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Michael Barkun
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A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Comparative Studies in Religion and Society Book 15) 2nd Edition, Kindle Edition

by Michael Barkun (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 50 ratings
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American society has changed dramatically since A Culture of Conspiracy was first published in 2001. In this revised and expanded edition, Michael Barkun delves deeper into America's conspiracy sub-culture, exploring the rise of 9/11 conspiracy theories, the "birther" controversy surrounding Barack Obama's American citizenship, and how the conspiracy landscape has changed with the rise of the Internet and other new media.

What do UFO believers, Christian millennialists, and right-wing conspiracy theorists have in common? According to Michael Barkun in this fascinating yet disturbing book, quite a lot. It is well known that some Americans are obsessed with conspiracies. The Kennedy assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the 2001 terrorist attacks have all generated elaborate stories of hidden plots. What is far less known is the extent to which conspiracist worldviews have recently become linked in strange and unpredictable ways with other "fringe" notions such as a belief in UFOs, Nostradamus, and the Illuminati. Unraveling the extraordinary genealogies and permutations of these increasingly widespread ideas, Barkun shows how this web of urban legends has spread among subcultures on the Internet and through mass media, how a new style of conspiracy thinking has recently arisen, and how this phenomenon relates to larger changes in American culture. This book, written by a leading expert on the subject, is the most comprehensive and authoritative examination of contemporary American conspiracism to date.

Barkun discusses a range of material-involving inner-earth caves, government black helicopters, alien abductions, secret New World Order cabals, and much more-that few realize exists in our culture. Looking closely at the manifestations of these ideas in a wide range of literature and source material from religious and political literature, to New Age and UFO publications, to popular culture phenomena such as The X-Files, and to websites, radio programs, and more, Barkun finds that America is in the throes of an unrivaled period of millenarian activity. His book underscores the importance of understanding why this phenomenon is now spreading into more mainstream segments of American culture.
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  1. ISBN-13
    978-0520276826
  2. Edition
    2nd
  3. Publisher
    University of California Press
  4. Publication date
    August 15, 2013
  5. Book 8 of 8
    Comparative Studies in Religion and Society
  6. Language
    English
  7. File size
    993 KB
  8. See all details
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Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
50 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Patrick Revels
5.0 out of 5 stars Legitimate scholarship
Reviewed in the United States on May 17, 2022
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One would expect the second edition (2013) of this book to be hopelessly outdated, given the explosion and increased visibility of conspiracy material in the interim. Luckily, such a structure is laid out in this book that the recent activity actually seems rather predictable.

Certain threads of this culture go back to the fundamentalist polemicists of the 80's and 90's, who insisted that the New Age movement was Satanism in disguise. The problem being, the prophesied apocalypse never arrived. It's fairly predictable, given the exchange of cultural contents, that a turn toward what they once denounced would be in the cards (bird aliens, etc).

These concepts and this book in turn brush up against the epistemological vacuum created by the suspicions raised regarding what constitutes valid scholarship, research, and evidence. After all, there now exists a whole spectrum of bunk scholarship which, using its own pseudo-intellectual jargon, both criticizes and imitates the more traditional type.

So what is one to believe? The difference comes down to this: legitimate scholarship does not set out to prove an existing agenda, it first investigates, then decides. It doesn't make absolute claims of religious truth. The other type of imitative scholarship starts with the agenda, seeking support for it, and rejects or ignores anything that disagrees. Barkun's book constitutes the true type of scholarship.

I do have a few criticisms of this book: the section on esotericism doesn't reference the superior scholarship of Faivre and Hanegraaff, relying on the outdated and problematic work of James Webb. Also, I found the concluding chapter dull and unnecessary, and increasingly-irrelevant given the developments of the last decade. Thank you.
2 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Required Reading for Students of Conspiracy and Disinformation
Reviewed in the United States on October 3, 2023
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If you have come across any of the wide array of media on conspiracy theories. From pop cultural icons like the Men in Black to the underground hit movie Plandemic. You may be disoriented and confused why these cultural elements exist. Why people would ever believe wholeheartedly and truthfully things like QAnon, Pizzagate, the Protocols of Zion or Area 51. This book is for you.

This book establishes in a readable and intriguing format that gives a useful methodology for understanding how conspiracy theories are created and grow. Most important is his examination of "superconspiracies" that envelop more and more of reality and cause significant harm to a believers' critical thinking skills.

This book is especially useful for what it does not include: Donald Trump. Save for a single mention of him in the Birtherism movement. This book gives readers an exciting prospect of spreading an awareness of conspiracy theories as a mental prison without tripping over that one large tree in the middle of the road. Highly recommended for people of any political persuasion. The book itself is not partisan.
2 people found this helpful
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Sylvan
4.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely called-for!
Reviewed in the United States on August 17, 2016
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A Scholarly yet easily readable work and, definitely called for. It was high time someone simply presented products of the religulous-convoluted mind in a comprehensive form. Although limited to America, it is clearly an international, indeed global phenomenon, and it goes back some 2000 years, to Hellenism and Gnosticism. What prevents me from giving it a full five star rating is that I miss a history-of-ideas element as a backdrop. For instance: Barkun outlines the story in a movie, starring Mel Gibson, who at the end is on the point of meeting a swarm of black helicopters. It wouldn't have hurt to point out that this is an ingenious take on the ancient Greek story of Orestes who, having killed his mother, sees big black birds settling in the garden trees all around him. Others cannot see them but he can, and it chases him around the world. Both Sartre and Hitchcock made use of that; it is fair to say that it belongs to the collective unconscious--close to an archetype. A string of such comments would have expanded the scope of the book in a fascinating way, also putting the contemporary phenomenon in a historical perspective. Maybe, bringing in a co-writer would have been a good idea.
4 people found this helpful
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E. N. Anderson
5.0 out of 5 stars Lots of conspiracies....
Reviewed in the United States on October 30, 2013
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I'm sure that the various conspiracy theorists will all jump on this book and pan it, so let me counter them in advance by posting a good review. I read and loved the first edition. This new edition has various new subjects of conspiracy theorizing, such as President Obama, the alleged Maya prophecies for 2012, and the increasing number of conspiracy theories about 9-11. Suffice it to say that this book is your guide to the idea that giant reptiles under the earth secretly control the world through the Trilateral Commission, the Masons, and the Illuminati. The book is scholarly and well researched, which means it is not as exciting as the literature it analyzes (but, judging from the quotes, Barkun's book is in much better English--conspiracy theorists do not seem very literate).
We are living in a surrealistic age when everything is a "matter of opinion." The conspiracy theorists are no more far-out than the postmodernists who held in the 1990s that science was merely a set of white male hegemonic claims. That fad seems to have died, but it produced a widespread discrediting of science, seen e.g. in the truly horrible and terrifying anti-"shots" movement, as well as in denial of global warming, and in resurgent racism. I recently wrote a distinguished academic about some racist claims made by someone under his direction (at the time). The claims were factually wrong, disproved years ago, but the answer I got was that this was a matter of "opinion" and not to be censored. Similarly, in spite of the fact that global warming has been settled science for years, USA TODAY recently "balanced" an article about it with a denialist counter-article. People seem to have genuinely forgotten that there is a difference between an actual personal judgment and a proven fact.
Maybe this anti-fact agenda is yet another sneaky trick of those reptiles from outer space....
27 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

the science patrol
5.0 out of 5 stars I've read both the first and second editions
Reviewed in Canada on February 4, 2019
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Barkun's analysis holds up, as far as it goes (the section on birther theories gets us just to the beginning of the Trump era, when Glenn Beck and others made conspiracy thinking "mainstream"). One big difference in the editions: the conspiracies in the first are rich in UFO content, but in the second, aliens figure in a few strains of the 2012 predictions, but not much else. It is unclear to me if this is because ufology is seen as an exhausted field of study, or because the mainstreaming of conspiracy theory and conspiracy thinking by Fox News (primarily) resulted in the fringier ideas (aliens, satanic abuse, mysticism) being dropped to increase the credibility of claims.

I would like to see Barkun write about the current era, where conspiracy thinking has moved from the fringes of society to the White House. But the dude is 80 years old -- we're not likely to see more.
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Anglian Traveller
5.0 out of 5 stars Barkun's 2013 updated book remains an incisive contemporary analysis of `improvisational millennialism'
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 7, 2014
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Michael Barkun is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Syracuse University who specialises in the social history of fringe belief systems outside the mainstream. His previously published works include `Disaster and the Millennium' (1986) and `Religion and the Racist Right' (1997).

This 2013 edition of `A Culture of Conspiracy' updates and expands Barkun's 2003 book of the same title by including new chapters on the fabrication of multiple conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks, the wide range of conspiracy theories about Barack Obama (that he wasn't born in Hawaii, is a Moslem or `The Antichrist' prophesised in Revelations), the propensity for conspiracy theorists linked to armed militias on the extreme right of US politics to engage in violence, and an analysis of the various apocalyptic predictions about 2012.

Barkun explores the process whereby `New World Order' ideas originally promoted by a tiny number of right-wing Christian fundamentalist extremists like Pat Robertson in the pre-internet age fused in the 1980s first with the more scientifically respectable study of the UFO phenomenon, and later with other new-agey beliefs usually categorized as `stigmatized knowledge'. This polyglot wove together in the 1990s to meld on the one hand right-wing millennialist NWO beliefs inspired by end-times religious ideologies and multiple conspiracy theories about cabals of Jews, Catholics, freemasons, the Trilateral Commission, the UN & `secret government' scheming to do everyone down with dastardly plots visible only to CT promoters; with on the other hand an accessible bricolage of previously unrelated fringe beliefs: alternative medical cures, junk-science about a hollow Earth populated by shape-shifting reptilian beings, spiritual chanellers, cryptozoology, the UFO subculture and ideologically motivated propaganda against GM foods. Barkun coins the term `Improvisational Milleniallism' to describe this pick-&-mix societal phenomenon.

The author demonstrates how repositioning, mainstreaming and bridging are used by promoters to target their chosen market segment with this bricolage of alternative worldviews in the internet age. As long as `New World Order' ideologies were promoted only by violent anti-government militants, anti-Semites and neo-Nazis, their appeal was limited. Repositioning NWO beliefs within UFO subculture has led to a new cohabitation with Atlantis and `ancient aliens' believers with no overt political identity or agenda:

"...Conspiracism has now been placed squarely within the domain of stigmatized knowledge where it shares attention with alternative cancer cures, free energy panaceas and lore about the Great Pyramid" (p228)

Barkun considers this new cohabitation is leading to a potentially destabilizing situation where extreme right-wing conspiracy theorists (racist, violent, anti-government, armed) are becoming `culturally sanitized' because of their dilution into the new `cultic milieu'. He cites David Icke as one example of a bridging entrepreneur, targeting both New Age audiences and the racist, anti-government right with a seamlessly integrated and potentially dangerous conspiratorial fusion-ideology. The logical fall-out of such a development is societal polarization where the conspiratorially minded, like hardline Islamic fundamentalists, begin to see themselves as championing a true-believer ideology-of-the-faithful that must utterly obliterate the adversaries it has chosen to demonize.

Barkun's book is not a polemic, but an academic study analysing the defining characteristics of a social phenomenon in the modern age. Whilst neither as fluent nor engaging as the free-flowing prose of Peter Knight who writes on the same subjects, Barkun's writing style is nevertheless literate and scholarly without being dry. Readers unfamiliar with the academic style might however find this book hard going. My advice would be to read it slowly and take your time; the book runs to only 239 pages (50 more than the 2003 original) excluding notes, bibliography and index and the effort is well worth it.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 28, 2016
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A great look into the mechanisms of conspiracy thinking.
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