Are We Living in the Negative World?
There is a new positive attitude toward Christianity in our time. And elite ideology is targeting heretics against cultural leftism, not Christians.
Since 2014, changes in political ideology, toward cancel culture on the left, and political tribalism on the right, have been relatively obvious to observers. Conservative Christian concern is often focused on the cancel culture and the central place of sexual and gender ideology in it.
However, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, co-author with him of The Coddling of the American Mind, originally observed changes on college campuses at the psychological level, before things ever reached the political level. Lukianoff observed college student attitudes on free speech and censorship shifting strongly against free speech around 2014. Haidt and others later gathered psychological evidence of significant increases in anxiety and depression from college students at that time, changes which he argues are closely related to teenage social media use. This increased susceptibility to negative emotion by college-age students has led to an attempt by campus administrators to protect them from ideas they deem harmful.
At the same time, political and cultural changes were afoot to give elite approval to the ideas of cultural leftism. The Obergefell decision in 2015 was quickly followed by a strong push for transgender rights, a sharp change from when Obama, in 2008, opposed gay marriage, citing his own Christian religious tradition. Corporations began to host sensitivity training on sexual and racial matters. Stories of individuals being cancelled for running afoul of these ideas began to abound. A new movement of liberals disaffected from the cultural left arose; and then Jordan Peterson arose as the figure-head of a, for several years, politically non-partisan opposition to the cultural leftism that he called “Postmodern Neo-Marxism.”
On the political front, Trump arose as a kind of “middle-finger” to the cultural left, which further enraged the left, and probably strengthened its conviction, not to mention corporations’ intent to prove that they were not racist or otherwise bigoted. The country has continued to divide along the lines of people’s feelings about Trump on the one hand and cultural leftism (“wokeism”) on the other.
Is This the Negative World?
Several weeks ago, Aaron Renn noted that Jonathan Haidt’s analysis of a significant cultural change coincided with his identification of 2014 as the point of transition from the “neutral world” to the “negative world.” The neutral world was the phase of American culture from 1994-2014 in which being a Christian was seen as socially neutral, one lifestyle choice among others. The negative world is the period since 2014 in which being a Christian is decidedly a social negative, at least according to the prevailing zeitgeist.
However, rather than Haidt’s analysis supporting Renn’s, this observation made me wonder whether the “negative world” isn’t just the kind of psychological and political changes Haidt identified as commencing in 2014: the campus cancel culture, increased levels of anxiety and depression, and newly-ascendant cultural-leftist ideology. If so, this real change does not have Christianity per se as its target but rather particular heresies relative to its ideology, committed as often by Christians as by classical liberals, secular conservatives, and even old-school Marxists.
What is more, since 2014 - particularly since 2016 - I have also observed a new openness to Christianity that is just as distinctive of this cultural period, such that calling this phase the “negative world” misses out on the distinctive new openness to Christianity.
By viewing this cultural change in secular terms as a psychological and political phenomenon, Christians could avoid cultivating unnecessary fear and develop positive strategies effectively to engage this world, with its unique dangers and opportunities.
Christianity and Politics in the New World
In Aaron Renn’s analysis, this phase of American culture can be designated the “negative world,” because in it, being known as a Christian is a social negative, compared to previous eras in which it was socially positive or neutral. It should be said that Renn identifies these as three phases of the decline of American Christianity, at least in its cultural dominance.
But, is the post-2014 era best characterized as one in which being known as a Christian is a social negative, or rather one in which dissenting from cultural leftism is a social negative, because of the ascendancy of that ideology?
It is important to raise this question because evangelical churches and movements have themselves been divided along the lines of support of or opposition to Trump and opposition to or partial embrace of cultural leftism. This new divide is exactly the thing that Renn has sought to illuminate. I made my own contribution in my article, “The Evangelical Critics of the Evangelical Majority.” However, it reveals that the new era is not characterized by opposition to Christianity per se, but rather by devotion to a set of culturally leftist ideas and opposition to any dissent.
Among Christians who have merely moderate or moderately progressive sympathies, while retaining a Christian ethic, they often feel much more at home in that setting, even seeing it as an improvement. They don’t feel the “negative world.” In my own recent experience, I am thinking about folks in the Side B community and other “critical evangelicals,” who are at least temporarily aligned against the religious right.
Now, some of us, Renn and myself included, believe that those cultural dogmas are objectively contrary to Christian teaching (or at least many aspects of them are). But it is still not the Christianity per se that is the object of cultural scorn. It is, if anything, the political conservatism, sex-realism, or classical liberalism that opposes cultural leftist dogmas which is the object of scorn.
If you view things this way, the new left is actually less anti-religious. It is not primarily atheistic - famously, atheists have come into its cross-hairs - it is primarily culturally leftist and egalitarian.
Now Renn’s specific thesis is that elite (including corporate) culture has shifted from a kind of liberal neutrality toward Christianity to a position of moral criticism; I still believe that this is quite plausible, but the moral criticism is focused on areas, like sexual ethics, where Christians run afoul of the new dogmas. The atheism is less vocal, the progressive morality more vocal.
I also don’t want to ignore that there has been persecution of Christians in this context, but it always has to do with leftist dogma, like the refusal by some Christian bakers to bake cakes for gay weddings. The culture is actually welcoming of Christians to modify their views and teaching; they don’t care about most of our theological doctrines, only those points of divergence from cultural or moral leftism.
A New Positive World?
While the ascendant cultural left does not have an explicit stance toward Christianity, (of course, some of its academic counterparts do,) the new online, intellectual center-right does. In fact, it is more open to Christianity, recognizing Christianity’s key cultural and social role in Western, liberal civilization, even being the moral ancestor of progressivism. This was a change from the era of New Atheism, resulting in a set of “New New Atheists” (as Stephen Meyer calls them) who do not themselves believe but who do have a positive view of Christianity.
While many view the right’s response to the post-2014 changes as primarily socially negative, with Trump himself being representative, the online center-right has had much more nuance. Jordan Peterson and the “Intellectual Dark Web” were a politically and religiously diverse, sophisticated response to cultural leftism. Admittedly, Peterson’s work has taken a notable rightward turn in recent years, which subjects him to the temptations of political partisanship (to which he has sometimes succumbed). Nevertheless, the primary thrust of Peterson’s project has been an apolitical one, primarily psychological and even theological.
In this era, there has been a new openness to Christianity. This openness is often politically and intellectually motivated. An individual comes to believe that Western culture depends on Judeo-Christian foundations and then begins to explore whether he or she can embrace those religious foundations. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion is emblematic. Peterson’s wife has recently been baptized Catholic, and his daughter Mikhaila has begun to attend an evangelical church, that of Mark Driscoll.
Evangelicals have sometimes been unnecessarily critical of Peterson and his ilk as not sufficiently Christian. In doing so, I think they have missed out on this spiritual moment, with some notable exceptions, like Paul VanderKlay. Justin Brierley has traced the “surprising rebirth of belief in God” in his new book and podcast by the same title. Reading and listening to that work provides a real challenge to the idea that our time is defined by a negative stance toward Christianity.
Rekindling the Religious Right?
Given that Renn’s intellectual work has actually been inspired by Jordan Peterson, I think Renn would acknowledge these features of the “negative world” which are actually quite positive for Christianity. Indeed, instead of embracing negativity and fear, Renn has cautioned against adopting the strategy of a Trumpian populist or of the religious right, Christian nationalism, and the culture war. In fact, he has argued that the culture war strategy is just as ineffective in the “negative world” as the cultural engager strategy. I think some of his readers misunderstand him, for example, those who do not think there is anything to avoid in fundamentalism.1
Nevertheless, Renn’s rhetoric of the “negative world” ends up playing into the kinds of fears that motivate the religious right and culture war strategy.2 While Renn is simply more sophisticated and high-brow than pre-millennial dispensationalists, the story that ours is a world newly and uniquely hostile to Christianity plays into the evangelical fears that stop careful thought.
Nicholas McDonald recently argued the same about Carl Trueman’s book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, which attempted to give intellectual underpinning to conservative Christian concerns about the direction of culture, especially sexual and gender ideology. Opposite Trueman’s approach, McDonald sets Tom Holland’s monumental Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, a work that undoubtedly fits within the realm of the Intellectual Dark Web, the “New New Atheists,” and the recent openness to Christianity. In Holland’s narrative, even contemporary secular progressivism, with its cancel culture and Puritanism, is the fruit of the Christian revolution. Progressivism’s concern for the oppressed is the reversal of pagan attitudes that denigrated the weak and favored the strong.
While Holland himself has experienced cancellation from the cultural left, his narrative provides grounds to affirm elements of contemporary progressivism, at least in their intent. From this, McDonald develops a conversation strategy that takes shared features of Christian and progressive morality and uses them as a launchpad for gospel conversations. There is something remarkably constructive and win-win in such interactions, in contrast to the kind of conversations I criticized evangelicals for engaging in several weeks ago.
Another danger of Christians viewing the ascendant cultural left as an object of fear, and as something totally opposed to Christianity, is that they will fail to register legitimate critiques of evangelical attitudes and positions. I have found this particularly in the Side B discussion of the Christian sexual ethic. I know that many of the Christians who read Carl Trueman or Aaron Renn (like myself) are inclined to view Side B and Revoice as just an evangelical iteration of “woke ideology,” hence Rosaria Butterfield’s lumping of Side B together with Side A (gay-marriage affirming) as “Gay Christianity.”
Indeed, to the chagrin of many conservative Christians, Side B celibate, gay Christians view the LGBT rights movement in a relatively favorable way, at least for leading to a decrease in homophobia - the feeling of disgust toward people who are homosexual - and with it, an ability to be open about their sexual orientation, even if that is only to recognize it as fallen and disordered. On this view, the progressivism that motivated the LGBT rights movement included a proper Christian element of concern for the outcast, the societal leper.
On the other hand, it remains a question whether Christians who uphold a biblical sexual morality are just doing that, or are also expressing homophobic disgust and discrimination. This is a critique of the religious right and cultural conservatism that cannot be ignored. For example, we have to decide whether to take the path of Jerry Falwell or that of Francis Schaeffer in our approach to the same-sex attracted:
When Jerry Falwell in private brought up the issue of gay people with Francis Schaeffer, Schaeffer commented that it was a complicated issue. Falwell shot back a rejoinder: “If I had a dog that did what they do, I’d shoot it.” There was no humor in Falwell’s voice. Afterward Schaeffer said to his son, “That man is really disgusting.” (Greg Johnson, Still Time to Care, 13)
If Christians view all accusations of homophobia, sexism, and racism as baseless, they ignore the history of and temptation to prejudice in place of biblical faithfulness. Schaeffer was biblically faithful; Falwell was prejudiced. And which figure has been more influential in the popular, political evangelical movement since 1980?
Christian Strategies for Today
Where does this leave us? American culture has changed, post-2014, in unique and new ways, and Christian ministry and life has a new cultural context to which it must adjust. That cultural context cannot be singularly captured by the idea of the “negative world.”
Renn has written often about the need to develop new ministry strategies for the “negative world,” as opposed to the “culture warrior” strategy of the positive world, and the “cultural engager” strategy of the neutral world. What strategy is appropriate to our own new world?
To begin with, I think we need to understand the “material conditions” and psychological conditions of our context much better, with attention to Haidt’s descriptions, as well as those of other social and psychological researchers. In light of the progressivism of our moment, I think adopting Side B would be one method for being better received, recognizing the Christian source of concern for sexual minorities, not to mention the validity of Side B’s claims.
Likewise, embracing the new openness to Christianity, even if only on cultural and political grounds, would be advantageous for our intellectual and evangelistic approach. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion, as well as that of Paul Kingsnorth, are two examples from different political and moral places of the way that secular appreciation of Christianity is leading people to embrace Christianity personally.
In his last public statement, Tim Keller quite directly defended his approach against Aaron Renn’s claim that it was designed for the “neutral world.” Keller argued that New York was already in the “negative world” a long time before. While I do think there is a legitimate critique of those aping Keller’s approach, Keller himself is a model of how to engage with a culture that is negative toward Christianity, especially on moral grounds. Avoiding fear, being intellectually open and curious, and pursuing effectiveness, I believe it is time to give winsome Christian witness, combined with prudence, another try.
You can see this in the comments sections of the “Culture Warring” article, as well as of “Big Eva Says Out with Complementarianism, In with Anti-Fundamentalism.” https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/newsletter-78-big-eva-says-out-with/comments.
I also once debated this in the comments of Aaron’s blog with Dr. Benjamin Mabry, who thought that “fundamentalist” was nothing but a slur for evangelicals, rather than representing an error to avoid.
Some of the actions of New Founding reflect this embrace of culture warring quite blatantly, especially the debate over NETTR, “No enemies to the right.”
There's two pieces of data that you probably need to come to terms with if you want to argue that elite cultural leftism isn't essentially anti-Christian:
1. Darel Paul's work dealing with transgressive binaries and feeling thermometers. Paul argues that there is little to no lag between increasing feeling thermometers for left-signal groups and shrinking ones for right-signal groups. Of course, his particular interest is homosexuals-Christians over the time period that homosexuality became normalized. As one goes up, the other goes simultaneously down. If low feeling-thermometer scores for Christians was a response to "bigotry," then you would think that a person would have to become pro-homosexual before they would get offended by Christian teachings about gay marriage. In fact, Paul argues that the data points more in the opposite direction - that straight people who are already dispositionally anti-Christian become pro-gay as a transgressive action against the social norms of Christianity and rationalize their choices as an ethical position. He has an entire section about self-sorting and the way that the old "exposure hypothesis" is entirely backwards. Straight people who don't like Christians actively seek out homosexual friends - much to the annoyance of people who don't want to be the token gay friend for a neurotically-political straight person.
2. Stephen Bullivant's new book on Nonverts, which argues that the driving force of the cultural left is the "ex-effect" of cradle Christians who had some kind of falling out with their childhood faith and seek out transgressive ways of signaling their anti-identity. An important point in there is the rationalization process that nonverts go through in the beginning of their identity transitions. This is why you never trust interviewees to tell the truth. They say that the problem they had was that their church was "judgmental," "homophobic," or all the other popular taglines, but when you dig deep enough into their stories you find a person with a personal conflict or grudge with an individual pastor or members of a congregation, and who then backwards-rationalize their choice by reference to culture wars. Bullivant's data argues that culture warring is the effect, not cause, of Christian decline. People aren't leaving the church because of gay marriage or BLM, they are gravitating to neo-gnostic memes because they're already leaving the church, and using those culture issues to signal their new identities. Holding those positions is a kind of inverted credobaptism into their new faith.
Which is where my more controversial point comes into play - what we're seeing is a religious movement toward a new variant of Mainline Protestantism, a version that doesn't need the liturgy or the theology anymore. This "New Religion" keep the Mainline disposition, the Mainline cultural attitudes toward Catholics and Evangelicals, the Mainline politics, the Mainline eschatology, but adopt a new, quasi-gnostic soteriology of self-salvation through an intramundane social and political paraousia: the global monoculture that washes away the flesh of particularity and births humanity anew in a new, spiritual-universal form of perfect deracinated fraternity, which like all Idealist paraousias reorders the universe according to the will of the ideologue. Of course they're just as hostile against certain varieties of skeptical atheists - they're unbelievers in the New World to Come. Of course they're welcoming of Mainline Protestants - they are Mainline Protestants, at least in spirit. They're the latest iteration of the WCC, with the same agenda but a more modern aesthetic.
As John Rawls says, Christians are free to believe in anything except "Jesus Christ is Lord." As Richard Rorty says, you can play at any religion you want so long as you do it ironically and always remain within the "playing field" of secular liberalism. It might be possible for some people to walk that line, to "unironically-ironically" preach the gospel among the worldly-wise. But it's also easy to accidentally actually-convert, especially since you are right about the New Religion being genetically tied to Christianity through Mainline Protestantism, and too many "Side B" evangelicals look like converts these days. What's unfortunately not happening is that few Christians are actually digging into what kind of religion the New Religion is, where its points of reality-dysphoria make it vulnerable to being publicly discredited, and how to begin severing the ligaments and joints that hold the whole ideological superstructure together. That, unfortunately, won't be "winsome," but a matter of hard-headed practical action. Maybe even "cruel". More like a task for a St. Boniface than a Tim Keller.
I’d agree with you that, unlike with Woke, there wasn’t a breakpoint in 2014 when it comes to religious authority specifically and institutional trust more broadly. There’s probably been a decrease in those things for 60 years, though feels like an acceleration sometime in the last 10-15.
When it comes to sexual abuse: a possible breakpoint came first with the Catholic scandals farther back, but more recently with the SBC’s issues and Josh Duggar.
You might compare to an earlier complaint (which never went away) that was elevated by the televangelists and their scandals: that churches are rich and only interested in your money. Nowadays Osteen is the model.
I’d agree with you up to a point on sexual abuse. I have zero tolerance for anyone who engages in abuse of minors or who covers up for someone who does. As far as I’m concerned, such men have forfeited the right to ever be placed in a position of authority again. It all makes me angry. So I’d agree that organizations need to improve, and hopefully some of that will come naturally from generational change.
BUT there’s also no sense of scale to these things. When you’re in Positive World, people will respond to abuse reports with, “Eh, surely just a few bad apples.” In Negative World, they will assume those bad apples are the rule and not the exception.