ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the production of conspiracy theories among Orthodox Romanians starting from a specific question: in what ways are conspiracy thinking and Christian faith related? On 30 October 2015, the Bucharest nightclub Colectiv caught fire during a hard-rock concert, causing the death of 64 people and the injury of another two hundred, mostly youngsters. In the following days, inquiries were started to evaluate the responsibilities of the owners for not having respected safety measures, and of the city district administration, which, in turn, did not carry out inspections properly. Nevertheless, for some Christian-Orthodox priests and believers, the reasons behind such a tragic event resided elsewhere: it was God’s will to punish those who evoke evil by performing Satanist rock music. I shall argue that conspiracism and the Christian-Orthodox cosmologies presented in this chapter are better understood as systems of causal explanation operating through the redistribution of agency: in the attempt to make sense of tragic events, conspiracy and faith configure hierarchies of human and non-human agents. Seen in this light, they do not simply coexist but even reinforce one another as both are grounded on the idea that there is an underlying, unknown plan explaining what happens on the surface, that is, in everyday life.
