True, But Incomplete

Research reveals which Americans are most likely to believe in conspiracy theories (msn.com)

The proposal here is that Christians are most likely to believe in conspiracy theories.  The two that are mentioned are vaccines against the coronavirus, and who won the 2020 presidential election.  And the repeated explanations for naming Christians are "biblical literalism" and "Christian nationalism."

It's true that Christians have a unique burden when it comes to being rational and open-minded: it is their understanding that there's such a thing as "god," and that Jesus is the Messiah, but they long ago reneged on their commitment to Jesus as Messiah in what they originally proposed to be the meaning of the concept, and they're now waiting for a "Second Coming."  Frankly, who knows what they're waiting for, or how they would know if the wait was over?

But there are two other problems.  One is that it is in no way only Christians who are susceptible to believing in conspiracy theories.  All religions are built on nothing but fantasies, and anyone who believes in any of them is available to believe in anything else that is built on nothing.  That would very definitely include the sampling of conspiracies.  Anyone who takes literally something that cannot possibly be taken literally, and that is filled with inconsistencies and contradictions, is painfully easy fodder for conspiracy theories.  And that's a lot broader than fantasizing that this country was built on "Christian nationalism," which the Constitution (the First Amendment, anyway) explicitly says it was not.  I know plenty of non-Christian religious people who breathe a combination of oxygen and conspiracy theories.  It's true that there are far more Christian people than non-Christian religious people who live in this country today, but no other reason is given in this article to single out Christians as uniquely susceptible to conspiracy theories.  This article came from msn.com, which is not always high quality, and gets lazy, and maybe Christians for them were just low-hanging and juicy fruit.

So, one broad group of people who are susceptible to conspiracy theories are religious people, who insist on taking as "truth" something that is not at all true, and most certainly not confirmable.  But there's another group of people who are susceptible to conspiracy theories, and we talked about them some time ago.  They are people who are comparatively uneducated, or who don't have professional educations.  They literally, as it is said, "don't know what they don't know."  These are people who have not had to learn something rigorously in a way that holds them responsible for finding and understanding the truth of it (and challenging what's questionable), or at least understanding what, outside its own assertions, supports it.  And once you agree to believe something just because you do, or because someone on TV said it, you have departed any concept of solid ground, and you can believe, or refuse to believe, anything.  If you wish to believe a certain candidate won an election, and the election mechanism doesn't support your preferred belief, and all 61 court cases brought in the matter go against you, you can tell yourself everyone is wrong, and lying criminals, and only you and like-minded people are right.

So, it's fair to say that some categories of people -- Americans and otherwise -- are "most likely to believe in conspiracy theories," but this article doesn't go far enough, and work hard enough, to clarify and explain what those categories are.  And why some people are so susceptible.