Jared Stacy, a Southern Baptist pastor turned post-evangelical theologian and ethicist, tracks the rise of Christian paranoia and conspiracism in his debut book, Reality in Ruins: How Conspiracy Theory Became an American Evangelical Crisis (HarperOne, Mar.). Stacy examines how paranoia functions as a defense of power, often by casting those on the margins as existential threats to a perceived Christian social order. At the root, he argues, it is anxiety that is driving today’s most divisive ideologies, religious extremism, and a culture of suspicion.
You describe American evangelicalism as risen by menacing conspiracy theories and nearing a state of collapse—what is driving this?
I would pinpoint two areas. First, churches have been reorganized around political kinds of shibboleths, and so you have this fracturing of church life. Then the second area is media consumption. When we open our phone in the morning, we scroll through this spectacle that would have us see reality fundamentally different from whoever we're going to see at the office, and maybe whoever we come home to that night. We're not looking at just one-off conspiracies anymore. We're dealing with this wholesale default on common reality, and so the manifestations of that are felt in the most intimate and personal spaces of our lives.
You write that “holy paranoia” is central to the conspiracy problem within evangelicalism. Can you define that term?
When I talk about holy paranoia in the most basic terms, I’m describing a split vision of who Jesus is—a Jesus defined by suspicion of others and the pursuit of power, as opposed to a Jesus who speaks of love, faith, liberation, and hope. That split is what ultimately characterizes everything the book is wrestling with. Beneath the social and political fractures—and the real danger those pose to communities and bodies—there is a theological underbelly: a false, paranoid vision of Jesus caught between visions of American empire and the Kingdom of God. We cannot make peace with this contradiction.
“Good suspicion” is a theme throughout the book, positioned as a survival strategy for getting back to simplicity, humility, and honesty. What does it mean in practice?
It means recognizing how algorithms shape our reactions and creating space to say, “I don’t know.” It is a commitment to uncertainty. It frees us from this need to develop an immediate opinion or response to everything. And this isn't just for Christians. People are really tired of the sort of certainty that has got us into this position, and one counterbalance to that is allowing ourselves to recognize that while the truth is out there, our ability to enter it is going to require some humility. No one wants to be told they’re wrong; no one thinks they're living a lie.
You write that “the future we hope for…will demand better stories, and people of humility rather than violence.” What would that look like?
The first step toward better stories is admitting that the old ones no longer work. When people feel that loss of narrative, they often reach for fear and anxiety to fill the gap. But building something new will require artists, writers, and faith communities—churches, mosques, synagogues—working together to ask better questions about who we want to be.
One artist who deeply influenced my thinking, Makoto Fujimura, says that if you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor. Right now, “culture war” is the dominant metaphor shaping how we engage politics and public life. But what happens if we shift from culture war to culture care? That single change opens entirely different imaginative possibilities for how we live together.
