While the horrific scenes of the invasion and occupation of the US Capitol building played out on television, I happened to be doing a radio interview for my recent book on religious terrorism (Juergensmeyer 2020). The reporter asked if there were similarities between the Trump-incited rioters and the terrorists I have studied. I quickly responded “yes.” It is true that the reasons for religious-inspired insurrections around the world are specific to their contexts—supporters of al Qaeda are not the same as militant Buddhists in Myanmar. Yet there are some striking similarities among the cosmic battles imagined in the apocalyptic scenarios that propel movements of religious of religious violence. This includes ISIS, Christian militia groups, Jewish extremists, and Hindu and Sikh militants. They all bear some common characteristics, and QAnon shares many similarities with them. To begin with, QAnon bears some relationship to religion. To be sure, the conspiracy theory at the heart of QAnon belief is this-worldly. It includes the notion that there is a secret design among liberal politicians and media figures to take over the world for their evil purposes, among which is ritual leeching the blood of innocent children for empowerment.

Through the examination of QAnon as a religious apocalyptic “digital cult,” this paper integrates individual psychological models regarding the espousal of conspiracy beliefs with sociological and anthropological models of religious cultism, particularly in the context of destructive and violent cults. This integrative model purports to reconcile the apparent contradiction between the extravagant irrationality of the QAnon belief-system with the otherwise normative demographics of its adherents and distinguish—as scholars of religion often do—between the creed, the practice, and the social identity aspects of the movement. Cultic studies (adapted to the digital age) are leveraged to discern the functions that different strata of adherents provide to the movement, and elucidate the mechanisms by which they coexist, collaborate, and avoid splitting along organizational or ideological fault-lines. The model also draws upon studies of apocalyptic cults and violent radicalization to caution against counter-productive over-generalization, over-sensationalizing, and over-pathologizing of QAnon believers.