She started with essential oils. The algorithm did the rest.
Literal meaning: Conspirituality — a portmanteau of conspiracy and spirituality — describes the fusion of New Age spiritual beliefs with conspiracy thinking. It names the phenomenon where wellness culture, alternative health, and spiritual seeking overlap with distrust of mainstream institutions, belief in hidden elites, and susceptibility to conspiracy theories.
Origin: The term was coined by sociologists Charlotte Ward and David Voas in a 2011 paper in the Journal of Contemporary Religion, identifying an emerging online subculture that combined spirituality with political conspiracy. It gained much wider recognition during the COVID-19 pandemic, when anti-vaccine sentiment, distrust of pharmaceutical companies, and alternative health communities became major vectors for QAnon and related conspiracy content. Journalist Matthew Remski developed an extensive body of work documenting conspirituality in podcasting and online communities.
The fusion of wellness culture and conspiracy thinking — where shared distrust of mainstream institutions provides the bridge.
The Appeal: The overlap is not accidental. Both wellness culture and conspiracy thinking are organised around the same premise: mainstream institutions are hiding something that threatens you, and knowledge of the hidden truth empowers you to protect yourself. The move from “big pharma hides the cure” to “global elites control governments” is structurally small. The community, the sense of mission, and the insider knowledge are identical in form.
The Friction: Purity Culture — obsession with the clean body as political metaphor — is the shared substrate: the body that must be protected from toxins, vaccines, and corruption maps cleanly onto the nation that must be protected from infiltration. QAnon is the most prominent conspirituality destination: wellness communities became documented entry points during the pandemic. Wellness-to-Alt-Right Pipeline is the trajectory; conspirituality is the mechanism that makes the journey feel continuous rather than discontinuous. Social Contagion rhetoric is common in conspirituality: both apply contagion framing to phenomena (identity, belief, political change) that are not actually contagious. The algorithm in the opening line has a name: Recommender Systems supply the continuity, carrying a viewer from wellness content to adjacent material that shares its vocabulary of purity and hidden harm. The pipeline is not only a set of ideas that happen to fit together, it is also a ranking that keeps offering the next step.
Why This Matters: Conspirituality makes visible that the path to extremism does not always run through explicit political content. The yoga class, the health food shop, the essential oils community — these are documented entry points. Once you know the shared structure, you can read the pathway.
Related terms: Wellness-to-Alt-Right Pipeline · Purity Culture · QAnon · Social Contagion · Deplatforming · Great Replacement · Recommender Systems
Read more:
- The Emergence of Conspirituality — Ward, C. & Voas, D. (2011). Journal of Contemporary Religion
- Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat — Beres, D., Remski, M., & Walker, J. (2023). PublicAffairs.