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.
Thanks, Ben. Lots to chew on here - I'll be looking into Darel Paul and Stephen Bullivant. Where does Darel Paul deal with those topics? Having a hard time finding the right links.
There are two ways to go at this, because we could see progressives as anti-Christian or as mainline Protestant Christians in Spirit (following your hypothesis and Tom Holland's). The research you cite is very relevant - if pro-LGBTQ+ attitudes are motivated by anti-Christian sentiment, then my thinking may need to be revised. However, this still leaves aside the question of where the anti-Christian sentiment comes from. I'm working with the hypothesis that Christians are at fault when someone leaves the fold. The ex-Christian (or rebel against cultural Christianity, whether he or she was ever Christian) is arguably seeing some kind of flaw or hypocrisy in Christians and is thereby using some elements of Christian morality to judge Christian practice.
If wokeism (as the latest version of managerialism) is a variant of mainline Protestantism, then presumably you would grant that it picks up on certain Christian moral strands, i.e., Rev. 7:9:
"After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands."
It uses this moral foundation (to borrow Haidt's term) against other features of contemporary Christianity practice, like its becoming too tied to American culture.
As a conservative, I have tended to discount the purportedly "Christian" reasons for leaving Christianity. My working hypothesis has been that people just really want to indulge their passions. I'm finding that hypothesis lacking and seeing merit in the alternate hypothesis, that ex-Christians/progressives are not just rationalizing unbelief that is motivated by other things. If this is so, then Christianity does need to become more winsome by correcting for these errors.
If you accept the mainline Protestantism hypothesis, how would you articulate the Christian reasons for leaving Christianity behind? Or would you discount these as truly Christian in the moral sense?
I found Paul's book, *From Tolerance to Equality*, absolutely groundbreaking, such that I even wrote the review of the book for American Reformer. Yes, I also started with the assumption that "they just want to exercise their passions" and Paul was one of the people that sent me back to philosophers of ideology and identity for explanations. Unfortunately, the field is all too often polluted by poor scholars pushing their own ideological program (ie. James Lindsay) but that just forces us to be more careful in our reading of the primary sources.
Eric Voegelin's *New Science of Politics* and *From Enlightenment to Revolution* (of whom I'm a grand-student) lays out what he calls the gnostic mode of eschatological speculation, claiming that a whole host of ideological movements in the last 250 years have been continually drawing on Christian imagery and splintering off of orthodoxy. He argues that there are four major eschatological Christian symbols which are frequently either borrowed or transposed by 20th century ideologies: the False Prophet (transposed as the Intellectual), the Antichrist (transposed as the Great Leader), the Millennium, and the Brotherhood of Man. Some of these movements can combine the symbols (ie. Hitler who both wrote Mein Kampf and became the Fuhrer) or divide them (ie. Marx as the Intellectual, Lenin as the Great Leader). Some emphasize the axiological elements of apocalypse (The French Terror), and others the teleological elements (Comtean or Hegelian linear-progressive history). But I would go so far as to argue that in the West, at least, it is impossible for people *not* to think in terms of Christian imagery, even or especially those who are viscerally anti-Christian. Richard Eli's *Social Aspects of Christianity* and William Freemantle's *The World as the Subject of Redemption* are both clear examples of transitional texts between the modern New Religion and Mainline Christianity, where you see the way that political economics and cosmopolitan globalism are taking the role of the Kingdom of Heaven, while pushing out any spiritual interpretations of the Gospels.
As to the why question of the decline in Christianity, I prefer the kinds of explanations that Callum Brown uses, in the sense that we have long-standing trends stemming from the Industrial Revolution that erode the social function of the organized Church, but a sudden, rapid falling away around the turn of the millennium. I don't buy the notion that Christianity has been slowly declining since the First World War because I think it fails to take into account the fact that changes tend to be short, sudden, large-scale lurches.
I think the best explanations involve a combination of acknowledging the eroding function of the church in social life, the emergence of what Smith and Denton call the "parasitic faith" of the New Religion (which is broader than Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, imo, and involves a quasi-cult of 20th Century social justice movements and saint-like adoration of their all-too-flawed leaders), and the fact that sudden lurches are primarily driven by social and political events with very little of what we would call "spiritual" significance. David Campbell's hypothesis is that these lurches are primarily partisan, and the reason we see huge drops in Christian identification is related to the political events which are marked as religious upheavals by the New Religion, like the death of George Floyd.
The winsomeness argument fails because a great deal of the research I've read says that the choice to shift identification is neither based on religious ideals nor on the desire to sin, but on a long, slow acculturation to New Religion norms that is suddenly sparked by an interpersonal dispute with a member of their congregation. Smith and Denton's work on the slow growth of New Religion dogmas within the existing churches show that people are absorbing social libertarianism, the "cult of nice," soteriological universalism, Jesus-the-moral-teacher, all within the Sunday School and worship service environments. They're not picking it up outside the Church, but within it. Then they're trying to rationalize the inner conflict between two sets of beliefs in their day to day lives, which isn't too bad under normal circumstances.
This part got cut out of my First Things article because of length, but I focused a good bit on the Texas Pentacostal couple in Bullivant's new book. What started out as an employment dispute spiraled out into a loud and public apostasy, and then even began to bear political fruit. If you read what they wrote, their vocal anti-Trump sentiment had little to do with Trump's behaviors and more to do with the fact that they bitterly hated evangelicals and attacked Trump for representing them. This is where upper-middle class Christians don't get it - the directionality is wrong in our haute Evangelical discourse. They don't hate Trump because of his vices, they hate Evangelicals and therefore displace Trump's vices onto Evangelicals. Even Bullivant can't find any way to justify the Russell Moore hypothesis, and he tries.
So what causes these breaks is certain events and interpersonal problems that force the religion problem to the surface. When did people disproportionately "nonvert"? The late Bush administration and middle-Obama administration. When their devotion to New Religion principles comes into stark, political contrast with the majority of the Church, people lurch away. The rest is a slow bleed caused by inevitable clashes of personality within any human organization. But most scientists are clear - the theological and ethical justifications are all post-hoc. Nobody but weirdos like us change religion on the basis of theology. "Melissa" was angry at her employer/church, and so therefore he must be a bad person, they must be hypocrites, and suddenly she rediscovered feminism and liberalism. She even admits that she didn't think about these kinds of things as a Christian, but they became important after she nonverted. They're the principles of her new faith, the New Religion, and now justify the decision she made on the basis of her conflict with her boss.
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.
Well, the problem for this hypothesis is that the negative world is partly a product of a decade or two of Christian sexual-abuse-coverups becoming more widely known. It's not like these were known about as well in previous eras, but people assumed they were a few bad apples. There only a few stories at that time (presumably), so it looked like they *were* just a few bad apples. Since the Catholic abuse scandals, it has become apparent that it is *not* just a few bad apples, which plays into the sense that church authority structures are just old boys' clubs: The negative world (if that's what it is) is partly the product of serious malfeasance by powerful Christians coming to light.
It's clear to me that therefore we have to acknowledge these wrongs and avoid them in a new generation if we want people's attitudes to reverse about Christians. I am intrigued by the whole discourse about how Christians can be more effective, wield power, climb status hierarchies. But there seems to be a neglect of the PR dimension. Being perceived as low-status right-wingers/Christian nationalists is *terrible PR.* Russell Moore, Tim Keller, and David Brooks, for example, are doing a much better job of PR, and I say that even though I think Moore has lumped too many Republican-voting Christians together and thrown them under the bus in Washington Post articles. Still, that *is* the way to have more of a hearing in elite and non-elite progressive culture and to show that you can be a Christian without succumbing to the errors of the Christian right.
I think Aaron makes these caveats and argues against Christian nationalism/fundamentalism/culture warring. But again, I think many of his followers - folks interested in the new right from a Christian angle - don't see the dangers to their right flank.
I've tried to make the point a few times on Aaron's stack that there will continue to be considerable local variation in how Negative World plays out. And so long as intense political polarization remains a feature of our society, the secular right will remain broadly amiable and respectful towards the religious right, and perhaps even open to conversion. Tongue-in-cheek you could call this "converting to Christianity to own the libs." There are deep roots for this instinct in human psychology: setting aside differences between allies to focus on the common enemy.
As for the point that leftist moral ideas and not atheism per se are the source of pressure -- this is true, but I'm not really sure what to do with it. Atheism comes into fashion now and then but always burns itself out, for the simple reason that total atheistic materialism is a very unnatural attitude for most people, especially women.
Yet at the same time there's a cultural rebellion underway against all sources of authority, which includes any sort of organized religion, revealed scripture, or systematic theology. A dissolution of trust in ALL institutions. Along those lines, I do think there is a negative cultural view towards the idea that our particular very old book has all the answers. A view that wouldn't be so prominent in a society that has fewer problems with authority.
I also think a lot of people have adopted the attitude that sexual abuse is extraordinarily common in churches, to the point of being almost the norm. While at the same time overlooking or downplaying any sort of charity or kindness that is motivated by Christian teaching. Both of these seem to be changes from the past that mark Negative World.
Thanks, Thomas - the point you are making in Aaron's comments is exactly the kind of point I'm trying to make. And yes, atheism is unnatural for women - rationalist atheism is heavily male, just as wokeism is heavily female.
I don't see the cultural rebellion against institutions having a breaking point at 2014, unless that were conservative rebellion against institutions. The libs were really taking over the institutions and using them for their own purposes. The general left-skepticism of religious authority goes further back, and again, I don't see a point of transition for it at 2014.
Unless, that is, it's the particular woke, intersectional critique of patriarchy. The thing is that that attitude about sexual abuse in churches is pretty well-evidenced. It was the Catholics, then the Southern Baptists, Bill Gothard, the Duggars... Every church seems to botch sexual abuse cases, etc. This is something that I think evangelicals need to accept as a real critique, rather than doubling down that this is always slander. The "negative world" mentality inoculates us against correction from our critics. I didn't really sense how much of a danger this was until watching "Shiny, Happy People." Now I understand why people react so strongly against an IBLP, fundamental-ish upbringing. I see the Doug Wilson corner and New Founding doubling down on a new fundamentalism/religious right in certain ways - though with more of a sense of humor, to their credit.
Very thought-provoking. There are always opportunities for Christianity, across the spectrum of cultural moments.
I think the truth in this discussion is a mixture of different true perspectives, as is often the case in such complex societal changes. Churches always had some members who were loosely committed to the Christian message. At one time, church leaders joked (sadly) that some members were there because it was good for business, meaning they gained business contacts and maintained social status by being a "good churchgoing man."
For decades, these "members" have been drifting away from churches across the country. Not to go to a different church, but having lost all interest (and pretense) of going to church. This drifting away began before wokeism, but accelerated in the 21st century.
So, I would say the beginning of the drift marked the neutral era, and the acceleration of the drift marks the negative era, of Christianity in America. This phenomenon is exactly what Aaron Renn was talking about. I don't think he was misinterpreting anything in this respect. I don't think that the conflict with wokeism explains the early years of the drifting away, even if it is insightful for explaining the transition from neutral world to negative world.
When I get time, I will post a positive response to the theme you hit on not treating "negative world" as reason for despair, for a bunker mentality, etc., but rather being ready for the unique opportunities our current era presents.
Thanks, Clark. I would love more information about "the acceleration of the drift," an increase in the rate of decline of Christianity. That would serve as another potential marker of the start of the "negative world." But I'm not persuaded that this continuous progression of Christian decline is the correct narrative, especially the change marked by 2014. Why identify this era as one particularly defined by a negative view of Christianity, in light of the new center-right positivity toward Christianity, and the fact that wokeism is aimed at specific political/cultural totems, rather than at Christians per se?
Faithful Christianity is destined to collide with wokeism. So, the rise of wokeism coinciding with increased hostility to Christianity makes sense. Yes, some non-Christians also get attacked by the woke mob, but that does not change the Three Worlds observations.
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.
Thanks, Ben. Lots to chew on here - I'll be looking into Darel Paul and Stephen Bullivant. Where does Darel Paul deal with those topics? Having a hard time finding the right links.
There are two ways to go at this, because we could see progressives as anti-Christian or as mainline Protestant Christians in Spirit (following your hypothesis and Tom Holland's). The research you cite is very relevant - if pro-LGBTQ+ attitudes are motivated by anti-Christian sentiment, then my thinking may need to be revised. However, this still leaves aside the question of where the anti-Christian sentiment comes from. I'm working with the hypothesis that Christians are at fault when someone leaves the fold. The ex-Christian (or rebel against cultural Christianity, whether he or she was ever Christian) is arguably seeing some kind of flaw or hypocrisy in Christians and is thereby using some elements of Christian morality to judge Christian practice.
If wokeism (as the latest version of managerialism) is a variant of mainline Protestantism, then presumably you would grant that it picks up on certain Christian moral strands, i.e., Rev. 7:9:
"After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands."
It uses this moral foundation (to borrow Haidt's term) against other features of contemporary Christianity practice, like its becoming too tied to American culture.
As a conservative, I have tended to discount the purportedly "Christian" reasons for leaving Christianity. My working hypothesis has been that people just really want to indulge their passions. I'm finding that hypothesis lacking and seeing merit in the alternate hypothesis, that ex-Christians/progressives are not just rationalizing unbelief that is motivated by other things. If this is so, then Christianity does need to become more winsome by correcting for these errors.
If you accept the mainline Protestantism hypothesis, how would you articulate the Christian reasons for leaving Christianity behind? Or would you discount these as truly Christian in the moral sense?
I found Paul's book, *From Tolerance to Equality*, absolutely groundbreaking, such that I even wrote the review of the book for American Reformer. Yes, I also started with the assumption that "they just want to exercise their passions" and Paul was one of the people that sent me back to philosophers of ideology and identity for explanations. Unfortunately, the field is all too often polluted by poor scholars pushing their own ideological program (ie. James Lindsay) but that just forces us to be more careful in our reading of the primary sources.
Eric Voegelin's *New Science of Politics* and *From Enlightenment to Revolution* (of whom I'm a grand-student) lays out what he calls the gnostic mode of eschatological speculation, claiming that a whole host of ideological movements in the last 250 years have been continually drawing on Christian imagery and splintering off of orthodoxy. He argues that there are four major eschatological Christian symbols which are frequently either borrowed or transposed by 20th century ideologies: the False Prophet (transposed as the Intellectual), the Antichrist (transposed as the Great Leader), the Millennium, and the Brotherhood of Man. Some of these movements can combine the symbols (ie. Hitler who both wrote Mein Kampf and became the Fuhrer) or divide them (ie. Marx as the Intellectual, Lenin as the Great Leader). Some emphasize the axiological elements of apocalypse (The French Terror), and others the teleological elements (Comtean or Hegelian linear-progressive history). But I would go so far as to argue that in the West, at least, it is impossible for people *not* to think in terms of Christian imagery, even or especially those who are viscerally anti-Christian. Richard Eli's *Social Aspects of Christianity* and William Freemantle's *The World as the Subject of Redemption* are both clear examples of transitional texts between the modern New Religion and Mainline Christianity, where you see the way that political economics and cosmopolitan globalism are taking the role of the Kingdom of Heaven, while pushing out any spiritual interpretations of the Gospels.
As to the why question of the decline in Christianity, I prefer the kinds of explanations that Callum Brown uses, in the sense that we have long-standing trends stemming from the Industrial Revolution that erode the social function of the organized Church, but a sudden, rapid falling away around the turn of the millennium. I don't buy the notion that Christianity has been slowly declining since the First World War because I think it fails to take into account the fact that changes tend to be short, sudden, large-scale lurches.
I think the best explanations involve a combination of acknowledging the eroding function of the church in social life, the emergence of what Smith and Denton call the "parasitic faith" of the New Religion (which is broader than Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, imo, and involves a quasi-cult of 20th Century social justice movements and saint-like adoration of their all-too-flawed leaders), and the fact that sudden lurches are primarily driven by social and political events with very little of what we would call "spiritual" significance. David Campbell's hypothesis is that these lurches are primarily partisan, and the reason we see huge drops in Christian identification is related to the political events which are marked as religious upheavals by the New Religion, like the death of George Floyd.
The winsomeness argument fails because a great deal of the research I've read says that the choice to shift identification is neither based on religious ideals nor on the desire to sin, but on a long, slow acculturation to New Religion norms that is suddenly sparked by an interpersonal dispute with a member of their congregation. Smith and Denton's work on the slow growth of New Religion dogmas within the existing churches show that people are absorbing social libertarianism, the "cult of nice," soteriological universalism, Jesus-the-moral-teacher, all within the Sunday School and worship service environments. They're not picking it up outside the Church, but within it. Then they're trying to rationalize the inner conflict between two sets of beliefs in their day to day lives, which isn't too bad under normal circumstances.
This part got cut out of my First Things article because of length, but I focused a good bit on the Texas Pentacostal couple in Bullivant's new book. What started out as an employment dispute spiraled out into a loud and public apostasy, and then even began to bear political fruit. If you read what they wrote, their vocal anti-Trump sentiment had little to do with Trump's behaviors and more to do with the fact that they bitterly hated evangelicals and attacked Trump for representing them. This is where upper-middle class Christians don't get it - the directionality is wrong in our haute Evangelical discourse. They don't hate Trump because of his vices, they hate Evangelicals and therefore displace Trump's vices onto Evangelicals. Even Bullivant can't find any way to justify the Russell Moore hypothesis, and he tries.
So what causes these breaks is certain events and interpersonal problems that force the religion problem to the surface. When did people disproportionately "nonvert"? The late Bush administration and middle-Obama administration. When their devotion to New Religion principles comes into stark, political contrast with the majority of the Church, people lurch away. The rest is a slow bleed caused by inevitable clashes of personality within any human organization. But most scientists are clear - the theological and ethical justifications are all post-hoc. Nobody but weirdos like us change religion on the basis of theology. "Melissa" was angry at her employer/church, and so therefore he must be a bad person, they must be hypocrites, and suddenly she rediscovered feminism and liberalism. She even admits that she didn't think about these kinds of things as a Christian, but they became important after she nonverted. They're the principles of her new faith, the New Religion, and now justify the decision she made on the basis of her conflict with her boss.
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.
Well, the problem for this hypothesis is that the negative world is partly a product of a decade or two of Christian sexual-abuse-coverups becoming more widely known. It's not like these were known about as well in previous eras, but people assumed they were a few bad apples. There only a few stories at that time (presumably), so it looked like they *were* just a few bad apples. Since the Catholic abuse scandals, it has become apparent that it is *not* just a few bad apples, which plays into the sense that church authority structures are just old boys' clubs: The negative world (if that's what it is) is partly the product of serious malfeasance by powerful Christians coming to light.
It's clear to me that therefore we have to acknowledge these wrongs and avoid them in a new generation if we want people's attitudes to reverse about Christians. I am intrigued by the whole discourse about how Christians can be more effective, wield power, climb status hierarchies. But there seems to be a neglect of the PR dimension. Being perceived as low-status right-wingers/Christian nationalists is *terrible PR.* Russell Moore, Tim Keller, and David Brooks, for example, are doing a much better job of PR, and I say that even though I think Moore has lumped too many Republican-voting Christians together and thrown them under the bus in Washington Post articles. Still, that *is* the way to have more of a hearing in elite and non-elite progressive culture and to show that you can be a Christian without succumbing to the errors of the Christian right.
I think Aaron makes these caveats and argues against Christian nationalism/fundamentalism/culture warring. But again, I think many of his followers - folks interested in the new right from a Christian angle - don't see the dangers to their right flank.
Good thoughts.
I've tried to make the point a few times on Aaron's stack that there will continue to be considerable local variation in how Negative World plays out. And so long as intense political polarization remains a feature of our society, the secular right will remain broadly amiable and respectful towards the religious right, and perhaps even open to conversion. Tongue-in-cheek you could call this "converting to Christianity to own the libs." There are deep roots for this instinct in human psychology: setting aside differences between allies to focus on the common enemy.
As for the point that leftist moral ideas and not atheism per se are the source of pressure -- this is true, but I'm not really sure what to do with it. Atheism comes into fashion now and then but always burns itself out, for the simple reason that total atheistic materialism is a very unnatural attitude for most people, especially women.
Yet at the same time there's a cultural rebellion underway against all sources of authority, which includes any sort of organized religion, revealed scripture, or systematic theology. A dissolution of trust in ALL institutions. Along those lines, I do think there is a negative cultural view towards the idea that our particular very old book has all the answers. A view that wouldn't be so prominent in a society that has fewer problems with authority.
I also think a lot of people have adopted the attitude that sexual abuse is extraordinarily common in churches, to the point of being almost the norm. While at the same time overlooking or downplaying any sort of charity or kindness that is motivated by Christian teaching. Both of these seem to be changes from the past that mark Negative World.
Thanks, Thomas - the point you are making in Aaron's comments is exactly the kind of point I'm trying to make. And yes, atheism is unnatural for women - rationalist atheism is heavily male, just as wokeism is heavily female.
I don't see the cultural rebellion against institutions having a breaking point at 2014, unless that were conservative rebellion against institutions. The libs were really taking over the institutions and using them for their own purposes. The general left-skepticism of religious authority goes further back, and again, I don't see a point of transition for it at 2014.
Unless, that is, it's the particular woke, intersectional critique of patriarchy. The thing is that that attitude about sexual abuse in churches is pretty well-evidenced. It was the Catholics, then the Southern Baptists, Bill Gothard, the Duggars... Every church seems to botch sexual abuse cases, etc. This is something that I think evangelicals need to accept as a real critique, rather than doubling down that this is always slander. The "negative world" mentality inoculates us against correction from our critics. I didn't really sense how much of a danger this was until watching "Shiny, Happy People." Now I understand why people react so strongly against an IBLP, fundamental-ish upbringing. I see the Doug Wilson corner and New Founding doubling down on a new fundamentalism/religious right in certain ways - though with more of a sense of humor, to their credit.
Very thought-provoking. There are always opportunities for Christianity, across the spectrum of cultural moments.
I think the truth in this discussion is a mixture of different true perspectives, as is often the case in such complex societal changes. Churches always had some members who were loosely committed to the Christian message. At one time, church leaders joked (sadly) that some members were there because it was good for business, meaning they gained business contacts and maintained social status by being a "good churchgoing man."
For decades, these "members" have been drifting away from churches across the country. Not to go to a different church, but having lost all interest (and pretense) of going to church. This drifting away began before wokeism, but accelerated in the 21st century.
So, I would say the beginning of the drift marked the neutral era, and the acceleration of the drift marks the negative era, of Christianity in America. This phenomenon is exactly what Aaron Renn was talking about. I don't think he was misinterpreting anything in this respect. I don't think that the conflict with wokeism explains the early years of the drifting away, even if it is insightful for explaining the transition from neutral world to negative world.
When I get time, I will post a positive response to the theme you hit on not treating "negative world" as reason for despair, for a bunker mentality, etc., but rather being ready for the unique opportunities our current era presents.
Thanks, Clark. I would love more information about "the acceleration of the drift," an increase in the rate of decline of Christianity. That would serve as another potential marker of the start of the "negative world." But I'm not persuaded that this continuous progression of Christian decline is the correct narrative, especially the change marked by 2014. Why identify this era as one particularly defined by a negative view of Christianity, in light of the new center-right positivity toward Christianity, and the fact that wokeism is aimed at specific political/cultural totems, rather than at Christians per se?
Faithful Christianity is destined to collide with wokeism. So, the rise of wokeism coinciding with increased hostility to Christianity makes sense. Yes, some non-Christians also get attacked by the woke mob, but that does not change the Three Worlds observations.