Fresh Challenges and Strategies for Living in an Anti-Christian Culture

Renn, Aaron M. Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture. Zondervan Reflective, 2024. 272 pages.

Pastors need a working understanding of the issues of the day to apply God’s Word in their particular settings. The truths of the gospel do not float about untethered—they must be tied to the times and places in which believers live out their faith. To that end, Aaron Renn offers us helpful contemporary analysis.

Fresh Challenges

In recent decades, thoughtful Christians have tried to make sense of rapid social and cultural changes that have left many Americans less favorable toward the gospel message. As late as the turn of the century, sociologist Christian Smith could argue that evangelicals were “embattled and thriving,” even as liberal Protestants and Catholics faced attendance and membership declines that resembled post-Christian Europe.

But much has changed in the twenty-first century, as long-term trends toward a post-Christian America have accelerated with astonishing speed. There’s ample evidence of hostility toward Christianity—at least of conservative varieties—especially in institutions governed by secular progressive elites. Committed believers have wrestled with what to do: how do Christians maintain their faith, fortify their institutions, safeguard and equip their children, and love God and neighbor in this new setting?

Perhaps the best-known prescription is Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option (2018). A former Catholic and now Orthodox Christian, Dreher sees dark days ahead for those who maintain a more traditional understanding of Christian theology and ethics. Refusal to bow down to the modern Baals and Molochs will bring increasingly severe costs, not only to livelihood and reputation but eventually to life and limb. Dreher suggests Christians need to take their cues from medieval monastics like Benedict, who withdrew from a wayward society and built distinct communities in order preserve and enhance Christianity. While Dreher doesn’t endorse literal monasticism or something directly approximating it for most Christians, he argues that Christians need to engage in selective withdrawal and institution building, the nature of which will vary based on geographic and cultural settings.

Evangelical critics of Dreher, while recognizing growing antipathy to Christian convictions and intense pressures to compromise the faith, charge that his perspective is too foreboding and his plans undercut evangelism and cultural engagement.

Into this discussion steps Aaron Renn, an evangelical Presbyterian based in Indianapolis. Raised a small-town Hoosier, Renn worked for years in management consulting and then conservative think tanks before turning to full-time writing about Christianity and culture. From corporate boardrooms to major financial centers, Renn’s background gives him strategic and institutional knowledge that differs from the perspective of most pastors and professors. Although not fundamentally a biblical or theological treatment, Renn’s book draws upon Scripture, theology, church history, and cultural criticism to offer a practical analysis of our current situation and potential paths forward.

Renn’s governing insight is an amplified version of a model he first put forward in a 2022 article published in First Things. Renn acknowledges that change toward a post-Christian Western world has been centuries in the making, along the lines of Carl Trueman and Charles Taylor’s analysis. According to Renn, the past sixty years of American culture can be understood through a paradigm that assesses how American culture and its governing institutions regard Christianity. He distinguishes three phases: the positive, neutral, and negative worlds. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s, American culture and its institutions viewed Christianity in generally positive terms; from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s, in generally neutral terms; and since the mid-2010s, in generally negative terms.

The timing of Renn’s positive world may sound discordant to those aware of the major changes underway in the 1960s, from the sexual revolution to various countercultural movements. Indeed, Renn’s critics have noted that at varying points in American history, from the 1920s to the 1840s or the decades surrounding the nation’s founding, there have been sharp critiques of orthodox Christianity and institutions hostile to Christianity. And surely from a theological perspective, the world has always been negative to the ways of God, in America and beyond.

These critiques are accurate, such as they are, but they overlook Renn’s more modest aims. His paradigm is intended to help us understand how the cultural and social esteem or respect accorded to Christianity changed so dramatically from the 1950s to the 1980s to today, and then most importantly, how those changes should impact our thinking and action. His model is not a theology of culture, but rather a sociological and operational analysis that offers tactical insights for our current setting. This does not preclude countervailing trends. Social changes arise gradually and accumulate in force until eventually becoming powerful enough to topple existing models, often with surprising speed, as we have seen in the past decade.

In some elite precincts or more ardently secular settings, the pace of change was quicker, and no doubt more than a few Ivy League professors and high-placed media members could attest that it was in no way beneficial for their careers and status to be known as an evangelical Protestant or traditional Catholic in the 1980s—or even decades before. These contexts served as the leading edge of change, but Christianity still had a measure of respect and status in the broader culture, so much so that many a local businessman might feel it necessary to be a member of a church, even if his convictions were more secular. Likewise, in the neutral era, major corporations embraced policies and practices that flew in the face of traditional Christian claims, but on balance it was neither beneficial nor detrimental to be identified as Christian.

That has changed, and the burden of Renn’s book is asking what the realities of the negative world mean for how we walk out our faith together. He argues that strategies devised in positive or neutral world contexts—such as seeker sensitive, culture war, and cultural engagement approaches—need to be rethought, since their underlying assumptions may no longer be applicable.

For example, seeker sensitivity, whatever its virtues or deficiencies, assumed a broad underlying cultural sensibility that people should be going to church or exposing their kids to Christian influence. It sought to remove perceived impediments to bringing such people into the fold by diminishing Christian language, symbols, and rituals that might be too odd and churchy for outsiders, while establishing an environment of casual comfort and welcome through familiar musical idioms, therapeutic language, and come-as-you-are attire.

But in the negative world, there is no widespread sense that people should go to church or be Christian. If anything, Christianity is denounced for its retrograde convictions; its adherents are deemed bigots, unless they have followed liberal Protestantism to a moral outlook safely congruent with that of the elite leadership class.

Fresh Strategies

If past strategies do not fit our current environment, what does Renn recommend?

First, evangelicals need to recognize the shift to the negative world that has occurred. The degree of exposure to these shifts will differ, so adaptations will need to be contextual. For instance, those in higher status and elite professions and institutions, as well as those in progressive cities, will be much more enmeshed in the negative world than those in small-town or rural areas where remnants of the neutral or even positive worlds remain.

Whatever the context, as we move forward into the unknown, Renn suggests we “think like an explorer” and embrace “living as a moral minority.” We need the vision, preparation, and fortitude of intrepid explorers entering alien territory, even as we need honesty and thoughtfulness to understand our status as a religious and cognitive minority. This does not mean we adapt our theology to suit the times. Our biblical convictions remain firm, but they must be applied with wisdom in a changed environment.

With these concepts in view, Renn examines the implications in the realm of our personal lives, our institutions, and our culture.

In Our Personal Lives

Personally, Renn calls on us to become obedient, excellent, and resilient. Simple biblical obedience is foundational, of course, but it needs to be stressed in a context where the cultural supports for marital fidelity, selfless giving, and the fruits of the Spirit have eroded. Renn calls for excellence in our work, personal lives, and creative endeavors, pushing against an evangelical culture that too often settles for mediocrity and a broader culture that questions standards of truth and judgment by which one could assess quality. Among other things, such excellence would better equip evangelicals for leadership in their own institutions and those of the broader society.

Finally, we need a resilience that can withstand hostility and persecution. Christians long enjoyed some measure of favored status in this country; rather than yearning for its return or fantasizing about taking back what we deem rightfully ours, we should equip ourselves for a difficult road ahead. The New Testament has much to say about suffering for the name of Christ, and our fellow brothers and sisters around the globe have much to teach us about courage and counting the costs. We need to learn and prepare.

In Our Institutions

Beyond the personal realm, Renn urges evangelicals to pursue institutional integrity, community strength, and ownership. Americans are distrustful of the institutions—in government, business, media, and education—that structure our collective lives. Unfortunately, sexual abuse scandals in churches and the moral failures of high-profile megachurch and parachurch leaders have added evangelical institutions to the list.

Renn argues evangelicals need a renewed commitment to institutional integrity, in terms of both honest dealings and prudent structures that take account of our sinful natures. The evangelical predilection for entrepreneurial and celebrity leaders needs to be checked by organizations that establish accountability and counteract abuses of power. Trustworthy institutions—churches, schools, and more—are a feature of strong communities.

While the government, major corporations, public schools, and academia may go their own way, following the powers and principalities of this world, evangelicals need to strengthen their own communities through education, “counter-catechesis,” “repairing our sexual economy,” and equipping believers rather than insulating them. There’s a pressing need for empowering the foundational institution of the family, about which Renn might have said more. In an era of deep sexual confusion and dysfunction, Christians have a tremendous opportunity to live out a more abundant, generative, and satisfying way of life in our families.

Renn also advocates greater evangelical ownership of key institutions like businesses. Small and especially medium-size businesses can support communities and provide protections against incursions from a wary or antagonistic culture. Herein, evangelicals should learn risk-management strategies from minority groups and from periods in church history when Christians have been unpopular minorities.

In Our Culture

Finally, Renn calls on evangelicals to bring light and truth to our troubled times by being “prudentially engaged” with our culture. Amid “fake news,” rampant tribalism, public scapegoating, and distortions of the basic reality of human sexual dimorphism, light and truth are in short supply. The absurd and fantastical is affirmed, prosaic existence is rejected, and truth-tellers are punished.

Can evangelicals articulate and live out the realities of manhood and womanhood, the beautiful and vexing union of the sexes, healthy biblical marriages and families, and faithful communities? Doing so will shine the light of Christ to those being chewed up by the manifold gods of our culture, who demand sacrifices no less severe than those of ancient vintage. Despair abounds in the loneliness, drug addiction, endless digital distractions, and apocalyptic hopelessness of our day. Can we offer better?

Engaging the culture is critical, but those evangelicals who operate in this vein too often seem inclined to accede slowly to its demands. Prudential engagement takes account of the variations Christians encounter in the negative world. It rejects wholesale disengagement, but it recognizes that evangelicals will need discerning withdrawal, communal and institutional strengthening, and judicious forms of engagement tailored to specific settings.

Conclusion

Life in the Negative World helps to make sense of our cultural moment and offers many insights to living faithfully in this context. It would be an excellent resource for pastors to discuss with one another. They would know best—in their particular settings—how its ideas might inspire sermon application and who among their church would benefit from thinking through such a book.