Evangelicals in CRISIS in 2023?!
Summary
➡ The shift to a negative world has intensified pressures against the church, leading groups within it to engage the culture in different ways. While some Christians have embraced secular frameworks such as social justice and racial reconciliation, others remain engaged in the culture wars, creating an intra-church conflict mirroring political polarization. Some, identifying as ‘seeker sensitive’, are caught in the middle of these polarizing forces. Additionally, current uncertainty about the future of American politics contributes to a heightened sense of anxiety across these factions.
➡ The discussion revolves around the global trend of returning to traditional religious and cultural values, the practical ways individuals and communities can protect and uphold their faith and values in a hostile world, and the need for a shift in mindset from majority to minority. It also emphasizes the importance of creating our own infrastructure to live authentically, however, does not reject participating in mainstream institutions, as long as it serves the family’s needs and upholds the faith.
Transcript
We’ve got people like David French, formerly National Review, taking up arms against the boogeyman of white supremacism and Christian nationalism. We’ve got others like Russell Moore, formerly the Southern Baptist, who have left their historical denominations and are accused by many of having gone fully woke. What’s happening in the Evangelical Church? Well, today I’m joined by one of the most insightful analysts of contemporary Christianity, and that’s Aaron Wren from American Reformer.
He’s a former senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a prolific writer published all around the world. Aaron, welcome. Great to have you here, my friend. Thanks for having me on, Dr. Steve. Oh, it’s an honor to have you. I really enjoyed your latest piece for First Things the Three Worlds of Evangelicalism. It’ll be linked down below for anyone who wants to read it. And you talk about America entering a new world, a new social context with regard to Christianity, what you call a negative world.
Can you expand on that? Sure. If you go back to the 1950s, this was really the high watermark of Christianity in America. Half of all Americans attended church on Sunday mornings, and being a Christian was just part of American identity. There’s a famous image you might have seen of New York City with all the skyscrapers lit up for Easter with crosses in them. That picture was taken in the 1950s, and sometime in the 1960s, I dated to around 1964.
Christianity began to go into decline in America. And that period of decline, from 1964 to the present, I divide into three eras, or worlds that I call the positive, the neutral, and the negative world. So the positive world is 1964 to 1994, and this is a period of decline for Christianity. But Christianity is still basically viewed positively. To be known as a good church going man makes you seem like an upstanding member of society.
Christian moral norms are basically the moral norms of society. By 1994, though, we hit this tipping point where Christianity is not really seen positively anymore, but it’s not really viewed negatively either. It’s viewed neutrally since I call it the neutral world between 1994 and 2014, in which Christianity is essentially one more lifestyle choice among many in a pluralistic public square, we might meet. I’ll say, I’m a Christian.
You’d say, Great, I’m a vegan. Let’s sit down. Let’s talk. Let’s have a conversation. But then in 2014, we had a second tipping point where we entered a very different place, where for the first time in the 400 year history of America christianity is now essentially viewed negatively by elite official culture. I call this the negative world. To be known as a good church going, Bible believing Christian does not help you get a job at Goldman Sachs or Google.
Quite the opposite, in fact. And Christian moral norms are expressly repudiated and in fact now viewed as the primary threat to the new public moral order. And so a lot of what we’re seeing happen politically and also within the religious world deals with this transition to what I have labeled the negative world. It’s so fascinating. I love how you schematize that. I became a Christian in 1994 and it was interesting because that was the height of Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition.
I remember when I got involved with them, I was very politically active believer. I found political activism as the means by which I came into Christianity, interestingly enough, particularly with the Christian Coalition. And I remember that’s when I got I mean, I was seeing polls like in Iowa that showed that like one out of every three voters was part of the Christian Coalition. But you definitely begin to see a decline from that 94 point, which I really appreciated.
That’s kind of I know it’s more aesthetic rather than specific but people easily could have picked 1989 the Fall of the Berlin Wall as the start of the neutral world. I picked 1994 because of exactly what you put up hit on. It really does seem to be the peak of evangelical influence within political conservatism. It was also the rise of the Gingrich Revolution. The Republicans took over the House and that really was a watershed because things after that really took a very different the left felt it seems they began to feel extremely threatened and this was something that needed to get neutralized.
It took a couple of decades to draw that out but now it’ll be a relatively straight line from the 1994 Gingrich Revolution to J Six, for example. In that sense, I like to your observation in your article on how seeker sensitive churches indicated a highly friendly relationship to secular culture. We’re surrounded by seekers and let’s arrange our church in such a way that accommodates and facilitates them. I’m thinking, too, of David Wells, of Gordon Conwell, his work on how he’s given a real sustained critique that it’s precisely during this time, this pre 94 period, I forget.
No Place for Truth, I think, was published in 92, I think, where he pointed out that the evangelical church’s peacemaking and bridge building with secular pop culture, which he argues actually undermines its truth claims because it’s largely therapeutic in nature with pop culture centering on the self rather than the sacred. But it’s interesting because he was arguing that it’s right around this time, this positive time that you still see as a decline which again, I so appreciate your analysis.
Wells would agree, wouldn’t he in the sense that he thinks in many respects, the seeds were sown during this time for our current crisis where this still positive period was nevertheless sowing the seeds for the negative one that we’re finding ourselves in. Would you agree? Yes. I, in addition to the three worlds, identify three major streams of evangelical strategic engagement, if the world, when you want to call it that, two of which date to the 1970s, and what I called the positive world period.
These were the culture war and secret sensitivity strategy. So the culture war is what you mentioned. It’s Jerry Falwell. It’s Pat Robertson. It’s Ralph Reed. It’s this conservative combative. Take back the culture response to rising secularity in the sexual revolution. So they saw church attendance going into decline. They saw the sexual revolution. They saw Roe versus Wade. And their response is again, we’re going to fight back. We are the moral majority.
You could only even plausibly call yourself that in this positive world period. But the other strand of that was what I called the seeker sensitives, where people like Bill Heibels of Willow Creek Church saw that people weren’t going to church. And so he decided to take a sort of business school approach. He went door to door in suburban Chicago asking people if they went to church. If they did interview over if they didn’t, he asked, why don’t you go to church? And from this sort of market research, he created a church that he thought would be a consumer friendly Christianity.
We’ll drop the stodgy robes and the hymns, and we’ll have a much more therapeutic, topical, informal, contemporary music driven service. And that really became the basis of the suburban megachurch as we know it now typically non denominational. He did that. Rick Warren at Saddleback Church in California was also a pioneer, and they drew on some earlier currents, such as the Jesus movement, which is the Christian expression of the counterculture, and the emergence of contemporary Christian music really came out of that.
Sort of the informality maybe came out of that, but it really congealed with this seeker sensitivity movement. And then there was a third stream that came out of the neutral world, which I call cultural engagement, which you can think of is either a seeker sensitivity for the cities or as essentially the opposite of the culture war. And so that’s pioneered by people like Tim Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York is, let’s go into these big cities.
Let’s go into these hostile secular environments. We’re not going to do what the largely suburban megachurches did. We’re going to be more oriented around career, around the arts, around the life of the mind, but we believe we can gain a hearing for the gospel in the secular environment, again taking advantage of this pluralistic public square. And so those are sort of the three groups, main groups that emerged out of this period.
There are others like the neoanabaptists, but those are the I would say the three main groupings. But you’re right. Secret sensitivity and culture war were both products of the decline, the observed decline of Christianity in the positive world. And their founders were sort of self consciously reacting against that. Yeah. In their own unique way. Yeah. Again, I loved your analysis. It was so nuanced. And what I liked too, about your article is how your analysis of how the shift to the negative world has had dramatic repercussions inside the church, not just the evangelical church, but the Roman Catholic Church as well.
Can you expand on that? How does understanding this larger negative context help us understand what’s happening inside the church today? How has the shift to the negative world affected, particularly evangelicalism? Sure. The negative world has brought new and more intense forms of pressure against the church and against Christians than we have really ever seen before. When you find yourself sort of on the outs as a clear moral minority, where you used to believe that you represented the majority, it’s very disconcerting, dislocating.
And so we’ve seen these different groups react in different ways. The group that I call the cultural engagers, the sort of urban, more educated, more upscale, professional class Christians. Again, you could think of the Gospel Coalition and the people involved and sort of that is basically representing that sensibility. A lot of those groups of people, rather than sort of sitting down and engaging with the culture, started to more synchronize with the culture.
Now, I want to be clear. They didn’t necessarily capitulate on the gospel or abortion or any of that stuff, but they started to reframe how they talk about things first. These are the ones who went woke. These are the ones who pivoted hard into Black Lives Matter and racial reconciliation, social justice, racial justice, essentially adopting the secular frameworks that were hitting the country hard initially after Trayvon Martin in 2012, but especially after 2014, which is also the date that people talked about the Great Awakening.
Jonathan Height, the sociologist at NYU, he just said in 2014. He was talking about the college campuses. It was like a flock of demons got loose and descended on America. Love it. And interesting religious language, I thought, for an agnostic atheist. But what we did see is a lot of these sort of more urban, upscale Christians really pivot into that because they’re like, finally, we can be on the winning side of an issue.
We don’t have to be the bad guys on abortion and stuff like that anymore. We can actually be in favor of racial justice. So they made a hard turn there. At the same time, they started talking about things like, well, pro life doesn’t just mean antiabortion. It means we need to be holistically pro life. We need to care about single moms more, we need to care about the immigrant more.
And then they started to soften and change the way they talked on sexuality. For example, you would hear people say, oh, we want to lament how the church has failed to be a welcoming space for sexual minorities or things of that nature. So this group definitely started cozying, much more up to the world. Some of them actually did, essentially. Some of them became gay affirming and that was kind of a minority.
Some of them deconstructing that’s a minority. Most of them adhered to their traditional theology, but their emphasis and the way they talked about it changed a lot. Yeah, then you saw the culture war group again, they’re still around, they’re still very active. And I do think they changed as well. And this is where those of us such as myself, who are more sympathetic to the populist world also need to be willing to acknowledge that some things changed.
This was the group of people who would have know character is a precondition of being a president or a politician. Bill Clinton is simply morally unfit to be president. They led the charge against him after the Michael Wincey scandal, but all of a sudden it’s no problem anymore, right? Donald Trump, all of his boastfulness, his pride, his historic womanizing, the kind of low class behavior he would do, they’re all of a sudden okay with that.
It’s becoming more real politique, if you will. Well, we can’t let Hillary win, right? So I think there was a shift there as well. And what we’ve seen is these two groups sort of became increasingly in conflict with one another and every issue has become polarized between this sort of progressive influenced culture engagement group and this more populist influenced culture war group. Sort of like an elite based split within the Republican Party.
And people used to talk about the culture wars going back to James Davis and Hunter’s book from the early 90s. Well, now to a lot of extent the culture wars within the church, that it’s evangelicals fighting evangelicals, and particularly a lot of these cultural engagement people are very keen to distance themselves from the people they call fundamentalists, these culture war type people. We don’t want to have anything to do with them.
They’re the bad guys. And of course, David French is very much in this mode, right? David French today says that essentially the bad guys in America are these culture war Christians. And he’s an interesting example of the shift because not long ago you would have said he was a culture war guy, right? Especially on pro life issues and the like. Yeah, but what has happened is different people have reacted in different ways.
And so David French and Russell Moore reacted one way where they sort of turned against the people you previously would have maybe bucketed them with. Although Moore was always a Democrat, he was always a little bit of a different and so now there’s just all these recriminations and things flying back and forth within the evangelical church. Again, I think it mirrors very much the elite establishment type versus the populace versus the base split within the Republican Party.
Are you familiar with Robert Woof now’s? The restructuring of American religion? He wrote in. No, I’m not familiar with that one. Yeah, it’s very interesting because it fits perfectly with your thesis, and it’s very prestionate goes back. I think it was published in mid 80s or so, the Restructuring of American Religion. And he was arguing there that he was noticing that we’re moving away from denominational divisions to political divisions.
So instead of being structured as okay, the Presbyterians over here, the Mormons over there and the Baptists over there and the Catholics over there, we were entering into a time where conservative Presbyterians were finding they had far more. In common socially, culturally and so forth with an LDS member than they do. Maybe with a fellow, but much more liberal Presbyterian sitting next to him. So he saw basically a very partisan political restructuring of the church that was the precursor to precisely this kind of populist restructuring of the people versus the pulpit, as it were, the more progressive urban class.
He saw that already beginning in the 1980s. Again, I think it overlaps perfectly with your timeline, your structure. Right. Well, we’ve definitely seen that. James Davidson Hunter, in his Culture Wars book from 92 talks about the same thing. It used to be the difference was between Protestant, Catholic and Jew or between these different denominations. And now Orthodox Jewish rabbis are maybe more likely to be partnering with an evangelical or Catholic pastor or a Catholic activist on some social issue than maybe with a more liberal Reformed Jew.
And so we see this within the different religions as we’ve sort of had these birds of a feather, which really are you can say they’re political, they’re also moral, they’re other types of issues. But I agree completely. People are sorting into different buckets than they used to. There used to be a set of categories that we applied to people. Now we’ve got new sets of categories. And I would say maybe we’re in this sort of uncertain phase where we really don’t know what American politics are going to look like in the future, and maybe in the future we’ll have a completely different set of buckets.
But the fact that everything seems unsettled is one of the things that’s really driving, I think, a lot of the anxieties and ramping up sort of the fever pitch of things. And then, of course, COVID, too, and we see this even with something that doesn’t necessarily have what you would think a political salience like COVID really polarized these churches along basically the same lines. Exactly. I mentioned the Culture War and cultural engagement as being the two kind of poles of this.
The seeker sensitives are often sort of in the middle, and their churches are sort of getting pulled in multiple directions. As a result of this. They don’t represent a pole per se, but they’re being polarized by these other groups, right? They’re being pulled one way or the other. Yeah, it’s so interesting because you’re talking about sort of the fluidity of the situation right now, the Dynamism of it.
It was very interesting because I was very critical of Rod Dre’s Benedict option. Actually, one of the first videos I did when I started this channel back in 2016 was a critique of a sympathetic critique of the Benedict option in that I thought it was rooted in a very poorly thought out conception of retraditionalization. He was arguing for retraditionalization, but he didn’t recognize it. And this was a dynamic I had encountered when I was studying out in Durham.
Just this extraordinary trend that’s going on all over the world of returning back to religion and civilization, so forth. I mean, China sees itself more as confucian than Communists. Now, of course, what we’re seeing in Russia with the rise of the Orthodox Church, the Hindu Nationalists in India and so on, and of course, resurgence in Islam. So I basically thought that he was arbitrarily restricting retraditionalization solely to the local.
And one of the counterexamples that I like to give to push back was Viktor Orbaum’s, Hungary. And now it turns out Rod Treyer has taken up residence in Hungary. So we could see the Dynamism here. But at the very least, he was looking for a solution to this hostile world, to evangelical faith of how we can live out an authentic Christian life in the midst of this negative world.
I’m curious on your assessment on that. For many, It’s homeschooling. I was involved in the classical school movement for 20 years. Some are homesteading, some are de urbanizing, leaving the cities and taking up rural residents. What’s your take on, in the Schaeffer’s term? How shall we then live in the midst of this negative world? Well, interestingly, I have a book coming out on that in January called Life in the Negative World, where I try to hit a few of those and I try to take into account some of the criticisms people made of Rod Dreer.
And so hopefully I will do a better job. Although a lot of what I’m looking out to do is very practically oriented rather than the theories around retraditionalization, which I completely agree with, by the way. I don’t think heading for the hills is really the right answer for most people. For some people, yes, you can go live off the grid in a rural area, and that’s great. I’m not going to tell people to get rid of their backyard chickens or not want to homestead or all that stuff.
I’m in favor of trying to recreate the productive household, for example. But realistically, we are all deeply tied into the cash nexus, as they used to call it. It’s essentially impossible to separate yourself from society today in a way that you could have thought about doing in the late 19th century. We have to instead position ourselves and to equip ourselves to do that in this negative world. So there are three dimensions of that, in my view.
The personal, the institutional, or you can think of the church and then the missional. So again, for personal, I say we have to get serious about our faith. We have to be all in on our faith in a way that we didn’t have to be back in the 1950s or even in the 1980s. We got to take it seriously. We have to be more excellent. We can’t be mediocre anymore.
We have to be just more excellent in every area of our life because the degree of difficulty dial, for example, on getting married and staying married in our society is just higher. We have to elevate our game, and then we should seek to be more resilient. And I draw often to SIM taleb’s work and yeah, don’t get into debt. Think about where you live. Create multiple revenue streams.
Think about the kind of occupation you’re in. Do you want to be in an occupation where you’re very vulnerable to these worldly pressure? Or do you want to be in an occupation where you’re less vulnerable to worldly pressure? Think about that. And again, our institutions here’s the most important thing, though. That’s just a little bit of proof. Here’s the most important thing. We need to have a shift in our mindset away from majority mindset to minority mindset.
Minorities in America have always had to specifically steward their own communities, values, beliefs, culture, and strengths, even when they loved America and were positive towards America. And the model that I look to is early 20th century Catholicism. Basically, this was a Protestant, dominant, normative country kind of. Catholicism was looked at skeptically. If you remember, even with John F. Kennedy, people were a little skeptical of him being the first Catholic president.
And so they had to build their own Catholic schools. They had to make Catholic universities. They had to create organizations like the Knights of Columbus. They had to create an infrastructure to sustain Catholic life in America. They did things like abstaining from Beat on Fridays. It had theological significance but also marked their community. We have to be willing to say things like, look, the public schools are not our problem.
The public schools are the problem of the people who are running the public schools. That’s right. Which ain’t us. Right? We’re not running them. Our values are explicitly disliked by the people who are running the public schools. We’ve been told we can’t have prayer in schools. We don’t want your religion in school. We don’t want your values in school. We’re promoting values antithetical to you. We’re perfectly entitled to say, look, we’re no longer the majority.
We’re no longer responsible for the mainstream institutions of society. We have to look to the good of our own community and our own kids, the people who control the mainstream institutions have to be accountable for what they have done. And so, yeah, homeschooling, classical Christian schooling, you name it, I’m all in favor of that stuff. Not to say that you can’t send your kid to a public school.
Okay? To be honest, my wife and I are planning to send our son to a public school. He’s got some special needs. We think that’s the right way for him. But we shouldn’t feel that sense of obligation in the way that we used to. And you could think of all the institutions of our society, so much of the rhetoric today is designed to gaslight you into saying, yeah, you white, conservative, Christian, your kids should enlist in the military so they can go get blown up in an IED somewhere in one of our bogus wars.
Right. That’s what they want you to do. They want you to sacrifice for the system. They want you to invest in this system that is not meeting your needs, that doesn’t like you, and basically does not have your good in mind right. Or the genuine public good in mind at all, and is incompetent in many other things I’d say about it. And I think this willingness to say, look, it’s not our responsibility anymore.
Back in the 1950s, yeah, protestant America was responsible for American institutions. That’s no longer the case. And so we need to adopt what I call the minority mindset. And that’s very, very hard. And if you do that again, you’re going to be subjected to gas lighting. And you’ve probably noticed a lot of evangelicals now like to talk about the common good. There’s a lot of common good talk.
Common good is sort of rhetoric that’s designed to make you continue investing in these mainstream institutions and continue subjecting yourself to these mainstream institutions that do not have the good of you and your family and your community and your faith in mind. Right. And so, again, if we were the Moral Majority, if we weren’t running them, then I would say, yeah, that’s ours, and we have a responsibility.
But we are not in that situation today. No, I love that phrase, build our own infrastructure. It’s comparable to this notion of the parallel economy or a parallel police or something. The Voslif benda Voslith humble back in the 1970s and old Soviet dominated Czechoslovakia talked about recognizing that you have to build a kind of infrastructure that allows for you to be able to live out truth, because that’s the only way, in the end, that you’re able to expose the dominant corrupt institutions to be what they actually are.
Which is a lie. And it’s brilliant. I love it. How can people keep abreast of your work? I think you have a substac. You churn out a lot of wonderful material. Well, thank you. Yeah. How can we keep up with what you’re doing? The number one thing you can do is go to my website, WW aaronren. com aarnrenn. com, and sign up for my free newsletter. You’ll get everything that I put out.
It goes there and I would love to have you on the list. Awesome. Well worth your time, gang. Aaron, this is amazing. Thank you for this incredible discussion about the three worlds of evangelicalism. Make sure to click on the link below, read the article for yourself. Send it around to friends and family. I’m sure they’re going to be blessed by it and it’ll help them to better discern the times we’re living in.
Aaron, thanks so much. We’ll have you back real soon. Thank you, Dr. Steve. .
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