The Positive Good Done By Aaron Renn

His new book 'Life In The Negative World' dropped this week -- thank God!

Aaron Renn (source)

This week Aaron Renn released his new book, Life In The Negative World. It’s early in the year, but I will be surprised if a more important book for the life of the church in America is published in 2024. Here is what I said about it in a blurb:

I mean it, too. The book is based on Renn’s megaviral First Things essay, “The Three Worlds Of Evangelicalism”. In that piece, Renn put forward his theory of Positive World, Neutral World, and Negative World. Quote:

Within the story of American secularization, there have been three distinct stages:

• Positive World (Pre-1994): Society at large retains a mostly positive view of Christianity. To be known as a good, churchgoing man remains part of being an upstanding citizen. Publicly being a Christian is a status-enhancer. Christian moral norms are the basic moral norms of society and violating them can bring negative consequences.

• Neutral World (1994–2014): Society takes a neutral stance toward Christianity. Christianity no longer has privileged status but is not disfavored. Being publicly known as a Christian has neither a positive nor a negative impact on one’s social status. Christianity is a valid option within a pluralistic public square. Christian moral norms retain some residual effect.

• Negative World (2014–Present): Society has come to have a negative view of Christianity. Being known as a Christian is a social negative, particularly in the elite domains of ­society. Christian morality is expressly repudiated and seen as a threat to the public good and the new public moral order. Subscribing to Christian moral views or violating the secular moral order brings negative consequences.

I won’t say too much about it now, because I have an interview with Aaron scheduled to appear in this space in the coming days. Aaron is an Evangelical, and I am not, but his insights are absolutely on point for all American Christians. A friend and reader of this newsletter sent me this this morning; it quotes a passage from Aaron’s book:

Not being Evangelical, I trust Aaron’s insights here, and I think they go beyond Evangelicalism, and cover most conservative American Christians. We have been conditioned by the American mindset, and a conservative iteration of the Myth Of Progress, to believe that we can’t lose. That is, that however bad things look now, God is going to pull a rabbit out of the hat, and make everything okay again. That America, deep down, is a Christian nation, and if we only believe that strongly enough, all will be well.

But this is not true. Of course God can do whatever He wants, and I do hope and pray (literally) that He leads us back to restoration. We should not expect this, though, and anyway, as I argue in the book, if it is going to happen, we Christians have a role to play by getting our own houses in order.

American Christians, by and large, cannot come to terms with the idea that it’s over for us, in this sense: that the country is post-Christian. I don’t mean that there aren’t Christians around. Obviously there are, and living in Europe, as I have been doing for most of the last three years, has shown me how much stronger the Christian presence is in America than over here, from where our Christianity came. Still, I believe the relative strength of American Christianity allows us to maintain the illusion that All Is Basically Well. For some of us, it comes down to the false belief that if we only seize political control, we can turn things around.

I was talking to a Russian friend recently, who pointed out that the Russian government is officially quite pro-Christian, and in favor of “Christian values” in the public square — but in fact, only a small number of Russians go to church. The same is true here in Hungary, which has a strongly pro-Christian government, but the churches are largely empty on Sunday. The lesson from this is not that Christians should abandon politics, or that government policy does not matter. The lesson, rather, is that politics aren’t remotely enough to preserve and restore the church.

Which is why I wrote The Benedict Option. In the book, I tried to be clear that I didn’t have all the answers. We are in a historically unprecedented time, and we are going to have to work the answers out together, through trial and error. What Christians who live in cities do is going to be different from what Christians who live in small towns and rural areas do. The Ben Op for Evangelicals is going to have to be somewhat different than what it will be for Catholics, owing to confessional differences. The point is, we have to do something; just doing what we have continued to do, hoping that this time, it will work, is a strategy of failure.

I compare our situation to the state of things in western Europe at the time of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, simply because both are times in which all the structures that traditionally gave order and meaning to our life had fallen apart, or were falling apart. Rome suffered from a lack of government, which is not our problem. Nevertheless, we are living in a time in which the generally Christian order that had characterized American life, and life in the West, for many centuries has ended. We are post-Christian not because there are no Christians left (though Europe is getting to that point), but because most people no longer look to the Bible as in some way narrating the stories of our life together, and giving us authoritative guidance. Tom Holland, in his great history Dominion, points out that even atheists in the West since the Enlightenment have pretty much been Christian atheists, in the sense that they have secularized basic Christian values, and tried to uphold them without belief in a transcendent grounding for those values.

Thus the advent of Negative World: a world in which people who profess and live by traditional Christian teaching can now expect to be scorned for those views, and to suffer hardship, even persecution. It has puzzled me how so many conservative Christians have denounced the book as “defeatist” — this, because I accept the reality that Christendom is over. I wish it weren’t so, but pretending that things are other than they are is folly. It’s the psychology of lost empire.

We Americans tell ourselves that our ideals are universal, that deep down, in everyone on the planet, there is a liberal democratic American waiting to be liberated. People who said that the Iraq war was a lost cause were denounced as unpatriotic and defeatist. Right now, we are hearing the same thing about the Ukraine War — that if we just believe strongly enough that Russia will be defeated, and keep sending money and weapons over, what we want to happen will happen. How many people have to die for an illusion?

Similarly, how many souls have to be lost, now and in the future, to protect the illusion that we still live in a Christian culture? The thing that concerns me more than anything is the future of the faith. I hope my country, America, and my civilization (Western) survives, but that’s not the most important thing. Without the faith, we are nothing. I truly believe that there are concrete things that we Christians in the West should do, indeed must do, to make ourselves resilient in Negative World. Aaron Renn’s book offers lots of practical advice.

In the fall of 2020, backstage at an event in Nashville, a prominent megachurch pastor met me, and said that when The Benedict Option first came out, he and all his circles thought it was alarmist and defeatist. But things had changed so rapidly in their city since then, especially during Covid and the Summer of Floyd, that they had all awakened to the fact that they are living the Benedict Option, or trying to.

The Ben Op came out at the beginning of the Trump presidency, in a time of confidence for conservative American Christians that the radical new president could turn things around. I did not share that confidence, but I hoped that I was wrong. And in truth, Trump did better than I thought he would. But I was right that he would not turn things around, and could not, not in the most important sense — the religious sense — because that’s not what politicians are for. I always quote Hungarian PM Viktor Orban, who once said that as a politician, he could provide people with things (meaning material assistance, and the creation of a different social playing field), but he could not provide people with meaning. That was the responsibility of meaning-giving institutions — the church, schools, the family, the arts, and so forth — to do. No political victories will matter without bedrock cultural change — and that won’t matter without religious conversion.

Look at post-Roe America. We pro-lifers gained a once-unthinkable victory with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, for which we should give President Trump and other Republican presidents thanks for appointing the justices who righted that grave historical wrong. But all ending Roe did was to return the issue to the states. Since then, we have seen many states pass laws that restore full abortion rights. It does not diminish the legal victory over Roe to note that pro-lifers, most of whom are Christians, now have to fight a religious and cultural struggle to create a culture of life.

Similarly with the Benedict Option, you’d have to be a fool in the year 2024 to think that things are going our way as small-o orthodox Christians. The churches who have capitulated to the culture, accepting secular culture’s critique of them (especially on LGBT and race), and abandoning gospel truths for the sake of appealing to Negative World, are emptying out. The faithful churches are also struggling, but if we are to build resilient disciples, we can only do so if we accept the truth that we are now, and will be for the foreseeable future, minorities — and in some cases, despised minorities. How can we be what Benedict XVI, quoting Arnold Toynbee, called “creative minorities”? That is the question posed, and partially answered, by The Benedict Option.

And it is also the questions raised and partially answered by Aaron Renn’s great Life In The Negative World. I hope you will buy it, read it, talk about it, and share it with your pastor and church friends. It’s important. Next week, as I said, I’ll publish a conversation with Aaron about it.

In the meantime, if you don’t subscribe to his Substack, I strongly recommend it. There aren’t many US Christians who have better insight on the intersection of church and culture. Here is a short essay of his on four themes in Life In the Negative World — I don’t know if it is paywalled, because I’m a subscriber, but I bet it’s not.

Cardinal Zuppi On The Benedict Option

With Matteo Zuppi, Archbishop of Bologna (now Cardinal), in 2018

An Italian journalist friend emailed me this morning to say that Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, the Archbishop of Bologna and a leading Italian prelate (many say he is a leading candidate to be the next pope), brought up my book in a new interview in the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica. The interview won’t be published until the weekend, but the journalist said that the cardinal brought up the book “unfortunately with the typical progressive caricature of those who haven’t read it.”

The journalist quoted Zuppi’s answer to a question about strategies for addressing the decline in church attendance and general “disaffection” for the Catholic Church in Italy. Zuppi said (translated from Italian):

“The reactions to the observation of this phenomenon are various, as are the reactions to the proposals of Pope Francis. There is the identitarian, muscular, ‘conflictive’ in the face of the world which is changing, and which changes us. We can synthesise it with “let’s close ourselves up in a monastery” evoked by a noted book of some years ago. [then there is a footnote which says “the reference is to R. Dreher, L’opzione Benedetto….”]

Ah yes, the famous “head for the hills” slander. Pathetic. In the seven years since my book came out, I have yet to meet a single person who describes The Benedict Option as a “head for the hills” tome who has, when questioned, admitted to having read the book. I bet Aaron Renn will have to deal with something similar.

I met Zuppi on the Ben Op book tour in Italy in 2018. Some unnamed people in the Vatican had been calling around Italy, urging bishops not to welcome Dreher into their diocese, but Zuppi, who is considered to be an open-minded liberal, said why shouldn’t he invite me? He arranged a dialogue in which we appeared together on the stage. He had not read the book, so we were mostly talking past each other, but I appreciated his hospitality. That’s us above; he was a very personable man, and I appreciated his hospitality.

The rest of the Cardinal’s response, in the translation my Italian journalist friend made:

A Church that must resist; which internally scolds itself for not being identitarian enough and externally is not interested in its mission, but instead, concerned with closing ranks, reiterating ‘who we are’, which exchanges ’the favour of all the people’ of Acts with weakness and intends conflict as defense of truth; which only speaks to ‘our people’ rather than doing so with concern for speaking to others, which doesn’t go in search of the lost sheep and puts to the test those who return. Dialogue is not hiding the truth. Truth and love always go together, one needs the other. And let’s not forget the admonishment of Pope Benedict:  the starting point for being Christian is not an ethical decision or a great idea, but rather the encounter with an event, with a Person. The encounter with Jesus brings the contrary of that which religion was accused of: it enters into us and into history, freeing us from an individualism “where the subject remains definitively closed in the immanence of his reason and his feelings". Love of God and love of neighbor merge together: in the smallest we meet Jesus himself and in Jesus we meet God.

It is so interesting how these progressive Catholics twist the late Pope Benedict’s words to support Francis’s program. I would just remind you that on that same 2018 trip, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, the personal secretary of Benedict XVI, gave a dynamite speech endorsing The Benedict Option. From the speech:

Quaerere Deum – to seek God and to let oneself be found by him, that is today no less necessary than in former times.  A purely positivistic culture which tried to drive the question concerning God into the subjective realm, as being unscientific, would be the capitulation of reason, the renunciation of its highest possibilities, and hence a disaster for humanity, with very grave consequences.  What gave Europe’s culture its foundation – the search for God and the readiness to listen to him – remains today the basis of any genuine culture.”

These were the words of Pope Benedict XVI on September 12, 2008 about the true “option” of Saint Benedict of Nursia.  – After that, all that remains for me to say about Dreher’s book is this: It does not contain a finished answer. There is no panacea, no skeleton key for all the gates that were open to us for so long and have now been thrown shut again. Between these two books covers, however, there is an authentic example of what Pope Benedict said ten years ago about the Benedictine spirit of the beginning. It is a true “Quaerere Deum”. It is that search for the true God of Isaac and Jacob, who showed his human face in Jesus of Nazareth.

More:

I must therefore honestly confess that I perceive this time of great crisis, which today is no longer hidden from anyone, above all as a time of Grace, because in the end it will not be any special effort that will free us, but only “the Truth”, as the Lord has assured us. It is in this hope that I look at Rod Dreher’s recent reports on the “purification of memory” which John Paul II entrusted to us, and so I also gratefully read his “Benedict option” as a wonderful inspiration in many respects. In recent weeks, few things have given me so much comfort.

The Benedict Option is about how to find God, and to live out fidelity to Him, in the Negative World. Benedict XVI and his personal secretary understood this (Italian journalists told me before Gänswein’s address that I could be sure that the Pope Emeritus had read and approved every word — which was why I was so nervous as the Archbishop began). The watery, progressive, well-meaning way of the progressives — Catholic and otherwise — bears no fruit. Where are all the Pope Francis vocations? Francis, who will not permit the Latin mass in St. Peter’s, the other day received a blessing from the Archbishop of Canterbury, another progressive prelate overseeing a collapse of the faith. Bishops of a feather…

Keep all this in mind as you read the responses to Renn’s Life In The Negative World. In the Evangelical world as much as in the Catholic, there are powerful institutional figures who have a personal interest in distorting the argument and smearing the messenger for bringing them news that they would prefer not to hear. And not all these figures will be progressives. There are Christian figures on the Right who have a lot riding, personally and professionally, on denying the Negative World thesis.

Renn may be wrong about some things in the book, or a lot of things. So might I have been. But you readers, please bear in mind that there is a difference between good-faith critics on the one hand, who want the same thing — the survival and thriving of the church in a difficult time — but who disagree about how to get there; and on the other hand bad-faith ideologues or politico-ecclesial grifters who want to protect their grift.

A Taylor Swift Dissent

A conservative reader writes to take issue with my take yesterday on the Taylor Swift/Donald Trump controversy:

I think you’re misreading Taylor Swift — for which you cannot be faulted — as she is a very explicitly and consciously political figure. That doesn’t mean I think the present antagonism toward her on the right is a good idea (it’s not, and go Chiefs), but it does mean that what you’re seeing is much more reaction than aggression. Swift decided to go full-in on political and social causes in the late stages of the (first) Trump administration, and the cause she chose was — sit down, this will shock you coming from a pop singer — gay and transgender rights. 

Swift is worth understanding, because you cannot understand American popular culture now without understanding her. She is the anthemic chanteuse for an entire generation of American women — themselves the fonts of popular mores and taste — and therefore possesses immense power. Much of her chronicling of the passages of these women’s lives, with whom she has grown up, is artistically excellent. Consider, for example, the 2012 All Too Well, which was pretty good when released, and elevated to stunning with the extended 2021 reissue. Watch the live performance here, and tell me anyone contemporary has captured lost love and the pain of rejection quite as well lately.

She isn’t actually a very good singer! But it doesn’t matter at all, because the heart is there, and so is the songwriting. 

Now — this is a Decline-of-the-West tragedy at hand — see what she released nearly a decade later, when she came into political consciousness in the Trump era. This is 2019’s You Need to Calm Down, which is on the surface level a love letter her gay / trans fan base, but on a deeper level a hate letter to her traditionalist fan base of mostly Christian girls from the 2000s. Just watch and you’ll see, it’s loathsome and revelatory.

As it happens, Swift the next year released a documentary about herself, Miss Americana, for the specific purpose of showcasing her arrival at progressive-left political consciousness. Suffice it to say that she has chosen her role and profile, and leaned hard into it — and what she gets now from the right is the fruits of that choice.

Now, I could psychoanalyze this in a different direction: as all this was unfolding, Swift was in a series of fruitless relationships with effeminate British men across a decade. Suddenly, now, she is on the arm of a genial midcountry meathead who will probably win the Super Bowl in two weeks. You might look at it as heroic Menelaus reclaiming Helen from the ruins of Troy, or perhaps the symbolic rebirth of America. That’s only partly a joke: the point is that Taylor Swift, at her cultural height, is a symbol too, and everyone making cracks about how her possible marriage to, and children with, a star NFL tight end will spur a wedding and baby boom are actually on to something. 

I did not know any of this. I thank the reader for his thoughts. I don’t know if he wanted to be identified, and he’s no doubt still asleep back in Murka, so I don’t have time to ask.