How QAnon infiltrated wellness culture on its way to the Capitol The distance between MAGA reactionaries and Goopsters in yoga pants may seem wide, but they share a distrust of institutions and often choose intuition over reason. Photo by Wesley Tingey/Unsplash/Creative Commons January 29, 2021 (RNS) — In 2019, when I began studying the “new religions” of the American spiritual landscape, it became clear to me that what was defining American religion (and politics) was not our ecclesiastical establishment but new folk faiths — wellness culture, modern witchcraft, alt-right-adjacent atavist movements. Even so, I would never have predicted QAnon. QAnon is a lattice of conspiracy theories blended with so-called “insider information” from an anonymous government official-turned-informant known as Q. The gist of Q’s warnings is that the federal government has been infiltrated by a satanic pedophiliac conspiracy, largely peopled by top Democrats and deep state denizens, and that Trump is part of a wider sting operation to stop it.