Dissident Blessings in the Negative World

Recently profiled by Ruth Graham in the New York Times, Aaron Renn has an unusual story for a prominent Protestant public writer. Most of those who claim fame in this sphere are ordained pastors. Renn is a consultant by trade, regularly offering social criticism and analysis that reflects his strategic orientation rather than a purely pastoral one. He’s written extensively and eloquently about topics as diverse as divorce and urban planning, but his article, recently expanded into book form, Life in the Negative World, offers something new: a vocabulary and framework for understanding Christianity’s apparent collapse in American public life.

Taken as a whole, the book observes a real phenomenon—the felt decline in public honor for Christianity—and offers a great deal of wisdom for how Christians might live worthy lives in such a time as this. He’s insightful and on target about many issues: For instance, it is hard to argue that in the name of being “winsome,” leaders in the Protestant world have not compromised with political and social forces committed to undermining the faith. These leaders have chronically misread the moment, believing that there is always a possibility of revival around the corner. Similarly, he’s correct that Christians should be more publicly committed to lives of integrity, accountability, and resilience. However, Renn’s diagnosis and aspects of his notions of moving forward miss something crucial about our situation.

On Renn’s account, one may divide recent American history into three distinct periods based on the public status of Christianity. The first of these he terms the positive world, a period from about 1960 to 1994, where being known as Christian confers certain benefits in most areas of American life, and where at least the outline of Christian morality (particularly concerning sexual ethics) was reflected to a degree in the law. The positive world “was a cultural environment structured to be friendly to Christianity, at least Protestant Christianity, and its ethical system”. Then followed the neutral world, which ran from 1994 to 2014, where the benefits faded, and many public norms and laws concerning morality shifted in a secular direction. The last 11 years Renn casts as the negative world, where Christianity has shifted into a decidedly minority status, a situation where Christians face active hostility from cultural elites, and their previously high status is lost.

On one level, this account is intuitively true: overall, American church attendance and membership are at their lowest point in our history, and the public’s disposition toward abortion, divorce, and issues of sexuality is significantly at odds with what Christianity teaches. Christians regularly face public pressure campaigns aimed at forcing them to abandon core moral and spiritual teachings, and businesses or other groups that appear to support Christian teachings or organizations regularly face criticisms for their refusal to go along with the spirit of the age.  

The trouble with Renn’s framing is that it presupposes that a public morality at least supportive of “religion” is good. Historically, the church has thrived precisely when least supported by politics or social approbation. More than this, Christian churches of all kinds have tended to stagnate in times and places of societal indifference or when the church has been a part of the official regime. Under those circumstances, only dissenter churches seem to have energy. The Puritans who first arrived on our shores did so in flight from established churches in England and the Netherlands; they, in turn, faced dissenters who left the Massachusetts Bay Colony to found their own churches. This is a pattern that has repeated itself time and again in our history.

But there’s a deeper issue troubling Renn’s negative world framing: It does not create a clear enough distinction between public morality and real adherence to the Christian faith. Renn is emphatic throughout Life in the Negative World that a significant number—perhaps the majority—of churchgoers in his positive and neutral worlds were nominal Christians, people who accepted that church attendance was a socially acceptable thing, and followed the perception that “social rewards often went along with being known as a good churchgoing person”.

For much of American history, he observes, Protestants followed a trajectory through various denominations as they moved through socio-economic classes. He quotes E. Digby Baltzel’s 1979 book Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia:

The average American is born the son of a Baptist or Methodist farmer; after obtaining an education he becomes a businessman in a large city where he joins a suburban, Presbyterian church; finally, upon achieving the acme of economic success, he joins a fashionable Episcopal church in order to satisfy his wife’s social ambitions.

This phenomenon of church-as-social-club suggests that the positive morality Renn thinks helped Christians was always more about honor and conformity than it was about upholding the teachings of the faith. This underscores the general problem with the framework: public morality does not do much to strengthen either the church or individual faith. It might make us feel more comfortable. But the times he points to as particularly emblematic of accepted Christianity were also times of great public hypocrisy and enforcement of rules without grace.

Nowhere is the gap between faith and honor clearer than in struggles over civil rights: Renn argues that Martin Luther King, Jr. wasn’t persecuted because he was Christian, but because he was black. But this isn’t the whole truth: King’s ideas and public speeches about the inherent dignity of all people were emphatically based on Christian theology, and his most famous public defense of the resistance tactics of the movement in Letter to Birmingham Jail drew on no less a personage than St. Augustine. Much of the criticism King faced focused on these issues, not his skin color. Many of his persecutors were “good Christians” living in a positive world, attached to the public morality of their social order, but could not accept that Christian faith might demand treating human beings with black skin as moral equals, or require resistance to the legal status quo. Civil Rights were championed by Christians but also opposed by cultural Christians living in the positive world.

Another way to frame this is to say that the era Renn calls the positive world wasn’t any friendlier to the theological core of Christianity than our day. Indeed, the public morality of the positive world adhered more closely to some Christian ethical teachings: it held marriage and the family to be important social institutions and condemned divorce, sexual activity outside of wedlock, and homosexuality. But at the same time, the public morality of the positive world lacked any semblance of the grace and forgiveness that Christianity also demands, and it did not go deep enough to help navigate the challenges of moral equality and human dignity that have defined so much of American life.

Framed in this light, it is truer to say that Christians have always lived in a substantively negative world. While higher and lower percentages of Americans have genuinely embraced the faith at different points in our history, the positive world’s cultural Christianity was at best a mixed blessing, and at worst, a constant source of hypocrisy that soured many Americans on the Christian message. Without it being the book’s main focus, Life in the Negative World builds a strong case against attempts to rebuild a hollow cultural Christianity, but at the same time, it is entirely too sanguine about the benefits that the lost positive world offered Christianity.  

The bulk of Renn’s attention is focused not on clarifying the situation but on articulating a practical response. His objective is to help Christians develop strategies for building a new way of engaging with the world and securing their lives against the ideological threats of our time. Again, many of his ideas here are wise (like the aforementioned pursuit of integrity), and the fact that many of them are not obvious to most churchgoers suggests that his criticism of their outlook on the world is right. In particular, he argues Christians ought to think more entrepreneurially and develop creative ways to blunt the pressure campaigns so often used effectively against them. In summary: Christians need to build networks that produce not just pastors, but a wide range of individuals who can influence American culture—and live lives that make the Gospel real to their neighbors. They will have to do so in a way that protects them and their churches against the inevitable backlashes in a world set against their teachings and way of life. Fair enough.  

In one major area, however, Renn's prescriptions are in at least partial tension: the resilient, entrepreneurial networks he desires require community building and local support, yet he simultaneously advises Protestants to pursue status in elite national institutions. He observes that the now moribund mainline Protestant denominations were once the churches that defined the American elite, and nothing in the Protestant world arose to replace them.

And so, Renn argues that today’s Protestants must seek excellence—he understands excellence here as being willing to pursue education and careers in the elite institutions of American life. But this sort of excellence cuts directly against the development and maintenance of community life. It requires that children decamp to the Ivy League and that young professionals regularly move to build their careers and enhance their status. The people who form the core of thriving Protestant churches may sometimes pursue this path for a time, but building and maintaining a deep community requires a different commitment.

In choosing the limits of life in a place, Christians can build many attractive parts of life that Renn recommends. But it isn’t apparent that they can attempt to join the commanding heights of American culture while also committing to a particular congregation and place. And if they cannot, then it is not evident that Protestant participation in the elite world will make much of a difference at all—for without the deep connections to churches that are orthodox in both theology and practice, any public face of Christianity will devolve into platitudinous piety, rather than lead to genuine revival of both holiness and human flourishing.

Brian A. Smith is Senior Program Officer at Liberty Fund and a Contributing Editor at Law & Liberty. He is the author of Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfarer (Lexington Books, 2017). Before joining Liberty Fund, he taught politics and great books at Montclair State University from 2009–18. He tweets at @briansmith1980.