Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 930 | Why 2014 Was America’s Last Good Year | Guest: Aaron Renn

Episode Date: January 9, 2024

Today we're joined by Aaron Renn, co-founder and senior fellow at American Reformer, to discuss his book, “Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture,” and how Christians can respond to the ever-increasing negative view of Christians in society. We discuss how Christianity was viewed in America's history and how the 1960s saw Christian moral norms begin to be called into question. Aaron breaks these moral norms down into three phases: the Positive World, Neutral World, and Negative World. We explain what the tipping point was between the positive and neutral views of Christianity, from 1950s Christian norms being held in honor to the 1980s "health and wealth" movement. Then, what changed in 2014, and what brought about the overall negative view of Christianity in American society? We explain how Republican candidates' changing views on gay marriage and race issues show us what social shifts have occurred. We also talk about the modern evangelical response to Donald Trump and what cultural/nominal Christianity has done to Christian culture and the act of making disciples. --- Timecodes: (01:02) Introduction to Aaron (03:01) Anti-Christian culture (09:03) Positive to Neutral (15:00) 1950s Christian culture (20:37) Boomers & health & wealth movement (26:59) What changed in 2014? (38:42) Evangelical response to Trump (51:40) Nominal Christianity (57:10) Public schools --- Today's Sponsors: CrowdHealth — get your first 6 months for just $99/month. Use promo code 'ALLIE' when you sign up at JoinCrowdHealth.com. Carly Jean Los Angeles — use promo code RELATABLE25 for $25 off an order of $125 or more, or RELATABLE50 for $50 off an order of $200 or more at CarlyJeanLosAngeles.com! Birch Gold — protect your future with gold. Text 'ALLIE' to 989898 for a free, zero obligation info kit on diversifying and protecting your savings with gold. Patriot Mobile — go to PatriotMobile.com/ALLIE or call 972-PATRIOT and use promo code 'FRIDAY76' to get a free smart phone with activation! --- Links: First Things: "THE THREE WORLDS OF EVANGELICALISM" https://www.firstthings.com/article/2022/02/the-three-worlds-of-evangelicalism --- Relevant Episodes: Ep 920 | Russell Moore, David French & the Fake Threat of Christian Nationalism | Guest: John Cooper https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-920-russell-moore-david-french-the-fake-threat/id1359249098?i=1000638231068 --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise – use promo code 'ALLIE10' for a discount: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Well, we are here, America. We are in a post-Christian country. We actually have been for a few years now. But what is it going to look like as the influence of Christianity wanes?

Is this maybe possibly a positive thing? or is it completely negative? How do we navigate it? How do we push back against it? How in the world did we get here and where are we going from here? That is what we are discussing today with author Aaron Rinn. We're going to discuss the subject of his book, living in a negative world, a world that is opposed to Christianity and Christian values. What do we do with that as Christians? A very fascinating conversation that I know you guys are going to like. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. to Good Ranchers.com. Use code Allie at checkout. It's good ranchers.com, code Allie. Aaron, thanks so much for joining us. If you could tell everyone who may not know who you are and what you do. Right. Well, I am a journalist and consultant who writes today primarily about the future of the evangelical church with an emphasis on men's issues, but really the future of the evangelical church. Before this, I was a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute in New York, worked a lot on urban policy, and before that I was a corporate consultant with Accenture for many years.

So I'm sort of a consultant diagnosing what's going on in the evangelical church. And today I'm a senior fellow at American Reformer, which is a Protestant nonprofit. Okay. And tell me what you mean by men's issues. Sure. Well, I actually got interested in the church because I saw – was a decade ago, so many young men turning to online influencers instead of the church and other traditional authorities. And many of these influencers were not good people. Some of them were okay

people. But I'm like, hmm, why is that? And it was very hard to explain that to people in, you know, back then because Jordan Peterson hadn't even come on the scene in 2013 when I started looking into this. But today, of course, everybody knows about Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Jocco Willink, and of course, the notorious Andrew Tate. And so what I wanted to do is see more men turning to the church and see the church be more competitive in reaching men. And as I got interested in the issues, it just exploded from there and actually became a little bit more known, more broadly, and sort of diagnosing what's been going on in the evangelical world in the future of the church. But that was sort of the genesis of where I came from.

Okay. So there is still, to me, you know, I have it in my heart. that I would much rather have men turning to Christ than to undertake. That's for certain. Yes, that is for sure, for sure. Okay, I'm so interested in your new book. I think I got the pitch for it a while ago. And as you probably do too, a lot of pitches come into my inbox. And there are very few that you look at and you're like, oh my gosh, yes, that is perfect.

That is absolutely something that I want to talk about on the show. and I was looking at your book and I just thought this is a fascinating analysis of what's going on. And I think the best books kind of confirm your suspicions or confirm what you already know, but then explain them in a way that makes sense. And so your book, Life in the Negative World, Confronting Challenges in an anti-Christian culture, does that. And you hear a lot of times from the secular left that, oh, Christians just have a victim complex that they think, think that they are marginalized in any way. If they think that there is an overarching negative attitude towards Christianity, they've just built it up in their minds. But you argue in this book

that for quite a while, decades at this point, we have been living in an America that overwhelmingly has a negative perspective, an antagonistic perspective on Christianity, right? Well, if you go back to the 1950s, there really was a sort of softly institutionalized, sort of generic Protestant Christianity in America. We never had a state church, like in Europe, but we did have a sort of soft institutionalization of Christianity. So the 1950s was the high watermark of church attendance in America. About half of all adults attend to church every Sunday. That's the decade we put in God we trust on our money. It's the decade we're we're we added under God to the Pledge of Allegiance. And there's a famous photo you might have seen

of the New York City skyline with the buildings lit up with crosses for Easter. That was from the 1950s as well. And we actually had prayer in schools, for example, in the 1950s. Well, starting in the 1960s, the status of Christianity began to go into decline in America. I date it to the Kennedy assassination, although that's a little bit arbitrary. And by decline, I mean, church attendance started declining, personal adherents started to decline, and Christian moral norms began to be called into question. So we had the 60s upheavals, the sexual revolution, et cetera. And I divide this period of decline of Christianity from 1964 to the present into three phases or worlds that I call the positive, the neutral, and the negative world. So the positive

world is from, say, 1964 to 1994. And this is a period of decline for Christianity. And this is a period of decline for Christianity. I want to be clear, things are not going well for Christianity, and yet, Christianity was still basically viewed positively by secular elite culture. To be known as a good church-going man made you seem like an upstanding member of society. Christian moral norms were still in effect, and if you violated those norms, you could have consequences. The example I like to use here is when it was reported that Colorado Senator Gary Hart had had a young woman stay all night in his New York, Washington townhome in 1987, he had to drop out of the presidential race because it was reported he had an affair. That would never happen today.

Right. Around 1994, we hit a tipping point where we enter what I call the neutral world, which lasted from 94 to 2014, which Christianity is really no longer seen positively, but it's not really seen negatively yet either. It's just one more lifestyle choice among many in a sort of pluralistic public square. We might meet. I'd say, I'm a Christian. You'd say, great, I'm a vegan, let's talk. And Christian moral norms still had a residual force in this era. But then in 2014, we had a second tipping point and invented what I called the negative world, where for the first time in the 400-year history of America, sort of official elite culture now views Christianity negatively. Being known as a Bible-believing Christian does not help you get

a job at Goldman Sachs or Google. Quite the opposite, in fact. And Christian moral norms are expressly repudiated in our society, and in fact, now viewed perhaps as the leading threat to the new public moral order. And the advent of what I call the negative world has really fundamentally transformed and overturned in many senses the evangelical landscape that so many people grew up with and knew. And as I argue, the underlying source of so many of the challenges that we face today. So what happened in 1994 that kind of tipped it over from a positive view of Christianity, predominantly, to a more neutral view of Christianity? 1994.

Well, that's interesting. I debated whether it should be 1994 or 1989. I think there were a number of things that happened. And keep in mind, we were in decline long before that. So we were going to hit a tipping point at some point. one of them for sure was the collapse of communism. You know, communism was this sort of atheist system, a validly atheist system, godless communism, some called it. And sort of as a result, we see that, you know, Christianity was so bound up with the West defense of its system

versus the communist that as long as the Soviet Union was intact, we were not going to see a, you know, a rejection of Christianity. Similarly, back in that mid-century era, we had what they called the WASP establishment or the Protestant establishment, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. And so the elites of America, you know, the Yale men of that era, the Thirst and Howell the Thirds from Gilligan's Island or things of that nature, if you remember those old TV shows, you know, they were self-consciously Protestant. Now, they may have been liberal Protestants in a sense that they didn't really believe in, you know, evangelical Christianity. We understand it. But Protestantism was very key to their identity as a class. And so they would never have allowed that to become negative,

but now they're gone. That's another one that happened. I think that we started to see the outworking of some of the deregulation that occurred during the Carter and Reagan administrations, where we began to see much more consolidation of corporate America into fewer and fewer powerful and gigantic banks and other corporations, certainly the tech industry, where many of them are monopolies. As an example of that. So the sort of citizenry was disempowered. But one reason I chose 1994 is it was the year Rudy Giuliani became mayor. And there was sort of an urban renaissance in America that I think really started us on the road to a little bit of a, not necessarily an anti-Christian culture, but essentially a non-religious culture. These urban centers that had previously been declined had never

been like hotbeds of Christianity since maybe the 19th or early 20th centuries. And as they came back, it sort of created a new social sensibility in America, one centered around things like the Seinfeld and Friends world and less around church. So I think you could have picked 89 from the fall of the Berlin Wall, but really the decline of the fall of the Soviet Union was really an important point. And then the resurgence of the cities as well. Yeah, I do think that we kind of were diluted into thinking that we had won and this idea that the world is just going to get better and better. Now that everyone's enlightened, now that we have defeated the enemy of Christianity, communism, everyone is going to see.

I mean, President Reagan famously thought this even about China, not necessarily that it was going to become Christian, but that it was going to become democratic with the rise of capitalism in China. And I think we all just kind of had this idea that American ideals and Christian ideals were going to spread everywhere. And we kind of took for granted the fact that it was something that had to be fought for, something that needed to be institutionalized, something that actually had to be lived out and promoted, that we couldn't just keep the foundation of Christianity without acting it out in our own lives and in our own communities. And you know what? I have started to think differently about the 80s recently. I'm someone who loves the 80s and has loved President Reagan for a long time.

But I've started to look differently at that era and even at President Reagan's presidency and wondering, I guess, maybe not as articulately as you've just expressed, if that kind of was actually a tipping point for America and not really in a good way. So that's really interesting. You're right that many of us simply assume that the triumph of the West, that the triumph of the liberal democracy meant in essence the triumph of Christianity. Yes. When in fact, there were a lot of people to whom Christianity was not an integral part of Western society and would have liked for a sort of triumphant liberal democracy to move forward in a sort of post-Christian way.

And that's something that we definitely saw. But it is important to keep it on. Again, the decline didn't start in the 80s or in the 90s. Yes. It really sort of started in a sense in the 60s. And it just has been outworking and outworking and that's continuing to the present day. And we debate all day long where exactly it went wrong. But certainly it's been going wrong for a while.

This is not just a recent problem that came into being. But I really love that insight about the idea that we just assumed the United States, the American way, the liberal democracy, the way. West included Christianity is an integral part. Yeah. And clearly many people didn't see it that way. Yeah. And, you know, I think about the 60s, I think everyone, whether they are, you know, historians

or not, we look back at the 60s and we do see a huge shift morally from the 50s. You could even, even if you were just to watch the series Mad Men, you would be able to see that shift, not just in style and how people talked and how people acted. but as you said, church attendance, and at least in a nominal way upholding the virtues of Christianity, the need for that seemed to kind of fall off in the 60s. And what's interesting about that is that is like the greatest generation was still leading the way at that point. Like they were the ones still having children maybe. They were probably stopping having children at that point is probably the silent generation.

But we think of the greatest generation. and I think rightly so as being heroes of American history, of being so courageous. And I do wonder if there were some failures by the greatest generation, probably the greatest generation of Americans that has ever lived, to continue to actually genuinely, sincerely live out Christianity in a way that would have made it more concrete than it was. So it wouldn't have been swept away in the 1960s and 70s. What do you think about that? Well, that's a good question.

it's really hard for us to talk about the 50s because none of us lived there and lived in that time. And you are right that in that era, there was a lot of non-Christian stuff going on in society. But at least in sort of public official proclamations, Christianity was held in honor. Christian moral norms were held in honor. And there even were, again, penalties for violating them. And sort of that elite wasp society that I talked about, for example, in Philadelphia, anyone who had been divorced could not be invited to the most prestigious balls of the year, the assembly dances.

You were just, it didn't matter if you were from the most prominent family of town. If you got divorced, you couldn't attend. And this was up until the 60s. Yeah. And then that sort of went away. Now, of course, there were always divorces and affairs and all that. And you could think of the works of like Edith Wharton and things of that nature, kind of sort pooh-poohing some of that. But nevertheless, there was sort of a public, things were publicly held in honor.

And, you know, the 50s were sort of conformist in a way. And a lot of the history of that has been written by its critics by those who didn't like it, who saw it as suffocating, you know, the man of the gray flannel suit, the organization man, bland, suburbia, et cetera. many people did like it. But I think there was something about American society that many people rebelled against in that era. And the original generation, excuse me, generation was between the sort of greatest generation and their boomer children. Yeah. Who just wanted something different.

And whether the greatest generation or kind of the early silent generation could have done something different, could have bridged that gap is interesting. to think about, but whatever the case, it didn't happen. And there was sort of a rupture, if you will, with the boomers. And certainly suburbanization played something of a role in that as people left the cities, left the old ethnic neighborhoods, moved into these new kind of cookie cutter Levittown subdivisions where people were not stratified by, you know, sort of ethnicity, with the exception, of course, shamefully of blacks who were excluded by law and by deed restrictions from many of these things. But people might find themselves living next to people that they had not been by before, but they were all of a similar stage of life, similar kind of economic status,

having their young kids. And it sort of broke up some of those sort of thick networks and societies that existed in the old urban neighborhoods. Some of that was replicated in the suburbs, of course, but it's sort of like, it's sort of like, again, it was breaking up some of the old social glue maybe that existed in a more urban America, where we began to have a country that was much more organized around sort of, you know, homogenous districts as opposed to kind of much more economically, socially, ethnically, ethnically diverse cities. Hey, this is Steve Deist. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe

is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.

You talk about the boomers who kind of wanted something different. And I really like kind of using 1989 as a reference point with the fall of communism. Because I do wonder, as we already talked about kind of, okay, this idea that Western civilization won, in a sense, Christianity has won. And you do kind of see in the 80s and 90s, boomers saying, I'm just going to be as successful as possible. I am going to build upon what my parents gave me through their hard work and I am going to go into corporate America, forge my own way, be as successful as possible, try to set my children up well. I'm not speaking for all boomers, of course, but I'm just kind of speaking in generalizations. And there is something that you see, I think, in the 80s and 90s with the Christianity that a lot of baby boomers held. And it became kind of a, I don't want to say it became like this didn't exist before the 80s and 90s because it probably.

did. But you saw a wedding of the self-help industry with Christianity to become kind of this health and wealth, purpose-driven life tool to be as successful as possible for the Lord. I think you saw this insurgents of the prosperity gospel in the 80s and 90s. And I wonder if that played a part in this idea of just kind of neutral Christianity. That Christianity rather than being the end is kind of just a means to an end. It means to an end of success. It means to an end of stability. I don't know.

I wonder if that kind of change in Christianity, wedding with corporate America, the goals and the aims of the boomers, I just wonder if that played a part in the kind of transformation of how our country saw Christianity in the 90s, in that neutral period from 94 to 2014. Well, it certainly did. Now, the self-help industry didn't originate. in that era. Yeah. You know, if you go back even to the 50s,

Elron Hubbard's Dianetics was published in the 50s, sort of the original books, Dale Carnegie, and especially the power of positive thinking by Norman Vincent Peel, who had a big influence on Trump. And Dale, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was,

how to win friends and influence people. Yeah. Yes, yes, yeah. Some of that stuff is like, it goes back a long way. But there really was in, you know,

the boomers were the original me generation. Yeah. Christopher Lash's book from the 70s, the culture of narcissists. was really about the boomers. There was a lot of sort of post-counterculture stuff around self-discovery, the human potential movement, and things of those, that nature. So, and the yuppies, of course, came out in the 80s. And, of course, the boomers really were, you know, they started out with some serious issues, like Vietnam draft, for example, stagflage of the 70s. But really after

the 80, kind of 81, 82 recession, they really did well. They were sort of the original. self-oriented generation. And of course, all of us are their successors. Let's not say that we're not, that we're all selfless people, I think. As Generation X, I can't claim that I'm any different necessarily. What we did see is, you know, in the 70s, there was a lot of hand-wringing about the decline of Christianity, but much of it was about the decline of attendance of the mainline denominations. Back in the 50s, you know, a lot of people attended those mainline churches, you you know, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Lutheran, etc. And they were unable to adapt to changing times.

They still haven't been. And today, they're sort of withering away, if you will. They have a lot of money, but, you know, not very many attendees and the ones that are really old. Evangelicalism really filled that gap in the 1970s. But evangelicalism had always been sort of a less institutional in the way that, you know, the mainline denominations had been. Yeah.

It was a little more middle class, very charismatic driven by sort of individual sort of celebrity preachers. And maybe we went to see this preacher that you really liked. And certainly, you know, Pentecostalism. And, you know, I remember the end times fervor with like that book from the 70s, the late great planet Earth. And, you know, this epic confrontation with communism sort of portended Armageddon. And, you know, so out of that, I think there has been certainly a lot of prosperity God. in it. And so that's where I do think, you know, some of the, some of the critics of evangelicalism are not wrong in the sense that they're not just today, but, you know, all along, there have been,

you know, more than a few bad apples, plenty of hocksters, plenty of failed, you know, morally failed televangelist, and plenty of prosperity, you know, the prosperity gospel, you know, really kind of unhealthy and, you know, a lot of people got into it. So, you know, the critics aren't wrong in that. The other thing I think is important is that communism played such a key role in papering over other differences, not just in religion, but throughout society. If you read a guy named George Nash wrote what's considered the canonical history of the American conservative movement. It's called the American conservative, the conservative intellectual movement in America since 1945, although it really ends in the 70s. And you hear a lot about the three-legged stool of conservatism, you know, free markets,

sort of traditionalism or social conservatism, and anti-communism. And this fusionism, what they called fusionism, this sort of reconciling of free market economics with sort of traditionalism or social conservatism was really only made possible. And Nash makes this clear because of a shared sense of the existential threat that communism posed to America. And so once communism went away, now all these groups are sort of free to turn on each other. And I think that is part of, you know, with the evangelical conflict, part of the challenges kind of royal and conservatism as well. They no longer have this overarching external enemy in the Soviet Union that's like an existential threat to our way of life. And so now we can't suppress these other divisions. Yeah, yeah, that makes

sense. That makes sense. That's really interesting. And I'm wondering why 2014, too. So we went through 1994, what happened even in the early 2000s, if we're looking at kind of the change in evangelicalism. But I think all of us sense that something changed in 2014. That was the year for me that I graduated from college. So at the time, it probably would have been difficult for me to know if it was a real shift in the culture or if it was just a shift in my life, seeing what the real world is like. And plus, the 2016 election, it wasn't the first election that I voted in, but it was the first election that I was really paying attention to. Before that, I was in college, you know, kind of how it is. But after college, paying attention to the election and having a sense that

this is a different election that elections passed and that things feel different. I mean, I was living in the South. I was living in Georgia at the time. And actually, the reason why I started doing what I do now is because I sensed in this college town in Athens, Georgia, that there was kind of an opposition to, at least a soft opposition to Christian conservative principles among the young people and the college students that I was around. So I actually started speaking to sorority girls at their chapter meetings and things like that, just totally for free. I was like, I just had a sense that, oh, my gosh, something is happening. And I want to go to these young women and be like, okay, here's what's going on.

Here's why you need to vote. Here's how we think about these things. Anyway, that's how this whole thing started. And so I even had a sense as someone who wasn't a political expert who was just getting into the real world, who had my first real full-time job, that things were shifting. But I didn't have the words for it. And I still don't necessarily have the words for why that was. happening. So that's what I want to hear from you. Why 2014 did we tip over from a Christian neutral world to now a negative feeling and animosity towards Christianity in America?

It must have been really interesting going into those sororities. I almost want to turn it around and start interviewing you to hear more about that. But I'll try to answer your question. Really something changed profoundly in American society during Obama's second term. So one of them was what maybe, I don't know if Matthew Iglesias coined it, but he said 2014 was the year that the great awakening on race started in America. Although, again, potentially you could date it to Trayvon Martin in 2012. But there's been a lot of research showing that like the frequency of terms like white supremacy and structural racism in newspapers like the New York Times, et cetera, soared in that era. And this was pre-Trump. So you can't just say it was a response to Trump. There really was this sort of hard turn into sort of far-left race ideology around that time in 2014. There were big changes on campus as well. NYU professor Jonathan Haidt, he said 2013 is when he first started noticing kind of college students going crazy and all this cancel culture and all the things that we're seeing on campus. And of course, 2014 was one. year before the Supreme Court's Obergefell decision, which legalized gay marriage. Keep in mind,

in 2008, the state of California, California, this deep blue state voted in a referendum to ban gay marriage in its state constitution. Both Obama and Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2008 if publicly opposing gay marriage. And so the fact that now gay marriage, became not only like legal, but essentially the only social position one can hold in, say, 2015, that is an immense sea change. And then, of course- For Republicans or Democrats, for Republicans or Democrats. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

And then you start to see, you know, again, like Rick Warren prayed at the Obama's first inaugural. In a second inaugural, Louis Giglio, I believe is how you pronounce his name. had to bow out of giving the invocation because of concerns that, you know, he was, didn't support gay marriage. And so there were some big changes there. Wow, I did not even know. Louis Giglio was invited to be a part of Obama's inauguration? His second inaugural.

He was going to give a prayer at the second inaugural. And he had to, you know, he had to withdraw after controversy. And so that tells you something had changed there. And then, of course, the Trump election, 2016, 2015 election, that tells you that something has profoundly changed in America. So all those things happened. A lot of it really happened in Obama's second term. And I really alighted on 2014. But if you want to say it was 2013 or 2015, I'm not going to get an argument. I think that one is a lot easier to dial in. Obama's second term was a real cultural shift point in America. Gosh, you're so right. I mean, I remember, I remember Obergefell when Obergefell happened. And the few years before Obergefell happened is when people at least in college really started talking about that. And you could actually have a debate in college over gay marriage. Like you could have that discussion. You could have that debate with friends, with classmates. And you weren't maligned as some like crazy person or even religious fundamentalist or bigot. You could even have debates when I was in college. So, two, 2010 to 2014 about things like race. Some of the best discussions and debates that I had in my school in South Carolina was about those things.

But then when Obergefell finally happened, it was like immediately everyone had to not only be on board, but celebrating it. And you're right. It was like it was the only social position that you could possibly take. And now we have a Republican, you know, candidate, Chris Christie, if you even want to consider him that. you know, having to publicly say, you know, I was wrong for once opposing gay marriage. I'm totally for gay marriage now. Even the church, the Catholic Church is blessing same-sex unions.

He has to say that to stay in the race as a Republican candidate. Yeah, that's wild. That's such a shift. Trump was the first Republican candidate to openly support gay marriage. You know, he showed up that rally in Iowa, I believe it was, holding a pride flag. And again, keep in mind, eight years previously, Barack Obama had said he did not support gay marriage because of his strong Christian faith. And in 2016, it's the Republican candidate who's out on stage with a pride flag. And that really tells you that something changed a lot. That's an issue. The sexuality issue and the race issues are the two that really show that. Now, is Christianity necessarily? implicated on all of these changes. Not necessarily, again, this is a broader social shift. It isn't just strictly about Christianity, but it certainly affects Christianity. But again, one of the things that we see is that it isn't just that this affects the church. And so I think a lot of conservative Christians think, well, wow, this affects us. Now we're on popular. Now we hold positions that are going to be

treated like being pro-segregationist, et cetera. And, you know, there's a part of that. that's true, but it also has profound effects on mainstream secular society as well. If you think about Donald Trump getting elected, go back to the Gary Hart situation, right? 87, just the report that this guy might have had an affair, he had to drop out of the race. You know, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, 98, badly, badly damaged Bill Clinton. And even though he survived it, you know, that's probably why Bush was elected, even though the economy had been pretty good in the 90s. Whereas by the time, you get to Donald Trump, it's like to access Hollywood tape is like a 48-hour blip of a scandal. And all of the stuff that he does that so horrifies the people in the mainstream media,

back in the positive world or pre-1960s America for certain, someone like that would never get anywhere near the White House. He would have just been considered, you know, morally unfit to be elected president, you know, because of, you know, his various antics. And now all these people who, I think there's an irony, all the people who tore down all of the guardrails and moral rules of our society in the name of personal liberation now have no standard by which they can judge Donald Trump. Yeah. How can they judge Donald Trump?

It's ridiculous. And so we do see, and I've written about this, and I don't say it too much in the book, is we've reached essentially the end of. morality in public politics where we're just going to see, you know, womanizing members of Congress out there. We're going to see people showing up at the prayer breakfast, joking about how they, you know, pushed off their, their living fiancé for sex before they're in order to make it there on time. Oh, my gosh. It's just going to be, it's just going to, that's the norm. That's going to be the norm. I think politicians and other people, they're going to be much

more open about, yeah, my wife and I are splitting up. You know, like here in Indianapolis, we had a mayoral election. Like a month before the election, the mayor and his wife announced they were splitting up. And it was like, no big deal. Nobody asked about it. Nobody cares. People are going to have affairs. And unfortunately, the Republican Party is, you know, I'm hardly the first to say is looking

much more like the Jerry Springer show every day in some cases. But I think that that's one and one. the old sort of moral norms are now gone. And really, it's the left who now is like, wait a minute. You mean we don't have any standards anymore that we can't judge, you know, these horrible deplorables that we want to do? Like, how can they throw stones at anybody when they are the ones who want to have a completely libertinist society?

But they don't, not that one. But of course, so I think what we're going to see is there's just going to be profound changes in our society that go far beyond the, the church itself in terms of being in essentially a, not just a post-Christian society, but in some sense, an anti-Christian society. You know, I'm curious, I know that your book is not about Trump and this conversation isn't about Trump, but speaking of evangelicals and their reaction to him, personally, I am in between, I think, if we're just looking at Christians who would call themselves at least theologically conservative, and where we fall when it comes to Trump. You've got the people over here who Trump really can almost do no wrong to them. Like no matter what he does, what he says, and they will deny this even while they do it.

They will justify it. They will find a way to justify anything he says or does. It's really actually incredible. It's almost like an art. And then you've got people over here, like David French and maybe Russell Moore, who it does. it matter if Trump, you know, if he nominates the best Supreme Court justices that end up leading to the fall of Roe, like they will never give him credit for anything good that he has done. And really, Trump seemed to push them to the left on a lot of fundamental issues, which is very

strange. So I'm neither in the Russell Moore-David-French camp. I am definitely not in the Trump apologist camp. I'm in the camp of someone who is thankful for the good things that he has done, who disagrees with things that he says and does and obviously doesn't, you know, I don't feel like I align with him morally in plenty of ways. So like where, what do you think has been the effect of Trump on evangelicalism? And do you think that the fact that there is any evangelical Trump support is like a sign of the times, an indication that we've kind of all had. had to accept that we are in a post-Christian world, and the best that we can do is to nominate someone, anyone that will fight communism, even if we don't like their personal values or some

of the things that they tweet. Well, in the book, I talk about the different tribes, if you will, of evangelicals. There were sort of three main evangelical responses to this period of decline going back to the 70s. Two of them were from the positive world, which I call culture war. secret sensitivity. A third developed in the neutral world, which I call cultural engagement. And the culture war is the religious

right, as we know it, pioneered by people like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson. Keep in mind, evangelicals were originally Democrats. Jimmy Carter was the first evangelical president, and people weren't sure what to make of this Bible thumper in the Oval Office. But in the 80s,

this group realligned into the Republican party. It's the largest, most loyal and most important voting block in the Republican Party. They saw sort of the decline of Christianity in America and decided to mobilize to fight it politically and, you know, take back the country, speaking for what they called the moral majority to use the name of Falwell's organization. Well, of course, no one would talk about a moral majority today, of course, that would be ludicrous, but it was at least plausible to claim it back then. A second thing that happened at the same time was the secret sensitivity movement pioneered by people like Bill Heibles and Willow Creek in

suburban Chicago, Rick Warren at Saddleback. And they saw church attendance and decline. And their response was to essentially design a church that was more consumer friendly and would appeal to the emerging baby boomer suburbanites and get people to come in the door. Hugely successful and like the culture war is still with us, you can think of the suburban non-denominational megachurch, really kind of the evangelical mainstream is representing this. They, They still tended to vote Republican, but were not quite as aggressive on a culture war. And then in the 90s, with the resurgence of cities, we had the cultural engagement movement, which was pioneered by people like Tim Keller, a Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York.

And you can think of them as either a secret sensitivity for the cities, you know, with a more urban sensibility, or you can think of them as a little bit the opposite of the culture war. Rather than fighting with people all the time, they said, let's take advantage. of this pluralistic neutral public square. Let's have conversations with people. And they're still here today. As we've entered the negative world, we really have not seen the emergence of a specific evangelical strategy for the negative world. The only thing that's really been written to date about how to live in the negative world, although it doesn't use this term, is Rod Dreher's Benedict Option. And when his book, The Benedict Option, came out, evangelicals basically rejected it. They didn't like it.

And I think, you know, part of it was because it may have been too Catholic for their taste. You know, he's Eastern Orthodox, formerly Catholic. He doesn't know the evangelical world. Monastic imagery doesn't resonate with evangelicals. But I think that there was also a sense of denial. And what we've seen is, since people are not really adapting specifically to the negative world, sort of the existing groups of people who represent kind of distinct geographic and social groupings, You can think of the culture wars more rural, secret sensitivity, more suburban, cultural engagement, more urban.

They're now morphing, deforming, and coming into conflict. So with the culture war people, you know, these were the ones who would have said, character is paramount in a political leader. These are the people who would have said of Bill Clinton, he simply lacks the character to be president, full stop. Nothing else matters. Well, now in the negative world, all of a sudden it's like, well, you know, with Trump, like, well, can't let Hillary win, can we? And as you note, some of these people have really turned

into like hardcore Trump apologist. Now, that's not all Trump supporters by any means, but certainly quite a lot of them have. And then other people in this more cultural engagement world who live, and again, a lot of them live in big cities. They sort of work in high profile professions. They are horrily. They're kind of horrified by Trump. And also all these Trump supporting evangelicals make them look bad. You know, being known as an evangelical when the stereotype of the evangelical is one of these hardcore Trump supporters causes them a lot of pain. Now, I would say French and Moore came from sort of different places, but they are sort of paradigms of how this group attacked. They have now declared their own culture war. Only their culture war is against the Trump evangelical. So now we have

the culture war that's moved more from the world to internal to the church. They're fighting with each other and not necessarily adapting to this. And as you say, it's not obvious what to do here. And you're not going to be able to vote for a candidate who is truly going to represent your values, even in the Republican Party. It's just not going to happen. And so how you navigate that is a complex question. And I think we need to do some R&D in development and think about how do we explore what it means to live faithfully in this new and truly unprecedented society, which I say, it's new in 400 years going back to, you know, the Puritans in New England. We never had a society that was like this in America. It certainly could even think of Christendom as a whole. It's, it's unprecedented, I think.

So it really is dislocating, and we have to think a lot about it. But the pressures that are bearing down from this negative world are really causing evangelicals to more fight with each other. I think then really come up with new ways to adapt. And I think we need to focus on that. And by unprecedented, you mean living in a post-Christian world? Because you don't mean living in an anti-Christian world. Because obviously throughout the history of the church, Christians universally are, you know, they have been hated and antagonized.

Yeah. Well, yeah, there is a sense in like it's unprecedented for us in sort of the, the, the, the, the West in America in Christendom. Obviously, if you're the cops in Egypt, you're used to, you've been used to living in the negative world for a very long time. If you're in China or Korea, or excuse me, North Korea, you're dealing with very, very serious existential problems. But I do always caution people. You know, a lot of people like to point to them and talk about persecution. I don't necessarily think that what we face in America is that kind of persecution. Instead, what we face is a more subtle form of social and economic pressure that is hard to recognize

and hard to know how to respond to sometime. I use the example of the Apostle Paul. You know, Paul talks about, hey, I was shipwrecked. I was beaten with rods. I was stone. Look at these terrible things that happened to me. But you know what? Nobody ever took away his ability to earn a living by being a tentmaker.

But that sort of pressure is what you could face in America. You could be at risk of having all your friends get mad at you, of having a social media hate storm. And so the fear of a maybe unlikely negative social outcome is a form of, again, more subtle pressure that's hard to recognize and respond to. Whereas, you know, in China, when the government's arresting you, that's pretty, straightforward to see. So I don't want to, I don't want to be one of these people to say we're being persecuted. What we're experiencing today is a little different than we saw in the past. And we see in some of these other things. But certainly Christians throughout history, going back to the earliest days of the church, have definitely experienced bona fide persecution negativity. That was just not our experience here in the United States. Even, you know, some critics of my thesis have said, look, it wasn't a positive world for black Christians, Aaron. And that was true. wasn't, but they weren't being...

Not because of their Christianity, though. Not because of their religion. It was because of their race. If they basically rejected Christianity and say, hey, I'm not a Christian anymore, that's not going to make Jim Crow go away. Right. Exactly. That's not why they were being.

And again, I'm not arguing that America itself embodied, you know, Christian ideals throughout its history either. It didn't. But it was a country where, you know, being Christian, and especially being a Protestant Christian up until, you know, maybe the 70s even, was really considered sort of the norm, the path. And you could be in trouble. You know, even here where I live in Indianapolis, you're only just now hearing people in sort of, you know, official positions on social media say things like, wow, it's amazing. I don't have to pretend to be religious anymore.

I can just be openly the atheist. I've always been. So all of that has sort of, it's sort of changed a lot. It's very different from those of us who grew up in this sort of Christian America and who thought, to go back to something you said earlier, that America, the American way of life, the West, liberal democracy, all of that was integrally bound up with Christianity. You know, it's interesting because on the one hand, I can see some positives to it. Just strictly, I mean, looking at the body of Christ and looking at Christianity is that without nominal Christianity and the need for nominal Christianity, you know, as you said earlier, you no longer have to say, oh yeah, I'm a member at this church. I'm a part of this Christian community in order to have good standing in your town or in your community. And I think part of that is good because people can drop the pretense. And, I mean, fake Christianity, while it might count for something in the world, it's never counted for anything in the kingdom of God.

It's not like God has been fooled by someone who just goes to church in order to be in good standing with their town. And so as it gets more difficult, I think, to be a Christian in the West, you do separate the wheat from the chaff. and the real church of God does have an opportunity to be a light in such darkness. And the church in a lot of ways has always thrived on the margins. However, I think the people who really, who really suffer a loss, I guess all of us in a way do suffer a loss from the diminishment of cultural Christianity. Because I think something that people don't recognize is like the idea of rights is based on this, idea that we are all made in the image of God with innate worth. And the institution of marriages

being between a man and a woman, this monogamous institution is not just the only child-created institution that exists, but the only real child-protecting institution that exists. There are a lot of benefits that we have gotten from Christianity being the norm, especially benefits to the most vulnerable, the widow, the orphan, the child, and women that people take. today don't connect to Christianity, but nevertheless, that, you know, that causal relationship is there. And so I see some eternal, I guess, positives to it, some spiritual positives, but a lot of imminent negatives that I don't think people realize are going to occur with the loss of mainstream cultural Christianity. And you write in your book that we have strategies as Christians for how to

navigate this tension, how to navigate in the negative world as Christians. So tell us about that. How do we do it? Sure. You know, one of the things that you could have highlighted there as an additional point on what we lose with cultural Christianity is it really does complicate evangelism. And this is one thing where I really want to stress as in the book, the church cannot give up on the mission of making disciples just because things are tough for us. We can't just kind of go into hiding. We can't run away and hide. We have to be out there trying to reach the lost.

At the same time, it's harder to do that because a lot of people don't know or care who Jesus is. You know, it's not like in the old days where people kind of knew the Bible stories, and they had kind of, you know, even if they weren't Christian, they'd never been religious. They sort of absorbed things through osmosis. Now, people don't even have the categories. You can talk about the gospel, but, like, they don't have any of the background information on it. And so that raises the need for what I call pre-evangelism. That is, you know, it's not just about sharing the gospel.

It's about giving people enough pre-information to understand what the gospel actually is. There was an ad campaign that got a lot of tension and controversy that He Gets Us campaign, that did the Super Bowl campaign. It's basically an ad campaign for Jesus. It's a billion dollars or something like that they're going to spend on it. And again, it was controversial. in many respects, but it gets it something important, which is a lot of people don't know much about Jesus. They don't know who he is. And trying to do something to like introduce some of

these concepts is, I think, important. So we need to think about, we need to think about that a lot more, how to reach people. The other thing that I say, and this gets to, you know, what you said about the opportunities that come from this negative world is, you know, in 1950s America, where it's sort of assumed and normative that everybody's at least some kind of nominal Christian, churches sort of had to accommodate the nominal Christians in their pews. You had to have a sort of least common denominator, Christianity, that was sort of open to all, kind of didn't make too many demands beyond being sort of a respectable member of society. etc. Well, now that we enter this negative world, there are opportunities to say, hey, look,

we can actually set a higher standard and a biblical standard for what it means to be a Christian. And, you know, we don't have to just set the bar so low that any person can clear it in terms of what it actually means to live out life as a Christian. Obviously, you never want to close the door, to the gospel, but once you are a Christian, like, what does it mean to live that? And it's a pretty radical call on your life. So I think we have opportunities to do that. And that's part of thinking like a minority. I really think one of the biggest shifts we have to make is a shift away from thinking that America is a sort of Christian country, and we represent the majority or sort of the broad center of the country, and thinking that, hey, you know, we are actually now a minority,

which doesn't mean hating other people. It doesn't mean hating America. But what it means is, like any other minority, we have to recognize that the mainstream institutions of society no longer embody our values and transmit them to ourselves or our children, like the public schools. Not only, they're not prayer in schools anymore. The school is probably teaching a lot of things that, you know, you don't believe. And so we need to self-consciously steward the strength of our own community in order to sustain faith in ourselves and our children and to have something to invite people into. The example there that I give is early 20th century Catholicism. So, you know, again, America was a very Protestant normative country. You know, the Catholics really didn't like the

Perarid school, the Bible reading in school, because I thought it was too Protestant. So what do they do? They created their own schools. They created the Knights of Columbus, their own social societies. They created their own parish infrastructure, their own universities. Whereas the Protestants had mostly relied on the traditional universities like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, that had all been founded to train Christian ministers. That was the Protestant institutions were the main institutions of society. You didn't have to have the Protestant school, necessarily. The public schools were basically Protestant. Well, now, and I think education is the best example here, we need to have infrastructure that supports our community strength and our values. Even though, you know, we can see

that these mainstream institutions are troubled and that there are very serious problems and that that has negative consequences for society. Because those are no longer our institutions, we don't run them and they reject our values, we cannot see ourselves as morally obligated to those institutions. And so we see Christians, you know, of all stripes, opting out of public education, in favor of homeschooling, in favor of classical Christian schools, other schools, and simply saying, look, there's no path for us to positively influence those schools. Now, again, I'm not saying you should never send your kid to public schools, you know, while we're planning to send our son to a public school. But the point is like saying that like, oh,

the public schools, the main institutions of society are sort of our institutions that should reflect our values. That's just a little obsolete thinking. We have to be willing to check out of those and self-consciously create things to sustain our own community life. I think that's one of the main shifts that will happen. And that won't be popular. And again, there's a lot of people who don't like homeschooling and don't like Christian schools. They say, you know, you're hurting people in the public schools. And I think there's a sense in which that's true. It's a big reality, because the public schools are terrible. They close down for two years during COVID, like in some places. They're not serving their students well. At the same time, what can we do about that? We don't run those schools,

and our views are considered completely legitimate in those schools. and the responsibility for that is on the people who are in charge of them. And that is not us. And so breaking that psychological link, I believe, is very important. And it will not be something that is approved of by, you know, the Russell Boers and the David Frenches of this world. Well, I appreciate your perspective so much. People who listen to this podcast know my take on public schools.

You and I might differ. And we don't have time to debate all of that. perspective is that Christians should do everything they possibly can to give their kids a Christian education because all education is discipleship. And so do you want your child to be disciplesed 40 hours of the week by an anti-Christian worldview or a biblical worldview? What at the end of those 13 years is going to give them a better foundation for the craziness of this world? And that's not to say that, you know, public or private school guarantees apostasy or salvation. but since education is discipleship, I don't want someone who does not believe that God created

the heavens in the earth to disciple my child. I simply don't. So that doesn't have to be homeschool, but some kind of Christian education I personally think is important. I'm sure that we agree on the importance of a foundation for our children in our communities. So thank you. I'm very supportive of that 100% on, you know, and I think most Christians realistically, they're headed for the exit ramps and well, they should. Right, right. Well, Thank you so much. This is a really fascinating conversation, and I just encourage people because there's so much that we didn't get into in this conversation to actually go out and get your book. So tell us again, title of the book, where they can find it and where they can follow you.

Right. It's called Life in the Negative World Confronting Challenges in Antichristian Culture. It's available wherever fine books are sold. And you should also go to my website, www. aaronren.com and sign up for my newsletter. I put all my writings there so you can keep up with everything that I'm awesome thank you so much aaron i really appreciate it thanks so much for having me on it's an honor hey this is steve day if you're listening to alley you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political they're moral spiritual and rooted in what we believe is true about god humanity and reality itself on the steve day show we take the news of the day and tested against first principles faith truth and objective reality we don't just chase narratives

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