Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - January 09, 2024


Ep 930 ｜ Why 2014 Was America’s Last Good Year ｜ Guest： Aaron Renn


Episode Stats

Length

57 minutes

Words per Minute

170.5286

Word Count

9,788

Sentence Count

556

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

44


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.840 Well, we are here, America. We are in a post-Christian country. We actually have been for a few years
00:00:08.200 now, but what is it going to look like as the influence of Christianity wanes? Is this maybe
00:00:15.480 possibly a positive thing or is it completely negative? How do we navigate it? How do we push
00:00:20.520 back against it? How in the world did we get here and where are we going from here? That is what we
00:00:25.980 are discussing today with author Aaron Wren. We're going to discuss the subject of his book,
00:00:31.720 Living in a Negative World, a world that is opposed to Christianity and Christian values.
00:00:39.800 What do we do with that as Christians? A very fascinating conversation that I know you guys
00:00:44.000 are going to like. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to
00:00:47.600 goodranchers.com. Use code Allie at checkout. That's goodranchers.com, code Allie.
00:00:55.980 Aaron, thanks so much for joining us. If you could tell everyone who may not know who you are
00:01:05.460 and what you do. Great. Well, I am a journalist and consultant who writes today primarily about
00:01:13.080 the future of the evangelical church with an emphasis on men's issues, but really the future
00:01:19.960 of the evangelical church. Before this, I was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute in
00:01:25.400 New York, worked a lot on urban policy. And before that, I was a corporate consultant with
00:01:31.260 Accenture for many years. So I'm sort of a consultant diagnosing what's going on in the
00:01:36.500 evangelical church. And today I'm a senior fellow at American Reformer, which is a Protestant
00:01:40.940 nonprofit. Okay. And tell me what you mean by men's issues. Sure. Well, I actually got interested
00:01:48.300 in the church because I saw, this was a decade ago, so many young men turning to online influencers
00:01:56.400 instead of the church and other traditional authorities. And many of these influencers
00:02:01.460 were not good people. Some of them were okay people, but I'm like, hmm, why is that? And it
00:02:07.320 was very hard to explain that to people back then because Jordan Peterson hadn't even come on the scene
00:02:14.260 in 2013 when I started looking into this. But today, of course, everybody knows about Jordan
00:02:18.940 Peterson, Joe Rogan, Jocko Willink, and of course the notorious Andrew Tate. And so what I wanted to
00:02:24.880 do is see more men turning to the church and see the church be more competitive in reaching men.
00:02:32.420 And as I got interested in the issues, it just exploded from there and actually became a little bit
00:02:37.240 more known more broadly and sort of diagnosing what's been going on in the evangelical world and the
00:02:43.320 future of the church. But that was sort of the genesis of where I came from. So there is still,
00:02:48.720 to me, you know, I have it in my heart that I would much rather have men turning to Christ than
00:02:55.200 to undertake. That's for certain. Yes, that is for sure. For sure. Okay. I'm so interested in your
00:03:02.260 new book. I think I got the pitch for it a while ago. And as you probably do too, a lot of pitches come
00:03:09.080 into my inbox. And there are very few that you look at and you're like, oh my gosh, yes, that is
00:03:15.120 perfect. That is absolutely something that I want to talk about on the show. And I was looking at your
00:03:20.200 book and I just thought this is a fascinating analysis of what's going on. And I think the best
00:03:26.820 books kind of confirm your suspicions or confirm what you already know, but then explain them in a way
00:03:33.860 that makes sense. And so your book, Life in the Negative World, Confronting Challenges in an
00:03:38.760 Anti-Christian Culture, does that. And you hear a lot of times from the secular left that, oh,
00:03:45.960 Christians just have a victim complex, that they think that they are marginalized in any way. If they
00:03:53.360 think that there is an overarching negative attitude towards Christianity, they've just built it up
00:03:58.880 in their minds. But you argue in this book that for quite a while, decades at this point,
00:04:03.620 we have been living in an America that overwhelmingly has a negative perspective,
00:04:08.820 an antagonistic perspective on Christianity, right?
00:04:13.600 Well, if you go back to the 1950s, there really was a sort of softly institutionalized,
00:04:20.920 sort of generic Protestant Christianity in America. We never had a state church like in Europe,
00:04:26.380 but we did have a sort of soft institutionalization of Christianity. So the 1950s was the high watermark
00:04:32.680 of church attendance in America. About half of all adults attended church every Sunday. That's the
00:04:38.740 decade we put In God We Trust on our money. It's the decade we added Under God to the Pledge of
00:04:43.580 Allegiance. And there's a famous photo you might have seen of the New York City skyline with the
00:04:50.520 buildings lit up with crosses for Easter. That was from the 1950s as well. And we actually had
00:04:55.580 prayer in schools, for example, in the 1950s. Well, starting in the 1960s, the status of Christianity
00:05:02.880 began to go into decline in America. I date it to the Kennedy assassination, although that's a little
00:05:09.160 bit arbitrary. And by decline, I mean, church attendance started declining, personal adherence
00:05:14.680 started to decline, and Christian moral norms began to be called into question. So we had the 60s
00:05:20.920 upheavals, the sexual revolution, etc. And I divide this period of decline of Christianity
00:05:27.880 from 1964 to the present into three phases or worlds that I call the positive, the neutral,
00:05:34.200 and the negative world. So the positive world is from, say, 1964 to 1994. And this is a period of
00:05:40.460 decline for Christianity. I want to be clear. Things are not going well for Christianity, and yet
00:05:46.240 Christianity was still basically viewed positively by secular elite culture. To be known as a good
00:05:52.580 church-going man made you seem like an upstanding member of society. Christian moral norms were still
00:05:58.220 in effect, and if you violated those norms, you could have consequences. The example I like to use here
00:06:04.400 is when it was reported that Colorado Senator Gary Hart had had a young woman stay all night in his
00:06:09.800 Washington townhome in 1987. He had to drop out of the presidential race
00:06:14.340 because it was reported he had an affair. That would never happen today.
00:06:18.460 Right.
00:06:18.980 Around 1994, we hit a tipping point where we enter what I call the neutral world, which lasted from
00:06:24.000 94 to 2014, which Christianity is really no longer seen positively, but it's not really seen negatively
00:06:29.100 yet either. It's just one more lifestyle choice among many in a sort of pluralistic public square.
00:06:35.380 We might meet, I'd say, I'm a Christian. You'd say, great, I'm a vegan. Let's talk. And Christian
00:06:41.000 moral norms still had a residual force in this era. But then in 2014, we had a second tipping point
00:06:47.960 and have entered what I called the negative world, where for the first time in the 400-year history
00:06:52.880 of America, sort of official elite culture now views Christianity negatively. Being known as a
00:06:59.600 Bible-believing Christian does not help you get a job at Goldman Sachs or Google. Quite the opposite,
00:07:05.080 in fact. And Christian moral norms are expressly repudiated in our society, and in fact now viewed
00:07:11.240 perhaps as the leading threat to the new public moral order. And the advent of what I call the
00:07:16.780 negative world has really fundamentally transformed and overturned, in many senses, the evangelical
00:07:24.700 landscape that so many people grew up with and knew, and is, I argue, the underlying source of so
00:07:31.400 many of the challenges that we face today. So what happened in 1994 that kind of tipped it over
00:07:49.740 from a positive view of Christianity, predominantly, to a more neutral view of Christianity?
00:07:56.240 1994. Well, that's interesting. I debated whether it should be 1994 or 1989. I think there were a
00:08:04.700 number of things that happened. And keep in mind, we were in decline long before that. So we were going
00:08:10.080 to hit a tipping point at some point. One of them, for sure, was the collapse of communism. You know,
00:08:16.760 communism was this sort of atheist system, a validly atheist system, godless communism, some called it.
00:08:23.600 And sort of as a result, we see that, you know, Christianity was so bound up with the West defense
00:08:32.660 of its system versus the communists that as long as the Soviet Union was intact, we were not going to
00:08:39.460 see a, you know, a rejection of Christianity. Similarly, back in that mid-century era, we had what they
00:08:46.400 called the WASP establishment or the Protestant establishment, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
00:08:50.800 And so the elites of America, you know, the Yale men of that era, the Thurston Howell III from
00:08:57.260 Gilligan's Island or things of that nature, if you remember those old TV shows, you know, they were
00:09:02.140 self-consciously Protestant. Now, they may have been liberal Protestants in a sense that they didn't
00:09:07.000 really believe in, you know, evangelical Christianity as we understand it. Yet Protestantism was very key to
00:09:12.220 their identity as a class. And so they would never have allowed that to become negative. But now they're
00:09:17.660 gone. That's another one that happened. I think that we started to see the outworking of some of the
00:09:24.240 deregulation that occurred during the Carter and Reagan administrations, where we began to see much more
00:09:29.980 consolidation of corporate America into fewer and fewer powerful and gigantic banks and other
00:09:36.900 corporations, certainly the tech industry, where many of them are monopolies, as an example of that. So the sort of
00:09:42.960 citizenry was disempowered. But one reason I chose 1994 is it was the year Rudy Giuliani became mayor.
00:09:49.660 And there was sort of an urban renaissance in America that I think really started us on the road
00:09:57.920 to a little bit of a, not necessarily an anti-Christian culture, but essentially a non-religious
00:10:03.200 culture. These urban centers that had previously been declined had never been like hotbeds of
00:10:08.380 Christianity since maybe the 19th or early 20th centuries. And as they came back, it sort of
00:10:14.520 created a new social sensibility in America, one centered around things like the Seinfeld and
00:10:19.380 Friends world, and less around church. So I think you could have picked 89 from the fall of the Berlin
00:10:24.980 Wall. But really, the decline of the fall of the Soviet Union was really an important point. And then the
00:10:30.520 resurgence of the cities as well.
00:10:31.820 Yeah, I do think that we kind of were deluded into thinking that we had won. And this idea that
00:10:40.760 the world is just going to get better and better now that everyone's enlightened, now that we have
00:10:45.760 defeated the enemy of Christianity, communism, everyone is going to see. I mean, President Reagan
00:10:52.600 famously thought this even about China, not necessarily that it was going to become Christian,
00:10:57.240 but that it was going to become democratic with the rise of capitalism in China. And I think we all
00:11:03.840 just kind of had this idea that American ideals and Christian ideals were going to spread everywhere.
00:11:11.600 And we kind of took for granted the fact that it was something that had to be fought for,
00:11:16.480 something that needed to be institutionalized, something that actually had to be lived out and
00:11:21.180 promoted, that we couldn't just keep the foundation of Christianity without acting it out in our own
00:11:26.900 lives and in our own communities. And you know what? I have started to think differently about the
00:11:32.140 80s recently. I'm someone who loves the 80s and has loved President Reagan for a long time. But I've
00:11:37.580 started to look differently at that era and even at President Reagan's presidency and wondering,
00:11:46.100 I guess, maybe not as articulately as you've just expressed, if that kind of was actually a tipping
00:11:53.000 point for America and not really in a good way. So that's really interesting.
00:11:59.680 You're right that many of us simply assume that the triumph of the West, that the triumph of a
00:12:06.120 liberal democracy meant, in essence, the triumph of Christianity. Yes. When in fact, there were a lot
00:12:11.760 of people to whom Christianity was not an integral part of Western society and would have liked for
00:12:19.000 a sort of triumphant liberal democracy to move forward in a sort of post-Christian way. And that's
00:12:25.000 something that we definitely saw. But it is important to keep in mind, again, the decline didn't start in
00:12:29.800 the 80s or the 90s. Yes. It really sort of started, in a sense, in the 60s. And it just has been out
00:12:37.060 working and out working. And that's continuing to the present day. And we debate all day long where
00:12:42.720 exactly it went wrong. But certainly it's been going wrong for a while. This is not just a recent
00:12:47.580 problem that came into being. But I really love that insight about the idea that we just assumed
00:12:53.620 the United States, the American way, the liberal democracy, the West included Christianity as an
00:13:00.280 integral part. Yeah. And clearly many people didn't see it that way. Yeah. And, you know, I think about
00:13:05.460 the 60s. I think everyone, whether they are, you know, historians or not, we look back at the 60s and
00:13:11.820 we do see a huge shift morally from the 50s. You could even, even if you were just to watch
00:13:18.520 the series Mad Men, you would be able to see that shift, not just in style and how people talked and
00:13:25.060 how people acted. But as you said, church attendance and at least in a nominal way,
00:13:31.340 upholding the virtues of Christianity, the need for that seemed to kind of fall off in the 60s.
00:13:38.260 And what's interesting about that is that is like the greatest generation was still leading the way
00:13:44.040 at that point. Like they were the ones still having children. Maybe they were probably stopping
00:13:50.900 having children at that point is probably the silent generation. But we think of the greatest
00:13:54.540 generation and I think rightly so as being heroes of American history, of being so courageous.
00:13:59.940 And I do wonder if there were some failures by the greatest generation, probably the greatest
00:14:05.440 generation of Americans that has ever lived to continue to actually genuinely, sincerely live
00:14:12.780 out Christianity in a way that would have made it more concrete than it was. So it wouldn't have
00:14:18.640 been swept away in the 1960s and 70s. What do you think about that? Well, that's a good question.
00:14:24.240 It's really hard for us to talk about the 50s because none of us lived there and lived in that time.
00:14:29.400 And you are right that in that era, there was a lot of non-Christian stuff going on in society.
00:14:37.740 But at least in sort of public official proclamations, Christianity was held in honor.
00:14:43.820 Christian moral norms were held in honor. And there even were, again, penalties for violating
00:14:49.160 them. And sort of that elite WASP society that I talked about, for example, in Philadelphia,
00:14:55.480 anyone who had been divorced could not be invited to the most prestigious balls of the year, the
00:15:03.000 assembly dances. You were just, it didn't matter if you were from the most prominent family of town,
00:15:07.780 if you got divorced, you couldn't attend. And this was up until the 60s. And then that sort of went away.
00:15:15.220 Now, of course, there were always divorces and affairs and all that. And you could think of the
00:15:19.140 works of like Edith Wharton and things of that nature, kind of sort of poo-pooing some of that.
00:15:23.780 But nevertheless, there was sort of a public, things were publicly held in honor. And, you know,
00:15:29.720 the 50s were sort of conformist in a way. And a lot of the history of that has been written by its
00:15:38.300 critics, by those who didn't like it, who saw it as suffocating, you know, the man in the gray flannel
00:15:44.600 suit, the organization man, bland suburbia, et cetera. Many people did like it. But I think there was
00:15:51.880 something about American society that many people rebelled against in that era. And the original
00:15:57.760 generation gap was between the sort of greatest generation and their boomer children who just
00:16:05.260 wanted something different. And whether the greatest generation or kind of the early silent
00:16:12.000 generation could have done something different, could have bridged that gap, is interesting to think
00:16:18.540 about. But whatever the case, it didn't happen. And there was sort of a rupture, if you will,
00:16:25.140 with the boomers. And certainly suburbanization played something of a role in that as people left
00:16:31.120 the cities, left the old ethnic neighborhoods, moved into these new kind of cookie cutter Levittown
00:16:37.900 subdivisions, where people were not stratified by, you know, sort of ethnicity, with the exception,
00:16:44.940 of course, shamefully of blacks who were excluded by law and by deed restrictions or many of these
00:16:51.320 things. But people might find themselves living next to people that they had not been by before,
00:16:56.600 but they were all of a similar stage of life, similar kind of economic status, having their young
00:17:01.900 kids. And it sort of broke up some of those sort of thick networks and societies that existed in the old
00:17:07.860 urban neighborhoods. Some of that was replicated in the suburbs, of course, but it's sort of,
00:17:12.860 sort of like, was it breaking, it was breaking up some of the old social glue, maybe that existed in
00:17:21.980 a more urban America, where we began to have a country that was much more organized around sort of,
00:17:28.260 you know, homogenous districts, as opposed to kind of much more economically, socially, ethnically
00:17:34.500 diverse cities. You talk about the boomers who kind of wanted something different. And I really like
00:17:50.880 kind of using 1989 as a reference point with the fall of communism, because I do wonder, as we already
00:17:57.220 talked about, kind of, okay, this idea that Western civilization won, in a sense, Christianity has won,
00:18:03.300 and you do kind of see in the 80s and 90s boomers saying, I'm just going to be as successful as
00:18:09.060 possible. I am going to build upon what my parents gave me through their hard work, and I am going to
00:18:15.620 go into corporate America, forge my own way, be as successful as possible, try to set my children up
00:18:20.600 well. I'm not speaking for all boomers, of course, but I'm just kind of speaking in generalizations.
00:18:24.840 And there is something that you see, I think, in the 80s and 90s with the Christianity that a lot of
00:18:30.680 baby boomers held. And it became kind of a, I don't want to say it became like this didn't exist
00:18:36.560 before the 80s and 90s, because it probably did. But you saw a wedding of the self-help industry
00:18:43.640 with Christianity to become kind of this health and wealth, purpose-driven life tool to be as
00:18:54.420 successful as possible for the Lord. I think you saw this insurgence of the prosperity gospel
00:19:00.960 in the 80s and 90s. And I wonder if that played a part in this idea of just kind of neutral
00:19:07.000 Christianity, that Christianity, rather than being the end, is kind of just a means to an end. It
00:19:13.520 means to an end of success. It means to an end of stability. I don't know. I wonder if that kind of
00:19:19.040 change in Christianity, wedding with corporate America, the goals and the aims of the boomers,
00:19:25.240 I just wonder if that played a part in the kind of transformation of how our country saw Christianity
00:19:30.160 in the 90s, in that neutral period from 94 to 2014.
00:19:35.320 Well, it certainly did. Now, the self-help industry didn't originate in that era. You know,
00:19:40.680 if you go back even to the 50s, L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics was published in the 50s, sort of one of the
00:19:45.940 original books, Dale Carnegie, and especially The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent
00:19:51.340 Peale, who had a big influence on Trump. And Dale Carnegie, I think, was in the 30s, right?
00:19:54.880 Yeah, yeah, yeah. He had to win friends and influence people. Yeah.
00:19:58.540 Yes, yes, yes. Some of that stuff is like, it goes back a long way. But there really wasn't,
00:20:02.980 you know, the boomers were the original me generation. Yeah. Christopher Lash's book from
00:20:07.380 the 70s, The Culture of Narcissism, was really about the boomers. There was a lot of sort of post-counterculture
00:20:14.140 stuff around self-discovery, the human potential movement, and things of that nature. So, and the
00:20:22.420 yuppies, of course, came out in the 80s. And of course, the boomers really were, you know,
00:20:28.600 they started out with some serious issues, like Vietnam draft, for example, stagflation in the 70s.
00:20:33.680 But really, after the 80, kind of 81, 82 recession, they really did well. They were sort of the original
00:20:39.320 self-oriented generation. And of course, all of us are their successors. Let's not say that we're not,
00:20:47.480 that we're all selfless people, I think, as Generation X. I can't claim that I'm any different,
00:20:53.060 necessarily. But what we did see is, you know, in the 70s, there was a lot of hand-wringing about the
00:20:59.640 decline of Christianity. But much of it was about the decline of attendance of the mainline denominations.
00:21:04.600 Back in the 50s, you know, a lot of people attended those mainline churches, you know,
00:21:09.220 Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Lutheran, etc. And they were unable to adapt to changing times. They
00:21:15.020 still haven't been. And today, they're sort of withering away, if you will. They have a lot of
00:21:20.380 money, but, you know, not very many attendees and the ones that are really old. Evangelicalism really
00:21:25.460 filled that gap in the 1970s. But evangelicalism had always been sort of a less institutional
00:21:31.820 in the way that, you know, the mainline denominations had been. Yeah. It was a little
00:21:39.080 more middle class, very charismatic, driven by sort of individual sort of celebrity preachers. And
00:21:46.080 maybe we went to see this preacher that you really liked. And certainly, you know, Pentecostalism.
00:21:51.320 And, you know, I remember the end times fervor with like that book from the 70s,
00:21:56.460 the late great planet Earth. And, you know, this epic confrontation with communism sort of portended
00:22:01.680 Armageddon. And, you know, so out of that, I think there has been certainly a lot of prosperity gospel
00:22:07.840 in it. And so that's where I do think, you know, some of the some of the critics of evangelicalism are
00:22:14.380 not wrong in the sense that they're all they're not just today, but, you know, all along there have
00:22:21.900 been, you know, more than a few bad apples, plenty of hucksters, plenty of failed, you know, morally
00:22:29.240 failed televangelist and plenty of prosperity, you know, the prosperity gospel, you know, really kind
00:22:35.360 of unhealthy. And, you know, a lot of people got into it. So, you know, the critics aren't wrong in
00:22:40.040 that. The other thing I think is important is that communism plays such a key role in papering over
00:22:45.640 other differences, not just in religion, but throughout society. Yeah. If you read a guy named
00:22:53.780 George Nash wrote what's considered the canonical history of the American conservative movement,
00:22:58.300 it's called the American conservative, the conservative intellectual movement in America
00:23:01.900 since 1945, although it really ends in the 70s. And you hear a lot about the three legged stool
00:23:07.520 of conservatism, you know, free markets, sort of traditionalism or social conservatism and anti
00:23:14.220 communism. And this fusion, what they called fusionism, this reckon this sort of reconciling
00:23:20.540 of free market economics with sort of traditionalism or social conservatism was really only made possible.
00:23:27.720 And Nash makes this clear because of a shared sense of the existential threat that communism posed to
00:23:34.880 America. And so once communism went away, now all these groups were sort of free to turn on each
00:23:41.940 other. And I think that that is part of, you know, with the evangelical conflict, part of the
00:23:48.120 challenges kind of roiling conservatism as well. They no longer have this overarching external enemy in
00:23:55.980 the Soviet Union that's like an existential threat to our way of life. And so now we can't suppress these
00:24:01.520 other divisions. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. That's really interesting. And I'm wondering
00:24:07.320 why 2014, too? So we went through 1994, what happened even in the early 2000s, if we're looking at kind of
00:24:16.500 the change in evangelicalism. But I think all of us sense that something changed in 2014. That was the year for
00:24:23.960 me that I graduated from college. So at the time, it probably would have been difficult for me to know if it was a
00:24:30.420 real shift in the culture or if it was just a shift in my life, seeing what the real world is like. And
00:24:35.000 plus, the 2016 election, it wasn't the first election that I voted in, but it was the first election that I
00:24:40.100 was really paying attention to. Before that, I was in college, you know, kind of how it is. But after
00:24:46.260 college, paying attention to the election and having a sense that this is a different election than
00:24:51.880 elections passed and that things feel different. I mean, I was living in the South. I was living in Georgia
00:24:58.040 at the time. And actually, the reason why I started doing what I do now is because I sensed in this
00:25:03.780 college town in Athens, Georgia, that there was kind of an opposition to at least a soft opposition
00:25:13.500 to Christian conservative principles among the young people and the college students that I was
00:25:18.760 around. So I actually started speaking to sorority girls at their chapter meetings and things like
00:25:24.020 that just totally for free. I was like, I just had a sense that, oh, my gosh, something is happening.
00:25:30.220 And I want to go to these young women and be like, OK, here's what's going on. Here's why you need to
00:25:35.320 vote. Here's how we think about these things. Anyway, that's how this whole thing started.
00:25:39.580 And so I even had a had a sense as someone who wasn't a political expert, who was just getting into
00:25:45.200 the real world, who had my first real full time job, that things were shifting. But I didn't have the
00:25:50.860 words for it, and I still don't necessarily have the words for why that was happening. So that's
00:25:56.660 what I want to hear from you. Why 2014 did we tip over from a Christian neutral world to now a negative
00:26:04.820 feeling and animosity towards Christianity in America?
00:26:09.920 It must have been really interesting going into those sororities. I almost want to turn it around
00:26:14.020 and start interviewing you to hear more about that. But I'll try to answer your question. Really,
00:26:19.180 something changed profoundly in American society during Obama's second term. Yes. So one of them
00:26:27.820 was what maybe I don't know if Matthew Iglesias coined it, but he said 2014 was the year that the
00:26:34.620 great awokening on race started in America. Although, again, potentially you could date it to Trayvon
00:26:41.580 Martin in 2012. But there's been a lot of research showing that the frequency of terms like white
00:26:49.180 supremacy and structural racism in newspapers like the New York Times, et cetera, soared in that era.
00:26:56.220 And this was pre-Trump. So you can't just say it was a response to Trump. There really was this sort
00:27:01.840 of hard turn into sort of far left race ideology around that time in 2014. There were big changes
00:27:10.480 on campus as well. NYU professor Jonathan Haidt, he said 2013 is when he first started noticing kind
00:27:18.540 of college students going crazy and all this cancel culture and all the things that we're seeing on
00:27:22.840 campus. And of course, 2014 was one year before the Supreme Court's Obergefell decision,
00:27:28.760 which legalized gay marriage. Keep in mind, in 2008, the state of California, California,
00:27:36.780 this deep blue state voted in a referendum to ban gay marriage in its state constitution.
00:27:45.080 Both Obama and Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2008 if publicly opposing gay marriage. And so the
00:27:54.140 fact that now gay marriage became not only like legal, but essentially the only social position
00:28:01.680 one can hold in, say, 2015. Yeah, that is an immense sea change. And then, of course,
00:28:08.200 Republicans or Democrats for Republicans. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, for sure. And then you start to see,
00:28:15.420 um, uh, you know, again, like Rick Warren prayed at the, uh, Obama's first inaugural and a second
00:28:21.620 inaugural, uh, Louis Giglio, I believe is how you pronounce his name, uh, had to bow out of, of giving
00:28:28.480 the invocation because of concerns that, you know, he was, uh, didn't support gay marriage. And so there
00:28:34.380 were some big changes there. Wow, I did not even know. Louis Giglio was invited to be a part of
00:28:41.400 Obama's inauguration? His second inaugural. He was going to give a prayer at the second inaugural.
00:28:46.920 And, uh, he had to, uh, you know, he had to, he had to withdraw after controversy. And so that tells you
00:28:52.060 something had changed there. And then, of course, the Trump election, 2016, 2015 election, that tells you
00:28:58.180 that something has profoundly changed in America. So all those things happened. A lot of it really happened
00:29:06.520 in Obama's second term. And I really alighted on 2014, but if you want to say it was 2013 or 2015,
00:29:13.220 I'm not going to get in an argument. I think that one is a lot easier to dial in. Obama's second term
00:29:19.100 was a real cultural shift point in America. Gosh, you're so right. I mean, I remember,
00:29:25.920 I remember Obergefell, um, when Obergefell happened in the few years before Obergefell happened is when
00:29:33.140 people, at least in college really started talking about that. And you could actually have a debate
00:29:37.720 in college over gay marriage. Like you could have that discussion. You could have that debate with
00:29:42.460 friends, with classmates, and you weren't maligned as some like crazy person or even religious
00:29:49.060 fundamentalist or bigot. You could even have debates when I was in college. So 2010, 2014 about
00:29:55.380 things like race, some of the best discussions and debates that I had at my school in South Carolina,
00:30:00.840 was about those things. But then when Obergefell finally happened, it was like immediately everyone
00:30:08.040 had to not only be on board, but celebrating it. And you're right. It was like, it was the only
00:30:13.380 social position that you could possibly take. And now we have a Republican, you know, candidate,
00:30:19.680 Chris Christie, if you even want to consider him that, you know, having to publicly say, you know,
00:30:24.440 I was wrong for once opposing gay marriage. I'm totally for gay marriage now. Even the church,
00:30:29.560 the Catholic church is blessing same sex unions. He has to say that to stay in the race as a
00:30:35.720 Republican candidate. Yeah, that's why it's such a shift. Trump was the first Republican candidate to
00:30:44.840 openly support gay marriage. You know, he showed up at that rally in Iowa, I believe it was holding a
00:30:49.420 pride flag. And again, keep in mind, eight years previously, Barack Obama had said he did not support
00:30:56.020 gay marriage because of his strong Christian faith. And in 2016, it's the Republican candidate who's
00:31:02.660 out on stage with a pride flag. And that really tells you that something changed a lot. That's an
00:31:09.240 issue. The sexuality issue and the race issues are the two that really show that. Now, is Christianity
00:31:17.900 necessarily implicated on all of these changes? Not necessarily, again, this is a broader social
00:31:25.560 shift. It isn't just strictly about Christianity. But it does certainly affects Christianity. But again,
00:31:32.780 one of the things that we see is that it isn't just that this affects the church. And so I think a lot
00:31:38.840 of conservative Christians think, well, wow, this affects us. Now we're unpopular. Now we hold positions
00:31:44.500 that are going to be treated like being pro-segregationist, etc. And, you know, there's
00:31:49.420 a part of that that's true. But it also has profound effects on mainstream secular society as well.
00:31:55.980 If you think about Donald Trump getting elected, go back to the Gary Hart situation, right? 87,
00:32:02.300 just the report that this guy might have had an affair. He had to drop out of the race. You know,
00:32:07.420 the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 98 badly, badly damaged Bill Clinton. And even though he
00:32:14.200 survived it, you know, that's probably why Bush was elected, even though the economy had been pretty
00:32:18.000 good in the 90s. Whereas by the time you get to Donald Trump, it's like the Access Hollywood tape
00:32:24.100 is like a 48-hour blip of a scandal. And all of the stuff that he does that so horrifies the people in
00:32:31.620 the mainstream media, back in the positive world or pre-1960s America for certain, someone like that
00:32:39.740 would never get anywhere near the White House. He would have just been considered, you know,
00:32:44.440 morally unfit to be elected president, you know, because of, you know, his various antics.
00:32:51.280 And now all these people who I think there's an irony, all the people who tore down all of the
00:32:59.440 guardrails and moral rules of our society in the name of personal liberation now have no standard by
00:33:06.540 which they can judge Donald Trump. How can they judge Donald Trump? It's ridiculous. And so we do
00:33:11.700 see, and I've written about this, and I don't say it too much in the book, is we've reached essentially
00:33:16.340 the end of morality in public politics, where we're just going to see, you know, womanizing members of
00:33:26.360 Congress out there. We're going to see people showing up at the prayer breakfast, joking about how
00:33:32.640 they, you know, pushed off their living fiancé for sex in order to make it there on time.
00:33:38.860 Oh my gosh.
00:33:39.700 It's just going to be, it's just going to, that's the norm. That's going to be the norm.
00:33:44.340 I think politicians and other people, they're going to be much more open about, yeah, my wife and I
00:33:50.440 are splitting up. You know, like here in Indianapolis, we had a mayoral election, like a month before the
00:33:56.340 election, the mayor and his wife announced they were splitting up and it was like, eh, no big deal.
00:34:00.260 Nobody asked about it. Nobody cares. People are going to have affairs. And unfortunately,
00:34:05.060 the Republican Party is, you know, I'm hardly the first to say, is looking much more like the
00:34:11.220 Jerry Springer show every day in some cases. But I think that that's one, one, the old sort of
00:34:17.040 moral norms are now gone. And really it's the left who now is like, wait a minute, you mean we don't
00:34:23.800 have any standards anymore that we can't judge, you know, these horrible deplorables that we want to
00:34:29.600 do? Like, how can they throw stones at anybody when they are the ones who want to have a completely
00:34:34.640 libertinist society? But they don't, not that one. But of course, so I think what we're going to see
00:34:39.520 is there's just going to be profound changes in our society that go far beyond the church itself,
00:34:47.280 in terms of being in essentially a, not just a post-Christian society, but in some sense,
00:34:52.540 it's an anti-Christian society.
00:35:06.080 You know, I'm curious. I know that your book is not about Trump and this conversation isn't about
00:35:10.420 Trump, but speaking of evangelicals and their reaction to him, personally, I am in between.
00:35:18.140 I think if we're just looking at Christians who would call themselves at least theologically
00:35:25.220 conservative and where, where we fall when it comes to Trump, you've got the people over here
00:35:32.440 who Trump really can almost do no wrong to them. Like no matter what he does, what he says,
00:35:38.760 and they will deny this even while they do it, they will justify it. They will find a way to justify
00:35:45.100 anything he says or does. It's really actually incredible. It's almost like an art. And then
00:35:51.500 you've got people over here like David French and maybe Russell Moore, who it doesn't matter if Trump,
00:35:57.880 you know, if he nominates the best Supreme Court justices that end up leading to the fall
00:36:05.520 of Roe, like they will never give him credit for anything good that he has done. And really,
00:36:12.560 Trump seemed to push them to the left on a lot of fundamental issues, which is very strange.
00:36:19.280 So I'm neither in the Russell Moore, David French camp. I am definitely not in the Trump apologist
00:36:25.160 camp. I'm in the camp of someone who is thankful for the good things that he has done, who disagrees
00:36:30.180 with things that he says and does. And obviously doesn't, you know, I don't feel like I align with
00:36:34.820 him morally in plenty of ways. So like, where, what do you think has been the effect of Trump on
00:36:43.600 evangelicalism? And do you think that the fact that there is any evangelical Trump support is
00:36:50.280 like a sign of the times, an indication that we've kind of all had to accept that we are in a post
00:36:56.620 Christian world. And the best that we can do is to nominate someone, anyone that will fight
00:37:02.320 communism, even if we don't like their personal values or some of the things that they tweet.
00:37:10.480 Well, in the book, I talk about the different tribes, if you will, of evangelicals. There were
00:37:15.900 sort of three main evangelical responses to this period of decline going back to the 70s. Two of them
00:37:23.660 were from the positive world, which I call culture war and seeker sensitivity. A third
00:37:27.860 developed in the neutral world, which I call cultural engagement. And the culture war is the
00:37:33.640 religious right, as we know it, pioneered by people like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson. Keep in mind,
00:37:39.920 evangelicals were originally Democrats. Jimmy Carter was the first evangelical president, and people
00:37:45.220 weren't sure what to make of this Bible thumper in the Oval Office. But in the 80s, this group realigned
00:37:51.140 into the Republican Party. It's the largest, most loyal and most important voting bloc in the
00:37:56.340 Republican Party. They saw sort of the decline of Christianity in America and decided to mobilize
00:38:01.540 to fight it politically and, you know, take back the country, speaking for what they called the moral
00:38:07.520 majority, to use the name of Falwell's organization. Well, of course, no one would talk about a moral
00:38:12.660 majority today. Of course, that would be ludicrous, but it was at least plausible to claim it back then.
00:38:18.440 A second thing that happened at the same time was the seeker sensitivity movement pioneered by people
00:38:23.740 like Bill Hybels and Willow Creek in suburban Chicago, Rick Warren at Saddleback. And they saw
00:38:29.960 church attendance in decline, and their response was to essentially design a church that was more
00:38:34.840 consumer-friendly and would appeal to the emerging baby boomer suburbanites and get people to come in
00:38:39.640 the door. Hugely successful, and like the culture war is still with us, you can think of the suburban
00:38:45.860 non-denominational megachurch, really the kind of the evangelical mainstream is representing this.
00:38:50.760 They still tended to vote Republican, but were not quite as aggressive on the culture war.
00:38:56.620 And then in the 90s, with the resurgence of cities, we had the cultural engagement movement,
00:39:03.440 which was pioneered by people like Tim Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York.
00:39:07.400 And you can think of them as either a seeker sensitivity for the cities, you know, with a
00:39:12.980 more urban sensibility, or you can think of them as a little bit the opposite of the culture war.
00:39:17.820 Rather than fighting with people all the time, they said, let's take advantage of this pluralistic
00:39:22.120 neutral public square. Let's have conversations with people. And they're still here today. As we've
00:39:27.600 entered the negative world, we really have not seen the emergence of a specific evangelical
00:39:33.500 strategy for the negative world. The only thing that's really been written to date about how to
00:39:39.580 live in the negative world, although it doesn't use this term, is Rod Dreher's Benedict Option.
00:39:44.300 And when his book, The Benedict Option, came out, evangelicals basically rejected it. They didn't
00:39:49.520 like it. And I think, you know, part of it was because it may have been too Catholic for their
00:39:54.200 taste. You know, he's Eastern Orthodox, formerly Catholic. He doesn't know the evangelical world.
00:39:58.840 Monastic imagery doesn't resonate with evangelicals. But I think that there was also a sense of denial.
00:40:06.320 And what we've seen is, since people are not really adapting specifically to the negative world,
00:40:12.840 sort of the existing groups of people who represent kind of distinct geographic and social groupings,
00:40:19.640 you could think of the culture wars more rural, seeker sensitivity more suburban,
00:40:23.340 cultural engagement more urban, they're now morphing, deforming, and coming into conflict.
00:40:30.120 So with the culture war people, you know, these were the ones who would have said,
00:40:34.720 character is paramount in a political leader. These are the people who would have said of Bill
00:40:39.440 Clinton, he simply lacks the character to be president, full stop, nothing else matters.
00:40:45.660 Well, now in the negative world, all of a sudden, it's like, well, you know, with Trump, it's like,
00:40:49.840 well, can't let Hillary win, can we? And as you note, some of these people have really turned into
00:40:55.980 like hardcore Trump apologists. Now, that's not all Trump supporters by any means, but certainly
00:40:59.920 quite a lot of them have. And then other people in this more cultural engagement world who live,
00:41:06.860 and again, a lot of them live in big cities, they sort of work in high profile professions.
00:41:12.120 They are, you know, they're kind of horrified by Trump. And also, all these Trump supporting
00:41:18.880 evangelicals make them look bad, you know, being known as an evangelical when the stereotype of
00:41:23.440 the evangelical is one of these hardcore Trump supporters, causes them a lot of pain. Now, I would
00:41:28.280 say French and more came from sort of different places, but they are sort of paradigms of how this
00:41:32.720 group attacked. They have now declared their own culture war, only their culture war is against the
00:41:38.820 Trump evangelicals. So now we have the culture war that's moved more from the world to internal to
00:41:42.680 the church. They're fighting with each other, and not necessarily adapting to this. And as you say,
00:41:49.920 it's not obvious what to do here. And you're not going to be able to vote for a candidate who is truly
00:41:56.580 going to represent your values, even in the Republican Party. It's just not going to happen. And so how you
00:42:03.320 navigate that is a complex question. And I think we need to do, you know, some R&D and development and
00:42:10.600 think about how do we explore what it means to live faithfully in this new and truly unprecedented
00:42:16.780 society, which I say it's new in 400 years, going back to, you know, the Puritans in New England.
00:42:23.740 We never had a society that was like this in America. It certainly could even think of Christendom as a
00:42:29.500 whole. It's unprecedented, I think. And so it really is dislocating, and we have to think a lot
00:42:36.320 about it. But the pressures that are bearing down from this negative world are really causing
00:42:40.400 evangelicals to more fight with each other, I think, than really come up with new ways to adapt.
00:42:47.560 And I think we need to focus on that.
00:42:51.000 And by unprecedented, you mean living in a post-Christian world? Because you don't mean living
00:42:57.280 in an anti-Christian world, because obviously throughout the history of the church, Christians
00:43:01.260 universally are, you know, they have been hated and antagonized. Yeah.
00:43:07.120 Well, yeah, there is a sense in like, it's unprecedented for us in sort of the West,
00:43:12.720 in America, in Christendom. Obviously, if you're the cops in Egypt, you've been used to living in the
00:43:19.020 negative world for a very long time. If you're in China or Korea, or excuse me, North Korea,
00:43:25.360 you're dealing with very, very serious existential problems. But I do always caution people,
00:43:31.820 you know, a lot of people like to point to them and talk about persecution. I don't necessarily
00:43:36.540 think that what we face in America is that kind of persecution. Instead, what we face is a more
00:43:43.580 subtle form of social and economic pressure that is hard to recognize and hard to know how to respond
00:43:52.440 to sometime. I use the example of the Apostle Paul, you know, Paul talks about, hey, I was shipwrecked,
00:43:58.140 I was beaten with rods, I was stoned. Look at these terrible things that happened to me. But you know
00:44:03.760 what? Nobody ever took away his ability to earn a living by being a tent maker. But that sort of
00:44:10.480 pressure is what you could face in America. You could be at risk of having all your friends get mad at
00:44:18.520 you of having a social media hate storm. And so the the fear of a maybe unlikely negative social
00:44:26.340 outcome is a form of, again, more subtle pressure that's hard to recognize and respond to. Whereas,
00:44:35.920 you know, in China, when the government's arresting you, that's pretty straightforward to see. So I don't
00:44:40.580 want to I don't want to be one of these people to say we're being persecuted. What we're experiencing
00:44:44.160 today is a little different than we saw in the past. Yeah, we see in some of these these other
00:44:49.260 things. But certainly Christians throughout history, going back to the earliest days of the
00:44:52.720 church have definitely experienced bona fide persecution, negativity. That was just not our
00:44:57.100 experience here in the United States. Even, you know, some critics of my thesis have said, look,
00:45:04.740 it wasn't a positive world for black Christians, Aaron. And that was true. It wasn't. But they weren't
00:45:09.760 being not because of their Christianity, not because of their religion. It was because of
00:45:13.640 their race. Right. If they were if they basically rejected Christianity, say, hey, I'm not a Christian
00:45:18.740 anymore. That's not going to make Jim Crow go away. Right. That's not why they were being. And again,
00:45:24.020 I'm not arguing that America itself embodied, you know, Christian ideals throughout its history either.
00:45:31.420 It didn't. But it was a country where, you know, being Christian and especially being a Protestant
00:45:37.340 Christian up until, you know, maybe the 70s even was really considered sort of the norm, the path.
00:45:44.240 And you could you could be in trouble. You know, even here where I live in Indianapolis, you're only
00:45:48.400 just now hearing people in sort of, you know, official positions on social media say things like,
00:45:54.820 wow, it's amazing. I don't have to pretend to be religious anymore. I can just be openly the atheist.
00:46:00.180 I've always been. Yeah. So the all of that has sort of is sort of changed a lot. And it's it's very
00:46:08.180 different from those of us who grew up in this sort of Christian America and who thought to go back to
00:46:12.260 something you said earlier, that America, the American way of life, the West, liberal democracy,
00:46:16.680 all of that was integrally bound up with Christianity.
00:46:31.580 You know, it's interesting because on the one hand, I can see some positives to it just strictly.
00:46:36.680 I mean, looking at the body of Christ and looking at Christianity is that without nominal Christianity
00:46:42.600 and the need for nominal Christianity, you know, as as you said earlier, you no longer have to say,
00:46:48.840 oh, yeah, I'm a member at this church. I'm a part of this Christian community in order to have good
00:46:52.840 standing in your town or in your community. And I think part of that is good because people can drop
00:46:57.940 the pretense. And I mean, fake Christianity, while it might count for something in the world,
00:47:03.000 it's never counted for anything in the kingdom of God. It's not like God has been fooled by someone
00:47:07.280 who just goes to church in order to be in good standing with their town. And so
00:47:11.400 as it gets more difficult, I think, to be a Christian in the West, you do separate the wheat
00:47:16.260 from the chaff. And the real church of God does have an opportunity to be a light in such darkness.
00:47:22.580 And the church in a lot of ways has always thrived on the margins. However, I think the
00:47:28.520 people who really suffer a loss, I guess all of us in a way do suffer a loss from
00:47:38.080 the diminishment of cultural Christianity, because I think something that people don't
00:47:43.780 recognize is like the idea of rights is based on this idea that we are all made in the image of God
00:47:50.040 with innate worth. And the institution of marriage is being between a man and a woman. This monogamous
00:47:55.940 institution is not just the only child creating institution that exists, but the child, the only
00:48:01.620 real child protecting institution that exists, there are a lot of benefits that we have gotten
00:48:07.380 from Christianity being the norm, especially benefits to the most vulnerable, the widow,
00:48:13.840 the orphan, the child, and women that people today don't connect to Christianity, but nevertheless,
00:48:20.440 that, you know, that causal relationship is there. And so I see some eternal, I guess,
00:48:26.200 positives to it, some spiritual positives, but a lot of imminent negatives that I don't think people
00:48:33.740 realize are going to occur with the loss of mainstream cultural Christianity. And you write in your book
00:48:40.840 that we have strategies as Christians for how to navigate this tension, how to navigate in the
00:48:46.920 negative world as Christians. So tell us about that. How do we do it?
00:48:50.940 Sure. You know, one of the things that you could have highlighted there is an additional point on
00:48:59.540 what we lose with cultural Christianity is it really does complicate evangelism. And this is one
00:49:04.700 thing where I really want to stress is in the book, the church cannot give up on the mission of making
00:49:09.940 disciples just because things are tough for us. We can't just kind of go into hiding. We can't run away
00:49:17.080 and hide. We have to be out there trying to reach the lost. At the same time, it's harder to do that
00:49:22.040 because a lot of people don't know or care who Jesus is. You know, it's not like in the old days
00:49:28.200 where people kind of knew the Bible stories and they had kind of, you know, even if they weren't
00:49:31.840 Christian, they'd never been religious. They sort of absorbed things through osmosis. Now people don't
00:49:37.840 even have the category. You can talk about the gospel, but like they don't have any of the background
00:49:41.720 information on it. And so that raises the need for what I call pre-evangelism. That is, you know,
00:49:49.760 it's not just about sharing the gospel. It's about giving people enough pre-information to understand
00:49:56.220 what the gospel actually is. There was an ad campaign that got a lot of attention and controversy,
00:50:03.340 the He Gets Us campaign, the Super Bowl campaign. It's basically an ad campaign for Jesus.
00:50:07.940 It's a billion dollars or something like that they're going to spend on it. And again, it was
00:50:12.340 controversial in many respects, but it gets at something important, which is a lot of people
00:50:17.580 don't know much about Jesus. They don't know who He is. And trying to do something to like introduce
00:50:24.760 some of these concepts is, I think, important. So we need to think about that a lot more, how to reach
00:50:34.400 people. The other thing that I say, and this gets to, you know, what you said about the opportunities
00:50:40.700 that come from this negative world is, you know, in 1950s America, where it's sort of assumed and
00:50:48.260 normative that everybody's at least some kind of nominal Christian, churches sort of had to
00:50:52.820 accommodate the nominal Christians in their pews. You had to have a sort of least common denominator,
00:50:58.460 Christianity that was sort of open to all, kind of didn't make too many demands beyond being sort
00:51:05.600 of a respectable member of society, etc. Well, now that we enter this negative world, there are
00:51:13.620 opportunities to say, hey, look, we can actually set a higher standard and a biblical standard for what
00:51:19.340 it means to be a Christian. And, you know, we don't have to just set the bar so low that any person
00:51:28.240 can clear it in terms of what it actually means to live out life as a Christian. Obviously,
00:51:37.320 you never want to close the door to the gospel. But once you are a Christian, like, what does it
00:51:42.260 mean to live that? And it's a pretty radical call on your life. So I think we have opportunities to do
00:51:48.140 that. And that's part of thinking like a minority. I really think one of the biggest shifts we have to
00:51:55.640 make is a shift away from thinking that America is a sort of Christian country, and we represent
00:52:04.860 the majority or sort of the broad center of the country, and thinking that, hey, you know,
00:52:11.740 we are actually now a minority, which doesn't mean hating other people. It doesn't mean hating America.
00:52:17.280 But what it means is, like any other minority, we have to recognize that the mainstream institutions
00:52:22.220 of society no longer embody our values and transmit them to ourselves or our children. Like the public
00:52:29.480 schools. Not only are they not prayer in schools anymore, the school is probably teaching a lot of
00:52:33.900 things that, you know, you don't believe. And so we need to self-consciously steward the strength of our
00:52:43.640 own community in order to sustain faith in ourselves and our children and to have something to invite people
00:52:50.660 into. The example there that I give is early 20th century Catholicism. So, you know, again,
00:52:58.660 America was a very Protestant, normative country. You know, the Catholics really didn't like the
00:53:03.980 prayer in school, the Bible reading in school, because they thought it was too Protestant. So
00:53:06.800 what did they do? They created their own schools. They created the Knights of Columbus, their own
00:53:10.560 social societies. They created their own parish infrastructure, their own universities.
00:53:14.220 Whereas the Protestants had mostly relied on the traditional universities like Harvard, Princeton,
00:53:21.440 Yale, that had all been founded to train Christian ministers. That was the Protestant institutions were
00:53:26.640 the main institutions of society. You didn't have to have the Protestant school necessarily. The public
00:53:32.520 schools were basically Protestant. Well, now, and I think education is the best example here,
00:53:36.900 we need to have infrastructure that supports our community strength and our values. Even though,
00:53:45.500 you know, we can see that these mainstream institutions are troubled and that there are
00:53:50.600 very serious problems and that that has negative consequences for society, because those are no longer
00:53:57.240 our institutions, we don't run them and they reject our values. We cannot see ourselves as morally
00:54:03.800 obligated to those institutions. And so we see Christians, you know, of all stripes, opting out
00:54:10.220 of public education in favor of homeschooling, in favor of classical Christian schools, other schools,
00:54:16.140 and simply saying, look, there's no path for us to positively influence those schools. Now, again,
00:54:23.260 I'm not saying you should never send your kid to public schools, you know, while we're planning to send
00:54:27.880 our son to a public school. But the point is like saying that like, oh, the public schools, the main
00:54:32.520 institutions of society are sort of our institutions that should reflect our values, that's just a
00:54:38.900 little obsolete thinking. We have to be willing to check out of those and self-consciously create
00:54:45.100 things to sustain our own community life. I think that's one of the main shifts that will happen.
00:54:51.260 And that won't be popular. And again, there's a lot of people who don't like homeschooling and don't
00:54:56.020 like Christian schools. They say, you know, you're hurting people in the public schools. And I think there's
00:55:00.780 a sense in which that's true. It's a big reality because the public schools are terrible.
00:55:07.000 They closed down for two years during COVID. Like in some places, they're not serving their students
00:55:11.420 well. At the same time, what can we do about that? We don't run those schools. And our views are
00:55:16.740 considered completely legitimate in those schools. And the responsibility for that is on the people who
00:55:22.460 are in charge of them. And that is not us. And so breaking that psychological link,
00:55:27.420 I believe, is very important. And it will not be something that is approved of by the Russell
00:55:36.960 Moores and the David Frenches of this world. Well, I appreciate your perspective so much.
00:55:42.140 People who listen to this podcast know my take on public schools. You and I might differ. We don't
00:55:47.140 have time to debate all of that. My perspective is that Christians should do everything they possibly
00:55:53.240 can to give their kids a Christian education because all education is discipleship. And so
00:55:58.920 do you want your child to be discipled 40 hours of the week by an anti-Christian worldview or a biblical
00:56:05.240 worldview? What at the end of those 13 years is going to give them a better foundation for the
00:56:11.300 craziness of this world? And that's not to say that, you know, public or private school guarantees
00:56:17.240 apostasy or salvation. But since education is discipleship, I don't want someone who does not
00:56:24.460 believe that God created the heavens and the earth to disciple my child. I simply don't. So that doesn't
00:56:29.600 have to be homeschool, but some kind of Christian education, I personally think, is important. I'm
00:56:34.640 sure that we agree on the importance of a foundation for our children in our communities. So thank you.
00:56:40.160 Well, I'm very supportive of that 100 percent on, you know, and I think most Christians,
00:56:43.720 realistically, they're headed for the exit ramps. And well, they should.
00:56:48.040 Right, right. Well, thank you so much. This is a really fascinating conversation. And I just
00:56:52.100 encourage people, because there's so much that we didn't get into in this conversation, to actually
00:56:56.400 go out and get your book. So tell us again, title of the book, where they can find it, and where they
00:57:01.040 can follow you. Right. It's called Life in the Negative World, Confronting Challenges in Anti-Christian
00:57:06.900 Culture. It's available wherever fine books are sold. And you should also go to my website,
00:57:11.860 www.erinren.com, and sign up for my newsletter. I put all my writings there so you can keep up with
00:57:18.340 everything that I'm doing. Awesome. Thank you so much, Aaron. I really appreciate it.
00:57:22.320 Thanks so much for having me on. It's an honor.