Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking In Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Aaron Renn is a co-founder and senior fellow at American Reformer. He completed a Bachelor’s of Science in Business and Finance from Indiana University in 1992. After beginning his career in management and technology consulting, he became a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute of Policy Research with a focus on urban policy. His writing has been published, for example, by The Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, and First Things. It is his new book, Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture, that is the topic of our conversation today.
Aaron Renn, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Aaron Renn:
Thank you for having me, sir.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I’ve looked forward to this conversation and, frankly, your book Life in the Negative World has just taken off and it has become a catalyst for an awful lot of discussion, and it was based upon an article that appeared back in 2022 at First Things, the “Three Worlds of Evangelicalism.” You have obviously sparked an awful lot of conversation. Tell me, what was behind the article and what’s behind the book? What was driving you to this project?
Aaron Renn:
I actually came up with the idea for my “Three Worlds of Evangelicalism” model in 2014. I was briefly living here in Indianapolis before I moved off to take a think tank position in New York City, and I got invited to see a Christian short film, or a series of Christian short films, that a friend of mine helped produce that was showing at Indiana Wesleyan University. And I went there and I came away from it saying, “wow, they did a great job with this.” I was thinking, “my buddy did a film. I’m a little nervous of whether it’s going to be any good,” and it was actually very good, but yet I said to myself, “this film, the world that it is talking about and engaging with and trying to get students engaged with is a world that’s going to be disappearing any minute.” And so I went home and I opened my laptop and a Word document and I started banging in bullet points about what I thought was going to happen in the way the world was going to perceive Christianity, that we were going to move away into a more Christian hostile space.
Then I actually turned that into the first version of my article in 2017 in my own newsletter, which had 200 and something readers at the time. I wrote an article, it was then called “The Lost World of American Evangelicalism” and it went viral then. Rod Dreier wrote about it, other people wrote about it and sent me thousands of subscribers. That’s the only reason anyone’s ever heard of me. So it went viral initially. Then First Things Magazine asked me to update it. It was in their February 22 issue. It was a huge hit for them. It’s probably the most talked about article in the history of the magazine, and then I turned it into a book. And my background, my professional background is management consulting. When I came out of university, I went to work for Accenture, spent a long time there. And so my mind is always whirling, analyzing, turning things into frameworks. And so really just the way my analytical mind works, I guess, is how I ended up coming up with this framework and this idea and it resonated with a lot of people.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Well, I think the reason it resonates with a lot of people is because evangelicals, if they don’t have any other or just classical Protestant or for that matter, Christians in the world today, in the West in particular, recognize that we’re in a fundamentally changed position. The tectonic plates of the society have changed, and it requires some understanding of a periodization, historical schematic, but also a narrative flow just to kind of make sense of our world. Was this always the way things are? Is this the way things are always going to be? I think the radical ruptures of the last, say, century are very much apparent, but labeling them and even coming up with a periodic schema is rather controversial, and meant to be. So I’m going to argue with you a bit in the course of this conversation–
Aaron Renn:
Please do.
Albert Mohler:
But I want to start out first by just asking you some fundamental questions like, Why do you start where you start? Just lay out the system and so talk about the three worlds you identify and that’ll get us a long way towards our conversation.
Aaron Renn:
Sure. And this has been refined a little bit over the years as people engage with it. So I’ve helped me dial in my own thinking a little, but America never had a State church like they did in many European countries, but for most of our history we had a sort of softly institutionalized, generic Protestantism as our default national religion. So as recently as the 1950s, half of all adults attended church every Sunday, and that was actually the high watermark of church attendance in America. So we had prayer and Bible reading in public schools in the 1950s. We were adding in God we trust to our money, we were putting under God on the Pledge of Allegiance. We were in some sense, not an official sense, but a de facto sense, a Christian society. But starting in the 1960s, this started to become unraveled and the status of Christianity in America started to go into decline, and that’s a decline that continues to the present day.
And my three world’s model takes this period of decline of Christianity in America, from roughly 1964 to the present, and divides it into three eras or worlds that I call the positive world, the neutral world, and the negative world. So the positive world lasts from 1994–excuse me–1964 to 1994. And I want to be clear, things are not going well for Christianity. This is the initial phase of decline. Church attendance is down, the sexual revolution is happening, and yet Christianity is still basically viewed positively by society to be known as a good churchgoing man makes people think you’re an upstanding member of society, they want to vote for you. Christian moral norms are still the basic moral norms of society, and if you violate them, you could get into big trouble. Around 1994, we had a tipping point and we enter 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 either. It’s just one more lifestyle choice among many in a sort of pluralistic public square. And Christian morality has a residual hold, we may say, on society. But 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. Maybe that’s a better phrase to be known as a Bible. Believing Christian does not help you get a job in the elite domains of society. Christian morality is expressly repudiated and in some respects, Christianity and its ideas are viewed as the new leading threat to the new public moral order. And this has been very dislocating for a lot of people, and evangelicals are still trying to figure out, because it seems like the ground shifted rapidly under our feet about a decade ago and trying to figure it out. And I think one reason that this framework has resonated so much with people is it took all of the things that they were already observing in the culture and gave them a way to process it and make sense of it and put into something that they would understand. I didn’t tell ’em anything they didn’t already know. I just gave people a language to talk about what they themselves had already been seeing.
Albert Mohler:
Well, that though is one of the most important contributions a book can make, and whether it’s something like the very academic philosopher Charles Taylor in his book on the Christian age and just understanding that we are talking about radical change taking place in the society. So I think that’s a great achievement and frankly, very few authors hit that moment and you hit that moment both at first things, and I think with the book, just a very quick question. I was asked by a reader of one of my books just a few days ago, it’s 10 years after that particular book had come out, “are the things you’d want to say differently?” And I said, “well, for crying out loud, that was 10 minutes after I turned the manuscript in.” In other words, things happen and we also have additional thoughts. So I guess just at this point I want to ask you, are you basically confident we are in the negative world pretty much as you described it because at least a year ago since you touched the manuscript?
Aaron Renn:
Yeah, I would say that the three worlds model has held up pretty good. There are things that I’ve updated in response to certain critiques or understandings that people had of it. For example, when I originally laid it out in First Things I just described, the positive world is pre 1994.
And I think that that really wasn’t quite clear enough because what I really mean by the positive world is that first phase of decline. I think before Christianity goes into decline, back in the 1950s, it was still positive in a sense, maybe positive going all the way back to Constantine. We can think maybe this is a Christendom, whatever we want to call that. We have to make sense of that in different ways. And that was not a monolithic period, but there was a sort of a break, and again, is it 1964? I don’t want to get too hung up on the dates, but I think that the idea that Christianity goes into decline and the positive world is really the first phase of that decline. And so I think I’ve dialed in a couple other things. One of the things that I didn’t mention in the book, and if I had it to do over again I would is I talk about the neutral world, and there’s a model I call cultural engagement in there, which we can think of as urban Christianity.
And again, I’m a writer on urban policy and I was an urban policy guy to a think tank in New York City. I would’ve probably included the emerging church movement in that culturally so much of it, I’ve actually been reading a book about the emerging church. I never was really part of it. It was not a relevant part of my life, sort of like purity culture really had nothing to do with me. And yet the way that they talk about having a conversation like, we’ll come together in a pub, people who think all kinds of different things, we’re just going to have a conversation. So that was a great example of the neutral world, cultural engagement model getting started in the nineties. And then I just read a very interesting book by a French intellectual called Emmanuel Todd, and he talks about changes in America and in the West in terms of the decline of Christianity, especially Protestantism.
And he actually divides things into three phases. He calls it the active phase, the zombie phase, and the zero state. And he says, we’ve reached the zero state, and his dates line up pretty well with mine. So he says, we arrive at a Protestant zero state in which sort of, not just the Protestant religion, but, sort of, the habits and the values, the more morays of course of Protestantism have evaporated. The old Protestant work ethic is gone, for example. And I thought that model really aligned. So I would probably refer to his because it over overlaps my, but I haven’t necessarily changed any thinking in the world. But I also, one thing I tried to avoid was making any highly specific predictions about what the future holds because the truth is we just don’t know–
Albert Mohler:
No, I respect that.
Aaron Renn:
Five years from now, things could be very different.
Albert Mohler:
Alright, so I think your schematic is brilliant and very helpful. And there’s a sense in which everything like this, to use the categories of classical rhetoric, in a sense a tautology, in other words, you’re setting this out, you’re not staking your life on the fact that there’s a hard line of distinction between these three worlds, but you are helping to make sense of the whole thing. It’s a hortative process. I think what you lay out is very, very helpful. Now, by the way, I’ve been President of one institution for more than 30 years and I was elected to this role in 1993, very active in Christianity, public policy, apologetics, theology, all the rest, for a decade before that. So there’s a sense in which almost the entire–and I was born in the 1950s, so just about everything you talk about is in my lifetime.
And I can see where that’s right. And I can see where you would talk about the positive world, the neutral world, and the negative world in that light. As a theologian and historical theologian, I tend to think in a far larger time frame. And so I basically operate out of the pre-Christian West, the Christian West, and the post-Christian west. And so I see alarm bells long before you start your argument. So in other words, I’m looking at crucial turning points in which I think–for instance, if you’re writing in Britain, the negative world came a lot earlier. I mean, but you could look at the period around World War I and understand by that period identifying as a Christian and anything other than a cultural sense made you an outcast in many intellectual circles. But nonetheless, State church helped to hide all that and all the rest.
But I do think the threefold scheme, it’s not just Aristotle, it just makes sense. It’s because there was something before what came after. And what came after was a very long project. I mean, we’re talking about 1,500 years, or something like that, of dominant Christian influence that produced Western civilization. And the interesting thing is, Aaron, that as recently as five or six years ago, and certainly 20 years ago, you had most of the mainstream secular historians making that point themselves. And so they’re scrambling all over themselves now to say “no, there never was a Christian culture. And America was a secular experiment from the start.” But that’s not what they themselves were arguing 20 or 30 years ago. They were seeking to overcome that Christian reality in the culture, and they’ve been frankly, pretty successful.
Aaron Renn:
Yeah. Well, I agree, this–there’s different ways you can look at the world in different timeframes. I did read Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age, and he tells a 500 year story of secularization. So when you look at his narrative there, I’m dialed in on about 60 years and he’s looking at this hundreds of years. And again, you look at Emmanuel Todd, he would say that the UK went into what he called a zombie Protestant state in which religion no longer was truly believed. People didn’t necessarily go to church, but again, the culture was still Christian.
Albert Mohler:
You can still have a coronation!
Aaron Renn:
Yeah, and so you go into sort of the zombie state and then you end up transitioning out of that in the sixties. And so I think that these tools, there’s many different ways to look at the world. And you’re right that I’m not trying to make some distinction that I’m arguing that this is the difference between a solid, a liquid and a gas or something where a scientist would want to have much more rigorous–
Albert Mohler:
Yeah that’s good.
Aaron Renn:
–distinctions. I think these are sort of tools. I think a lot of frameworks are tools. And the question is, Does the tool help you? If you’re a pastor, does this framework help you understand the culture and lead your church? If the answer is yes, use it. If the answer is no, don’t use it.
Albert Mohler:
No, I think it clearly–
Aaron Renn:
That’s what I say or so I think you also, and there’s different tools for different jobs, so I never would want to tell people that what I’m saying is the one size fits all view of the world.
Albert Mohler:
Right. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. And look, I think it’s extremely helpful. That’s why I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. And frankly, you force–the good thing about this kind of argument is, and I think the true test of its effectiveness is that it kind of becomes a structure that people can continually refer to. And I think that’s probably the most important aspect of your book is how many evangelicals are now talking kind of openly and honestly about life in the negative world. So I am definitely not arguing in any sense with your assessment of the negative world. What threw me off when I read your article in First Things was, I’m sorry, I was alive at the time and it was not a positive world. We were already facing the onslaught. I was involved in court cases long before that. I’m just telling you, it was not a positive world. But I do concede that since you’re beginning in that period, especially in some parts of the country like the Bible Belt, you could pretty much convince yourselves you were in a positive world.
Aaron Renn:
Yeah. Well, one of the things that I use is some ways to illustrate this in terms of public morality, and I actually use three different presidential sex scandals to sort of illustrate this. And the one that I come to from the positive world was 1987 when Colorado Senator Gary Hart was the leading candidate to be the democratic nominee in 1988. And the newspapers reported that he’d been having an affair with a young woman. That ended his campaign, he had to drop out of the race. So the idea that having an affair would be a career ender as a politician in that era. And so you didn’t have to be a Christian, but the Christian sort of moral schema was still very active in society. And then of course, you fast forward to today, and the thing that gets me is the newspapers do reporting that says things about Christianity that just get material facts wrong about it, and it’s like nobody even knows what it is. And, of course, they reject it. So there is a sense in which I think people were, were going the wrong way. That was definitely the case, I’d say, in the positive world. But in a sense, I think there were certainly areas where–I think even in that era, if you were probably in suburban Dallas, probably going to church was very beneficial to your networks, your career, things of that nature.
Albert Mohler:
Oh absolutely. That is the key illustration I give when speaking to laypeople about the change in the cultural context of Christianity. Even at the time that I was editor of the Christian Index in Atlanta, I mean you were hard pressed to find a civic leader whose religious identification wasn’t like the third, if not the second, thing said about them. If you’re introduced at the Rotary Club, people are introduced to you in terms of your job, in terms of your family, and then in terms of your church, synagogue, temple, et cetera. And it was a limited range of sources there. And by the way, at that Rotary club in Atlanta, you would have titans of industry, but you would also have a Frank Harrington who was the pastor of Peachtree Presbyterian Church, very much an icon of establishment Christianity there in Atlanta. And yet nowadays that would seem out of place nowadays you show up and declare your preferred personal pronouns. That is a profoundly different world.
Aaron Renn:
Yeah and all those organizations like the Rotary Clubs and that they’ve kind of gone into decline. And again, that’s a big part of it. The civic associations were part of the Protestant kind of value set of people coming together and not dissimilar to a Baptist church I might imagine, and creating this institutions and of course that kind of civic life is dying, and that’s part of the decay, the loss, the civic spiritedness of Protestantism and the whole Protestant work ethic and all of that stuff. People don’t like to talk about that stuff as deriving from the Protestant culture of America, which is one reason I was very pleased to read Emmanuel Todd’s book. They’re like, here’s a French guy who’s an atheist who’s like, well Protestantism, he’s taken after Max Weber obviously in his sayings. It’s like it’s the heart of the modern west in terms of underpinning everything that’s been done. And so when the values disappear, you end up with the malaise we see in so much of society.
Albert Mohler:
Right. Well, it’s very interesting, and this is a tangential issue, but you mentioned France. I brought up Britain. We’re talking about the United States, but I’m going to bring in Germany. You mentioned Weber. I’m every once in a while in Germany and I was a part of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation Commemorations in 2017. I was there three times during that year for major events. And you know what? The German government and German academia was falling all over itself to talk about the influence of Protestantism in Germany. And I mean, Luther’s a patriotic hero there. The German government was not interested in justification by faith alone. It was interested in Luther, the great German symbol. And that struck me as I go across the English channel and I spend a lot of time in Britain, and there it’s profoundly different. You have the academic elites who’ve been trying to run from the idea that western civilization, and in particularly British culture, was built upon this kind of Protestantism. But it clearly was, I mean, there’s just no doubt about it. And by the way, derivatively, you can’t explain the United States anything other than as a continuation of that Protestant culture. And that was the central argument made by American historians in the beginning of the 20th century. But now their children want to act like they never even read the books.
In terms of the negative world–one of the problems on the left, and I mean that not as just a label but as an intellectual trajectory, is there, by definition, are no limits. So you’re conceding in your book, I think and in this conversation, that the negative world can get a lot more negative.
Aaron Renn:
Oh, it certainly could. I would not contraire what is happening to people in the United States to what is happening to Christians around the world right now. I’m on record saying I do not believe Christians are being persecuted in the United States. Now, there could be individual Christians here and there who could legitimately claim to be persecuted. The guy who owns Masterpiece cake shop in Colorado, he’s clearly been singled out and clearly there is government action directed at him to harm him on account of his Christian faith. but that’s very rare. Unlike in China where it’s pervasive that you could be arrested, that your church might be declared illegal– Christians in places like Nigeria or India even are being subjected to sectarian violence. We don’t have anything like that. Believe me, it could get a lot worse for us. On the other hand, I think this template of persecution as we understand it from the New Testament, which means going to jail or being fed to the lions or something like that, can render us blind to more subtle and indirect forms of pressure that society can put on to people.
So for example, I read in 2 Corinthians about Paul, he’s shipwrecked, I’m beaten with rods, I’m stoned. All these– thrown in prison–all this stuff happened. But as near as we know, no one ever took away his ability to earn a living as a tent maker. But that might happen to you in the United–you might lose your job not as a result of the government doing anything, but as a result of some private HR complaint. And so there’s different forms of pressure here. And what we also said is maybe we could say skeptical rather than negative is the operating term, because merely identifying as a Christian does not necessarily cause you a lot of static. So, Raphael Warnock, who is a senator from state of Georgia is a pastor of a church and he’s an extremely liberal person and he has all these liberal beliefs, so nobody calls him a Christian nationalist, right? Nobody gives him any grief. So if your beliefs conform to the world’s ideologies, you’re okay.
Albert Mohler:
But that’s the key insight. That is the key thing. And so what we have right now is what happened in terms of Germany in the 18th century and Britain in the 19th century, you have a distinction between what I would call classical Protestantism and what in Germany became known as cultural protestantismus. In other words, it’s cultural Protestantism. In Britain you had in the 19th century this distinction, creedal, confessional, even non-conformist Christianity, very defined by doctrine. And then you had those who associated themselves as a friend of the church, and a member of the church, with official Anglicanism, for example. I think the same thing happened in the United States, and I think it’s really relevant to your thesis because I think that continued into what you call the positive world. In other words, I think that continued, in some sense, a cultural Protestantism continued in some sense and, in some places by the way, still does.I could take you to places where it still does make a difference, but that’s not the leading edge of American culture.
If I could go back to something you just said, I deeply appreciate what I think is the moral seriousness of what you say about persecution. I try to insist upon the very same thing. I do not use the word persecution about the condition of Christians in the United States. I use two words, a marginalization and increasing coercion against Christians. And the coercion gets hotter the closer–those who hear me talk about this it’s just Cs. The closer you get to a city, the closer you get to a coast, the closer you get to a culture creating institution, the closer you get to a campus, then the coercive power goes up a lot. But for most people it’s a softer marginalization. I also want to make a distinction that when you mentioned Raphael Warnock, I appreciate the distinction here. You really nailed it when you said it’s because he has an inoffensive Christianity. That’s the thing, we’re in a situation right now where, and I don’t think we’re at this point very much different than the continent in Europe, nor in Great Britain, or even Australia or someplace like that. I don’t think you pay a great price for saying you’re a Christian. You pay a great price for making distinctively Christian arguments that run counter to the morality and the worldview of the negative world.
Aaron Renn:
I agree completely, and this is why it’s sort of a subtle danger because it puts essentially not direct threat of the state on you to reject your Christian beliefs. You must worship Caesar as a God, or something like that, or we will shoot you. They’re not doing that. What they’re basically saying is the social status system of America, and the sort of social, and even to some extent economic reward system of America, gives you bonus points if you bring your beliefs into alignment with their ideology and they take points away from you if you don’t. And so they leave you free to make your choice and they allow the incentives. It’s like economic incentives that economists like to talk about. What’s the incentive structure? The incentive structure is to find some way to bring your Christianity into alignment so that it does not conflict with the ideologies of many of these major institutions. And so I think that that sort of social pressure bearing down on people affects them a lot in terms of how they think about it. I think a lot of people are trying to figure it out.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I think it goes back to a very helpful category from sociology and economics in the middle of the 20th century, and that’s the notion of social capital. You gain it or you lose it. And I think you’re exactly right. Right now in our society you gain social capital by being very much with the leading edge of the culture, with its dominant ethos, and you lose social capital otherwise. I want to say in a little bit of pushback to both of us in this sense, it is hard to avoid feeling persecution and also it’s hard to find the right category to use on it where, quite frankly, you have DEI statements and corporations, which are creedal statements in some cases directly contrary to what a Christian can sign, and I’ve been presented with some of these by people. So this really can threaten employment. It certainly threatens the tenure track in the American university. It is an increasing threat. So that’s what I mean about the negative world growing more negative. I don’t want to exaggerate the problem, but as a grandfather with grandchildren, I want to say I believe the world they will inherit is going to be considerably more negative than the world we know now.
Aaron Renn:
Oh, yeah. I just interviewed a Canadian physician naming Yuan Gallagher who wrote a book about physician-assisted death, and he’s saying, you know, “in Canada where I practice, it is illegal for a doctor to refuse to refer a patient to assisted suicide.” And so they put–and this is the point that they do make on these things, the rhetoric is we just want people to have the freedom to do what they want. We want people to have the freedom to choose that I’m terminally ill, I’m suffering, I should be able to choose to get this thing in order to end my life with dignity. That’s how it’s phrased, that’s how it’s presented, but that’s not really what it is. They don’t just want the freedom to do it. They want to force you to join in with what they are doing and actively participate in what they are doing. And that’s why they are very coercive on that point.
Albert Mohler:
There’s been open conversation in Canada about basically blocking any pro-life applicants into a medical school program. The mechanism is just simply saying, you must be trained in abortion because that’s a part of the medical regimen and it’s bad investment of tax money to allow someone into this state university’s medical school if you’re not going to practice the full range of medicine.
Aaron Renn:
Right. If we go back to early Christianity in the Roman Empire, there were a lot of debates about this, and there were some professions that were viewed as off limits to Christians. And being a soldier was like a big debate. And we sort of settled that in favor of, you could be a soldier, but there was a period of time when people said, you can’t be a soldier and be a Christian.
Albert Mohler:
Even that conversation was very technical, and it came down to the fact you could serve in Caesar’s army, but you could not confess Caesar as Lord. So there’s a trip wire here, and it just so happened that socioeconomically politically at the time of the Empire, Caesar needed soldiers and was actually in the position of saying, well, maybe we’ll not watch those who are bending the knee. And so then the Constantinian revolution comes. But no, you’re exactly right. And there were medieval codes that clearly said these are things that Christians can’t do. And one of the big debates in European history was a soldier for hire. And that’s one of the reasons why the Swiss ended up in a different position than say the Germans or the English.
Aaron Renn:
Yeah, so these have been debates throughout Christian history that there are just certain professions that are viewed, become seen as off limits to Christians because of what you’re required to do would violate God’s law. And again, I don’t profess to be an expert on the particularities of any of those, and I sort of defer to people’s consciousness and people who are trained in those issues to make that. But I do point out in this world that does mean as we’re thinking about if you’re a young person and you’re thinking about what kind of a career do you want to go into, you have to take account of, what pressures am I going to be subjected to in the profession that I go into, in the entities that I want to work for in the geographies where I want to live, those sorts of things.
Albert Mohler:
What will be required of me?
Aaron Renn:
Yeah. Now, it’s not always as obvious as you might think. For example, New York City where I lived, New York City is a remarkably tolerant place. You can be a very conservative person in New York, and you’re not likely to get attacked when you’re walking down the streets or people will still be, still talk to you. It really is a more open-minded environment, whereas you might–
Albert Mohler:
Try that in Seattle.
Aaron Renn:
Yeah, yeah. Try it in Seattle, try it in different places. So it does matter. I would say right here in Indianapolis where I live in the urban center of town, it’s probably more conformist than Manhattan is. So it doesn’t always work the way that you think, but we do have to think about that consciously today in a way that we didn’t before. And one of the things I also talk about in the book is just like the reality that you can’t just rely on institutions to be neutral towards you anymore. The National Conservatism Conference that was just held in Brussels, they had two venues cancel on them after being pressured by the mayor to get rid of these guys. And so–
Albert Mohler:
As a threat to public order.
Aaron Renn:
Oh yeah. So the idea that you’ll be able to rent a facility that you’ll be able to do these things, you might not be able to do that. And so I’m not saying that you have to make any particular decision, but we have to be aware that there may be different pressures, different risks that people face in different environments. It has to be, we have to have intentionality about that. The other thing I’d say I think is, and I really wish, this is another thing I’d put more in the book, I’ve talked about a lot of it subsequently, is so much of what we think about the negative world. So we think about how it affects us, how does it affect the church, how does it affect me as a Christian? And that’s a part of it, but it also has profoundly affected society as well. And so now everything that in Christian America would’ve been considered shady activity that was the propense of the mafia is now a fully legitimate, even government sanctioned institutions–
Albert Mohler:
Look at gambling.
Aaron Renn:
Let’s say gambling, the sports leagues are in on it. Hot legalization, payday loans, everything on down. And so now–
Albert Mohler:
It’s hard to be a mobster these days, the government’s moving in on your business.
Aaron Renn:
Exactly. They’ve taken it all in. And there’s a lot of people who want to legalize “sex work.” So I think what that also says is the world is just riskier because we used to have– now it’s so much easier to destroy your life by maybe you think you’re just smoking some pot, you’re contaminated with fentanyl. Maybe your doctor prescribes you 90 high potency opioids because you have a toothache, which happens to that stuff. People are handing out that stuff like candy. So many people have gotten addicted because of their doctor. You might lose a fortune on the phone. So the world today is full of landmines because of we’re in this post-Christian negative world, Protestantism zero, whatever you want to call it. And so we just need to be much more diligent and much more intentional about what we’re doing because there are these new risks and there’s a whole lot of landmines for us and our children that didn’t use to be there. When I was a kid, if I wanted to get some hard drugs, I’d have to drive an hour into Louisville and try to find some dimly lit shady street corner somewhere that I wouldn’t even know where it would go. I wouldn’t even know where to go. Well, now I guarantee you they’re available where I grow up. And so this is a crazy world.
Albert Mohler:
It’s like pornography, the same thing. There was a day in which the average person wouldn’t confront anything pornographic in this society.
Aaron Renn:
Yeah so if you’re a guy now, it’s on your phone anytime you want it and it’s there. And so these are the things that make it more difficult to be a Christian. It’s not just that the marginalization of the pressure, that’s part of it, but the culture is pushing all sorts of toxic stuff designed to destroy your life so that somebody can make a buck off of your suffering. It’s just a very different society.
Albert Mohler:
I want to push back on another aspect here in the fun of this kind of conversation. The other word in your typology, this really offends me horribly, is the word neutral. And I’m saying this suggestively here, just to prompt the conversation, but after describing myself as a Christian and I would identify myself as a Protestant Christian and as a Baptist. Theologically, the most important word I would use about myself is that I’m Augustinian, and really cut my teeth theologically on understanding the world in a way that I am very thankful. Western Christianity is very much influenced by Augustine and the Augustinian tradition. And one of the most important things about Augustine’s contribution was that neutrality is apparent but not real. Now, he doesn’t say that, but that’s his argument and his understanding in the City of God. And so I understand you’re using this to prompt thinking and conversation, but I think from one Christian perspective, the world’s always been a negative world, and I think Paul, and Augustine saw himself as essentially an extension of Paul in this sense, I think the Apostle Paul sees the world’s a negative world. This doesn’t mean our disposition is negative. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have joy in this world. It doesn’t mean that we don’t raise families in this world, but it does mean that in this world we will have trouble as Jesus said. And so I think it’s important to read the culture, and I think you’re onto something incredibly important and really helpful to Christians in the positive, neutral and negative world. I want to come back as a theologian and say, I think there’s a sense in which from Genesis three onward, it’s a negative world, but that doesn’t mean our disposition is negative.
Aaron Renn:
I think again, there’s ways to look at it, I think at different, using different lenses. That was one of the things people say. It’s always been a negative world and it’s always been here, and there’s a sense in which that’s true, but there’s also, I think a very real sense in which we live in a different world today than we did 20 years ago. And so what I’m trying to get at is not to claim that sin was in abeyance in the world somehow during the 1990s, but that the sort of sociocultural moment allowed evangelicals to get a hearing and have a conversation and a dialogue with their secular partners in a way that is now basically closed. So one of the organizations that I think is a paradigm of the neutral world is the Veritas Forum. Again, it was founded in the early nineties.
It’s interesting that these things are founded, all these organizations founded, and it’s like, we’ll host a, we’ll go to an elite college and we’ll bring in a couple of speakers and they’ll have a dialogue on this issue, and it’ll be great. Again, the emerging church conversation. We’ll have a bunch of people come to a pub and we’ll have a conversation about sexuality and about these big issues. Tim Keller got invited to give a talk at Google. Why don’t you come talk to us at Google about Christianity? Then of course, by 2017, even Princeton Seminary, which is a PCUSA seminary, but it’s not Louisville Seminary, I think it’s probably one of the more conservative seminaries that–
Albert Mohler:
You mean by that, Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary
Aaron Renn:
Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, yeah.
Albert Mohler:
Thank you.
Aaron Renn:
Not The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, which I believe that Louisville Presbyterian Seminary is quite liberal within their denomination, but they’re like, oh, we can’t abide Tim Keller because getting this award because he doesn’t ordained women and he’s a hateful bigot. And then we just saw, again, not long ago, Robert George, a professor at Princeton, some one of the students took him to their dining club, which is big institutions at Princeton. And then they changed the rules about guests because he’s making people feel unsafe. And you think Tim Keller–
Albert Mohler:
Holder of one of the most distinguished chairs in the history of Princeton University, and it’s been his lifetime, adult lifetime there. That one’s actually just insane.
Aaron Renn:
They’re incredible gentlemen, incredibly kind people. You think about Robert George and Tim Keller, there’s two people that you don’t associate with sort of bomb throwing rhetoric or being provocateurs. These are people who bend over backwards to try to be polite, friendly, engaged, and even these guys are too much.
Albert Mohler:
But let me extend your argument here for a moment. I want to put out a thesis and get your response to it. I think the distinction on the part of both Keller and Robert George and looking at the reality that you described, I think the change is largely traceable singularly to L-G-B-T-Q issues, which are the key catalytic, Berlin Wall issue of our time. And it played out on the part of both of them. So the people who felt “unsafe,” and Robbie George is a dear friend, but the people who felt unsafe, they were not pro-abortion folks because of Robbie George’s pro-life defense. It’s very clearly tied to sexuality issues. When you talk about, I want to give you further evidence for your thesis, and I know you know all about this, but the left has recently put out some arguments very much celebrating the win on same-sex marriage and the fact that now it, it’s hardly questioned or questionable in the larger society. But between the period of 1999 and 2015, the numbers flipped about 60/40 or 70/30, depending on which poll. 70% of Americans in 1999 didn’t believe same-sex marriage should be approved and 30% did. And then that’s flipped within about a six year period. And I think that makes a great deal of your case for the negative world. But I do believe the most important salient issue is the L-G-B-T-Q issues because I think that’s the battering ram that’s being used these days.
Aaron Renn:
Well, certainly that’s a major cultural touchdown that would be something that happened. But if you go back again to Obama’s second term, there was a lot of things that happened there. 2014, obviously the year before Obergefell, is the year that somebody like Matthew Yglesias who’s a secular Jewish center left technocratic pundit, he said that’s the start of the great awakening where society kind of went a little crazy on race. And there’s been some interesting research showing that the use of terms like white supremacy and things like that just soared in the media right about that time. So something was happening there. Jonathan Haidt said that 2013 is when he started noticing campus craziness and all the unsafes and all this stuff started happening on campuses. Of course, we can think of 2015 and Donald Trump’s campaign, which is itself another thing. And so you label on top of that as well, what we’ve seen with gambling. Now I just say–
Albert Mohler:
And marijuana, same moral trajectory.
Aaron Renn:
Yeah, marijuana. So all of these things have happened, and I think the, kind of call it the final collapse of Protestant values in America definitely kind of underlies it. So yes, I would say sexuality issues are front and center, but we should be careful not to just reduce it to one issue. I think if we look at it, it’s going to be pervasive across a wide range of things–
Albert Mohler:
But I’m going to push back for a moment and say nobody’s being denied a job because they believe marijuana shouldn’t be legalized. I’m going to say I emphatically believe that in the workplace and on the campus, it’s the L-G-B-T-Q issues that are the definitive line. It may be that Palestinian causes become that for some people, but that’s where I am confronted constantly with people losing jobs.
Aaron Renn:
Yeah, I think that’s the case now. If you go back a few years ago, there are probably more people I can name that lost their jobs because they questioned BLM at work. A number of Cisco employees got fired over that. So anything that’s related to one of these intersectionality points, if you just get it a little wrong, you could just be subject to total destruction at any moment. And I think people are still sort of being destroyed over sort of accusations of racism as well.
Albert Mohler:
And the shocking part of this is that the left is continually shocked. So you may remember some of the folks at the New York Times, they got toppled by their 20 something junior colleagues in the middle of Black Lives Matter. So the left is a moving target these days.
Aaron Renn:
Yeah. So again, can I say that, can I directly tie the BLM movement to the cultural things here? I don’t really have a super great framework for it, but it certainly came about right about the same time, and it came about right about the same time. I think the change around Palestine is also related to this as well. They’re all kind of expressions of some underlying kind of changes, I think, in the culture. And that’s why I always, again, I say there’s the great irony around Donald Trump that all of these secular leftists just horrified by Donald Trump, but I’m like, you are the people who promoted the social changes that made it possible for him to become president. People don’t even talk about this at all, but go back to the late eighties, early nineties. Again, gambling was illegal. If you were going to gamble, you either need to go to a mob bookmaker in your local town or you went to Las Vegas to gamble on the sport, on the sports book, and the mob controlled that too. So gambling was basically viewed as a mobed up business. Donald Trump owned casinos. Being a casino owner would’ve, that by itself would’ve meant this guy’s never going to get elected president because it’d be like, what are we, what’s going on here? And he talked about running for president probably since the late eighties. He talked about it a lot, but other than that one kind of gimmicky reform party thing, he never did it. In 2015, he understood something: the world is now different, I can get elected president now in a way that it was not ever possible before because all of the standards of society are different, and we’ve come a long way, let’s just say.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, Aaron, just to make your point–
Aaron Renn:
And it was really the left that did that.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Just to make your point, and even as we’re having this conversation, the Trump trial in New York City is happening, and I’ve been taking notes from some of the mainstream media coverage, and they’re just really in a horrible quandary of their own making. It’s because they want to say that pornography or a porn star, et cetera, that that’s morally dubious, but they can’t say it. So they instead say, there are people who think that this might hurt Donald Trump.
Aaron Renn:
There are people who, this is bad.
Albert Mohler:
That’s right! And you could find them in museums supposedly, I guess, or someplace else.
Aaron Renn:
You Christians apply your old standards to Donald Trump even though we don’t believe in any of your standards and think they’re evil and a threat to our country? There’s so many ironies I think in this whole thing.
Albert Mohler:
And I will simply say, in the best English sense, irony is a part of the human condition, and it’s everywhere, but where irony becomes obvious and no one will name it, that’s when it becomes comic. And comic in this sense doesn’t mean it’s just lighthearted, but this is the old GK Chesterton kind of realization. If you say that’s ironic and you still find it ironic, that’s ironic.
Aaron Renn:
Right.
Albert Mohler:
But that’s where we live. We live in this constantly. Now, I want to also just go back to the moral change that has taken place. In reading your book, and especially where you talk about the negative world, it is clear that you’re writing this book to Christians about how to be faithful Christians. You’re not writing this as a book of social analysis, so you are wanting to encourage Christians to live faithfully in this world that is the negative world. And so just talk a minute about that. In other words, without going through every chapter, but in other words, what are the things, I think this is where the Apostle Paul gives some just brilliant responses, and Augustine gave brilliant responses. I want to set you up to give brilliant responses.
Aaron Renn:
Sure. I would just say, first, in the Protestant world, the evangelical world, we have been very reliant on pastors and theologians to tell us about things. In the Catholic world, there are more lay intellectuals that are looked to as leaders. And in fact, we often look to them too. We look at the Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor and say, tell us about secularization. We look to the Catholic, Patrick Deneen political scientists, tell us about liberalism. We don’t have as many of those people. And so one of the things I wanted to do was in that sense, bring a different lens to it. I always say, and this is very clear, that I’m clear in the book explicitly, I’m not a pastor or a Bible teacher. I’m going to tell you I’m not going to issue biblical commands or try to give you a theological explanation.
I’m giving you a sort of the MBA management consulting kind of view. Here’s how I see it, not because I think that is the one and only way to look at it, but it’s a lens that we don’t often get, I think in the evangelical world, and of course I’m looking for pastors and theologians to fill in that part of it as well. But I said there sort of three kind of aspects to how we should live in the negative world, what I call the personal, the institutional and the missional. The personal: how do we live as individuals and families? Institutional: how do we live as churches, ministries, maybe a Christian owned business thing of that nature? And then missional: how do we carry out the great commission, and then how do we, say, interact culture? How do we engage with the culture and the social trends around us? And so for each of those, I try to give three sort of starter ideas, but the general themes that I lay out, just a few things I’ll just lay out.
One is what adopting what I call the posture of exploration. And the idea here is we don’t really, we’re in a very unfamiliar territory. We’re sort of like the negative world is like the Louisiana purchase, and we’re like the Lewis and Clark expedition going off to explore it. The analogy from the Bible I like to use is Israelites crossing the Jordan River into the Promised Land. They’d spent their entire lives in the wilderness, and maybe it wasn’t great, but it was comfortable, familiar. They knew it. Every morning they woke up and there’s manna on the ground. Well, now they’re going to go into this place they’ve been promised, but they’ve never seen it. They know it’s full of fearsome people. And so I think we’re kind of in a scenario like that. Bill Hebel, when he started Willow Creek Church, he initially went door to door in suburban Chicago in the 1970s asking people why they didn’t go to church.
And he is like, I’m going to design a church based on my market research that will serve that market that’s not being well served today. I don’t think we’re in an environment where we can go ask people why they don’t go to church that’s going to inform us. So we have to be much more comfortable walking by faith and by sight. And again, as the Israelites, we’re crossing the Jordan River, there’s the line from Joshua, follow the Ark. That is follow God’s presence because you have not been this way before. And I think that’s us. And so we have to be a little bit comfortable in a turbulent unknown thing and much more reliant on God. And I say much more serious about our faith because the cost may be higher, not sure how high it’ll be, but higher than it used to be. The second one is that we need to reset. This is going to be a very painful reset, and I think it’d be a very, very controversial reset away from thinking, being that we’re the moral majority, to recognizing that we’re a moral minority, that most people don’t agree with us, they don’t like our ideas.
Albert Mohler:
I don’t see any argument on that point from evangelical Christians anymore.
Aaron Renn:
Okay, well, so part of that though is when you recognize that you are a minority, you have to act like a minority. So minorities always have to self-consciously steward the identity and strength of their own community. They can’t rely on the mainstream institutions of society. And so Protestants never had to do that in America for the most part because hey, when the public schools have prayer and Bible reading, they’re sort of reinforcing what you’re learning at home. That’s not true anymore. So we need to be much more focused on the internal health of our own community, not to the exclusion of outward facing mission, but in addition to. If you think about, there’s this quip I quote in the book, I can’t remember the gentleman who said it was in the early 19 hundreds. He was a British guy. I think he said, the church is the only institution that exists for the benefit of those who are not yet members. We’re going to have to make sure that we have strong, healthy churches so that we are able to have something to invite people into when we come up. So I feel like that’s going to be a very important part.
Albert Mohler:
Aaron, I so appreciate you being with us. What is your current intellectual project? What are you working on right now?
Aaron Renn:
Well, the main thing I have going is my own newsletter. It’s at aaronrenn.com, A-A-R-O-N-R-E-N-N.com. Please go sign up for it. All of my writing is there, and in terms of whether there’ll be a future book, stay tuned on that. I’m not actively working on anything at the moment though.
Albert Mohler:
Well, in my experience, books don’t write themselves, but if you are writing all that material, that may be the kernel of a book. Aaron Renn, we’re indebted to you for a really, really important argument, so well made, and I believe for faithful Christianity in this age, in this culture, you have offered a great assist. And for that, I want to say thank you and also for your time today, thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.
Aaron Renn:
Thank you for having me on Dr. Mohler.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest, Aaron Rinn for thinking with me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you will find more than 200 of these conversations@albertmohler.com under the tab Thinking In Public. For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, go to boycecollege.com. Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public, and until next time, keep thinking.