Religion, Politics, and Cognitive Warfare: Information, Interpretation, Conspiracy, and the Struggle for Reality
Details
- When: October 1-3, 2026
- Where: Online
- Registration: Now open
- Sponsored by: The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (JCRT) in collaboration with the University of Denver
This conference investigates how beliefs, paranoia, and conspiratorial modes of knowing shape a contemporary cognitive battlespace in which actors struggle to define truth, authority, and reality itself. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s Lectures on the Will to Know and Julia Kristeva’s This Incredible Need to Believe (2024), the event focuses on practices of selective fact use and “truth-selecting” that construct alternative epistemic orders while claiming privileged access to what is “really” going on.
Rather than treating conspiracy thinking as merely political or psychological, the conference foregrounds its religious dimensions: faith in hidden powers, moral dualism, apocalyptic expectation, and hermeneutical struggle over revelatory access to the real. Conspiracy cultures routinely reproduce theological structures of knowing—visions of salvation and corruption, truth and deception, initiation and blindness. At the same time, new forms of “cognitive warfare” reframe these religious energies within state and platform attempts to govern perception, attention, and trust. Artificial intelligence, algorithmic media, and strategic information campaigns do not only deliver messages; they create digital ecologies in which suspicion becomes faith-like and revelation is continual.
The conference organizers welcome contributions from scholars of religious studies, philosophy, communication, sociology, security studies, psychology, media, and related fields. We also encourage work that takes a reflective and analytical approach to both general and specific topics with international appeal or focus. Submissions should engage religion as a dynamic force—conceptually, historically, or materially—within the cognitive battlespaces of our time.
Keynote Address: Militarizing the Mind: Cognitive Warfare from the Cold War to the Dark Web
Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm
As I currently conceive it, the talk will open with three unsettling contemporary snapshots: a dark web occult repository of conspiracy theory screeds and “psychic mind-control” manuals; a NATO tactical statement declaring the human mind the “sixth domain” of warfare; and the familiar structure of a TikTok algorithmic rabbit hole. Together, these prismatic scenes suggest shared conceptions of the mind and a common repertoire of techniques for controlling perception, attention, and even thought itself.
The talk will trace the emergence of these conceptions of the mind to a Cold War military industrial complex and the convergence of cybernetics, psychic research, propaganda studies, and Soviet theories of reflexive control. From these entanglements emerged many of the psychological models and informational logics that continue to govern contemporary life. Engaging Han Byung-Chul’s “psychopolitics,” Bernard Stiegler’s account of the alienation of memory, N. Katherine Hayles’ account of virtual bodies, and Friedrich Kittler’s insight that civilian media infrastructures are basically sedimented military technologies, I will examine how modern systems of influence increasingly operate through feedback loops designed to capture attention, circumvent deliberation, and exploit fractures in epistemic authority and trust.
Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is the Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Religion, Chair of Science & Technology Studies at Williams College and author of The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History and Metamodernism: The Future of Theory.
The conference will be held online from October 1-3, 2026. Registration is free and open to interested participants. We look forward to gathering scholars, students, and interested readers to explore how religion, politics, and cognitive warfare shape the struggle for truth, authority, and reality in our contemporary world.
Sponsored by the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (JCRT) in collaboration with the University of Denver.