How To Fight Against A World Hostile To Christian Values

How did we get here? How is it possible that highly educated people in our culture think gender is something we can choose? How can those who say they care about children put a twelve-year-old on puberty blockers — and do so without consulting the child’s parents? How can a culture that once recognized the danger of sins against morality morph into one that only critiques, censors, and cancels what it considers to be sins against equality?

More generally, how can a society founded on Judeo-Christian principles normalize behaviors that would have shocked Greco-Roman pagans? How did we get here, and, more importantly, what do we do now that we are here?

Thankfully, a recent book by Aaron M. Renn provides the necessary perspective and tools to make sense of the mess we are in. In Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture, Renn, a current senior fellow at the American Reformer and former senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Public Research, offers both an analysis of the path that led us to where we are and a game plan for Christians to survive and thrive in the current cultural moment.

Renn identifies three stages in the slow unmooring of America from its Christian roots: the “positive world” (1964 to 1994), when society held “a mostly positive view of Christianity;” “neutral world” (1994-2014), when “Christianity no longer [had] privileged status, but nor [was] it disfavored;” and negative world (since 2014), where “Christian morality is expressly repudiated and … seen as a threat to the public good and new public moral order.” Whereas Christian moral norms were praised in the positive world and tolerated in the neutral, today, holding “to Christian moral views, publicly affirming the teachings of the Bible, or violating the new secular moral order can lead to negative consequences.”

The Dawn of the Negative World

To highlight the sudden change that befell the country with the start of the negative world, Renn recalls that in 2008, liberal California “approved Proposition 8, a state constitutional amendment to effectively ban same-sex marriage,” and Barack Obama “felt compelled to lie about this issue,” saying he opposed it to get elected. Still, though the change from neutral to negative seems to have appeared out of the blue, Renn traces some of the major influences that pushed America into a world where Christian virtues are treated as the problem rather than the solution and as the enemy rather than the anchor.

In addition to the social and sexual revolutions of the 1960s and 70s, Renn identifies 1) the collapse of the WASP establishment and their normalizing mainline Protestant values; 2) the end of the Cold War, which had championed America’s Christian identity as a counter to the (literally) godless communism of the Soviet Union; and 3) the deregulation of the business sector, which led to a few giant conglomerates with “vast top-down control” that could push their agendas and ideologies on the public at large without having to fear social or economic reprisals. In facing and countering these challenges, evangelicals “proved to be more adaptable to changing times” than the mainline Protestants who had made up the former WASP elite.

Throughout the positive and neutral world eras, evangelicals championed multiple strategies for reaching an unchurched culture that was either affirming or not openly hostile to Christian beliefs and practices. While the “religious right” became culture warriors who entered the public arena in defense of the Republican party and its platform (e.g. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Ralph Reed), less confrontational, but no less conservative evangelicals initiated the seeker-sensitive movement to make secular suburban baby boomers feel welcome and comfortable in church (e.g. Bill Hybels, Rick Warren).

A third strategy, which began “with the resurgence of America’s urban centers,” sought an apolitical cultural engagement with secular city-dwellers who were hungry for intellectual, social, and artistic dialogue (e.g. Tim Keller, Makoto Fujimura, Andy Crouch). For several decades, these cultural engagers, somewhat surprisingly, found themselves “treated as respectable by elite secular society in ways the culture warriors never were.”

All that ended with the dawn of the negative world. While evangelicals living in “small towns, rural communities, or remnants of the Bible Belt that are still in some ways positive toward Christianity” have been able to avoid confrontation, those living in cities who have attempted, often heroically, to continue their strategy of cultural engagement, have found themselves increasingly canceled by the same cultural elite that once praised them. This, and something else, has driven a wedge between the cultural engagers and the culture warriors, with the seeker sensitives gravitating toward one or the other. That something is Donald Trump.

In contrast to progressive Christians like David French who demonize Trump, and conservative Christians like Eric Metaxas who extol him, Renn takes a more nuanced look at how and why the religious right jumped on the Trump bandwagon. “They are Trumpist not just because they support Donald Trump politically, but also in that they’ve embraced his key positions on issues like immigration and trade restrictions—and sometimes post-liberal policies as well. They are populist in that they tend to attack elites, including evangelical elites, in the name of the masses,” Renn writes. Only in Trump have they found a politician who speaks for their concerns.

In doing so, Renn honestly points out, many culture warriors who had “denounced Bill Clinton as disqualified for office because of low moral character” overlooked Trump’s earlier acts of adultery in their desire to win. He also points out, with equal honesty, that many in the Trump camp have been legitimately “alarmed by what appears to be an in-progress abandonment of traditional beliefs on sexuality and the embrace of hard-left secular positions on race, such as payment of racial reparations to blacks, by some cultural engagement leaders.

Trump and wokeness,” Renn concludes, “are the two key polarizers re-sorting evangelicals.”

To remedy this polarization and the forces of the negative world that have inflamed it, Renn offers cautiously optimistic advice that all conservatives — whether secular or Christian, Catholic or evangelical, progressive or traditional — would do well to heed. He offers this advice in three realms: the personal, the institutional, and the missional.

Listen, Learn, and Act

“While twentieth-century liberal Protestants rejected the supernatural elements of Christianity,” Renn reminds us, “they largely held to the natural law and moral structures of Christianity.” How different from today, when secular elites of the negative world not only reject “the specifically Christian beliefs liberal Protestantism rejected, but many of Christianity’s core ethical and moral principles as well. In many cases, they are now at war not just with Christian dogma but with the created order of the universe itself.”

The only way evangelicals can hope to meet this challenge is to pursue intellectual excellence, developing the language and the skill to offer a counter vision to the ascendant materialist and relativist worldview. Rather than dismiss and bash America’s elites, they must do the hard work to gain themselves a seat, and a leadership one, in conservative think tanks and publications. For too long, evangelicals have left such things to Catholics, Jews, and Episcopalians. By adding their flexibility, common sense, and populist ethos to such groups, they can effect real change.

However, while they are waiting for those changes to arrive, evangelicals would do well to position themselves financially, vocationally, and geographically so that they and their families can weather the cancellation that will certainly come their way if they resist the zeitgeist of the negative world. That may include being a bi-vocational pastor or purchasing the property on which the church rests — two strategies that can free a church from accommodating progressive views on race and sexuality as a way of ensuring sufficient tithes to pay the bills.

In a time when the American public has lost its trust in most of the institutions that define our civilization, it is imperative that evangelicals pursue absolute integrity in their own lives and in the lives of their churches. One of the ways churches can do that is to avoid confusing religious mission with political or social activism. “Whether the problem is conservative politics linked with the mission of the church, Trumpism, wokeness, or some other matter, every evangelical church and evangelical-related institution needs to review its mission, make sure it is clear and aligned with its identity and purpose, and then seek to remain focused on that mission,” Renn writes.

While Renn does not advocate an evangelical withdrawal from the public square — he does not endorse Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option” — he makes it clear that “evangelicals are under no obligation to send their kids to poorly performing schools that also actively seek to undermine their beliefs, and they shouldn’t feel guilty when they decide to leave.” Rather than turn our churches into political action committees or monasteries, we must engage the negative world by being countercultural in a positive and invigorating way.

To this end, Renn observes “a community that’s heavily nonfamilial—where its members regularly watch porn, don’t marry, enter into short-term sexual commitments, and experience frequent divorce—is a weak community.” The most countercultural thing evangelicals and other conservatives can do is to form the opposite kind of community — one that is sexually pure, encourages stable and faithful marriages, and promotes fertility as natural, good, and life-enhancing.

As for missions, Renn will likely shock his evangelical readers by praising the “He Gets Us” campaign, rolled out in expensive advertisements in 2022. Far from watering down the gospel, Renn argues, we can no longer take for granted any knowledge of, or sympathy for, the teachings of the Bible. “He Gets Us” provided the kind of pre-evangelism needed today. “This campaign isn’t trying to share the gospel message; it’s attempting to introduce Jesus to people in a positive way to prepare them for future evangelism. In a negative world, this type of introduction to Jesus—in a variety of different ways—is an important activity, one that every Christian will need to learn how to do,” he writes. (Though it’s worth noting that after “He Gets Us” rolled out its campaign again during the 2024 Super Bowl, Renn posted an article on his substack critiquing this newer round of ads for presenting “Jesus as an ethical teacher and moral example rather than a savior,” and for being “explicitly left-wing culturally and politically.”)

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Renn calls on churches to teach biblical, scientific, and psychological truths about the differences between men and women, masculinity and femininity, husbands and wives. If they do not do this, if they keep quiet on issues of marriage and gender so as not to offend “sensitive” parishioners, their young men will “continue to turn to secular men’s gurus like Jordan Peterson, not the church, for answers and advice.” Meanwhile, those churches that treat men and women as interchangeable “will likely deform and ultimately embrace secular positions on gender and sexuality.”

While Renn warns advocates of “a full-throated embrace of patriarchy” that their views will not “likely succeed in our modern egalitarian society,” he nevertheless insists that the church must find the courage and wisdom to fight for a traditional view of marriage and the sexes. “In order for us to have church communities where marriage with children is the norm, divorce is the exception, [and] perpetual singleness is only for those truly called to it by God, gender confusion must be addressed as well as pornography use and sex outside of marriage,” he observes.

Only once we get ourselves, our families, our churches, and our communities in order will we have the stability and the vision to minister to the negative world. Renn provides us with a way forward, and we would do well to listen, learn, and act.   

Louis Markos, professor in English and scholar in residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. His books include “Apologetics for the 21st Century,” “On the Shoulders of Hobbits,” and “Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis.”