Aaron Wren has written a great book about the three worlds we live in today: The Positive World, The Neutral World, and The Negative World. In it, he describes the decline of Christianity in America from 1964 to 1994.
00:00:33.860I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
00:00:38.220So it's pretty impossible not to notice that the culture has gotten very hostile to Christianity.
00:00:44.120We 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.
00:00:55.100That's a vast change from the way most people understood American values our entire life.
00:01:00.580I 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.
00:01:08.860His name is Aaron Wren. Aaron, thank you for joining me.
00:01:14.160You'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.
00:01:27.740I want to dive into the book that you expanded out from that essay.
00:01:32.200But before we do, guys, let me tell you about your absolute moral duty to hire based people over with New Founding.
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00:02:47.340So, 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.
00:02:55.780Could you explain the three worlds framework?
00:02:58.800Unlike in Europe, America never had a state church.
00:03:02.820But for most of our history, we did have a sort of softly institutionalized generic Protestantism as our default national religion.
00:03:12.080So as recently as the 1950s, about half of all adults attended church every Sunday.
00:03:17.520That was actually the high watermark of church attendance in America.
00:03:20.640We had prayer and Bible reading in public schools.
00:03:24.420We were adding, in God we trust our money, under God to the Pledge of Allegiance.
00:03:30.540And so this was really a Christian sort of normative society, although we didn't have an official established church or anything of that nature.
00:03:37.400This old consensus began to unravel in the 1960s.
00:03:42.060And 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.
00:03:57.000So the positive world is from 1964 to 1994.
00:04:00.480And I want to be clear, this is a period of decline for Christianity.
00:04:03.980All is not going well for Christianity in America at that time.
00:04:07.160Church attendance is down a lot, for example.
00:04:09.840And yet Christianity is still basically viewed positively by official elite culture.
00:04:14.800To be known as a good church-going man makes you seem like an upstanding member of society.
00:04:20.020Christian moral norms are still the basic moral norms of society.
00:04:23.560And to violate them can get you into trouble.
00:04:25.380About 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.
00:04:38.160It's just one more lifestyle choice among many in a sort of pluralistic public square.
00:04:43.700And Christian morality has a sort of residual effect in society.
00:04:47.300But then in 2014, we hit a second tipping point and enter what I call the negative world,
00:04:52.880where for the first time in the 400-year history of America, official elite culture now views Christianity negatively, or certainly at least skeptically.
00:05:13.480In 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.
00:05:24.020Again, all of that rhetoric around Christian nationalism, I think, illustrates the way it is seen to some people.
00:05:32.460And this is obviously, again, unprecedented in the history of America and very dislocating to many American Christians, especially evangelicals.
00:05:39.480Yeah, 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.
00:05:50.820That's actually the beginning of decline or it's a period of decline for the church, as you pointed out.
00:05:56.800A 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.
00:06:12.240And 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.
00:06:21.620But is there really any value in a general Christian culture?
00:06:26.220And 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.
00:06:42.840There are a number of people who say good riddance to the old sort of Christian normative society.
00:06:49.720In their view, it's basically just a breeding ground for hypocrisy.
00:06:54.200And it's certainly fair to say that a lot of people who went to church weren't especially sincere in their faith.
00:07:01.000When Christianity is the thing to do, it's what's expected, then people do it because it's what is expected.
00:07:07.840Just 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.
00:07:20.180So certainly there was hypocrisy in that sense, although I don't think anyone ever pretended that everyone who attended church was a genuine convert.
00:07:28.360At the same time, you know, that society was also extraordinarily high functioning in a lot of ways.
00:07:37.360You know, it was really the underpinning of a lot of the Western ideas, you know, are somewhat outworkings of Christianity.
00:07:44.780It provided all the cultural categories in which people could understand the gospel if preached for them.
00:07:51.020And 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.
00:08:05.140You 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.
00:08:20.820Martin 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.
00:08:31.200And 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.
00:08:40.960And so I think we should be sorry to see it go in many ways.
00:08:45.760And 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,
00:08:52.300the 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.
00:09:06.280I mean, I think it's fair to say, right, in 1950s America, someone like Donald Trump was probably not going to get elected president.
00:09:13.400His candidacy is only viable in a negative world.
00:09:17.920And, 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.
00:09:27.620It's a vice or it's dangerous to certain people.
00:09:30.680We need to protect people with low impulse control, et cetera.
00:09:33.980So everything you used to have to go to the mob to get is now a fully legitimized multi-billion dollar business.
00:09:40.640Gambling is one of my favorite examples.
00:09:43.360You used to have to go to Las Vegas to gamble.
00:09:45.040Well, 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.
00:09:55.180And now the leagues themselves and all their leading stars are like knee deep in gambling.
00:10:02.480And 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.
00:10:13.460It tells you, you know, everything you need to know about how society has changed.
00:10:16.900And 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.
00:10:26.360And so it's going to be a, uh, more exploitative, more parasitic, uh, society defining life expectancy, et cetera.
00:11:24.620And 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.
00:11:40.780He was forced to drop out of the race over that.
00:11:43.980I mean, that would not be happening today.
00:11:45.860And indeed, so you can, you can really illustrate this change through sex scandals in a lot of ways.
00:11:52.040Again, look at the difference between Gary Hart and the Clinton Lewinsky scandal in the 1990s, the late 1990s, getting into the neutral world.
00:12:01.920Badly damaging to Clinton, but he survived it.
00:12:05.200And then fast forward to, you know, the Trump campaign, October 2016, the Access Hollywood tape.
00:12:12.320I mean, in retrospect, that was like a 48-hour blip.
00:12:20.140Yeah, 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.
00:12:25.580But 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.
00:12:40.800There'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.
00:12:53.880But I think in many ways, the problem for America is a lack of identity.
00:12:57.680It used to be that Protestant Christian identity that you were talking about.
00:13:01.640We 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.
00:13:15.860We were still able to operate, mainly because we still had this tie of Protestant Christianity.
00:13:20.400We never really truly had an ethnogenesis in the classic sense in the United States.
00:13:24.880But the Protestant Christian dynamic and our kind of extreme federalism allowed us to still operate with one shared understanding of American identity.
00:13:34.900And 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.
00:13:49.500The 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.
00:13:58.140I 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.
00:14:13.280But we mean entirely different things by them, because we no longer have that shared identity in Protestant Christianity.
00:14:21.640Yeah, I mean, the political scientist, Eric Kaufman, did sort of argue that there was an American kind of ethnic ethnogenesis in the early 1800s.
00:14:32.160As we sort of separated ourselves from our British identity, it was heavily Anglo-Protestant in its conception.
00:14:40.900And, you know, I think, you know, by the 1950s, that was simply no longer viable because of demographic change.
00:14:47.720I mean, we were heavily Anglo-Protestant demographically.
00:14:51.680And 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.
00:15:12.020And 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.
00:15:29.280So if you look, everybody always claims, for example, that JFK didn't wear a hat or at his inauguration or something.
00:15:36.280In fact, he did. In fact, he was wearing a morning coat and a top hat.
00:15:41.280And 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.
00:16:02.380You 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.
00:16:11.940But 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.
00:16:19.000The dream of all this congealing sort of blew up.
00:16:21.960And 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.
00:16:39.680And 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.
00:16:55.460And 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.
00:17:08.280And so who knows exactly what it's going to be in the future?
00:17:11.520But it certainly augurs for another redefinition of American identity.
00:17:15.020So in this situation, obviously, we see a significant shift.
00:17:21.400You have the strategies that worked in positive and neutral world and then the ones that might work in the negative world.
00:17:29.000Could 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?
00:17:38.780Sure. Well, I identify three different strategies that were undertaken by three different groups of evangelicals.
00:17:47.260I'm not looking at Catholics or mainlanders. I'm looking at evangelicals specifically.
00:17:51.900And I identify three, two from the positive world, one from the neutral world.
00:17:56.180In the positive world, that was culture war and seeker sensitivity.
00:18:01.000And in the neutral world, it was what I call cultural engagement.
00:18:05.300So 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.
00:18:19.360I think the very name of Falwell's organization, Moral Majority, it just speaks to a positive world.
00:18:26.600Now, it may not have been true even then, but at least it was plausible to claim that you spoke for the moral majority.
00:18:35.300Well, sort of like Nixon's silent majority, if you will. Certainly no one would ever claim that today.
00:18:43.280And clearly they were not successful at sort of stopping the tide, if you will.
00:18:48.860Now, whether they could have been successful, I think, is an open question, but they certainly weren't successful.
00:18:55.040The 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.
00:19:06.000And what this group of people did also in the 1970s is saw people weren't attending church.
00:19:11.720And so they just said, let's build a church that people actually will attend.
00:19:15.920So the origin story of Willow Creek is that Bill Hybels went door to door in suburban Chicago doing surveys of people.
00:19:22.680Why don't you go to church? And he said, they gave me an earful.
00:19:27.020And 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.
00:19:34.460Let's be more informal, more contemporary music, more sort of topical therapeutic sermons.
00:19:40.000And this really became kind of the progenitor of the non-denominational suburban megachurch that we all know,
00:19:47.280and which in many ways is the evangelical mainstream.
00:19:49.340I 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,
00:19:57.040again, 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,
00:20:04.540you know, that they almost have to justify to themselves why they don't go to church.
00:20:09.480Again, I don't think somebody starting out today would be going door to door in the suburbs asking questions like that.
00:20:14.700Then the third started in the 1990s as cities came back under people like Mayor Rudy Giuliani in New York.
00:20:21.660And this is the cultural engagement strategy pioneered by people like Tim Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City.
00:20:29.560You can think of this either a couple of ways. One is as a seeker sensitivity for the cities.
00:20:34.700You know, it's just as the high bulls and the warrens reached suburban boomers.
00:20:38.740These guys were reaching the new educated urbanites.
00:20:41.180You could also think of it as the opposite of the culture war.
00:20:43.720Rather than fighting with people all the time, why don't we take advantage of this pluralistic public square and have a conversation with people?
00:20:50.200And again, this was very successful in its day.
00:20:53.020And there's still a lot of these people around in cities.
00:20:55.920But again, I think this idea of engaging with the culture kind of assumes a little bit of a neutral perspective,
00:21:01.640that the culture is interested in what you have to say,
00:21:04.540that you can sit down and have that conversation, a good faith conversation,
00:21:08.580even where there are major differences, and still leave with goodwill.
00:21:13.340And I think that era is increasingly past in America, you know, not even just religiously,
00:21:18.960but politically in terms of people's ability to have those conversations.
00:21:22.960And so I think, you know, they were all sort of built on certain cultural assumptions of those previous eras that are no longer true.
00:21:30.560And so that's one reason I feel like there's a lot of turmoil in evangelical land today
00:21:37.020is because people are still doubling down on sort of existing strategies
00:21:41.680rather than they're developing kind of new strategies,
00:21:44.980which admittedly I think is very difficult to do in this environment.
00:21:48.160Absolutely. And I definitely want to touch on those new strategies.
00:21:51.760And most importantly, I think I want to talk a little bit about why our elites change their disposition to all of this.
00:21:58.660But before we do, guys, let's hear about Newfounding's Venture Fund.
00:22:02.280Hey, guys, I need to tell you about Newfounding Venture Fund.
00:22:04.900Look, we all know that the current system, the current companies out there, the current institutions,
00:26:56.480They were so motivated by genuine public service that they actually spent down their entire family fortunes.
00:27:04.160So, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., I read a biography of him called The Last Brahmin.
00:27:11.480You know, he basically spent his entire life as things like ambassador to the UN and ambassador to Vietnam, South Vietnam.
00:27:18.800And, you know, whether you agree whether he did a good job or a bad job,
00:27:22.080at the end of his life, he's basically selling off artwork to raise funds.
00:27:25.680I mean, there's nobody like that in America today.
00:27:30.140You know, you go into public service to get rich, right?
00:27:33.200Or to get something for yourself or whatever.
00:27:36.940You know, you're the White House spokesman.
00:27:38.820And the next thing you know, you're buying multimillion dollar homes.
00:27:41.240And 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,
00:27:54.080whose standards are entirely ideological in nature, not moral or conduct based.
00:27:59.800And thus, they're constantly changing all the time.
00:28:02.320So you have to be hyper attuned to what's going on.
00:28:04.620And 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.
00:28:16.340And it's not just, you know, eight Protestants and one Jewish guy, which it was for a while.
00:28:52.780Well, I think the transition to an ideological society is a critical point because we had an organic understanding.
00:29:02.620Again, 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.
00:29:17.100It was tied in, as you pointed to, you know, because it was very hereditary.
00:29:22.000And 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.
00:29:34.740And once you get far enough out, you have to go to the realm of ideology.
00:29:39.120But the problem of ideology is it's not actually organic.
00:29:42.540It doesn't actually have the kinds of things that create true social bonds.
00:29:47.080And so it'll throw a coalition together under the head of conservative or, you know, Democrat or Republican or whatever.
00:29:52.880But 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.
00:30:03.380Yeah. 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.
00:30:18.120Yeah. And I think the other thing that you could probably put on this and which Baltzl missed, in my view, was the managerial revolution.
00:30:25.700And I think one explanation you could use to see this is essentially the rise of the managerial class.
00:30:34.160And they have essentially been liquidating, you know, all, you know, obstacles to their unchecked rule or to the unchecked rule of essentially managerialism.
00:30:43.760One of the core functions of the old upper class is it was actually a community, much like the aristocracy in England.
00:30:51.600They were a sort of rival power block.
00:30:54.700They 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.
00:31:08.440Well, you know, managerialism is now liquidated. It's basically liquidated everything else, liquidated those guys.
00:31:21.140The family today is certainly nothing like what it was in the 1950s.
00:31:25.520It's a best a highly contingent entity.
00:31:29.760You 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.
00:31:36.960And 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.
00:32:07.700But 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.
00:32:20.000You know, assuming that people would have an understanding that the place is the church is a place you should probably be.
00:32:26.080And this is this is something you should probably participate in.
00:32:29.000And 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.
00:32:38.940I think it's interesting that all of those approaches were essentially deconstructions.
00:32:45.400They 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.
00:32:55.840And 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.
00:33:04.320That creates the short term burst of attendance that you might get from some of these secret sensitive strategies like you were talking about.
00:33:11.240But it does seem overall to wear down the ability of, you know, Christianity to actually attract people or keep them engaged.
00:33:18.380It 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.
00:33:27.680It'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.
00:33:43.180It'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.
00:33:56.120I would put Vatican II in sort of the same category of, I call them relevant strategies.
00:34:04.200You know, the idea is, you know, changing church to become more relevant.
00:34:08.340And there's sort of a double-edged sword there.
00:34:10.920You 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.
00:34:20.380On the other hand, it actually did work to get a lot of people in the door.
00:34:23.140You know, the mainline denominations really dominated the religious landscape of America up through the 1950s.
00:34:30.700And, you know, when they started losing people, they never really figured out how to get people to come in the door.
00:34:44.920And, you know, I think we feel keenly the loss of those denominations, by the way.
00:34:50.880But, 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.
00:35:01.440And, 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.
00:35:13.640Because if people are expected to go to church on Sunday, you need to have a place for everybody who shows up.
00:35:21.480You can't simultaneously say this is who we are.
00:35:24.380And it's an extremely difficult standard, only a very few people who can meet.
00:35:29.900And I do think that as Christianity declines in America, it actually provides new opportunities.
00:35:36.000One of them is to say we don't have to be maximally relevant anymore.
00:35:40.140You 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.
00:35:48.720And we're not going to ask them to do all that much or change all that much.
00:35:52.060You know, I think we can have, we can set a higher bar.
00:35:55.020And there is going to be a tremendous need for churches to create a culture that is meaningfully distinct from society at large.
00:36:09.640And that, by the way, doesn't have to mean, you know, hatred of other people out there or actually fighting with them.
00:36:17.640It just means, like, this is who we are and we live very differently.
00:36:21.440You 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.
00:36:31.000You know, we shouldn't be watching porn.
00:37:01.160The truth is, you know, I think the Mormons had actually done a great job of this.
00:37:05.140You 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.
00:37:15.240And, you know, you look at Utah, which is very Mormon dominated.
00:37:18.280It's an extremely high functioning society.
00:37:20.400It'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.
00:37:32.100And, 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.
00:37:41.080And 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.
00:37:55.760That means the people who don't have family are going to be at a disadvantage in life.
00:38:01.200It means the people who aren't part of like a high trust church, you know, are going to be at a disadvantage in life.
00:38:07.200And so I think we're going to be seeing this.
00:38:09.940Yeah, I did a, I did a stream with Daryl Cooper, the Martyr Maid podcast.
00:38:16.940And we talked about why the state ends up breaking up, you know, families, ends up breaking up higher trust communities.
00:38:24.720It has to, in order for it to kind of, as we spoke about with Manageo revolution and increase its power.
00:38:30.800And so one of the things that, you know, yes, decline bad, but also decline good in this way.
00:38:35.960One 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.
00:39:15.980I 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.
00:39:28.460You know, the 11% of people now homeschooling.
00:39:31.740Private schools, like, have lines out the door.
00:39:35.280People are, you know, the collapse in enlistment in the military, which I think is a beautiful thing.
00:39:39.940You 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.
00:40:01.820That doesn't make a whole lot of sense, you know, and, you know, people are checking out and it's a huge problem.
00:40:07.880I mean, the decline in military enlistment really is a huge problem for the system.
00:40:13.760And 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.
00:40:27.540And again, they don't have the, you know, they can disrupt your organizations and things of that nature.
00:40:32.600Yes, they can, but it's very hard for them to get you to, you know, be actively investing back into their system.
00:40:38.820And that's an interesting question, I think, for a lot of Christians, because simultaneously, they're naturally conservative.
00:40:47.280They want to commute, you know, they want to go ahead and contribute to their community.
00:40:52.440But 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.
00:41:03.040And so they probably look at these situations and say, you know, I want to be someone with honor.
00:41:08.040I want to be someone who's a powerful social force.
00:41:11.620And 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.
00:41:22.860But what do I do in this situation where, you know, are these institutions too far gone?
00:41:30.160Do we create something new in parallel?
00:41:31.740Like, 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?
00:41:48.100So this is sort of my own lay reading of the New Testament.
00:41:51.320You know, one time I made a list of all the commands that Paul issued in his epistles, and I divided them into various categories.
00:41:59.500And 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.
00:42:06.180And most of it was really about how to accommodate yourself to it with the least disruption.
00:42:12.780How to avoid, you know, having the eye of Caesar fall on you, for example.
00:42:17.100So 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.
00:42:27.340And I think there's a lot of wisdom there.
00:42:28.880I think a lot of evangelicals candidly go out of their way to make themselves unpopular in ways that's not necessary to do.
00:42:36.680You 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.
00:42:44.220He wasn't actually concerned with them all that much.
00:42:46.860He was mostly concerned with life inside the church and how Christians were living.
00:42:51.240And he also prioritized, you know, the needs of the church, the needs of the people who were in the church, right?
00:42:58.320When 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.
00:43:07.180So, 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.
00:43:17.000And 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.
00:43:30.360It'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.
00:43:39.640And 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.
00:43:49.500However, 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.
00:43:57.220But, 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.
00:44:12.840Yeah, 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.
00:44:27.220And they were always going to be the same thing.
00:44:29.620And 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.
00:44:39.060There's no way that America could fall.
00:44:40.920There's no way that the Christianity of America could fall away.
00:44:52.520And 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.
00:45:08.400And investment in those institutions was investment in Christianity.
00:45:12.100And 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.
00:45:20.040What do minorities that want to protect themselves, you know, how do they interact in a society?
00:45:24.960I think it's hard to make that switch when you still are wrapped up in that boomer eschatology.
00:45:45.280Down, down to a minority and shrinking.
00:45:48.680You know, certainly Christianity, you know, was the majority, you know, position in America.
00:45:54.500You 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.
00:46:04.660But when it came to ethics and moral, they all believed the same thing.
00:46:08.280You 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.
00:46:18.520And, like, now it's a painful shift when you're used to, when you consider yourself the majority, and now you are a minority.
00:46:29.140And 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.
00:46:43.260But you've got to adapt to that new reality.
00:46:49.520And 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.
00:47:00.400And so they always had to self-consciously steward and sustain a distinctively Catholic identity within this Protestant country.
00:47:10.320And so sort of Protestant, you know, evangelicals and Protestants have to learn from what other minority groups have done.
00:47:19.780And I think, again, you know, I think Catholicism is a good example, early 20th century Catholicism is a good example to follow.
00:47:28.640But you could think the Mormons may be another good example to follow.
00:47:32.620You 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.
00:47:48.900The 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.
00:47:59.380We're not—citizenship is not in America.
00:48:01.920You know, our citizenship is in heaven.
00:48:03.660All that stuff people like Russell Moore and David French would spout.
00:48:06.900The 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.
00:48:23.340You know, those are not the same things.
00:48:25.640You know, they don't actually take their own rhetoric, I think, as seriously as they could.
00:48:30.820And 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.
00:48:49.460But 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.
00:49:03.280You have to get beyond—you have to get beyond boomer eschatology there.
00:49:08.000We 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.
00:49:14.580But before we do, I have one more question I wanted to ask you.
00:49:17.840I think another big aspect of what's happening is the end of an unenchanted world.
00:49:25.380We've kind of—the Enlightenment experiment has run its course.
00:49:30.320We've made things as hyper-rational as we can.
00:49:34.680And 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.
00:49:48.480I think re-enchantment is a step that we're seeing.
00:49:51.780I 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.
00:50:05.400And 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.
00:50:19.060People don't even know what that means anymore.
00:50:22.880There's not even the question of the death of what deity.
00:50:27.780And 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.
00:50:37.860They didn't know who Mary and Joseph were.
00:50:39.920They're just—it's not that they're unchurched.
00:50:42.240It's that they literally just are complete voids culturally.
00:50:45.360Like, they can tell you what Pepsi and Pizza Hut symbols look like, but they have zero connection to anything of the spiritual.
00:50:55.720And in some ways, that's super terrifying.
00:50:57.620But 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.
00:51:09.020And 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.
00:51:31.760I agree. I think that's a great insight.
00:51:35.200You know, I hadn't necessarily thought about it that way.
00:51:37.820But 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.
00:51:53.520I agree completely about re-enchantment as a huge theme.
00:51:57.480You know, Rod Dreher is writing a book about re-enchantment.
00:52:00.720He's very good at putting his finger on things earlier.
00:52:03.820I think it's going to be one of the big themes of the next decade.
00:52:07.600And, 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.
00:52:17.060And I think this rise of sort of a New Age spirituality, you know, that we're seeing is very much aligned with that.
00:52:25.740What do I mean by New Age? Everybody who's into psychedelics as a gateway to spiritual experience.
00:52:32.000I'm going to go on an ayahuasca trip, you know, to South America or something.
00:52:37.040I think the Jordan Peterson phenomenon is heavily driven by a sort of New Age sensibility, sort of his sort of Jungian mysticism there.
00:52:49.920You know, he's got a new book out called We Who Wrestle with God.
00:52:52.980I don't think it's actually out yet, but he's got a tour.
00:52:54.660I 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.
00:53:01.360And 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.
00:53:13.740And I do think there's a huge lesson from the rise of Jordan Peterson that it shows that people are hungry for something.
00:53:24.220You know, they're hungry for something.
00:53:25.840And he very much tapped into it and he was able to, you know, attract people from a variety of things.
00:53:32.420But 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.
00:53:53.580And so I do think his understandings of the Bible are far from orthodox.
00:54:01.300I 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.
00:54:11.140Other 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.
00:54:26.100Because he knows that he's not, he's far from orthodox Christianity.
00:54:30.540But 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.
00:54:41.220One 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.
00:54:55.820It's also why Pentecostalism has been growing so powerfully.
00:55:00.180It gives people the sense of a genuine encounter with the divine and speaks to the real-world problems, you know, that people are having.
00:55:08.520I don't think it's any accident that Pentecostalism is very strong among people with very serious problems.
00:55:15.480You know, because if you're a recovering drug addict, you are keenly aware that without the power of the Holy Spirit, you are sunk.
00:55:23.900And so I think that there are these things.
00:55:26.300This is a way to think about evangelism and mission.
00:55:29.040I 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.
00:55:39.260Absolutely. All right, guys, we're going to transition over to the questions of the people.
00:55:44.240But 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?
00:55:50.680The book is Life in the Negative World, Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture.
00:55:56.280You can buy it, obviously, on Amazon or anywhere else. Fine books are sold.
00:56:00.780Anyone should be able to get you a copy if they don't have it in stock.
00:56:38.900Yeah, maybe they have made an amazing discovery.
00:56:40.960I 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.
00:56:46.020I think it's called the Democratic Party.
00:56:48.420Cooper 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?