Aaron M. Renn joins John Hirschauer to discuss his book, Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture, and how American Christians can adapt to a changing culture.
Audio Transcript
John Hirschauer: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks podcast. This is John Hirschauer, Associate Editor of City Journal. Joining me on today's show is Aaron Renn. He is a writer and consultant based in Indianapolis and a co-founder and senior fellow at American Reformer, a nonprofit that seeks to address issues facing Christians in the United States and to reform decaying Christian institutions. Before co-founding American Reformer, Aaron spent five years as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute where he focused on urban policy. He writes a monthly newsletter, and his written work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, First Things, and of course, City Journal. Today we're going to discuss his new book, Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture, which was published earlier this year.
Aaron, thanks for joining the show.
Aaron M. Renn: Thanks for having me on.
John Hirschauer: So this book draws on themes that you first discussed in a much debated 2022 essay for First Things titled “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism.” In that essay and now in your book you sketch a three-pronged account of the changing relationship between American culture and evangelical Christianity across the 20th and 21st centuries, what you describe as the positive, neutral, and negative worlds. When did each of those periods begin and end, and how did American elites' view of Christianity change across those decades?
Aaron M. Renn: Unlike in Europe, we never had a state church, but for most of our history, America had a softly institutionalized generic Protestantism as its default national religion. So as recently as the 1950s, half of all Americans attended church every Sunday. There was prayer and Bible reading in public schools at that time. We were adding, "In God we trust," to our money, "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance. So there was in a sense a Christian normative society, really essentially Protestant normative society.
But starting in the 1960s that really began to become unraveled and the status of Christianity went into a decline in America, a decline to continues to the present day. And I divide that period of from roughly 1964 to the present into three eras or worlds that I call the positive, neutral, and negative worlds.
So in the positive world, Christianity is in decline. I want to make that clear. Church attendance is down, for example, and yet it's still basically viewed positively. To be known as a good churchgoing man makes you seem like an upstanding member of society. Christian moral norms are still the basic moral norms of society, and if you violate them, you could get into trouble.
Around 1994, we hit a tipping point and entered what I call the neutral world, which lasted from 1994 to 2014. And in the neutral world, Christianity is no longer seen positively, but it's not really seen negatively yet either. It's just one more lifestyle choice among many in a pluralistic public square. And the Christian moral system had a residual effect, you might say.
Then in 2014, we hit a second tipping point and enter what I call the negative world where for the first time in the 400-year history of America, official elite culture now views Christianity negatively, or certainly at least skeptically. That might be a better way to see it. To be known as a conservative Christian does not help you get a job in the elite domains of society. And Christian morality of the traditional type is now expressly repudiated, and in fact, in many ways is seen as the new leading threat to the new public moral order. So this has been very dislocating, I think, for American Christians to say the least, and have really struggled to figure out how to adapt to it.
John Hirschauer: And you acknowledge in the book that any division like this is going to be to some extent arbitrary, but what were the flagship events that you think ushered in each of these three eras?
Aaron M. Renn: Sure. I don't subscribe to the where did it all go wrong theory, but there were certainly some seminal events along the way. One was the collapse of the old Protestant establishment or WASP establishment in the 1960s that was really, in some respects bound up with this dissolution of the old Protestant order.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 was really an important event. In fact, you could argue, maybe that, I should say the neutral world started then because communism was an avowedly atheist materialist system, and Christianity was bound up with the West's war, if you will, against the Soviet Union in the Cold War. And so it really was not feasible to abandon that religion during the Cold War. But with the end of the Cold War that freed essentially our society up to unbundle Christianity from what it meant to be a western liberal democratic society.
In terms of the proximate events around the switch from the neutral to the negative world, there was definitely a major cultural rupture in Obama's second term. So we see this in the Great Awokening, which even say a left-wing pundit like Matthew Yglesias has said occurred around 2014 where we had this hard left turn into race issues and words like “white supremacy” begin to soar in usage in the papers, for example. Which by the way, I think it's key, this happened before Trump really came on the scene. You could think about the Obergefell decision legalizing gay marriage in 2015.
2013 was the year that NYU Professor Jonathan Haidt said that he started to see things go a little crazy on campuses. And then Donald Trump himself, his candidacy in 2015 was really also a harbinger of a changed world. And this goes to show, I think, really the profound in nature of this shift to the negative world. I think a lot of people would think when I tell this story that the real implication is how it affects the church, but really it affects everything.
Donald Trump's only a plausible candidate for president, only a credible candidate in a negative world where the old religiously derived standards and guardrails that would've kept someone like him out of the presidency have essentially been dissolved by society. He had talked about running for president for 30 years, but he never really did it. I don't really count that Reform Party thing in 2012, but he saw something change in the culture, and the fact that he had been a gambling magnet, or the fact that he had affairs, or the fact that he was not exactly known as a truth teller, none of these things would count against him anymore because in our society, gambling is now perfectly acceptable and mainstream, sexual libertinism is fully accepted. Nobody really cares whether you tell the truth anymore, it's whether you can get ahead. And so all of these things made it possible, I think, for Trump to become president in a way that it would not have happened before. So he's a symptom and also a milestone on the way, I guess.
John Hirschauer: And so, one of the features of the negative world that creates these political shifts, or at least it responds to some of the political shifts, I suppose, is that there's now a penalty to be paid for being publicly Christian. That it's not merely that the culture has changed in the directions you described where gambling or these other vices are looked on in a more permissive way, but it's that if you express orthodox Christian sentiments about sexuality, for example, there's an associated social cost to be paid for doing so. And that's in the book, that's something you kind of described as one of the characteristic features of the negative world.
Because your book focuses on evangelical Christianity, what are some of the different ways that evangelical Christians responded to the rise of the negative world and the social penalties that are now associated with expressing their faith in public?
Aaron M. Renn: Right. Well, I identify essentially three strategies that evangelicals used over the past 40, 50 years to respond to changes in cultures. There was the culture war strategy or the religious right strategy, which emerged in the late 1970s, probably peaked around 1994, but of course is still with us today. There was the seeker sensitivity strategy, which is the non-denominational megachurch that in many respects represents the evangelical mainstream in America today. And then there was a later strategy that emerged in the nineties that I called cultural engagement, which is essentially the urban church movement that expanded in the wake of the Giuliani-era transformations of the city, which it was a mixture of a seeker sensitivity for the cities, but also a little bit of the opposite of the culture war approach, which is rather than fighting with people all the time, let's take advantage of the pluralistic public square and have conversations with people.
And so all three of those are essentially here. And as essentially the church has transitioned into this negative world, there really has not been the emergence of new approaches specific to that. What I see is a lot of essentially doubling down on the existing. So you've seen a lot of deconstruction, so a lot of people who've publicly abandoned their faith, maybe even written books talking about that. I don't think you could really have a deconstruction phenomenon if the relationship of culture towards Christianity hadn't changed. It wouldn't be possible to write books, certainly not as many books. So we see that.
We see realignment where people change teams within the religious landscape. Maybe a great example of this is David French. 10 years ago you would've said David French, the conservative columnist, well, was a conservative columnist, you would've said he was a hardcore culture warrior. Well, today he is a New York Times columnist who writes about the great exemplars of masculinity that exists among the men in Kamala Harris' Democratic Party.
And then we also see what I would call deformation, where these people, again have doubled down on these strategies, that are abandoning some of their previous touchstone. So the culture war people, if you think back to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, they would've said moral character is the paramount consideration in who can be president. Well, now it's a little more realpolitik when it comes to something like supporting Trump. The old cultural engagers, they're not as much engaging the culture as they're echoing the culture. And you see this cadre of never-Trump evangelicals, very similar to the never-Trump Republicans and equally as histrionic in many cases. And of course, because that's a popular view in secular society, they've been elevated and given a pretty large voice, even though numerically there aren't that many of them.
And so I think the net result has been increasing conflict within the church. I say there's now a culture war, but the culture war is basically internal to evangelicalism. These different factions have basically turned on each other in a sense. And so they really haven't cracked the code, I think, on what it means to operate in this negative world.
And just a couple examples of I think how the landscape is changing in ways that will force adaptation. One is on abortion. I mean, now that Roe versus Wade has been overturned, we now see, I think pretty clearly at the ballot box that the majority of the people in the country want abortion to be legal, at least at some level. And so naturally, the Republican Party, which is a political organization that wants to win elections, whose elites were never that social conservative, let's be honest, have essentially, they're running away from any abortion restrictions. So now there's two parties that aren't necessarily interested in banning abortion, although certainly the Democrats support it much more enthusiastically now, basically championing abortion as long as there's one toe still inside the mother's body. So that's an example of what's happening.
And we also see that people seem to want pot to be legal now. I think pot legalization is bad, but what do you do when people want pot to be illegal? They want gambling to be illegal. And so we're going to see much more of this. The ability to influence legislation relative to the culture will decline.
And I think we also see it with the recent Paris Olympics opening ceremony, which included this drag queen mockery of Leonardo's Last Supper painting, there's just going to be more of that. And so you're going to have to have a little bit of a thicker skin maybe, I think with some of that. Are you really going to be troubled by these things, which maybe understandably so, but this is the world we live in.
And so these are the sorts of things that I think evangelicals and of course, conservative Catholics and others, they're going to have to come to some ability to decide how they're going to respond to these changed conditions.
John Hirschauer: Yeah. Your book is one part diagnostic and one part prescriptive. You have the diagnostic portion, but then the prescriptive portion as well of what do evangelicals do now that they are a minority, not only in numerical terms, but in terms of the values that they hold. They no longer constitute the moral majority. And one of the things that you suggest is that evangelicals should self-consciously view themselves as a minority. What are the political implications of adopting that minority mindset?
Aaron M. Renn: When you're the majority culture, you don't have to worry about reinforcing your own kind of values, right? When the public schools are reading your Bible, and making your prayers, and more or less designed, at least in ways, consistent with your values, you don't have to really do much yourself to do that.
Whereas if you're a minority, even in cases where you're very positive towards society, you understand that the institutions and the culture of society is not going to sustain your own culture. And so you have to have your own institutions and practices that demarcate and sustain your own community life.
And the example that I give as maybe one that's a good one for evangelicals to look at is early 20th century Catholicism. So pre-War America really was anti-Catholic in a lot of ways. And all these Catholic ancestors like my own came here and they said, "If we want to be faithful Catholics in America, then we have to create, again the infrastructure to allow us to do that." So they created the parish school networks, Catholic universities, Catholic fraternal societies. They had all of the different Catholic practices around praying the rosaries, et cetera, that set them apart from the country and enabled them to transmit, and again, sustain community life.
And so now that Harvard, Princeton, and Yale are no longer institutions that are certainly not designed to train Protestant ministers anymore, which they once were, but they're not even self-consciously Protestant institutions anymore in the way that they were in the mid-century era. I mean, people forget, one of the reasons there was such a furor over William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, was it 1952, I think, is that he was an Irish Catholic guy trashing this WASP elite entity that had invited him kind of into their inner circle. He came across, I think, as an ingrate to them. And they talked about this in their critique of Buckley, that he was Catholic and this was a Protestant institution.
Now that you don't have that, I think you have to act much more like the Catholics. And one reason maybe there's been more Catholic intellectual life and other things in America than Protestant intellectual life is because the Catholics never fully let go of their own institutions, even when they were brought into the mainstream. Maybe again, also the way that some of what Mormons experienced over the course of America could be instructive as well. Mitt Romney, who was running for president in 2012, and there were major people who said he was a member of a cult and maybe probably did lose some votes over being a Mormon. And so there's things to learn from there, even if the situation is a little bit different. You can't exactly just copy everything other people did, but hopefully you can learn from that.
John Hirschauer: Yeah. And insisting on that distinctiveness and remaining true to your religious convictions is a potential response that you highlight in your book for Evangelicals in the Negative World. And one example that really leapt out to me was that of Cadbury chocolate, which was originally run by the Quakers, and they often did business with the Friends. At the time, you write in the book, many chocolate companies mixed brick dust and iron fillings into their batches to cut costs. But because Cadbury was a Christian company and operated according to their convictions, they declined to cut those corners, and as a result, they built a reputation for excellence that endured for generations.
Another Christian company with an excellent product, Chick-fil-A, while they've seen tremendous sales, they've also faced pushback in cities across the country because of its founders views on same-sex marriage.
So kind of with those two examples in mind, I wonder what are the prospects for explicitly Christian businesses in the so-called Negative World?
Aaron M. Renn: Yeah. Well, the Quaker businesses of late-nineteenth-century Britain were definitely very impressive. Certainly in the public square, there's a limit to the amount of religiosity that you're going to be able to do, essentially given the legal, regulatory, and cultural environment of America.
What I think is much more important is how your life of your community itself functions and flourishes, because that's critical. Just as one example, we're seeing tremendous declines in marriage rates and in birth rates in America, maybe a quarter of millennial women, a third of millennial men may be permanently childless, may never marry, many of them may never marry. And so we're kind of entering a post-familial world. And I think that's the thing that if you're the church, you don't want to become conformed to the world in that way. You want to create an environment in which people still are able to get married, stay married, have healthy families, have and raise children in a healthy way, etc. while of course, always welcoming those who, for whatever reason, were not married or did not have kids.
But I think those are the sorts of things. I'm much more interested in what we are doing than what other people are doing. I think that's one of the implications of being a minority. Not that I suggest completely abandoning the political and cultural realm, though you have to engage prudently there, but I think clearly there's a lot of work to do internally, and that should be a really big focus.
John Hirschauer: Well, thanks for your time, Aaron. Your book is really thoughtful, and I found it even as a non-evangelical Christian, to contain a great deal of wisdom about how to approach the many cultural turns against traditional faith and its adherents in the negative world.
The book again, is Life in the Negative World published by Zondervan. You can find City Journal on X @CityJournal and on Instagram @cityjournal_mi. Aaron's Substack is at aaronrenn.com. That along with the book is linked in the description.
As always, if you like what you've heard on today's podcast, please give us a five-star review on iTunes.
Aaron, thanks so much for joining the show.
Aaron M. Renn: Thank you.
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