The Auron MacIntyre Show - Christians Trapped in Negative World ｜ Guest： Aaron Renn ｜ 3⧸1⧸24

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00:00:30.000 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:31.860 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.860 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:38.220 So it's pretty impossible not to notice that the culture has gotten very hostile to Christianity.

00:00:44.120 We recently had someone get on MSNBC and explain that Christian nationalism was the idea that your rights would come from God and not say, I don't know, the Congress or the Supreme Court.

00:00:55.100 That's a vast change from the way most people understood American values our entire life.

00:01:00.580 I have a guest today who's written a great book about negative world, the kind of world that we find ourself in when it comes to Christian values. 0.93

00:01:08.860 His name is Aaron Wren. Aaron, thank you for joining me.

00:01:12.100 Thanks for having me on.

00:01:12.880 Absolutely.

00:01:14.160 You've got this fascinating essay that you kind of turned into a larger book about the three worlds that have kind of come when we're talking about evangelical Christianity and the way that it has framed the world that we now live in today.

00:01:27.740 I want to dive into the book that you expanded out from that essay.

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00:02:47.340 So, Aaron, I know that this book began life as an essay for first things where you talked about kind of the three worlds framework for people who are unfamiliar.

00:02:55.780 Could you explain the three worlds framework?

00:02:57.880 Sure.

00:02:58.800 Unlike in Europe, America never had a state church.

00:03:02.820 But for most of our history, we did have a sort of softly institutionalized generic Protestantism as our default national religion.

00:03:12.080 So as recently as the 1950s, about half of all adults attended church every Sunday.

00:03:17.520 That was actually the high watermark of church attendance in America.

00:03:20.640 We had prayer and Bible reading in public schools.

00:03:24.420 We were adding, in God we trust our money, under God to the Pledge of Allegiance.

00:03:30.540 And so this was really a Christian sort of normative society, although we didn't have an official established church or anything of that nature.

00:03:37.400 This old consensus began to unravel in the 1960s.

00:03:42.060 And I divide this period of sort of the decline of Christianity in America from 1964 to the present into three phases or worlds that I call the positive world, the neutral world, and the negative world. 0.74

00:03:57.000 So the positive world is from 1964 to 1994.

00:04:00.480 And I want to be clear, this is a period of decline for Christianity.

00:04:03.980 All is not going well for Christianity in America at that time.

00:04:07.160 Church attendance is down a lot, for example.

00:04:09.840 And yet Christianity is still basically viewed positively by official elite culture.

00:04:14.800 To be known as a good church-going man makes you seem like an upstanding member of society.

00:04:20.020 Christian moral norms are still the basic moral norms of society.

00:04:23.560 And to violate them can get you into trouble.

00:04:25.380 About 1994, we hit a tipping point and enter what I call the neutral world, which lasted from 1994 to 2014, in which Christianity isn't seen positively anymore, but it's not really seen negatively either.

00:04:38.160 It's just one more lifestyle choice among many in a sort of pluralistic public square.

00:04:43.700 And Christian morality has a sort of residual effect in society.

00:04:47.300 But then in 2014, we hit a second tipping point and enter what I call the negative world,

00:04:52.880 where for the first time in the 400-year history of America, official elite culture now views Christianity negatively, or certainly at least skeptically.

00:05:04.820 We can dive into that if you want.

00:05:06.800 To be known as a Bible-believing Christian doesn't help you get a job in the elite sectors of the economy.

00:05:12.700 Quite the opposite.

00:05:13.480 In fact, Christian moral system is now expressly repudiated and in many ways is now viewed as the leading threat to the new public moral order.

00:05:24.020 Again, all of that rhetoric around Christian nationalism, I think, illustrates the way it is seen to some people.

00:05:32.460 And this is obviously, again, unprecedented in the history of America and very dislocating to many American Christians, especially evangelicals.

00:05:39.480 Yeah, I think it's really critical that you make it clear that even in the positive world, when you start out with that title, a lot of people assume, okay, well, this is great.

00:05:50.820 That's actually the beginning of decline or it's a period of decline for the church, as you pointed out.

00:05:56.800 A lot of people have debated whether it's more valuable to have a general Christian culture or to have a more specific kind of energized church in the individual sense or in each one of these churches.

00:06:12.240 And I wonder what you think about that, because I think for a lot of people who look at what happened, the slide there, they might say, well, maybe more people are going to church or less people are going to church.

00:06:21.620 But is there really any value in a general Christian culture? 0.84

00:06:26.220 And I just wonder what you think about that, because as we're looking at the story and the story of decline, it feels like that story is not just a loss of individual faith, but it's the loss of a wider culture being able to animate and hold itself to a particular standard.

00:06:42.180 Yeah, I think so.

00:06:42.840 There are a number of people who say good riddance to the old sort of Christian normative society.

00:06:49.720 In their view, it's basically just a breeding ground for hypocrisy.

00:06:54.200 And it's certainly fair to say that a lot of people who went to church weren't especially sincere in their faith.

00:07:01.000 When Christianity is the thing to do, it's what's expected, then people do it because it's what is expected. 0.99

00:07:07.840 Just like a lot of people in corporate America, you know, put the BLM square up or whatever, regardless of what they really think of it, because that's what people do today. 0.94

00:07:20.180 So certainly there was hypocrisy in that sense, although I don't think anyone ever pretended that everyone who attended church was a genuine convert.

00:07:28.360 At the same time, you know, that society was also extraordinarily high functioning in a lot of ways.

00:07:37.360 You know, it was really the underpinning of a lot of the Western ideas, you know, are somewhat outworkings of Christianity.

00:07:44.780 It provided all the cultural categories in which people could understand the gospel if preached for them.

00:07:51.020 And even in the cases where there were incredible and legitimate injustices that existed in society, and certainly we had them throughout our history, Christianity also provided the tools that could be used to critique that.

00:08:05.140 You know, for example, the fact that much of the animating power of the civil rights movement was by black ministers who made specifically theological arguments about why segregation was wrong.

00:08:20.820 Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham jail, I believe it's addressed to my fellow clergymen, and it's very much written in a sort of theological register.

00:08:31.200 And so it provided a sort of common moral language, you know, a common set of values, and also a lot of, you know, a lot of great tools for, you know, the pursuit of justice.

00:08:40.960 And so I think we should be sorry to see it go in many ways.

00:08:45.760 And I think there's a great irony when you look at some, but when, when you look, for example, at the election of Donald Trump,

00:08:52.300 the very people who are professed to be the most horrified about Donald Trump are the very people who tore down all the old standards of what society should be.

00:09:06.280 I mean, I think it's fair to say, right, in 1950s America, someone like Donald Trump was probably not going to get elected president.

00:09:13.400 His candidacy is only viable in a negative world.

00:09:17.920 And, and of course, you know, we see all the negatives that come with things like the fact that everything that the Christian society used to say, we're not going to do that.

00:09:27.620 It's a vice or it's dangerous to certain people.

00:09:30.680 We need to protect people with low impulse control, et cetera.

00:09:33.560 Now it's gone.

00:09:33.980 So everything you used to have to go to the mob to get is now a fully legitimized multi-billion dollar business.

00:09:40.640 Gambling is one of my favorite examples.

00:09:43.360 You used to have to go to Las Vegas to gamble.

00:09:45.040 Well, now you just pull out your phone where, you know, you know, the, the leagues, poor Pete Rose, I mean, banned for life from baseball for betting.

00:09:55.180 And now the leagues themselves and all their leading stars are like knee deep in gambling.

00:10:02.480 And I think it's really the case that kind of clean cut all American boys like Peyton and Eli and Manning feel completely comfortable getting into the gambling pitch business.

00:10:13.460 It tells you, you know, everything you need to know about how society has changed.

00:10:16.900 And of course, it's going to have horrible damage in our society as a, as drug legalization, as has the elimination of all the usury laws and many other things.

00:10:26.360 And so it's going to be a, uh, more exploitative, more parasitic, uh, society defining life expectancy, et cetera.

00:10:35.300 It's going to be lower trust.

00:10:36.640 I don't think those are things we should want.

00:10:39.260 Yeah.

00:10:39.720 I think it's interesting.

00:10:41.360 You probably, I mean, obviously you had these things.

00:10:44.280 I think if you look at the life of JFK or Martin Luther King Jr.

00:10:47.580 himself, their sexual improprieties were pretty epic.

00:10:50.640 And so I think it's less that those things didn't exist, but you had to, you had to keep that in the background there.

00:10:56.720 There at least had to be an understanding that this was not okay.

00:11:00.240 And this was not the, the foot that you put forward with someone like Donald Trump doesn't really care one way or the other.

00:11:06.220 And it doesn't seem to matter very much one way or the other.

00:11:08.400 It would have never occurred to anyone to say that these affairs were great.

00:11:12.040 And the truth is, if those had been publicized, it probably would have meant the end of them.

00:11:16.900 You know, it was actually noted at the time that Ronald Reagan was the first president who'd ever been divorced.

00:11:24.240 Right.

00:11:24.620 And then in 1987, when Colorado Senator Gary Hart, who was the front runner to be the Democratic nominee in 1988, was revealed in the press to have allegedly had this young woman stay all night in his townhouse in Washington.

00:11:40.780 He was forced to drop out of the race over that.

00:11:43.980 I mean, that would not be happening today.

00:11:45.860 And indeed, so you can, you can really illustrate this change through sex scandals in a lot of ways.

00:11:52.040 Again, look at the difference between Gary Hart and the Clinton Lewinsky scandal in the 1990s, the late 1990s, getting into the neutral world.

00:12:01.920 Badly damaging to Clinton, but he survived it.

00:12:05.200 And then fast forward to, you know, the Trump campaign, October 2016, the Access Hollywood tape.

00:12:12.320 I mean, in retrospect, that was like a 48-hour blip.

00:12:14.920 Nobody even talks about it today.

00:12:17.500 Yeah, it was very interesting.

00:12:18.200 It's like a minor footnote at best.

00:12:20.140 Yeah, it was very interesting in the book that you tried each one of those transitions to a scandal and the way that the public reacted to it.

00:12:25.580 But I think it's also important that you point out this kind of background identity of the United States, because I think one of the problems we have today, particularly on the right, is the notion of identity politics as the core of our problem.

00:12:40.800 There's a lot of truth to that in many ways, right, that the focus on certain types of identity is divisive, and especially those that are completely destructive to the human being, like trans ideology, is destructive. 0.85

00:12:53.880 But I think in many ways, the problem for America is a lack of identity.

00:12:57.680 It used to be that Protestant Christian identity that you were talking about.

00:13:01.640 We had a very wide selection of people from all over, and they had many different traditions, even across a geographically very large country, which would have been many different countries in a place like Europe.

00:13:15.860 We were still able to operate, mainly because we still had this tie of Protestant Christianity.

00:13:20.400 We never really truly had an ethnogenesis in the classic sense in the United States.

00:13:24.880 But the Protestant Christian dynamic and our kind of extreme federalism allowed us to still operate with one shared understanding of American identity.

00:13:34.900 And it feels like the unspooling of that is also the story of your transition of worlds here, where, you know, it's interesting that you point out 1964, I mean, as kind of the beginning of this, that's also the beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution.

00:13:49.500 The next year you get Hart's cellar. There's a lot of things that are tearing away at what had been kind of the Protestant Christian consensus.

00:13:58.140 I think that it existed prior to that, and that makes it very difficult, I think, at this point for us to even have a shared common moral language, because we're all grasping at these terms about justice and freedom, liberty, all these things.

00:14:13.280 But we mean entirely different things by them, because we no longer have that shared identity in Protestant Christianity.

00:14:21.640 Yeah, I mean, the political scientist, Eric Kaufman, did sort of argue that there was an American kind of ethnic ethnogenesis in the early 1800s.

00:14:32.160 As we sort of separated ourselves from our British identity, it was heavily Anglo-Protestant in its conception.

00:14:40.900 And, you know, I think, you know, by the 1950s, that was simply no longer viable because of demographic change.

00:14:47.720 I mean, we were heavily Anglo-Protestant demographically.

00:14:51.680 And then with Ellis Island immigration of people, you know, such as my family from Catholic peasant stock in Germany and Sicily and places like that, others, you know, there was kind of, I think, a svelte need that, you know, we had to expand the circle to become more inclusive of those people.

00:15:12.020 And the idea, I think, originally was that they would, you know, in essence, assimilate into basically American pattern of life and, you know, in return, they would get legitimacy.

00:15:29.280 So if you look, everybody always claims, for example, that JFK didn't wear a hat or at his inauguration or something.

00:15:36.280 In fact, he did. In fact, he was wearing a morning coat and a top hat.

00:15:41.280 And JFK very much imitated the WASP upper class aesthetic and tried to embody, I think, those ideals in his public persona precisely as a way of showing that this, you know, Irish Catholic guy, you know, was really, you know, authentically American too.

00:16:02.380 You know, William F. Buckley's sort of accent and sort of affected WASP mannerisms, even though he was Irish Catholic, was probably something in this line.

00:16:11.940 But maybe with the assassination of Kennedy, that's actually the thing that I latched on to is the sort of date when everything seemed to go crazy.

00:16:19.000 The dream of all this congealing sort of blew up.

00:16:21.960 And rather than sort of this more expansive American identity that would be inclusive of Catholics and Jews and things coming out of World War II and this great victory where all these people fought side by side under the American flag, that dream sort of blew up.

00:16:39.680 And so there's certainly, you know, he'd take a historian to really dig into exactly the whys and wherefores, but we're sort of, we're sort of a little bit in that same condition today as a country where we've had massive demographic change in the country.

00:16:55.460 And so, you know, even the more expansive idea that, you know, we're a Judeo-Christian nation is just going to be completely, increasingly untenable, right, as the demographics of the country change.

00:17:08.280 And so who knows exactly what it's going to be in the future?

00:17:11.520 But it certainly augurs for another redefinition of American identity.

00:17:15.020 So in this situation, obviously, we see a significant shift.

00:17:21.400 You have the strategies that worked in positive and neutral world and then the ones that might work in the negative world.

00:17:29.000 Could you talk a little bit about the assumptions of positive and neutral world, the things that we were attempted there and why they might have led to some of the things we're seeing now?

00:17:38.780 Sure. Well, I identify three different strategies that were undertaken by three different groups of evangelicals.

00:17:47.260 I'm not looking at Catholics or mainlanders. I'm looking at evangelicals specifically.

00:17:51.900 And I identify three, two from the positive world, one from the neutral world.

00:17:56.180 In the positive world, that was culture war and seeker sensitivity. 0.99

00:18:01.000 And in the neutral world, it was what I call cultural engagement.

00:18:05.300 So culture war is the religious right that we know, you know, initiated by people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson in the late 1970s as part of that broader new right movement of the era.

00:18:19.360 I think the very name of Falwell's organization, Moral Majority, it just speaks to a positive world.

00:18:26.600 Now, it may not have been true even then, but at least it was plausible to claim that you spoke for the moral majority.

00:18:35.300 Well, sort of like Nixon's silent majority, if you will. Certainly no one would ever claim that today.

00:18:43.280 And clearly they were not successful at sort of stopping the tide, if you will.

00:18:48.860 Now, whether they could have been successful, I think, is an open question, but they certainly weren't successful.

00:18:55.040 The seeker sensitivity people, that was pioneered by people like Bill Hybels of Willow Creek Church in suburban Chicago or Rick Warren at Saddleback Church in Orange County.

00:19:06.000 And what this group of people did also in the 1970s is saw people weren't attending church.

00:19:11.720 And so they just said, let's build a church that people actually will attend.

00:19:15.920 So the origin story of Willow Creek is that Bill Hybels went door to door in suburban Chicago doing surveys of people.

00:19:22.680 Why don't you go to church? And he said, they gave me an earful.

00:19:27.020 And so you design a church they'll attend. It's let's get rid of all these old denominational distinctives people don't care about, you know, stodgy hymns.

00:19:34.460 Let's be more informal, more contemporary music, more sort of topical therapeutic sermons.

00:19:40.000 And this really became kind of the progenitor of the non-denominational suburban megachurch that we all know,

00:19:47.280 and which in many ways is the evangelical mainstream.

00:19:49.340 I think, though, the very term seeker sensitivity and the very idea of going door to door asking people why they don't go to church,

00:19:57.040 again, that's a very positive world. It assumes a lot of people are seeking and that most people kind of have a vague idea that they should be in church,

00:20:04.540 you know, that they almost have to justify to themselves why they don't go to church.

00:20:09.480 Again, I don't think somebody starting out today would be going door to door in the suburbs asking questions like that.

00:20:14.700 Then the third started in the 1990s as cities came back under people like Mayor Rudy Giuliani in New York.

00:20:21.660 And this is the cultural engagement strategy pioneered by people like Tim Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City.

00:20:29.560 You can think of this either a couple of ways. One is as a seeker sensitivity for the cities.

00:20:34.700 You know, it's just as the high bulls and the warrens reached suburban boomers.

00:20:38.740 These guys were reaching the new educated urbanites.

00:20:41.180 You could also think of it as the opposite of the culture war.

00:20:43.720 Rather than fighting with people all the time, why don't we take advantage of this pluralistic public square and have a conversation with people?

00:20:50.200 And again, this was very successful in its day.

00:20:53.020 And there's still a lot of these people around in cities.

00:20:55.920 But again, I think this idea of engaging with the culture kind of assumes a little bit of a neutral perspective,

00:21:01.640 that the culture is interested in what you have to say,

00:21:04.540 that you can sit down and have that conversation, a good faith conversation,

00:21:08.580 even where there are major differences, and still leave with goodwill.

00:21:13.340 And I think that era is increasingly past in America, you know, not even just religiously,

00:21:18.960 but politically in terms of people's ability to have those conversations.

00:21:22.960 And so I think, you know, they were all sort of built on certain cultural assumptions of those previous eras that are no longer true.

00:21:30.560 And so that's one reason I feel like there's a lot of turmoil in evangelical land today

00:21:37.020 is because people are still doubling down on sort of existing strategies

00:21:41.680 rather than they're developing kind of new strategies,

00:21:44.980 which admittedly I think is very difficult to do in this environment.

00:21:48.160 Absolutely. And I definitely want to touch on those new strategies.

00:21:51.760 And most importantly, I think I want to talk a little bit about why our elites change their disposition to all of this.

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00:23:04.880 So, Aaron, earlier you had mentioned that many people who were attempting to ascend

00:23:11.160 wanted to mimic the WASP culture. 0.71

00:23:13.620 They wanted to signal that even if they weren't from that elite,

00:23:16.840 they understood that it was part of being American and part of leading Americans

00:23:21.220 was to join that elite.

00:23:22.820 And that's what we expect.

00:23:24.320 We're big believers in elite theory on this show.

00:23:27.160 We believe that elites are those that drive things.

00:23:30.220 Wilfredo Pareto talked a lot about the circulation of the elites

00:23:34.220 and the need for those who would rise amongst the elites to rejuvenate its ability

00:23:39.860 to go ahead and still conform to many of the traditions and paths

00:23:44.940 to signal themselves as adopted into that elite,

00:23:48.420 just like you were talking about there.

00:23:50.000 And I'm wondering for you when you think that shift occurred,

00:23:53.540 because it's hard for people not to notice that the Protestants have fallen out

00:23:58.360 of elite culture almost entirely.

00:24:00.360 They've certainly fallen out of all the institutions.

00:24:02.920 When we see people looking to go ahead and place someone on the Supreme Court,

00:24:07.120 it seems invariably to be a Catholic, you know,

00:24:10.140 someone who is not from that kind of classic Protestant background.

00:24:14.600 Why did we end up seeing this shift?

00:24:16.660 Why did we see WASPs seem to abdicate their responsibility 1.00

00:24:20.140 to continue their leadership role inside the United States?

00:24:25.080 That's a great question, in part beyond kind of my expertise.

00:24:31.260 You know, as you may know, I've definitely been partial to the work

00:24:35.840 of a sociologist named E. Digby Baltzell, B-A-L-T-Z-E-L-L,

00:24:40.260 who was the foremost scholar of the American upper class.

00:24:43.440 He basically popularized the term WASP with books like

00:24:47.920 The Philadelphia Gentleman, The Protestant Establishment, 0.74

00:24:51.760 and Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia.

00:24:55.040 I do think the collapse of what they called the old WASP establishment

00:24:58.260 in the 1960s was, you know, a critically important event.

00:25:05.080 You know, and from that, you know, America's leadership culture

00:25:08.780 was irrevocably changed because there was one thing that it had

00:25:14.460 was a sort of hereditary component to it.

00:25:17.740 So it wasn't just the richest person who got the job.

00:25:21.780 It wasn't just the person with the highest test scores who got the job.

00:25:27.760 It was, to some extent, depended on, did you come from one of these families?

00:25:32.620 You know, were you from the right, you know, did you come up through the right institutions

00:25:37.460 in that respect?

00:25:39.520 And there, in some respects, was amazing continuity of some of these lineages.

00:25:44.760 So the president of Yale during the Vietnam War was named Kingman Brewster,

00:25:50.700 and he was the 11th generation descendant of Elder William Brewster from the Mayflower.

00:25:56.840 There were members of the Adams family that were still prominent in America

00:26:01.160 up through certainly the mid-20th century, maybe even to the second half of the 20th century.

00:26:06.320 Charles Francis Adam IV, for example, was the president of Raytheon.

00:26:11.260 And one of the things Baltzl talks about is that when you have this sort of upper class

00:26:15.820 that has this hereditary component to it, they play a key role in society

00:26:21.840 in establishing sort of norms and codes of behavior.

00:26:26.160 The code of the gentleman, what it meant to behave like a gentleman.

00:26:30.600 And if you wanted to be part of their society, you had to live by these codes.

00:26:36.920 And people look to these codes as sort of aspirationally what everyone should aspire to be.

00:26:43.480 It allowed them to sort of enforce the unwritten rules and the norms

00:26:48.220 and the rules of the game of these things.

00:26:51.900 So, you know, what are the interesting things?

00:26:54.220 You'll look at some of these guys.

00:26:56.480 They were so motivated by genuine public service that they actually spent down their entire family fortunes.

00:27:04.160 So, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., I read a biography of him called The Last Brahmin.

00:27:11.480 You know, he basically spent his entire life as things like ambassador to the UN and ambassador to Vietnam, South Vietnam.

00:27:18.800 And, you know, whether you agree whether he did a good job or a bad job,

00:27:22.080 at the end of his life, he's basically selling off artwork to raise funds.

00:27:25.680 I mean, there's nobody like that in America today.

00:27:30.140 You know, you go into public service to get rich, right?

00:27:33.200 Or to get something for yourself or whatever.

00:27:36.940 You know, you're the White House spokesman.

00:27:38.820 And the next thing you know, you're buying multimillion dollar homes.

00:27:41.240 And so I do think the collapse of this establishment created very negative effects in our culture where we have had a turnover of elites who don't come from any social community with standards,

00:27:54.080 whose standards are entirely ideological in nature, not moral or conduct based.

00:27:59.800 And thus, they're constantly changing all the time.

00:28:02.320 So you have to be hyper attuned to what's going on.

00:28:04.620 And so we've certainly had, I think, a not I mean, there's good things about the fact that actually, you know, that you can be Catholic and, you know, get on the Supreme Court.

00:28:16.340 And it's not just, you know, eight Protestants and one Jewish guy, which it was for a while.

00:28:22.320 It is a good thing.

00:28:23.460 On the other hand, it probably shouldn't be zero Protestants either.

00:28:27.260 There actually is one Protestant, but he's actually a convert from Catholicism on there.

00:28:31.900 And there should be a sort of code of conduct and standard of behavior that just doesn't exist in our society.

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00:28:52.780 Well, I think the transition to an ideological society is a critical point because we had an organic understanding.

00:29:02.620 Again, even if it was a bit of a hodgepodge from across Europe, we had the organic understanding bound together under, again, that Protestant Christian identity that, again, had a more natural way of being.

00:29:15.480 It had certain traditions.

00:29:17.100 It was tied in, as you pointed to, you know, because it was very hereditary.

00:29:22.000 And the fact that you basically changed the composition of the United States so radically that you could no longer identify and promise those lines meant that you had to go to a higher level of abstraction to bind the society together.

00:29:34.740 And once you get far enough out, you have to go to the realm of ideology.

00:29:39.120 But the problem of ideology is it's not actually organic.

00:29:42.540 It doesn't actually have the kinds of things that create true social bonds.

00:29:46.900 Exactly.

00:29:47.080 And so it'll throw a coalition together under the head of conservative or, you know, Democrat or Republican or whatever.

00:29:52.880 But it won't actually create the kind of bonds and communities necessary to perpetuate any tradition, any kind of chain of being that really makes people who they are.

00:30:03.380 Yeah. And so as soon as we allowed that that great shift, I think, in who we were as a society, it was inevitable that we were going to have to abstract out the kind of things that bound us together and it would hollow out and lead us to the kind of situation we're in now.

00:30:18.120 Yeah. And I think the other thing that you could probably put on this and which Baltzl missed, in my view, was the managerial revolution.

00:30:25.700 And I think one explanation you could use to see this is essentially the rise of the managerial class.

00:30:34.160 And they have essentially been liquidating, you know, all, you know, obstacles to their unchecked rule or to the unchecked rule of essentially managerialism.

00:30:43.760 One of the core functions of the old upper class is it was actually a community, much like the aristocracy in England.

00:30:51.600 They were a sort of rival power block.

00:30:54.700 They stood apart from corporate power or managerial power or financial power and could be part of this series of like, you know, internal, you know, division within the elites that preserves freedom.

00:31:08.440 Well, you know, managerialism is now liquidated. It's basically liquidated everything else, liquidated those guys.

00:31:15.020 It's liquidated our intermediary institutions. It's done essentially liquidated the family.

00:31:21.140 The family today is certainly nothing like what it was in the 1950s.

00:31:25.520 It's a best a highly contingent entity.

00:31:29.760 You know, the fact that, you know, we're so, you know, we're now seeing, you know, complete abandonment of family formation and having kids and other people.

00:31:36.960 And so I think the advance of managerialism is definitely one of the stories of why all these other things have gone into decline, because the managerial class and sort of the managerial mindset is deeply hostile to anything that might inhibit managerial, you know, structuring of control over society.

00:32:01.000 I think that's right.

00:32:02.060 And in fact, I think there's an insightful book coming out about that soon.

00:32:04.860 It'll state.

00:32:05.540 I imagine so. I imagine so.

00:32:07.700 But but but but we talked about that transition in styles and you pointed out that a lot of this was reliant again on those assumptions of positive and neutral world.

00:32:20.000 You know, assuming that people would have an understanding that the place is the church is a place you should probably be.

00:32:26.080 And this is this is something you should probably participate in.

00:32:29.000 And so we'll just go ahead and change the way that we present church to make it a little a little more interesting to those who may be fallen away from the more stymieing aspects.

00:32:38.940 I think it's interesting that all of those approaches were essentially deconstructions.

00:32:45.400 They were all looking to go ahead and strip away many of the traditions, liturgies, things that, again, provide that structure that maybe put the church in the past.

00:32:55.840 And instead, you know, if we can just remove that stuff and reduce the amount of friction between people and church attendance, then all of a sudden they'll be very interested.

00:33:04.320 That creates the short term burst of attendance that you might get from some of these secret sensitive strategies like you were talking about.

00:33:11.240 But it does seem overall to wear down the ability of, you know, Christianity to actually attract people or keep them engaged.

00:33:18.380 It seems like we're not learning the lesson in many ways, you know, Christians, that it is actually the things that set you apart from the culture that matter. 0.99

00:33:27.680 It's actually the fact that you don't conform to these things, that there are demands placed onto you that actually are more likely to make your your community last longer, especially as the culture around you grows more hostile.

00:33:43.180 It's retreating into the things that separate you, the differences that actually make you longer lasting rather than trying to make yourself as accessible as possible to the culture at large.

00:33:54.960 I agree completely.

00:33:56.120 I would put Vatican II in sort of the same category of, I call them relevant strategies.

00:34:04.200 You know, the idea is, you know, changing church to become more relevant.

00:34:08.340 And there's sort of a double-edged sword there.

00:34:10.920 You know, on the one hand, I think people have long criticized, you know, the shallowness of some of the, you know, seeker sensitive type churches and those things. 1.00

00:34:20.380 On the other hand, it actually did work to get a lot of people in the door.

00:34:23.140 You know, the mainline denominations really dominated the religious landscape of America up through the 1950s.

00:34:30.700 And, you know, when they started losing people, they never really figured out how to get people to come in the door.

00:34:37.360 And, I mean, they tried.

00:34:38.720 I mean, they tried, you know, becoming super liberal politically.

00:34:41.360 Many other things, it didn't work.

00:34:44.920 And, you know, I think we feel keenly the loss of those denominations, by the way.

00:34:50.880 But, yeah, there is this sense that I think when you get into like a negative space versus a positive or a neutral space, the calculus really changes a lot.

00:35:01.440 And, you know, when you are, when Christianity is the sort of default religion of society and there's sort of a normative expectation around it, you do have to have a sort of least common denominator religion.

00:35:13.640 Because if people are expected to go to church on Sunday, you need to have a place for everybody who shows up.

00:35:19.480 You know, they need to be welcome.

00:35:21.480 You can't simultaneously say this is who we are.

00:35:24.380 And it's an extremely difficult standard, only a very few people who can meet.

00:35:29.900 And I do think that as Christianity declines in America, it actually provides new opportunities. 0.97

00:35:36.000 One of them is to say we don't have to be maximally relevant anymore.

00:35:40.140 You know, we don't have to think that, you know, we have to have, you know, everybody just shows up, can kind of feel comfortable as they are.

00:35:48.720 And we're not going to ask them to do all that much or change all that much.

00:35:52.060 You know, I think we can have, we can set a higher bar.

00:35:55.020 And there is going to be a tremendous need for churches to create a culture that is meaningfully distinct from society at large.

00:36:09.640 And that, by the way, doesn't have to mean, you know, hatred of other people out there or actually fighting with them.

00:36:17.640 It just means, like, this is who we are and we live very differently.

00:36:21.440 You know, I just put up an article this week where I said, you know, one of the things I think we ought to do is we need to reject all these vices that are out there.

00:36:31.000 You know, we shouldn't be watching porn.

00:36:33.400 We shouldn't be smoking pot.

00:36:35.240 We shouldn't be gambling on our phone.

00:36:37.440 Probably shouldn't be using profanity.

00:36:39.780 Probably shouldn't be, you know, having other forms of vulgarity and things of that nature.

00:36:44.020 And, again, some of these things, you know, you can have a debate as to whether they're objectively sinful.

00:36:49.920 I just argue, you know, it's like Paul said, all things are lawful, but not all things are profitable.

00:36:55.860 And so I think, you know, which activities are profitable?

00:36:59.000 We need to have a distinct community.

00:37:01.160 The truth is, you know, I think the Mormons had actually done a great job of this.

00:37:05.140 You know, they've managed to create an environment in which people still basically get and stay married, in which people are generally very successful in life.

00:37:15.240 And, you know, you look at Utah, which is very Mormon dominated.

00:37:18.280 It's an extremely high functioning society.

00:37:20.400 It's like the last American state where it's still like the old America in terms of being an intact, higher trust, you know, socially functional society.

00:37:32.100 And, you know, I think more and more, you know, we're going to have to have, and this is going to be, I think it's going to be a theme even apart from religion.

00:37:39.440 We're becoming a low trust society.

00:37:41.080 And in a low trust society, you have to have communities of actual trust, you know, actual genuine trusted relationships to draw on because you're not going to be able to just by default rely on the stranger.

00:37:55.760 That means the people who don't have family are going to be at a disadvantage in life.

00:38:01.200 It means the people who aren't part of like a high trust church, you know, are going to be at a disadvantage in life.

00:38:07.200 And so I think we're going to be seeing this.

00:38:09.940 Yeah, I did a, I did a stream with Daryl Cooper, the Martyr Maid podcast.

00:38:15.460 Yeah, yeah.

00:38:16.940 And we talked about why the state ends up breaking up, you know, families, ends up breaking up higher trust communities.

00:38:24.720 It has to, in order for it to kind of, as we spoke about with Manageo revolution and increase its power.

00:38:30.800 And so one of the things that, you know, yes, decline bad, but also decline good in this way.

00:38:35.960 One of the things that happens, as you said, is when people can't rely on the state anymore, when they can't assume the high function, the high trust of the society, they have to start looking to rebound themselves into those communities.

00:38:47.180 It's no longer an option.

00:38:48.560 It's just default and assume that everyone around you is going to have some level of social coordination.

00:38:54.900 And so you have to start searching for those groups again.

00:38:58.020 Yeah.

00:38:58.160 And it's also, I think, undermining the state in a sense.

00:39:03.700 I mean, we've basically got a bet going on.

00:39:06.500 You know, will our technology advance fast enough to replace human buy-in into the system?

00:39:14.300 Right.

00:39:14.460 Or will the system collapse first?

00:39:15.980 I mean, like, you know, the, you know, complete catastrophic collapse in trust in public education post-COVID that's been going on, not just among religious people, but others.

00:39:28.460 You know, the 11% of people now homeschooling.

00:39:31.740 Private schools, like, have lines out the door.

00:39:33.880 People are getting out.

00:39:35.280 People are, you know, the collapse in enlistment in the military, which I think is a beautiful thing.

00:39:39.940 You shouldn't have, you know, I'm not saying no one should enlist in the military, but the fact is this idea that, you know, sort of the, you know, you know, proverbial Trump voting families in, you know, rural America need to keep sending their sons to die or get their arms blown off in the service of some foreign war.

00:40:01.820 That doesn't make a whole lot of sense, you know, and, you know, people are checking out and it's a huge problem.

00:40:07.880 I mean, the decline in military enlistment really is a huge problem for the system.

00:40:13.760 And so sort of the fact that people are hitting the exits on these institutions because they have so undermined, they themselves have undermined trust in the system really is a serious issue there.

00:40:27.540 And again, they don't have the, you know, they can disrupt your organizations and things of that nature.

00:40:32.600 Yes, they can, but it's very hard for them to get you to, you know, be actively investing back into their system.

00:40:38.820 And that's an interesting question, I think, for a lot of Christians, because simultaneously, they're naturally conservative.

00:40:47.280 They want to commute, you know, they want to go ahead and contribute to their community.

00:40:50.140 They want to be a positive force.

00:40:52.440 But at the same time, it's hard to do that because every major system that you look at is actively hostile to them, is actually applying poisonous ideology to everything around it.

00:41:03.040 And so they probably look at these situations and say, you know, I want to be someone with honor.

00:41:08.040 I want to be someone who's a powerful social force.

00:41:10.140 I want to be contributing.

00:41:11.620 And the fact that we abandoned many of these institutions early on to thinking that they would remain neutral without constant evangelical Christian involvement was kind of one of the problems.

00:41:22.860 But what do I do in this situation where, you know, are these institutions too far gone?

00:41:28.540 Can we save them through entryism?

00:41:30.160 Do we create something new in parallel?

00:41:31.740 Like, what is the solution to the Christian who wants to be involved but recognizes that the institutions that they would normally involve themselves in are completely rotted through? 0.84

00:41:42.600 Sure.

00:41:43.180 I mean, I'm not a pastor or a theologian.

00:41:46.360 You know, I always say that.

00:41:48.100 So this is sort of my own lay reading of the New Testament.

00:41:51.320 You know, one time I made a list of all the commands that Paul issued in his epistles, and I divided them into various categories.

00:41:59.500 And the thing, one of the things that really came through to me is he had remarkably little to say about the world outside of the church.

00:42:06.180 And most of it was really about how to accommodate yourself to it with the least disruption.

00:42:12.780 How to avoid, you know, having the eye of Caesar fall on you, for example.

00:42:17.100 So he would say, pay taxes to whom taxes is due, give honor to whom honor is due, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men, all of that sort of stuff.

00:42:27.340 And I think there's a lot of wisdom there.

00:42:28.880 I think a lot of evangelicals candidly go out of their way to make themselves unpopular in ways that's not necessary to do.

00:42:36.680 You know, and on the other hand, he was not saying that you should try to prop, actively prop up the institutions of the Roman Imperium.

00:42:44.220 He wasn't actually concerned with them all that much.

00:42:46.860 He was mostly concerned with life inside the church and how Christians were living.

00:42:51.240 And he also prioritized, you know, the needs of the church, the needs of the people who were in the church, right?

00:42:58.320 When they were, you know, even from the earliest church, selling their property and bringing it in, they were giving the money to the widows in the church and distributing it to the widows in the church.

00:43:07.180 So, yes, it's good to help other people, as Paul said, do good to all men, but also especially to the household of the faith, I think, as he said.

00:43:17.000 And so, you know, I don't think Paul was telling people, I didn't think they were basically telling people, let's go prop up a corrupt system by becoming a Roman legionnaire or something of that nature.

00:43:30.360 It's like, let's create, you know, a distinct form of community here that models, you know, the kingdom of God and a new way of living.

00:43:39.640 And then it will work out into the world through the way that we do sort of serve others at the retail level, helping the poor, for example.

00:43:49.500 However, that looks like in our society may be different than how it looked like in that, but that's still very much part, I think, very much part of the mission of the church.

00:43:57.220 But, you know, propping up the instruments of the globalist American empire, I don't think is any more the call of the church than propping up, you know, the imperium of Rome was an imperative for the church.

00:44:12.840 Yeah, and I think that's right, but I think it's really hard for a lot of people to make that mentality shift because a lot of people, I think, are, they have what I like to call boomer eschatology, where we have, you know, it's the church, America and Christianity were the same thing.

00:44:27.220 And they were always going to be the same thing.

00:44:29.620 And the only way they could imagine, basically, like, America not ushering in the new millennium, you know, was if the return of Christ, like, that's it.

00:44:39.060 There's no way that America could fall.

00:44:40.920 There's no way that the Christianity of America could fall away.

00:44:44.200 This was the end of history.

00:44:45.720 This is the right-wing evangelical version of the end of history.

00:44:49.520 Boomer eschatology. 0.89

00:44:50.580 I want to remember that one.

00:44:51.780 Yeah, yeah.

00:44:52.520 And so there's just this idea that they didn't need to protect it and they didn't need to, that basically the institutions in the United States would always uphold, you know, the Constitution especially, would just always ensure that America was going to be Christian forever and its institutions would be Christian forever.

00:45:08.400 And investment in those institutions was investment in Christianity.

00:45:12.100 And so I think it's very hard for them to shift to something you talk about in the book, which I like, which is the adopting the minority position. 0.95

00:45:20.040 What do minorities that want to protect themselves, you know, how do they interact in a society?

00:45:24.960 I think it's hard to make that switch when you still are wrapped up in that boomer eschatology. 0.62

00:45:28.940 For sure.

00:45:30.260 I mean, you know, the reality is Protestant Christians were the demographic majority of the country.

00:45:37.360 I believe the Protestants are still maybe a plurality in America, believe it or not.

00:45:42.800 Protestant by identity, at least.

00:45:45.280 Down, down to a minority and shrinking.

00:45:48.680 You know, certainly Christianity, you know, was the majority, you know, position in America.

00:45:54.500 You know, a lot of people talk about, like, the mainline versus fundamental debates, you know, the old debates between the liberal Protestantism and, you know, traditional Protestantism.

00:46:04.660 But when it came to ethics and moral, they all believed the same thing.

00:46:08.280 You know, they might have disagreed about the virgin birth, but they had no disagreement about, like, adultery, you know, thou shalt not commit adultery and things of that nature.

00:46:17.020 They agreed on that stuff.

00:46:18.520 And, like, now it's a painful shift when you're used to, when you consider yourself the majority, and now you are a minority.

00:46:29.140 And it can be very embittering when people realize that, in part, they have become a minority through the conscious actions of, you know, some people in society and choices that were made along the way.

00:46:43.260 But you've got to adapt to that new reality.

00:46:48.480 That's the fact.

00:46:49.520 And that's where, like, you know, I point to early 20th century Catholicism as a model because, you know, Catholics never had this sort of mindset that they were the majority of America.

00:47:00.400 And so they always had to self-consciously steward and sustain a distinctively Catholic identity within this Protestant country.

00:47:10.320 And so sort of Protestant, you know, evangelicals and Protestants have to learn from what other minority groups have done.

00:47:19.780 And I think, again, you know, I think Catholicism is a good example, early 20th century Catholicism is a good example to follow.

00:47:28.640 But you could think the Mormons may be another good example to follow.

00:47:32.620 You know, evangelicals now have to create an identity for themselves that is distinct from this idea that being an American and being an evangelical, it's like all, you know, that's all part of the same complex of things.

00:47:47.380 Because it's not.

00:47:48.900 The irony is it's the sort of progressive evangelicals, the ones who are always saying things like, we should identify primarily with Christians around the world.

00:47:59.380 We're not—citizenship is not in America.

00:48:01.920 You know, our citizenship is in heaven.

00:48:03.660 All that stuff people like Russell Moore and David French would spout.

00:48:06.900 The truth is, if you actually took that seriously, you would say, yeah, Protestant Christians should be much more concerned about bonding with other Protestant Christians here in America and a lot less about propping up the globalist American empire.

00:48:23.340 You know, those are not the same things.

00:48:25.640 You know, they don't actually take their own rhetoric, I think, as seriously as they could.

00:48:30.820 And if you think about it that way, if you just listen to what they have to say and take it seriously, well, then, it does lead to that sense of creating a distinctive—an identity that doesn't reject American citizenship and say that we're not citizens of America, we should hate our country or anything of that nature.

00:48:49.460 But it also says, you know, just being an American and being kind of an evangelical are not the same—exact same thing in America is not going to embody the values that you have in your religion.

00:49:03.280 You have to get beyond—you have to get beyond boomer eschatology there.

00:49:07.280 Absolutely.

00:49:08.000 We have a lot of questions stacking up, so I want to switch over to those in a second because I want to get through those.

00:49:14.580 But before we do, I have one more question I wanted to ask you.

00:49:17.840 I think another big aspect of what's happening is the end of an unenchanted world.

00:49:25.380 We've kind of—the Enlightenment experiment has run its course.

00:49:30.320 We've made things as hyper-rational as we can.

00:49:34.680 And I think we're running kind of into the end of the utility of that for human beings in general and certainly for Christians who have been trying to do that to their own faith in many ways. 0.94

00:49:48.480 I think re-enchantment is a step that we're seeing.

00:49:51.780 I think that's why you see a lot of people looking at things like Eastern Orthodox Christianity because it's something that has a far more mystical aspect in ways that hyper-Protestant denominations probably didn't have access to.

00:50:05.400 And Alexander Dugan talks about how there's a post-postmodern moment where your modernism is the death of God and kind of your post-postmodernism moment is the death of who.

00:50:19.060 People don't even know what that means anymore.

00:50:22.880 There's not even the question of the death of what deity.

00:50:27.780 And I noticed this because when I was teaching, a lot of the kids—in fact, I had entire classrooms of kids who couldn't even tell you anything about the birth of Christ.

00:50:36.320 They didn't know what Bethlehem was.

00:50:37.860 They didn't know who Mary and Joseph were.

00:50:39.920 They're just—it's not that they're unchurched.

00:50:42.240 It's that they literally just are complete voids culturally.

00:50:45.360 Like, they can tell you what Pepsi and Pizza Hut symbols look like, but they have zero connection to anything of the spiritual.

00:50:55.720 And in some ways, that's super terrifying.

00:50:57.620 But in other ways, it means that there's a whole generation without any of the baggage that came with kind of these culture wars and all these things, these attitudes about Christianity.

00:51:09.020 And I wonder what you think about the idea that, you know, moving forward, that that creates a whole nother—there's a whole nother paradigm about how you can approach those people and the way that we do so might not fall in line with kind of our previous hyper-rational understandings of trying to justify Christianity to a modern person.

00:51:31.760 I agree. I think that's a great insight.

00:51:35.200 You know, I hadn't necessarily thought about it that way.

00:51:37.820 But you're right. These younger generations, the Gen Zs or even the Gen Alphas, they're not going to have this legacy baggage of the culture wars in a way that a lot of the people who are writing for some of the magazines and things today do.

00:51:53.520 I agree completely about re-enchantment as a huge theme.

00:51:57.480 You know, Rod Dreher is writing a book about re-enchantment.

00:52:00.720 He's very good at putting his finger on things earlier.

00:52:03.820 I think it's going to be one of the big themes of the next decade.

00:52:07.600 And, you know, yes, it's going to be in the church, but I think also we see it in the world as well, the search for re-enchantment.

00:52:17.060 And I think this rise of sort of a New Age spirituality, you know, that we're seeing is very much aligned with that.

00:52:25.740 What do I mean by New Age? Everybody who's into psychedelics as a gateway to spiritual experience.

00:52:32.000 I'm going to go on an ayahuasca trip, you know, to South America or something.

00:52:37.040 I think the Jordan Peterson phenomenon is heavily driven by a sort of New Age sensibility, sort of his sort of Jungian mysticism there.

00:52:49.920 You know, he's got a new book out called We Who Wrestle with God.

00:52:52.980 I don't think it's actually out yet, but he's got a tour.

00:52:54.660 I went to see him and it occurs to me, you know, his, you know, one of the things that put him on the map was his Genesis lectures.

00:53:01.360 And this idea of taking the old religious content and packaging it in a sort of New Age way, you know, to the people who are hungry for spirituality, I think is there.

00:53:13.740 And I do think there's a huge lesson from the rise of Jordan Peterson that it shows that people are hungry for something.

00:53:24.220 You know, they're hungry for something.

00:53:25.840 And he very much tapped into it and he was able to, you know, attract people from a variety of things.

00:53:32.420 But one of his gifts was to talk about the Bible and religious themes in a sort of way that's compelling to people, that sort of speaks to what the types of questions that they're trying to get answers to today, the types of voids that they're trying to fill.

00:53:53.580 And so I do think his understandings of the Bible are far from orthodox.

00:54:00.180 Let me put it to you that way.

00:54:01.300 I don't think it's any accident that this guy who talks about the Bible all the time rarely actually engages with actual orthodox Christians.

00:54:11.140 Other than Jonathan Pagot, the Eastern Orthodox icon painter whose hyper-symbolic understandings of the world align very well with Peterson, he doesn't seem to have a lot of, like, traditional Christian guests on his shows talking about things.

00:54:26.100 Because he knows that he's not, he's far from orthodox Christianity. 0.98

00:54:30.540 But I think if we could find a different way, and I think as you mentioned, the rise of Eastern Orthodox faith, it's showing that a sort of different way of talking about what it means to be a Christian.

00:54:41.220 One that's not rooted in a sort of hyper-rationalistic, you know, maybe ultra-Calvinistic type of, you know, intellectualized approach to the faith can be quite compelling to people.

00:54:55.820 It's also why Pentecostalism has been growing so powerfully.

00:55:00.180 It gives people the sense of a genuine encounter with the divine and speaks to the real-world problems, you know, that people are having.

00:55:08.520 I don't think it's any accident that Pentecostalism is very strong among people with very serious problems.

00:55:15.480 You know, because if you're a recovering drug addict, you are keenly aware that without the power of the Holy Spirit, you are sunk.

00:55:23.900 And so I think that there are these things.

00:55:26.300 This is a way to think about evangelism and mission.

00:55:29.040 I wish I could have put some of that in the book that you just said, because I do think this idea of thinking about a re-enchanted view and how we talk about faith and talk about the world is very important.

00:55:39.260 Absolutely. All right, guys, we're going to transition over to the questions of the people.

00:55:44.240 But before we do, Aaron, could you go ahead and let people know everything, the name of the book, where they can find it, everything like that?

00:55:50.680 The book is Life in the Negative World, Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture. 0.91

00:55:56.280 You can buy it, obviously, on Amazon or anywhere else. Fine books are sold.

00:56:00.780 Anyone should be able to get you a copy if they don't have it in stock.

00:56:04.740 Life in the Negative World.

00:56:05.940 And then all of my writing, you know, I put up on my own newsletter, AaronRenn.com, A-A-R-O-N-R-E-N-N.com.

00:56:13.920 Please go there and sign up so we can stay in touch.

00:56:18.220 Excellent. All right. Let's get over to our questions here.

00:56:22.120 Fizzlecrack says, I know you don't like Berinsko.

00:56:25.740 I don't know who that is, so I don't know how I could not like it.

00:56:28.100 Maybe Aaron does, but she found a real big political party of the commies who have a plan to topple the U.S. government. 0.90

00:56:33.640 Please look into it.

00:56:34.560 I got to say, sorry.

00:56:36.080 I don't know this person.

00:56:36.600 Yeah, sorry.

00:56:37.500 Borysenko, I don't know that person.

00:56:38.900 Yeah, maybe they have made an amazing discovery.

00:56:40.960 I mean, I don't think you have to look very hard to find a party full of communists who want to topple the United States.

00:56:46.020 I think it's called the Democratic Party.

00:56:48.420 Cooper Weirdo says, I know it's not the biggest problem in on the right, but how do we stop the Catholic Protestant faith measuring contest?

00:56:56.220 It's annoying and not hetero.

00:56:58.640 Yeah, I mean, obviously, we have bigger fish to fry at the moment.

00:57:01.880 I think that that's a big story for Christians in general.

00:57:07.860 But Aaron, what do you think about the internecine Christian conflict?

00:57:12.280 You know, I'm not as familiar with this one either.

00:57:14.180 I guess maybe I don't, you know, I'm not like a Catholic hater by any means.

00:57:18.300 Yeah, I think there's just a lot.

00:57:20.560 I think there's always a desire to kind of, you know, own a particular space.

00:57:26.560 And, you know, there's certainly differences there, to be sure, guys.

00:57:29.720 But I don't think now is the time.

00:57:32.580 Let's see here.

00:57:34.580 Matt Greeter says, it's crazy that gambling has become so popularized and isn't taboo anymore.

00:57:38.680 Another vice that we've suddenly decided is totally fine.

00:57:41.260 I agree.

00:57:43.460 It's really kind of insane to think about that, you know, the government's in on it.

00:57:49.840 You know, they can't legalize different forms of gambling fast enough.

00:57:54.400 Everybody knows that it's like the 3%, 5% of people who are prone to gambling addiction,

00:58:01.280 who are the people where a lot of the profits come from.

00:58:04.760 It's literally a form of exploitation, highly asymmetric.

00:58:08.620 First, we know the house always wins.

00:58:10.780 Secondly, on these phone apps, you know, these companies are using the same sort of cutting-edge

00:58:15.720 psychological techniques, you know, that the social media companies use to keep you scrolling.

00:58:20.920 They're using it to keep you betting.

00:58:23.520 And, you know, it's, you know, this is the world we live in.

00:58:28.760 Yeah, it's amazing that people don't understand.

00:58:31.120 And, I mean, look, there's always going to be vice, but putting those barriers between

00:58:35.500 people and bad decisions matters.

00:58:37.760 And the more you can deliver these things to the phone in people's pockets, the more you're

00:58:42.400 going to guarantee their ubiquity.

00:58:44.320 And so I think that, you know, that's exactly right.

00:58:46.660 The other thing I'd say is, you know, here's the stone-cold reality, unfortunately.

00:58:51.640 If you ask the very people who are most victimized by these things, you know, or even took a poll,

00:58:57.840 let's take a poll among the quote-unquote conservatives who are going to vote for Trump.

00:59:02.480 I guess, I doubt that there would be a majority for rolling back gambling legalization.

00:59:07.400 I think very few people support it.

00:59:08.980 The reality is, you know, it's like the old H.L. Mencken quote, that democracy is the belief

00:59:15.140 that people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

00:59:18.620 Unfortunately, that's what we're getting.

00:59:20.220 I think the same thing with usury.

00:59:22.000 You know, like, as you mentioned, these are just things that have become so normalized.

00:59:26.160 Most people can't imagine operating an economy without it.

00:59:29.060 And because of that, you see an amazing amount of financial damage and moral damage done to

00:59:34.780 our communities.

00:59:35.720 But again, people would just have a hard time understanding how that would even get rolled

00:59:39.080 back at this point.

00:59:40.440 Right.

00:59:41.620 Maximilian Cunning says, what's the replacement for profit-centric managerialism we live under

00:59:46.360 now?

00:59:46.640 We need alternative to commie economic agitation.

00:59:49.220 Well, I think this is a structural problem, first and foremost.

00:59:52.960 Again, there's a book coming out about this if you want to get into detail.

00:59:56.900 But I think scale is the enemy.

00:59:59.100 And I think that managerialism is unavoidable as long as we intend to operate our civilizations

01:00:04.980 at the scale we do now.

01:00:06.500 And so if we don't intend to scale down our political units, we simply cannot escape the

01:00:12.640 structures that they currently hold.

01:00:13.920 Yeah, I would agree with that in general.

01:00:17.600 But I think it's interesting to look at the rise of artificial intelligence.

01:00:23.220 The truth is that if it develops in the proper directions and is allowed to develop in the

01:00:31.940 proper directions, AI provides a plausible alternative to many of the managers.

01:00:39.760 And if AI is targeted at eliminating the managerial class, then, you know, AI allows us to essentially

01:00:51.980 change, you know, again, have a little bit of a change in the leadership structure of

01:00:57.480 society on that basis.

01:00:59.600 I think AI is the potential game changer.

01:01:02.840 And of course, I would expect the managerial class to do everything in their power to

01:01:08.940 prevent AI from doing that. 0.98

01:01:11.660 But well, they're making it as dumb as possible right now for a reason. 0.96

01:01:14.420 Yeah. 0.99

01:01:14.860 Right.

01:01:15.720 Aaron Wren, actually a closet Nick Land fan.

01:01:18.400 Are you familiar with Nick Land at all?

01:01:20.580 You know, I do.

01:01:21.700 I haven't read much Nick Land, you know, but let's just say I think I've been influenced

01:01:28.200 by people who are influenced by Nick Land on that point.

01:01:30.940 Yeah, it's not quite accelerationism.

01:01:33.220 You know, I don't think I fully understand accelerationism, but I do think, you know,

01:01:37.080 one of the things that the managerial writers like Burnham and his predecessors note is,

01:01:42.300 you know, the elite class is a product of where the wealth, the people who control the wealth

01:01:47.740 producing entities of society.

01:01:50.600 So we went agricultural was when we have an agricultural wealth producing system.

01:01:54.840 It was a feudal economy.

01:01:56.400 You know, when we shifted to, you know, a manufacturing-based, commercial-based economy,

01:02:01.320 you know, we went to a, you know, essentially laissez-faire, you know, the capitalist, the

01:02:06.700 mercantile class.

01:02:07.880 Then as we got so big, the managerial took over.

01:02:11.060 So if we don't have something to change the basic economic structure of society in some

01:02:17.600 way, we're not going to have a change in elites.

01:02:20.440 See, guys, we get to do a little Marxism, too.

01:02:22.200 You get it all here today.

01:02:23.000 And I think, well, I think that is true.

01:02:24.060 I mean, I think, I really believe the biggest flaw in conservative thinking is the lack of

01:02:30.340 attention paid to material conditions.

01:02:33.140 Not just economic, not just the economy properly so-called, but changes in the structures of

01:02:40.540 society, you know, changes in, you know, many things.

01:02:44.060 I mean, you know, ideas have consequences, but lots of other things have consequences,

01:02:49.420 too.

01:02:50.640 And, you know, so I'm not, I don't shy away from saying that material forces are extraordinarily

01:02:55.500 powerful.

01:02:56.680 Yeah, this is why we, this is where we get our distributist lecture, right?

01:02:59.460 All right.

01:03:00.380 Kruper Weirdo says, how does the Jesus Revolution fit into all this?

01:03:07.320 I'm not super, I know, I know a little bit of the background of the Jesus Revolution,

01:03:10.420 but I feel like it was mentioned in the book, right?

01:03:12.500 There's, uh, are you talking about the Jesus movement?

01:03:16.340 Wasn't there a film?

01:03:16.860 I think that's probably what he meant.

01:03:17.420 There's a film called Jesus Revolution that might have been about the Jesus movement.

01:03:21.320 Yeah.

01:03:22.260 Yeah.

01:03:22.800 So the, the Jesus movement was basically sort of the Christian expression of the counterculture.

01:03:27.660 Contemporary Christian music came out of that.

01:03:31.700 Um, and, um, you know, I'm not an expert on it.

01:03:36.600 Um, but, uh, I would, I sort of see it as a sort of a precursor maybe of,

01:03:42.220 uh, strands flowing into seeker sensitivity that I do.

01:03:45.840 I do mention in the book that I think some of the developments around informality and

01:03:50.900 contemporary music very much flowed into what became seeker sensitivity.

01:03:56.540 Uh, life of Brian here says, how does managerialism glom into cover ideologies like fascism and

01:04:02.340 communism?

01:04:02.880 They never call themselves managerialists.

01:04:04.880 Yeah.

01:04:05.000 Again, uh, this was the thesis of the managerial revolution by James Burnham was the idea that

01:04:10.100 whether it be fascism, communism, or liberal democracy, all modern states were managerial

01:04:15.900 in nature.

01:04:16.560 And we're the only difference you were looking at was the kind of the way the political

01:04:21.340 formula justified managerial power.

01:04:23.460 And more importantly, uh, whether or not it was a hard or soft managerial, uh, class,

01:04:28.680 we ended up with the soft managerial class, soft managerial, uh, system, the Fox led system

01:04:34.320 tended to be more resilient, uh, especially because the majority of the problems that managerial

01:04:39.840 societies were trying to assess were ones that were logistical and coordination based rather

01:04:44.520 than, uh, hard power based.

01:04:46.800 Uh, and so, uh, that, that's why you end up seeing this get three different coats of paint,

01:04:52.220 but always being a similar structure.

01:04:54.940 All, all economies had to become centrally planned, uh, functionally.

01:04:58.400 And we just came up with three different excuses for why we were going to do that.

01:05:02.400 Yeah.

01:05:02.940 I don't, um, I don't think it's useful to talk about things like communism or fascism today

01:05:09.040 because those ideologies as understood don't exist anymore.

01:05:13.140 You know, I don't think there are very many people who are communist or socialist in terms

01:05:19.200 of things like, you know, wanting state ownership of the means of production.

01:05:23.300 I mean, there are a few, um, but you know, we apply these names to things that are very

01:05:29.220 different from what they were before.

01:05:31.380 And I think it obscures more than it reveals.

01:05:34.380 Yeah.

01:05:34.840 I think the mystery Grove, uh, definition of communism, which is like, it's just an ideology

01:05:39.360 for ugly people to destroy people and take things that works a little bit, but yeah, if 0.72

01:05:44.340 you're actually talking about the real application of, you know, uh, Gentile's fascism or, or Marxism,

01:05:50.800 like these things simply don't actually get applied.

01:05:52.740 I mean, there were also things like, you know, Francois Meterhahn was a socialist of

01:05:56.760 sorts.

01:05:57.300 He did want to nationalize companies, you know, and he, people wanted to do things like that.

01:06:03.820 You know, that was still a live issue, you know, in the 1980s, whether you should nationalize

01:06:08.680 banks, nationalize major companies in Europe.

01:06:11.020 Like nobody talks like that anymore.

01:06:14.940 Uh, let's see, uh, Jacob Zendel.

01:06:17.300 You may be pleased to know that when you add the total state to the court on Amazon, Bertrand

01:06:21.660 DeJuvenal is the frequently bought together recommendation.

01:06:25.140 Yes.

01:06:25.340 Yes.

01:06:25.740 I appreciate that very much.

01:06:27.160 Definitely a heavy influence and honor to be paired with him on Amazon.

01:06:31.720 Uh, Florida Henry says, love you guys, but it's over Reaganomics gutted middle America

01:06:36.500 and funneled money to the hateful coast. 0.72

01:06:38.740 Uh, I worked all over and everyone is fat, drugged and hopeless. 0.94

01:06:42.440 Henry. 0.63

01:06:43.100 I appreciate that.

01:06:44.240 I understand what you're saying, man, but, uh, sorry, it's not over.

01:06:47.140 It's just not, um, there's, there's still plenty of hope.

01:06:50.020 It's, it's going to be on the other side of some difficult things, but there's plenty

01:06:53.580 of hope, man.

01:06:54.540 Yeah.

01:06:55.020 I always tell people do not become invested in the idea that America is over and, uh, that

01:07:01.080 the system is crumbling.

01:07:02.480 I do think people are withdrawing trust from the system.

01:07:05.620 And I think that's healthy because until, um, you know, until there is a problem, we typically

01:07:11.000 don't address the problem, you know?

01:07:13.780 And, um, you know, but the idea that like, this is the worst it's ever been, you know, the

01:07:18.460 civil war wasn't, you know, that was a much era, that was a much greater threat to the

01:07:22.160 country.

01:07:22.720 The depression was a much greater threat to the country and you might not like the solutions,

01:07:28.060 but people came up with essentially institutional refreshes.

01:07:31.920 We redefined what America was.

01:07:34.100 We sort of rewrote the constitution a little bit after the civil war.

01:07:38.100 We did the same thing.

01:07:38.820 Just a little bit.

01:07:39.160 Yeah.

01:07:39.420 We did the same thing, you know, uh, with the new deal and then with the post-war, uh,

01:07:44.720 security architecture and all these things, there were problems.

01:07:48.460 You know, you know, the civil rights act was a response to legitimate problems, you know,

01:07:53.320 in society.

01:07:53.920 It wasn't some, it wasn't just some plot to seize power.

01:07:57.520 And so we've, you know, we've seen these problems and we've come up with institutional

01:08:01.500 solutions to those problems.

01:08:03.500 Now that I think there's a real question as to whether our current elite class, you know,

01:08:08.840 our managerial class is actually capable of creating these institutional refreshes in

01:08:15.900 the way that the old WASPs were, the WASPs were capable of building things like the post-war 0.97

01:08:21.580 security architecture.

01:08:22.900 So it is an open question.

01:08:24.420 I wouldn't say it's guaranteed, but, you know, you know, say in the seventies, you know, we

01:08:28.820 did figure out how to crush inflation and reform became a bipartisan consensus, uh, around,

01:08:35.760 you know, things like deregulation, which actually began under Carter, not Reagan, uh, things of that

01:08:40.340 nature. And so I think, you know, I'm actually optimistic in one sense, and I think there are

01:08:45.580 increasing numbers of people across the political spectrum who realize that we have very serious

01:08:51.280 problems as a country. And we actually do need to make substantive changes, uh, related to, some of

01:08:59.660 it's related to competition with China. Some of it's related to, oh, we realize our defense

01:09:04.080 industrial base, uh, is, is eroding. Some of it's, we're realizing that our, you know, our, you know,

01:09:09.780 our human capital is becoming degraded and not everybody agrees on what to do, but there are a

01:09:14.500 lot, I sometimes get invited to these little weekend retreat things where they bring together

01:09:19.920 people from different political persuasions to talk about issues. It's amazing how much agreement

01:09:24.360 there is on a lot of things that people wouldn't say publicly. And so, um, you know, I think there's a

01:09:31.440 growing recognition of some of these things, even among, you know, the secular elite class and,

01:09:36.680 you know, will the, will the politics align for that at some point? Who knows, but I think it's,

01:09:41.580 I'm not, I'm not counting out America. I think historically we have risen to the challenge

01:09:45.700 and we shouldn't want America to, to fail. We should want, you know, uh, you know, we should want

01:09:53.600 the country to transform in a positive way. Well, I do think that the story of America has been

01:10:01.220 the centralization of power. I think that, you know, whether it be the civil war or the civil

01:10:06.260 rights movement, especially the civil rights movement was, you know, while legitimate problems

01:10:11.140 were there, it was mainly used by the managerial elite to create a power structure that allowed

01:10:16.380 them to govern from the state of exception and not through the constitution. And I think that that

01:10:21.920 will probably continue a pace until people understand that there's a, there's a wider problem

01:10:26.700 there. I do, I am with you that I think it's good that people do divest from current structures.

01:10:33.720 I am long on the American people, but I'm not long on the current American structure. I don't think

01:10:39.920 that that can, that can continue to hold. Um, but no, you're right. You're right about that. And the

01:10:44.780 truth is we're not still using, we're like on our third or fourth iteration of the structures of

01:10:50.460 America. Oh yeah. Changing the structures of America is as American as apple pie. Yeah. And so

01:10:55.760 anybody that tells you that, you know, NATO as originally conceived is like just as sacred as

01:11:04.280 the declaration of independence, like, no, we created NATO because we needed it. And now we're

01:11:10.460 going to say, what do we need today when it comes to China? For example, I'm pretty sure NATO is not

01:11:16.000 going to help us with China. So we need to think about what we need. That's new. What we need is

01:11:20.540 different for the challenges of the 21st century. Uh, last question here. CB says, uh, thought on

01:11:27.020 thoughts on bringing more men into church. Does Christianity have a masculinity problem? 0.91

01:11:32.860 I will say, uh, definitely by the book, life in the negative world, the longest chapter is on gender. 0.79

01:11:39.760 I think there's huge issues in the church, uh, things that are just not being taught at all,

01:11:45.020 uh, entire, um, sections about what it means to be a man or woman or not talked about.

01:11:50.420 And then a lot of the things that are being said are wrong. And to be honest, it's quite embarrassing

01:11:56.000 when you have so many secular influencers who are drawing hordes of men and they're not all bad

01:12:04.860 people. You know, yes, Andrew Tate is a bad person. Jocko Willink is not a bad person. He's like,

01:12:10.460 I'm actually like telling you like productive, healthy things to do. And yet people are not

01:12:15.540 turning to the church. I think it's embarrassing, uh, that you're considered not just, uh, again,

01:12:21.980 not just wrong, but just irrelevant to the questions people are asking about their lives.

01:12:27.120 Absolutely. All right, guys, well, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up. Make sure to go ahead

01:12:31.020 and check out the negative world. I think it has a lot of very interesting things today and, uh,

01:12:36.020 to say, and make sure to check out the rest of Aaron's work. Of course, if this is your first time

01:12:40.500 on this channel, make sure you go ahead and subscribe, turn on notifications, hit the bell

01:12:44.760 so that you can see when our shows go live. And of course, if you'd like to get these broadcasts

01:12:49.540 as podcasts, make sure that you go ahead and subscribe to the Oro McIntyre show on your favorite

01:12:53.100 podcast platform. When you do leave a rating or review, it really helps with the algorithm magic.

01:12:58.040 Thank you so much for coming by guys. Have a great weekend. And as always, I will talk to you next time.

01:13:06.020 Thank you.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - March 01, 2024

Christians Trapped in Negative World ｜ Guest： Aaron Renn ｜ 3⧸1⧸24

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