Jared Stacy wasn’t surprised by a 2021 Lifeway report: “Half of U.S. Protestant Pastors Hear Conspiracy Theories in their Churches.” Conspiracies about Democratic pedophile rings and other nonsense infested Spotswood Baptist Church in Fredericksburg, Va., where he was pastor to college and young adults.
He resigned that year and took his wife and family to Scotland, where he earned a Ph.D. Now back in the U.S., he’s a “post-evangelical theologian and ethicist” with a new book, Reality in Ruins: How Conspiracy Theory Became an American Evangelical Crisis.
Jared Stacy
“We have lost a grip on common reality in no small part because of how evangelical faith” is “an agent of disreality,” Stacy writes. Evangelicals “conceive of themselves as the community who alone possess moral knowledge,” but they often struggle to tell up from down and are more likely than any other faith group to fall for QAnon conspiracies.
“Conspiracy theory isn’t a bug but a feature of evangelical Christianity in America,” he writes. It’s “a load-bearing wall.” Conservative believers fall hard for stories of “hidden actors who harbor hostile intent, whose continued existence provokes a sanctified struggle to defeat them.”
The trouble began before there was an America, with the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 as “ministers and officials across New England were drawn into, and perhaps stoked, a hysteria over witches who had supposedly infiltrated Puritan society,” he says. Identifying women and the enslaved as witches was “fitting for a patriarchal society driven in part by the economy of chattel slavery.”
Centuries later, D.L. Moody’s Moody Monthly gave its unflinching support for the antisemitic conspiracies promoted in the hoax document The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, saying the Protocols “simply gave to its readers what had been well known for some time to the thoughtful people of Great Britain.”
More recently, evangelicals have been some of the most enthusiastic promoters of Donald Trump’s conspiracies about the 2020 election.
“Conspiracy theory … dangerously malforms Christians with catastrophic consequences for fellow citizens and our common humanity,” writes Stacy, who studied at Liberty University, a school his fundamentalist relatives feared would turn him liberal.
He says conspiracy theories give those who believe them conversion experiences, systems of knowledge, feelings of supremacy (“I know, you don’t”) and community (“I know, we know”).
And pretty much any bizarre theory can be defended as “biblical:”
“The adjective ‘biblical’ works something like a lockbox. It gets filled with all sorts of claims and all sorts of teaching, on money, on racism, on morality, etc., and then wielded as an unquestionable truth. Because evangelicals believe the Bible is God’s word and not Jesuss’, they treat questions on what counts as biblical as a threat.”
The fundamentalist community where Stacy grew up may not know what to make of him now. But in his concluding chapters, he reappears as a pastor, pointing seekers to the transcendent truth found only in Jesus.
“Reality comes to us in Jesus as something we receive,” he writes. “It is no longer up to us to secure by any means. … God’s reality is a reality that claims us, an encompassing of a common world in love.”
Only Christ’s love and truth can overcome the “holy paranoia” and “corrosive suspicion” that conspiracy theories spawn, he says.