Life in Negative World (notes)

We recently had a men’s discussion of Renn’s Life in Negative World book. I really liked the book, though it is far from perfect. Obviously Renn is a sociologist not a pastor or theologian, but I still thought some of his interaction with Scripture could have been deeper. He really missed a lot of opportunities to bring biblical patterns and models into the discussion (e.g., Israel’s time in exile has a lot in common with “negative world” so passages like Jeremiah 29 and the book of Daniel would seem to be especially relevant; additionally, one could argue that all of Paul’s NT epistles were written to churches in a world far, far more negative than our own). He also failed to situate “negative world” within a larger eschatological framework that might provide solid hope for life on the other side of negative world. We do not live in a post-Christian world so much as a pre-Christian world; while ex-vangelicals grab all the headlines, pre-evangelicals (those who will be converted) are the real story. Further, Renn does not seem to be aware of the ecclesiocentric option (e.g., my church in three dimensions view). But overall, despite shortcomings here and there, I was pretty impressed with the book. Renn definitely has his finger on the pulse of evangelicalism, with all its various subcultures. No doubt, evangelicals will find his book more amenable than Dreher’s comparable Benedict Option. I might write a post that is more of a book review later on, but for now, here are some notes on what I found most interesting (and most worthy of further exploration) in the book.

1. Evangelicals need to come to grips with their own complicity in creating negative world. Negative world did not happen to us, it happened because of us. How so? Many reasons, but start here: We have kept our kids in idolatrous public schools. (Renn touches on public education, but just barely.) We have not had a doctrine of covenant succession that self-consciously passes the faith on to the next generation, trusting in God’s covenant promises. We have substituted youth ministry that is a cheap knock off of what the world is doing for serious discipleship. We lost too many of our kids and so we lost the culture. What has happened is our fault. We need to confess and repent.
2. Renn does not come out and say this, but I think his book implies that the strategies evangelicals adopted in positive and neutral world — particularly the seeker sensitive model and the cultural engagement model — basically produced negative world by ceding so much ground to secularism. These models had no way to stand against encroaching feminism (which has destroyed the family, which in turn, according to Mary Eberstadt, destroyed the faith of the next generation), the rolling civil rights revolution (which, as Christopher Caldwell explains, has created a new functional constitution in the US), pietism/dispensationalism (which cut off the church from using a lot of the Bible and produced a sense of inevitable decline), etc. Negative world is a sign of evangelicalism’s failure the same way the Reformation signaled the papacy’s failure. The leaders who crafted these strategies need to be held accountable for what they have wrought. 
3. I agree with Renn that evangelicals have not been elite and have not pursued the kind of excellence needed to be elite. Evanglicalism was supposed to correct the anti-intellectualism of the fundamentalist movement, but for the most part it has failed. Its elites are either badly compromised (like Francis Collins) or tend to operate in an evangelical bubble rather than the public square or really aren’t all that elite anyway. The kind of art and music evangelicals have produced is a major indicator of this. Are there any serious liturgical musicians in evangelicalism today? Any noteworthy artists or movie-makers? Sure, we have some talent and a few cultural products that might stand the test of generations, but not much. We can hardly even produce a decent Congressman, and we don’t have anyone near the Supreme Court. Renn cites Mark Knoll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind but I think a better explanation for why conservative Christians in America have not been elite is found in Nathan Hatch’s Democritization of American Christianity. 
4. Overall, Renn’s section on how the church should respond to negative world was better than I expected. He is certainly right that we will have to learn to function like a minority counter-culture for now. I think part of the problem with looking for a strategy is that we want something that is both efficient and effective in reaching people and changing the culture, and that just isn’t going to happen. There will be no shortcuts back to the promised land. Anytime the faithful church and our current cultural zeitgeist come into contact with one another in negative world, it will have to be a head-on collision. Strategies that aim at softening that collision aren’t going to work. As James Wood has shown, winsomeness will not save us. Attempts at accommodation just allow us to be steered and manipulated leftward. This will be a time of testing for faithful Christians. Thin skinned and easily triggered Christians are going to have a hard time making it through. Christians who have made a habit of seeking “third way solutions” are going to have a hard time, as one point of the triangle gets stretched further and further to the left, making triangulation ever more difficult. The same is even more true for those who have used a “punch right, coddle left” strategy of engagement. This has always been a form of pandering, but it’s going to be more obviously so as we get deeper into negative world. The reality is that progressives hate us and aren’t going to start liking us just because we try to speak as softly and winsomely as possible. It’s more likely that we can win their respect by being plain spoken about what we believe and why.
5. I appreciated Renn’s counsel for pastors. I wonder if the church will face a significant pastor shortage as we get further into negative world. Renn is certainly right that there are many more opportunities for division in the local church today, and that can wear pastors down. The kind of pastor who can thrive in negative world will be one who is anti-fragile and who scores high on the disagreeability scale so he can handle confrontation and conflict which will inevitably arise. Churches need to ditch marketing-type strategies and focus on clear, direct speech, communicating God’s Word in straight-forward terms. (I thought p. 153ff was one of the most important sections of the whole book.)
6. I do not think evangelicals need to abandon pursuing positions in elite institutions, e.g., top flight universities, high ranking political positions, C-level jobs in major corporations, etc. But we should be honest about the temptations and challenges. It seems to me that evangelicals need to work at creating alternatives in many cases. It’s not really possible to create an alternative to Harvard because part of Harvard’s aura is its longevity. But in the business and tech world, Christians should find many opportunities to upstage the far left wing radicals in Silicon Valley, etc. Elon Musk is not a believer but he does provide something of a template for standing up to the progressive powers that be.
7. I think Renn is correct that we are not under any great obligation to seek the common good in a nation that largely hates us. Instead, we have to seek the good of our own people. As we strengthen the church, we can hope that will spill over to the rest of society for its good. Our project at the moment is not America per se; it is the church, which is in shambles. And changing the entire nation is probably beyond us. However, we might be able to make a dent by pursuing a localist strategy. Think of Michael Foster’s “County Before Country” model — something like that seems to be the need of the hour. My argument has always been: we seek to implement a politiucal program that derives from Scripture, fits with our creational design, and that takes the reality of human sin seriously, all out of a love for our neighbors. I still think that’s true. But I believe we can probably make more headway at the county, city, and state level than the federal level. (This is one reason why I believe organizations like 1819 News here in Alabama are so important. While we’ve been fixated on Washington, DC, scoundrels have been having their way in Montgomery.)
8. All of Renn’s material in the book on marriage, singleness, the good and normativity of family life, etc. largely recycles material he has already published, but is excellent. He is right that much of the evangelical church has been teaching lies in these areas and needs to get red-pilled. Pastors especially have to stop avoiding teaching anything that might be considered unflattering to the fairer sex. People need specific and clear applicatons of God’s Word to daily life. I also think Renn is right that churches that have made a point to “evolve” on sexual issues to stay in tune with the culture are going to have a hard time figuring out where they will draw the line as progressivism continues to “make progress.” That being said, there were a couple comments that gave me pause. First, I agree with Renn that it is hard to be patriarchal in a society that rejects the patriarchal system. Neo-patriarchs face an uphill battle. How can one function as a patriarch of his family when the culture, the legal system, etc. are all premised on egalitarianism? It might seem that patriarchs are larping — but I’d actually say it’s the other way around because patriarchs have nature (God’s creational design) on their side. It’s the feminists and egalitarians who are larping — they are the ones in denial about reality, they are the ones pretending they can remake human nature to fit their ideology. Second, Renn complained that more patriarchal churches have failed to find a “compelling role for women apart from being mothers and housewives.” But isn’t that really the point — that most women should fit into the natural groove of wife and homemaker? Sure, the home needs to be made productive once again (as Renn acknowledges) but I don’t think it’s our job to find more compelling roles for women than those God has already laid out for them. Motherhood and homemakeing, rightly understood, are about the most compelling roles and tasks in the universe. If Renn is talking about finding a role for women who are called to singleness (which should be rare) or after they have raised children, fine — I’d say such women can pursue a wide variety of tasks and vocations, provided they don’t require her to deny or compromise her femininity. While I think there is a lot to be said for women transitioning from stay-at-home-mom to stay-at-home grandma, I think if older women with grown children want to have feminine friendly jobs outside of the home, they are free to do so, assuming they have their husband’s blessing. I would just say that ordinarily women should raise children when they are young, and get further education or a job after the kids are grown. Keeping that order straight is crucial.
9. Renn is exactly right to stress the need for personal holiness and institutional integrity. Obviously, this should characterize Christians in any cultural landscape. But in negative world, these counter-cultural virtues can serve as a kind of per-evangelism that gets our non-Christian neighbors asking the right questions.
10. Renn’s assessment of changes in evangelical political engagement and the shortcomings of the culture warrior model are interesting (p. 191ff). One note on Trump: I think most Reformed evangelicals would still say that character counts when it comes to political office. I don’t think we’ve actually changed on that point. The problem is that the quality of candidates in general has degraded. It’s not as if evangelicals who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 passed over a high character alternative in order to do so. In fact, the argument that most made (at the least the thoughtful evangelicals) is that Trump’s character was preferable to Biden’s — both are bad, but Biden is worse. Give me a high character candidate and I’ll vote for him. But there’s not going to be one in 2024. John Piper wrote an incredibly stupid article before the 2020 election that basically tried to draw a moral equivalence between Trump’s mean tweets (framed as arrogance) and Biden’s pro-baby murder position. The reality is that nothing is more arrogant than thinking we have the right to take innocent life in the womb. At some point, the era of Trump will mercifully come to an end and we can start talking about someone else. In the meantime, anyone who argues evangelicals should NOT vote for Trump is going to have to make a compelling case for some other course of action. Criticizing Trump as a low character candidate is not enough when all the candidates are terrible people. It needs to be demonstrated why voting for him is objectively worse than other alternatives and I have not seen anyone do that. Sadly, Trump will be the best option in 2024 — if that’s not a sign we have entered negative world, I don’t know what would be. All that being said: I do think Renn has a great point that evangelicals, for all their loyalty to the Republican party for nearly a generation, have virtually nothing to show for it. We’ve been chumps. We need to change that.
11. I think there are other ways of framing the “culture war” position; Renn is just not aware of them. For example, Peter Leithart’s 1992 book The Kingdom and the Power can be considered an ecclesiocentric alternative, an ecclesiocentric reframing of the culture war. It maintains the warfare motif but resituates the core of our warfare in the use of the weapons God has given to his church — especially preaching, praying, and psalming. This is the “holy war” or “spiritual war” behind the culture war. Obviously Leithart’s position never got mainstreamed but it would be good for Renn to consider it and other similar approaches. I think at some level Renn realizes that we cannot abandon the culture war altogether — he insists we should not withdraw from social and political engagement (p. 194f). But I think our activism will be much more effective if its grounded in the liturgy and life of the church instead of serving as a substitute for the pathetic ecclesiology of most American evangelicals for whom the church is an afterthought. This is really the problem the “religious right” had which has still not been solved: because our church life is so thin and vapid, we seek for meaning elsewhere and that usually turns out to be the political arena. If we adopted a higher ecclesiology, we could maintain our political activism but it would look quite different.
12. Finally, Renn is exactly right that we must accept the hypocrisy of double standards because there is nothing we can do to fix it at the moment. The left can get away with things that the right cannot because the left has control of almost every major institution. We see this all the time: conservatives are held to a different standard in the media and (sadly, now) in the legal system. Compare BLM riots to J6, for just one of a myriad of examples. We are not going to reverse the double standard anytime soon. It is a form of overt hostility towards conservatives and especially the church (which I think is the real target of all of this). This is the kind of persecution that aims to kill by 1000 paper cuts. The answer is simply faithfulness. As we are holistically faithful, we can hope that the gospel will begin to make its long march through the institutions once again, and turn negative world into positive world — indeed, into Christendom 2.0.