The World Of Aaron Renn

Plus: Is Yascha Mounk A Rapist? More...

Aaron Renn (source)

Aaron Renn came to fame among American Evangelicals two years ago this month, with the popularity of his First Things essay, “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism”. In it, he offered a critique of Evangelical approaches to public engagement, based on rapidly changing conditions of American life. In the piece, Renn wrote:

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.

His new book, Life In The Negative World, expands the original piece to book length, offering loads more depth and detail, plus practical strategies for Evangelical church life in a culture that is decidedly hostile to Christianity. Though his book is geared towards his fellow Evangelicals, Renn’s work has lots of application for non-Evangelical Christians too. We spoke last week. This interview has been edited for space and clarity.

ROD DREHER: You are not a pastor or a theologian. What qualifies you to tell the churches what to do?

AARON RENN:  Well, first, I'm not telling churches what to do. I come from a consulting background. Consultants give people tools to understand the world around them and make decisions to navigate it. But we don't directly tell people what to do. So been my mindset is to equip people to make their own decisions, rather than telling them here's exactly what you should do. And of course, part of that might be giving ideas that they can consider. But ultimately, I'm not trying to tell any particular pastor how they should be running their church.

Also, I think my background in consulting, journalism, and cultural criticism is a good complement to the pastors and theologians. It helps explain the context in which they operate. My book has very little theology of any sort; I'm not attempting to supplant or replace their theological or pastoral expertise. What I'm trying to do is supplement that with an understanding of the world around us -- where I think I'm certainly as qualified to do that as they are.

What role do you think that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism plays in Negative World?

Actually, I have not read the book where Christian Smith and his co-author lay that theory out. What I would say is that sentiment plays a big role in how Evangelicals think about the world. And for a lot of people, making someone feel bad is definitely somewhat anathema. Of course, that's not everybody. Some folks actually enjoy being provocateurs. But I do think there's a sort of sentimental conception of the religion -- not just among young people, but also among pastors -- that certainly affects how they see things.

Right, but it does seem to me pretty clear that if, if most Christians in America have been socialized into this sort of feel good, be nice distortion of Christianity, then it helps the Negative World. People point to small-o orthodox Christians and say, Aha, see! You’re mean, you don't have to believe those mean things to be a Christian.”

It certainly allows you to portray people whose beliefs are low-status as bad. Of course, there's a built-in word in the Evangelical lingo for that, which is fundamentalist. That's the go-to insult, to call someone a fundamentalist, which is to suggest that they're sort of a rube, and don't really understand the Bible. There’s a been a move in certain quarters to anathematize a sort of “neo-fundamentalism,” which is to say, people to their right that they don't like.

Why do you think so many Evangelicals rejected the Benedict Option thesis?

I'm very thankful to you for writing the book, because I got to learn from what happened to you. And in essence, I get to be the 2.0 version of the Benedict Option, for Evangelicals, that took advantage of your learning.

There’s definitely a sort of allergy to anything that seems very specifically Catholic -- the monastic imagery. The name “Benedict Option” is great. It's a catchy name, everybody knows it, it's on everybody's lips. But it also I think, in the Evangelical world, naming your thing after the father of Western monasticism had some downsides.

I also think that the use of the monastery in the book -- people took the wrong things away from that. That’s where people said, well, you're turning your back on the world, you're retreating into your fortress. The reality is that you were highlighting the importance of monastic commitment to a particular community, the monks’ stability of community, as well as their thick community and way of life that they had together. 

I also think for a lot of people, especially Baptists, evangelism is very central to their identity. And so anything that doesn't talk a lot about that might just be viewed as abandoning the Great Commission. I don't think, again, at all that you said that. But in my book, I try to make clear that there’s a new way we have to think about how we do mission, but we want to continue thinking about that.

But at the end of the day, I do think that there was sort of as the sense of denial about the world. You have a gift for being able to put your finger on what's coming next. And I think your book on re-enchantment is very much in that same theme, I think re-enchantment is going to be a big theme of the next decade. I think we're already seeing a lot on it. The challenge is, you are early to market, and sometimes people don't see it, so they think you're wrong. And then like five years later, or seven years later, all of a sudden is like, oh, yeah, now I see what he was getting at.

You were writing about this at a point where I think it hadn't really processed with people what was going on. And then the Trump election itself probably played a role in that maybe that seemed to people that conservatives weren’t as weak as some thought. 

But I think, ultimately, people were just still sort of in denial at the time. It’s understandable why they would want to feel that way. Their entire strategies in the way that they've built their churches and their ministries was architected around a certain set of cultural assumptions that were longer true. And if you had to admit that, then you have to admit that you have to change the way you're doing business. A lot of people don't want to do that. And frankly, a lot of those people were and still are very successful. So there's not really much incentive for them to change either.

What has changed in the seven years since The Benedict Option book came out that makes you think evangelicalism will be more open to the Negative World diagnosis, which of course, the Benedict Option shares?

A lot of this is, in my view, entangled with politics. It is a little difficult to disentangle what is political and what is religious from this. But I think you do see, increasingly stated in secular elite media, that the leading threat to the country is Christian nationalism. 

I think that's very bound up with people's thoughts about Donald Trump. I mean, if all the Evangelicals were supporting Nikki Haley, it might be a different scenario. But at the elite levels of society, there are a number of people who believe that literally anything is justified to prevent him from becoming president again. Trump supporters are depicted as a menace to society. You can see that in all the papers, and think, wow, this is different than it used to be.

When I talk about the Negative World, it's not just about how it affects the church. It's about how it affects society pervasively, to be in an era of that's essentially now post-Christian. Donald Trump is only possible in a Negative World. There’s a great irony that the very people who wanted to tear down all the former standards of society, the moral and ethical frameworks of the old society, are the ones most horrified about Trump. Now, they don't have any more standards to deploy against him.

We see it, for example, in the metastasizing embrace and commercialization of gambling, which is everywhere. Pot legalization, psychedelic legalization, gambling legalization, payday loan stores -- everything that once upon a time was sort of shady and sleazy, that you had to go to the mob for, is now big business. And it is embraced by entities like the NFL and college football programs, and “clean cut” people like Peyton and Eli Manning, who are flogging gambling. We are a completely post-Christian society in a whole slew of ways.

You’ve identified an aspect of Negative World “in which a denatured Christianity is acceptable, but orthodox Christianity is not.” And you say that Evangelicals have been under pressure to find ways to make their theological beliefs align with secular culture. Can you give some concrete examples?

Merely identifying as a Christian in this society may get you treated with a little skepticism or suspicion, but won't necessarily be viewed as unacceptable and in and of itself, right? So, Pete Buttigieg says he's an Episcopalian -- he's not getting any flack for that. Raphael Warnock, the senator from Georgia, is a very liberal pastor; he's not getting any flack for that. You can be a Christian in society, and it's not viewed badly, if you're viewed as very friendly to the secular point of view.

I don't sense that Evangelicals have changed their beliefs. Although I do think there are some shifts in things like women's ordination, I think there's a there's definitely a group of people that would like to start ordaining women. So I think there have been some shifts, but what we see is primarily in the rhetoric.

You see it in things like the “holistically pro-life movement,” or this idea that being pro-life also means supporting more benefits for single mothers, and more support for refugees coming across the border, things of that nature. So what you see is essentially a shift in the emphasis of the rhetoric away from things that would cause problems, towards things that are very aligned [with secular progressivism]. You definitely saw this in Evangelical churches during the Great Awokening, when large swathes of Evangelicalism basically went all in on the BLM approach to race. And very little of that is materially distinguishable from a secular point of view, but they talk about it a lot.

I call it the “refugees and racism” approach to faith. You become very loud and publicly beat your breast over those things, while not saying things that might get you in trouble.

However, in a Negative World, you do have to be judicious about what you go around saying and doing, just as you know, if you live in a foreign country, you might not want to go around insulting your hosts. It's a different world. 

What do you think about Christian nationalism as a response to Negative World?

Christian nationalism is very interesting. I'm on the record saying that I am not a Christian nationalist and do not support Christian nationalism. I believe that we do have very serious problems in America, but I believe that the cultural and political traditions of America, and the way that we've talked about and thought about our own country, contain all of the resources that we need to address our problems, which we've done many times in the past.

I do find a few things interesting about Christian nationalism. It’s much like a Protestant version of Catholic integralism. The content is different, but parallel, and it’s interesting that these things have come to the fore just as we've never been further away from having anything like a religiously informed government. We are certainly not on the verge of a theocracy in our society, that's for sure.

What is also interesting about these movements is that if you if you take a step back and say, Christianity is no longer the majority culture, and you're a minority, then you don't really have so much responsibility for the culture, then it frees you from having to pitch yourself in a way designed to appeal to the cultural or political majority. Go back to the 1950s, when we had a softly institutionalized generic Protestantism in America. Half of all Americans attended services on Sunday. When Christianity is sort of the de facto national religion, you basically have to have a place in the pews for anybody who wants one. You have to have a least common denominator Christianity.

In today's world, there is opportunity to step back and say, Okay, now that we're actually not as entangled with politics, because we're on the outs, what do we really believe? What's our ideal society or our ideal point of view? And we don't have to worry about how that plays out in practice, politically. So if you are a Catholic integralist or a Protestant Christian nationalist, you are thinking about what is theoretically the best society that you would design.

The other thing is that Christian nationalism is part of a movement that has been ongoing in the Protestant world to go back to the original Reformers, and the original Reformation theology, and allow that to essentially inform today's world. I'd say a lot of Evangelicalism was very detached from the original Reformation theology. And so, this is sort of like, okay, let's go back to Luther and Calvin, and all these people. And look at this rich and highly detailed and very thoughtful body of literature that those people produced -- they really thought through these issues -- and let's bring that to bear on how we should think about politics.

Yes, this stuff has been deeply thought through in the past, but their conclusions applied to a society and a culture that was already consciously Christian. And this is why I see both Christian nationalism on the Protestant side and Catholic integralism, as strategies of impotence. You know, it's sort of a play in the face of powerlessness, because the only way you could ever implement these things in a post-Christian society is through tyranny.

I think the Christian nationalism debates expose something very important in the way many Evangelicals think about politics, and the way that a number of Evangelicals would like people to think about politics.

I mention this in the book, that there is this movement among a certain group of people to essentially promote the idea of a sort of Anabaptist-inflected political disengagement. The idea here being that our citizenship is not in this world, our citizenship is in heaven. We are exiles here. We lose down here. Jesus didn't come to exercise power, he came to give up power. The whole idea is to completely de-legitimize any use, or pursuit of any sort of power in this world, by Evangelicals.

Now, of course, the people who say this are the most active on the social justice issues, to which they never apply these principles. They never apply this to any group of people other than white Evangelicals. There's a sense in which this is really designed to denature or politically neuter Evangelicalism.

Stephen Wolfe, who wrote the book The Case for Christian Nationalism, his analysis of this, is pretty spot on. Many of these people want to render Evangelicalism politically and culturally harmless so that it makes Evangelicalism safe to be tolerated. And to be honest, I think there is a sense in which there's an element of that that should be adopted, candidly, because if you are a minority, if you're on the outs, then you have to sort of adapt yourself to that reality. I think not as a matter of theology, but as a matter of prudence. You have to be aware of how far you can go.

As we've seen with these votes, for example, in favor of abortion, what do you do, when a solid majority of the public wants abortion to be illegal? What is your strategy? The overturn Roe vs Wade strategy was successful. Now, what's the next strategy when you're a minority? Where do you go from there? And I don't know that it's immediately obvious what to do, but you have to think about what is the path that leads you to the best outcome there.

Going back to the Christian nationalism debate, this idea of de-legitimizing the exercise of power has to be rejected, because there will be situations in which Evangelicals find themselves in positions of authority in society. And they have to be able to exercise authority wisely, in accordance with their values, understanding the cultural and legal situation they're in, in order to produce better outcomes for our kind of societies. We certainly need to have much more prudent consideration of what's the best way to be publicly and politically engaged, I think that's a conversation that's worth happening, worth having.

I am actually not as big a fan of the culture war model as a lot of people think. But at the same time, I think where I differ from some of these people who want to sort of make peace with secular society is they have a very, very high view of our elites and our culture. By contrast, I have a very jaundiced view of them, because I don't think they're doing a very good job. When you look at our fentanyl overdoses, when you look at our declining life expectancy, when you look at what's going on with NYPD cops getting assaulted by these migrants, who were then released with no bail, they flip the bird to the cameras on the way out of the house, and then take a bus out of town -- I'm not taking these [elites] seriously. And I think a lot of these Evangelicals who have status really aspire to be a part of that club. 

You suggest in the book that only the people you identify as a gel because you identify as Culture Warriors, have a reasonable chance of surviving in negative world, as distinct from the Seeker-Sensitives and the Cultural Engagement Christians? Why is this?

Well, I don't think that the culture war people are facing necessarily a great future either. But we did see, you know, in the past, where when the Mainline Protestant denominations went liberal, in the early 20th century - the famous Fundamentalist/Modernist controversy in the Presbyterian Church, for example - the Fundamentalists lost, but the Fundamentalists didn't go away. They survived in their own little world, in their own little ecosystem.

Much of the culture war crowd can continue in a similar vein. We could go back to a kind of backwoods Christianity, if you want to call it that. It'll be smaller, it'll be less culturally influential. But it has never been built on being popular, or being liked. And it always had a little bit of an edge in terms of hostility against the culture that certainly, I think helps you make kind of maintain your own kind of community boundaries.

I don't think this would be a thriving group by any means. But it's not built on, for example, having a seat at the table in the art world [the Cultural Engagement model – RD]. Nor is it built on having this sort of consumer-friendly model where you just create like a something that's stylistically what people want, and doesn't have a lot of artificial barriers to get in the door [the Seeker-Sensitive model – RD]. Those models aren't going away either, but they're much more directly threatened by Negative World.

Again, I don’t want to give the impression that culture-warring is going to be, per se, a successful strategy. I just think that that kind of sensibility has proven resilient, even in defeat, in at least persisting.

Yes. And if you look to the other strategies you mention – Cultural Engagement and Seeker-Sensitive -- they just, they haven't produced results. They ended up being pathways, I think, to assimilation. You see the same thing in the Catholic Church, living here in Europe as I do, Protestantism, is basically dead. Catholicism is flat on its back. And yet you see Catholics like Pope Francis sounding like mainline Protestants of the 1980s and 1990s. In the US, you know, that they keep preaching this thing that everybody can see doesn't work.

I think we have to be honest, and take stock of some of the critics who have pointed to the problems that the church itself has. Yes, the culture has changed. And I certainly don't want to blame the church for the culture changing, which has sort of been the approach taken by people like Russell Moore and Tim Alberta of The Atlantic – that the reason that the culture doesn't like the church is because Christians have been bad. And if they hadn't been bad, none of this would have happened.

I don't believe that's true. However, it is absolutely true that the church has a lot of very serious internal problems. Obviously, the Catholic Church and its abuse scandals are one, but Protestant churches have a lot of abuse scandals, too. There are a lot of these preacher types who are kind of hucksters. There are people promoting conspiracy theories, and working people up into a fever pitch in order to sell them stuff. We don't need Jericho Marches. There's a lot more of that than people would like to admit.

We absolutely need to take the log out of our own eye. People love to talk about the bad things going on in the world. And there's a lot to talk about there. But why can't we spend a lot more time talking about what's wrong at the church? We’ve got to have a strategy of what are we going to do about that.

You know, our family formation rates aren’t good. What's the Evangelical solution to that? The Evangelical solution seem to be to talk about making an idol out of the family. How about instead, let's work on creating a community where people do form families, where we aren't actually watching porn, where divorce rates are lower, where there's a lot of work that needs to be done internally. And I think that should be much more of a focus than it presently is.

Talk about what you call in the book “explicit counter-catechesis” as being necessary to equip people to navigate the Negative World. Reading that part brought to mind conversations with pastors who are solidly orthodox, but who are terrified to talk about anything controversial. They just assume that their congregation knows right from wrong.

We have to shift more towards a minority mindset. Cultural minorities have to not only teach their children what they do – that is, the practices that define them as a people. They also have to point at the things that the majority culture does and say: We don’t do that.

Jews have to explain to their kids what Christmas is and why they don't celebrate it. And it doesn't have to be rooted in hostility. It's like, Okay, we're in this Christmas-saturated culture. and that's not us. And so I think we were going to have to do that. We're going to have to create our own sort of moral communities in which we uphold a different way of life, and a different standard for ourselves than the world. 

I don't think a lot of this is even all theological. I mean, it's very difficult in the Evangelical world to talk about anything that doesn't have a Scripture attached to it. But there's a lot of things. It's like, look, we don't smoke pot, we just don't do that. Right? We don't watch porn, we don't do that. We don't gamble on our phone, we don't do it. We just don't do that.

We need to we need to build a moral community that is distinct. And now one of my inspirations was 19^th-century Quakerism, in England, where they just said: here's how we operate. The way that they conducted business, for example, was way different than how other people conducted business. This was before regulation and consumer protection. Back then, people wanted to do business with Quaker businessmen, even if they weren't Christian, because they knew that those guys wouldn’t cheat them. Cadbury chocolate, became famous because other people were putting sawdust and iron filings in their chocolate, but the Quakers who owned Cadbury refused to do that.

So we need to be consciously thinking about creating a moral community that says, yeah, the rest of the world may operate on this set of principles. But that's not how we operate. It’s much vaster than just a few points of disagreement on things like abortion.

Let’s end on this. Despite the differences our two approaches, I think in the end, that you and I agree that the church has to survive this dark and uncertain period, and that to do so, Christians are going to have to make peace with the idea of being a minority, even a hated minority. But this is what I'm seeing from talking about the Benedict Option for seven years, is that it is very difficult to get Americans to accept the idea of defeat in any way, even if it's just like a strategic retreat, to keep the church alive until such time as the sun comes out again. How do we deal with this? How do you get Americans, with our can-do optimism and even the expectation American Christians have of natural cultural dominance, to make the mindset shift necessary to deal with the reality of the negative world?

Well, I think that's an interesting question. Definitely defeatist imagery is not going to sell. I think there is a lot of imagery that is authentically American, and that resonates with people. Consider the image of the frontier, of people who went to the West to settle the wilderness, in order to create something new. Typically, this was because they weren't hyper-successful where they came from. That was one of the points Eric Hoffer made: that the new is often created by people who are not especially successful at the existing. That’s how we can think about creating and building a future.

I am not necessarily as gloomy as you are about Christianity having a going out of business sale, or turning into a hyper-persecuted minority. But being a minority doesn't necessarily mean that it's over. You know, the Jews are a tiny minority and are highly successful in America and have been highly influential in our culture. In America, Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about the rule that it's actually the indigestible minority that often drives many things. Amy Chua wrote a book about market-dominant minorities. Of course, I'm not seeking to become a market-dominant minority, but being a minority does not mean it's all over for us, not by any means.

I don't pretend to have all the answers. But I don't think Christianity is going away in America anytime soon. And so that will be my optimistic message.

Is Yascha Mounk A Rapist?

I don’t know, and only two people do: Mounk, and the woman who now publicly accuses him of raping her nearly three years ago. And even they might disagree. But on the basis of her accusation alone — she has not pressed charges — The Atlantic has severed ties with the political scientist, who was a contributor to the magazine.

This is appalling. Certainly if Mounk is guilty of rape, he should be punished. But unless there’s something to this story that we don’t yet know, the magazine acted solely on the basis of the alleged victim’s accusation. Is that all it takes to hurt professionally a man you hate? Say he raped you, and demand that one of his employers punish him? Seems like it.

Mounk deserves due process. This is unjust. You should not be able to do this to anybody on the basis of accusation alone!

Dr. Garry Nolan & UAPs

One of you put me onto the recent interview below with Stanford’s Garry Nolan, one of the world’s leading scientists in the field of immunology. But he is better known to the general public as one of the top investigators in the field of UFOs (or UAPs, if you prefer). If you’ve read Diana Pasulka’s books, he’s in them prominently.

It’s well worth watching. Around the 26 minute mark, the men mention that these entities might be understood in terms of the demonic, and discuss that they might be trying to change human nature. Until watching the interview, I had never heard of the “Wow signal paper”, a calculation made a few years back by some mathematicians, who claimed to demonstrate that certain patterns in human DNA are too precise to have emerged spontaneously. Some read that as evidence for an intelligent designer; apparently some UAP community people think this could be evidence that the designers might be alien intelligences.

Around minute 38, Nolan says that brain studies shows that about one percent of people have structures in their brains that allow them to perceive things others cannot. He says it’s not a magical ability, but a feature of intelligence that can be passed down in families. He has been tested, and he has it. This might account for some people being able to see UFOs, and others not.

It is also true from the evidence, Nolan says, that whatever these entities are, they have the ability to control our perception. And this is one reason it’s so hard to study this phenomenon.

Nolan predicts that we are a couple of years away from a major disclosure by the government. He also says that “it’s pretty well known” that those in the US Government who want to keep all this secret believe that it’s demonic. The interviewer Ross Coulthart says that he has spoken to sources in the US Air Force who have warned him to stay away from this story, because these things are evil.

“To me, even if it is demonic, I want to understand what they’re doing, and what their intent is,” replies Nolan.

I think that’s right. I would rather know what we’re dealing with than not. What do you think?

In Praise Of Conspiracy Theory

Last word: a link to my new European Conservative essay about why we need to start giving more credence to things that seem crazy or bad. In it, I talk about Bret Weinstein at the Darien Gap, and Jean Raspail’s at times racist but entirely accurate predictions about what mass migration was going to do to Europe.