hitting the turning point in evolution for humanity to escape that spiritual enslavement,” Suarez wrote.
“It is so spiritual warfare because the battle we are fighting here is energetic not physical. It’s a war of energy.”
Suarez, who said she was writing on behalf of the group, said it doesn’t peddle conspiracy theories, and that the term “conspiracy theory” itself is the distortion. She said the group is not a cult, and that it does not “recruit” per se, but “shares the truth and allows others to resonate with it or not.
“I mean, the message that god is a woman, she’s here and we are in an ascension process is sometimes not the easiest thing for beings to grasp but it’s still important to share it widely,” she wrote.
“Our goal is to wake people up.”
It was to their headquarters in a tiny Colorado town that
Amanda’s brother travelled last spring, staying for three days before he became lost in the wilderness outside of town, eventually arrested by the county sheriffs for trespassing, and brought home to his family.
The circumstances of his meander into the wilderness are not clear — Amanda and his family claims the group members left him there, which Love Has Won denies.
It took more than a month of working with cult expert Steven Hassan before her brother began to feel like himself again, Amanda said. Now, Amanda said, he’s bewildered that he ever became involved.
“He still does not fully understand how he fell victim,” she says. “It was very traumatic for all of us.”
He did not wish to speak to the Star.
Amanda now works on a group called “Rising Above Love Has Won” that attempts to make contact with members and find the resources to bring them home.
In the dozens of families and former members she’s made contact with, she said, many of them became involved the same way her brother did: by finding the livestreams on a Facebook group.
“The conspiracy theory aspect is really what draws in a lot of people and it hasn’t always been that way with Love Has Won,” Amanda said. It was on a conspiracy theory Facebook group that her brother found the group, a message she’s heard from other family members, too.
From what she can glean, Amanda said, she believes the group started recruiting in conspiracy theory groups about three years ago, around the time QAnon began.
“Then they started talking more about Trump as an angel,” she said.
“Nazis. Loved. Yoga.” That’s a quote from a Twitter thread by Matthew Remski, an outspoken Toronto commentator on the apparently paradoxical alliance between right-wing conspiracy thinking and wellness communities.
Along with Derek Beres and Julian Walker, Remski hosts a weekly podcast called “Conspirituality,” dissecting the language of those involved and trying to explain when communities ostensibly interested in self-discovery and improvement go off the rails. The podcast has been vocally critical of Norris-Clark, and she’s shot back criticisms at the hosts in her own videos.
For Remski, his special interest is in yoga.
He’s fascinated by the history there, both micro and macro. How individuals who, as they do in modern yoga, train themselves to believe that all things are connected by invisible energies that are knowable (but only by practising) can begin applying those beliefs to other parts of their inner universe. Think: Believing that their individual actions can protect their bodies from a virus better than a vaccine can, or that voting is futile and the only form of resistance takes place on a spiritual plane.
He’s seen how the community of modern yoga has flourished and spread under a spiritual banner, encouraging intuitive knowledge of one’s self while resisting fields that depend on drawing objective dichotomies and truths. Like politics. Or science.
“People who are interested in yoga, alternative health and wellness, they tend to share a number of interests and commitments. Three of them might be the notion that everything is connected, nothing is as it seems and everything happens for a reason,” he said. “This can be axiomatic to eastern spirituality for example — but they also happen to be the principles by which conspiratorial thinking drives itself.”
Those convictions: That everything is connected, nothing is as it seems and everything happens for a reason, are similar to what Ward and Voas found to be the core uniting feature behind conspirituality.
Though Remski’s feedback sounds scathing, it’s not an outright rebuke of spirituality. He’s not an outside observer on this topic. Remski is a yogi, a dedicated one, with decades of experience, some good, some bad. Rather than throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, he’s dedicated years of research and writing to constructive criticism about the field and teaching his insights.
The header to his website reads, in part: “spirituality, like the unconscious, can be a broken space” and goes on to say that some teachers and methods within yoga and spirituality may actually be hurtful when we want them to be healing.
“If the question is where does QAnon and conspirituality become dangerous, it’s when it becomes a gateway for larger numbers of people to accept extremist action — even if it’s violent — and when it gives them the language to justify the extremist action as spiritually necessary,” Remski said.
He’s understanding. A bit consoling, even.
But at the end of the day he’s saying that those trying to escape the lies and corruption of modern life in spiritual communities, may not find what they think they’re seeking.