‘New Orleans wrecked me’: How a young pastor’s time in Louisiana reshaped his faith

Jared Stacy doesn’t talk about his years in New Orleans as a charming chapter of early adulthood. He talks about them as devastation — the good kind.

“New Orleans wrecked me in the best way possible,” he said.

Near the end of his time in Louisiana, Stacy attended what he thought was a prayer gathering for pastors at LSU’s Pete Maravich Assembly Center. Instead, he found himself crossing a protest line between a Christian rally and pro-choice demonstrators — a moment that unsettled him in ways he didn’t yet understand.

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Stacy, now 35 and living in St. Petersburg, Florida, grew up in a conservative Baptist environment that he describes as “hard right and far right.” As a child, the word “fundamentalist” simply meant serious Christianity.

In the church culture he knew, faith was defined by certainty — about theology, politics and the boundaries between believers and everyone else.

Living and working in New Orleans began to chip away at that certainty.

The experience eventually became the starting point for his work examining conspiracy thinking inside American evangelicalism — and for his new book, “Reality in Ruins: How Conspiracy Theory Became an American Evangelical Crisis,” which will be released March 17 by HarperCollins.

“I definitely grew up and knew the language,” he said. “Fundamentalist was a good thing. To me as a kid, it just meant we were Christians. We were serious Christians.”

A storefront church in Metairie

After marrying his wife, Stevie Noble, the couple chose New Orleans in 2012 so they could both pursue graduate degrees. Stacy enrolled at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in Gentilly. Within six months he was pastoring a small church in Metairie.

The congregation met in a storefront church near Fat City, where apartment buildings, parade routes and late-night restaurants filled the surrounding blocks and the church door stayed open throughout the week. Neighbors drifted in and out. The surrounding neighborhood — dense, pedestrian and diverse — exposed him to people he had rarely encountered in his upbringing.

“People just walked in,” he said.

That environment brought him into conversations he had rarely experienced before.

The congregation included people with different political views and life experiences than the communities he had grown up around.

“I remember thinking, ‘Man, I’m going to church with people who are Democrats,’” he said. “That was a first for me.”

Living and working in the New Orleans area slowly dismantled assumptions he had carried since childhood. He says that the experience was not dramatic in the moment, but it gradually reshaped how he understood faith and the people around him.

“I really felt like I was the one being pastored just by the experience itself,” he said. “I didn’t have the language to be able to articulate the sort of changes that were occurring. The ways that my lived theology was undergoing a crisis that I didn’t realize.”

At the time, he did not fully understand the internal shift that was happening. Years later, those experiences would shape his academic work.

His book examines the long relationship between evangelical Christianity and conspiracy thinking in the United States. One of his central arguments is that conspiracy theories are not a recent intrusion into evangelical culture but something woven into its history.

“Conspiracy theory is very much like a load-bearing wall in the evangelical house in America,” he said. “It is a feature, not a bug.”

The idea deepened during his doctoral studies at the University of Aberdeen, which he completed in 2024.

The more he studied American history and evangelical culture, the more he saw how persistent conspiracy thinking had been.

“You can’t tell the story of America without conspiracy theories,” he said. “These stories are always the things that get told when we’re afraid of society getting turned upside out.”

What surprised him even more was how resistant those beliefs are to correction.

Fact-checking alone, he said, rarely changes deeply held beliefs shaped by religious or cultural narratives. Instead, he argues, conspiracy thinking often operates inside broader stories people already believe about the world — stories that make some claims feel plausible and others impossible.

Modern technology has only accelerated that dynamic.

“We are living with more facts, more information than we’ve ever lived with before,” he said. “And, ironically, we are less able to parse fact from fiction, reality from disreality than perhaps at any other time.”

For Stacy, those questions are not purely academic.

After their time in New Orleans, Stacy and his wife moved to her childhood church in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

“We didn’t realize how much we had changed. We thought we were going back to somewhere familiar,” Stacy said, “but that was the place where we began to work through how our beliefs changed and the contradictions between our beliefs and the Southern Baptist Convention were unveiled in a local, concrete place.”

From Fredericksburg, Stacy decided to go back to graduate school to earn a doctorate.

His research intersects with his own spiritual journey and with debates inside American Christianity about power, politics and belief.

He describes his approach as “doing theology against theology” — using Christian ideas to challenge political or religious movements that claim Christian authority.

“I do that as an insider,” he said. “I was in there — and I called White Christian nationalism just Christianity.”

The urgency of the problem, he argues, is not simply theoretical.

The stories communities tell about one another can shape how people treat each other in the real world.

“I call it a crisis because there are real human communities, human lives, human bodies that are placed in physical risk because of the stories we tell,” he said.

But the word “crisis,” he said, also carries another meaning.

Moments of crisis demand decisions.

“A crisis in the truest sense of the word calls for a decision,” he said. “To not choose is to choose.”

Noticing the signs at LSU

Walking across LSU’s campus with a Bible in hand, Stacy joined a group heading toward the event at the PMAC. Along the way, he struck up a conversation with an English professor walking beside him.

As they neared the PMAC, Stacy noticed the signs. He realized that the people he was walking with were part of a pro-choice demonstration that he would have to walk through to attend the Christian rally inside.

The moment forced him to confront two worlds colliding in the same space.

“I suddenly look around and realize that they are holding pro-choice signs,” he said. “And I have this moment where the guy that I was walking with, and I suddenly recognized that we’re not part of the same people here.”

Crossing the protest line to enter the rally unsettled him in ways he could not fully explain at the time.

He now sees that moment as an early glimpse of the religious and political fusion he later studied.

“I had this very unsettling sense that maybe the Jesus that I worshipped would not have crossed that picket line,” he said. “I felt like this lit professor and I might have had a lot to talk about. I’m like crossing this protest line to go to a prayer rally.”

Looking back, he says those kinds of experiences helped him recognize how closely political rallies and religious revivalism could mirror each other, seeing the two as almost indiscernible.

A crisis inside evangelicalism

Today, Stacy works as a hospice chaplain and attends what he describes as a “post-evangelical” church in St. Petersburg. The congregation still recites ancient Christian creeds and the Lord’s Prayer each week, but it has moved away from the evangelical label.

The shift reflects a broader attempt to acknowledge the tradition the church came from while moving beyond it.

“If we just give it up,” he said of the label evangelical, “no one has to say they’re sorry.”

Stacy still considers himself a Christian, though his faith looks different from the one he inherited and knew as a child. He says that his faith has been totally altered — and yet it hasn’t changed at all.

Part of faith, he believes, involves letting go of illusions.

“I think part of the Christian faith involves being dispossessed of our illusions,” he said.

For pastors and believers wrestling with the tensions he describes, Stacy says speaking honestly may come at a cost and that “courage can look like ruin.” The choice to challenge conspiracy thinking or Christian nationalism can threaten careers and congregations.

Pastors who speak out, he acknowledged, may lose jobs, relationships or stability. But, he says, silence carries its own consequences.

“Our world needs not just analysts and experts,” he said. “It also needs witnesses.”

For Stacy, that journey began years earlier in a storefront church in Metairie — where the certainty he once carried first began to come undone.