There is a new divide among evangelicals; rather than between progressives and conservatives, it is among conservative evangelicals. The evangelical majority does well to heed its evangelical critics.
I think this framework maps pretty well. Though I think COVID was as big of a polarizing issue as Trump, and reveals another factor That I don't think you mentioned: trust in establishment narratives. Evangelical Critics are generally trusting of establishment narratives and sources of facts (CRT, Covid, climate change, and the Evangelical Majority are generally distrustful and look for dissident experts as their source for facts.
2020 was extremely polarizing in this regard. If you leaned towards trusting the establishment you probably think it's really super important to trust the establishment now since distrust of vaccines, masks, and lockdowns literally killed people. If you leaned towards distrust, then now you think it's critical that we never comply with the establishment ever again since blind trust in authority led to biomedical tyranny, deaths of despair, religious persecution, and widespread cases of "died suddenly."
So not only are the two camps divided culturally and politically, but they're also divided epistemologically to the point where they may as well be inhabiting two different worlds.
I'd say I'm on the right on these issues (though I have zero tolerance for sexual abuse, and I'm generally suspicious of any leader who doesn't live by something like the Billy Graham Rule), but Covid doesn't seem as polarizing to me. By contrast, Trump remains polarizing, everyone has strong views about him.
Maybe I'm a Covid centrist, as is nearly everyone around me? So having strong views about Covid seems "Very Online" to me. I wonder how narrow my experience here really is though. Since I'm mostly in rightist spaces online, I mostly hear the rightist extreme views, but I remember drifting into a leftist online space in late 2021 and people were talking breathlessly about the "mental health challenges" of "living in a pandemic," which struck me as nuts. I think of "the pandemic" as something that lasted for a few months in early 2020, but these people were living it for going on 2 years. But the leftists that I know in real life (admittedly a smaller part of my personal network) are mostly not this way, either. They're generally "Covid centrists" who want to live life as well.
Maybe it helps that I'm in an area that didn't have prolonged shutdowns. I can imagine that many of the more extreme voices on the right are angry about extreme precautions that their states and local governments undertook. Covid was something that inconvenienced us for a month or two of restaurants being takeout-only, and a few more months of wearing masks at public places (though not my office, i.e. the main public place I go to). The schools didn't close. The churches I'm aware of didn't close.
I mostly abandoned the mask thing after the Summer of Floyd, and my low respect for this country's authorities and elites was reduced further at that time, but mask compliance here was always haphazard. I gave the anti-vax ideas some notice but decided they were as paranoid as anti-vaxxers have always been, and I got two vaccine shots. Again, most people around me did the same. I didn't catch Covid until 2022, and when I did, it was very mild. Maybe the vaccine helped, and if not, I still have no regrets about taking it.
Thomas and Mason, I do think COVID mapped onto this to some degree, and my experience of it was not exclusively online. It definitely affected personal relationships. However, I decided to just keep that out of my telling of the divide. It was temporary, though it is reflective of this longer-term divide on a broader range of issues.
Love this assessment. Renn's blog is basically one ad hominem after another, implying people don't have "courage" if they don't agree with an old-school fundamentalist vision of evangelicalism. I once brought up to him that I'd actually been "cancelled" by evangelicals by having my funding withdrawn because I was perceived as "too progressive" on racial issues. I asked him why he thought a Josh Hawley type was "courageous" for supporting Trump, whereas I am "cowardly" for stating my convictions. He said my convictions sounded too similar to liberals, that's why.
So interesting. I was reading an article recently about how people have been complaining to pastors quoting from the sermon on the mount for being to Liberal! Whilst these stories are anecdotal it certainly dovetails with the recent survey that came out showing that Trump supporters trust him more than religious leaders and even their own family!
Thanks, Nicholas! I think one of the issues is that we're not relativizing our judgments of courage to people's institutional contexts. For example, in your piece, "My Pastor Literally Canceled Jesus," your institutional context was, well, Whiteland(!). In that context, criticizing a white majority that is unconcerned about blacks and about racism in general takes courage and involves undertaking risk.
Aaron has his sights set primarily on evangelicals (I think) who are in (or enter) institutional settings that confer status on more progressive perspectives. For example, he critiques Moore for criticizing other evangelicals from the pages of the Washington Post. Relative to the Post audience, you're only going to get applause for doing that. But the complexity is that Moore's actual institutional was the SBC, which turned to have more features in common with "Whiteland" than he anticipated.
I think it's really tempting to generalize our own experiences to everyone. My experiences at several educational institutions definitely had more progressive pressure, and it felt courageous to be a conservative. But I recognize that the academy is not the world. The friends I mention in the article have grounded me, one in his experience of Trumpy southern Christianity in Florida, in the SBC. He assures me that Moore's critiques are correct of that kind of culture. :)
True, but I think it's more insidious than that. For instance, Renn believes anything Keller did that didn't tow the fundamentalist line was only him catering to the liberal agenda. He doesn't accept Keller's own exegetical convictions and evangelistic methodology is behind some of the ways Redeemer NY looks different than most churches. Rather, the way he articulated it to me, he thinks Keller was just trying to please the progressives enough to get them in the door. That's just poor analysis and thinking, and frankly, it's slanderous.
I'm disappointed how your conversations with Aaron went, but I agree with Mason that what I've heard from him in his writing is more nuanced. Aaron's thesis is that the public perception of Christianity has changed, so that Keller's approach was well-adapted to a social world in which being a Christian is sort of "neutral," another lifestyle choice in NYC. The problem is that that approach no longer works in general, especially given the new dogmas of our culture surrounding sexual morality.
Now, Tim Keller's last video to the world basically included his response, that, if anything, ministering to NYC was like ministering to the "negative world," just a couple of decades early; so he would dispute Aaron's historical thesis, or widely it applies.
I do think a lot of people receive his critique (and James Woods') of Keller in the way you're talking about. I would have hoped that Aaron would communicate that better in person, but am I just defending slander of Tim Keller? I don't mean to be.
Yeah, I'm drawing from an in person conversation, so it's kind of meaningless for me to defend what I said or what Aaron said. I don't think Keller is untouchable, but I was disheartened that Renn's critique of some things Keller has very carefully argued for exegetically and practically, Renn boiled down to: "He was just trying to please the libs." He also, frankly, made some incredibly racist remarks to our staff, essentially saying the same thing about the black church: if evangelicals care about the critiques of the black church, they're cowards. Is that what we call a "nuanced" critique of culture?
On slander: to me, attributing false motives to someone - especially when they've carefully outlined their views from scripture - in such a reductionistic way, whether you agree or no, is slander. If that's not slander, what is?
Joel, I didn't perceive you have defending Renn. I thought you did a good job.
I don't think you're being fair to Aaron Renn. He's actually spoken very highly of Keller despite having a following that doesn't generally care for Keller. It's one thing to disagree with his analysis, but if even Renn's careful, particular critiques in the context of general admiration are beyond the pale and "slanderous" then I think we're in "touch not the Lord's anointed" territory.
I think this framework maps pretty well. Though I think COVID was as big of a polarizing issue as Trump, and reveals another factor That I don't think you mentioned: trust in establishment narratives. Evangelical Critics are generally trusting of establishment narratives and sources of facts (CRT, Covid, climate change, and the Evangelical Majority are generally distrustful and look for dissident experts as their source for facts.
2020 was extremely polarizing in this regard. If you leaned towards trusting the establishment you probably think it's really super important to trust the establishment now since distrust of vaccines, masks, and lockdowns literally killed people. If you leaned towards distrust, then now you think it's critical that we never comply with the establishment ever again since blind trust in authority led to biomedical tyranny, deaths of despair, religious persecution, and widespread cases of "died suddenly."
So not only are the two camps divided culturally and politically, but they're also divided epistemologically to the point where they may as well be inhabiting two different worlds.
I'd say I'm on the right on these issues (though I have zero tolerance for sexual abuse, and I'm generally suspicious of any leader who doesn't live by something like the Billy Graham Rule), but Covid doesn't seem as polarizing to me. By contrast, Trump remains polarizing, everyone has strong views about him.
Maybe I'm a Covid centrist, as is nearly everyone around me? So having strong views about Covid seems "Very Online" to me. I wonder how narrow my experience here really is though. Since I'm mostly in rightist spaces online, I mostly hear the rightist extreme views, but I remember drifting into a leftist online space in late 2021 and people were talking breathlessly about the "mental health challenges" of "living in a pandemic," which struck me as nuts. I think of "the pandemic" as something that lasted for a few months in early 2020, but these people were living it for going on 2 years. But the leftists that I know in real life (admittedly a smaller part of my personal network) are mostly not this way, either. They're generally "Covid centrists" who want to live life as well.
Maybe it helps that I'm in an area that didn't have prolonged shutdowns. I can imagine that many of the more extreme voices on the right are angry about extreme precautions that their states and local governments undertook. Covid was something that inconvenienced us for a month or two of restaurants being takeout-only, and a few more months of wearing masks at public places (though not my office, i.e. the main public place I go to). The schools didn't close. The churches I'm aware of didn't close.
I mostly abandoned the mask thing after the Summer of Floyd, and my low respect for this country's authorities and elites was reduced further at that time, but mask compliance here was always haphazard. I gave the anti-vax ideas some notice but decided they were as paranoid as anti-vaxxers have always been, and I got two vaccine shots. Again, most people around me did the same. I didn't catch Covid until 2022, and when I did, it was very mild. Maybe the vaccine helped, and if not, I still have no regrets about taking it.
Thomas and Mason, I do think COVID mapped onto this to some degree, and my experience of it was not exclusively online. It definitely affected personal relationships. However, I decided to just keep that out of my telling of the divide. It was temporary, though it is reflective of this longer-term divide on a broader range of issues.
Love this assessment. Renn's blog is basically one ad hominem after another, implying people don't have "courage" if they don't agree with an old-school fundamentalist vision of evangelicalism. I once brought up to him that I'd actually been "cancelled" by evangelicals by having my funding withdrawn because I was perceived as "too progressive" on racial issues. I asked him why he thought a Josh Hawley type was "courageous" for supporting Trump, whereas I am "cowardly" for stating my convictions. He said my convictions sounded too similar to liberals, that's why.
Sheesh.
So interesting. I was reading an article recently about how people have been complaining to pastors quoting from the sermon on the mount for being to Liberal! Whilst these stories are anecdotal it certainly dovetails with the recent survey that came out showing that Trump supporters trust him more than religious leaders and even their own family!
Thanks, Nicholas! I think one of the issues is that we're not relativizing our judgments of courage to people's institutional contexts. For example, in your piece, "My Pastor Literally Canceled Jesus," your institutional context was, well, Whiteland(!). In that context, criticizing a white majority that is unconcerned about blacks and about racism in general takes courage and involves undertaking risk.
Aaron has his sights set primarily on evangelicals (I think) who are in (or enter) institutional settings that confer status on more progressive perspectives. For example, he critiques Moore for criticizing other evangelicals from the pages of the Washington Post. Relative to the Post audience, you're only going to get applause for doing that. But the complexity is that Moore's actual institutional was the SBC, which turned to have more features in common with "Whiteland" than he anticipated.
I think it's really tempting to generalize our own experiences to everyone. My experiences at several educational institutions definitely had more progressive pressure, and it felt courageous to be a conservative. But I recognize that the academy is not the world. The friends I mention in the article have grounded me, one in his experience of Trumpy southern Christianity in Florida, in the SBC. He assures me that Moore's critiques are correct of that kind of culture. :)
True, but I think it's more insidious than that. For instance, Renn believes anything Keller did that didn't tow the fundamentalist line was only him catering to the liberal agenda. He doesn't accept Keller's own exegetical convictions and evangelistic methodology is behind some of the ways Redeemer NY looks different than most churches. Rather, the way he articulated it to me, he thinks Keller was just trying to please the progressives enough to get them in the door. That's just poor analysis and thinking, and frankly, it's slanderous.
I'm disappointed how your conversations with Aaron went, but I agree with Mason that what I've heard from him in his writing is more nuanced. Aaron's thesis is that the public perception of Christianity has changed, so that Keller's approach was well-adapted to a social world in which being a Christian is sort of "neutral," another lifestyle choice in NYC. The problem is that that approach no longer works in general, especially given the new dogmas of our culture surrounding sexual morality.
Now, Tim Keller's last video to the world basically included his response, that, if anything, ministering to NYC was like ministering to the "negative world," just a couple of decades early; so he would dispute Aaron's historical thesis, or widely it applies.
I also really appreciated a talk of Aaron's in which he details what's wrong with the religious right/fundamentalist culture war strategy: https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/culture-warring-is-also-obsolete?r=k9yk0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web.
I do think a lot of people receive his critique (and James Woods') of Keller in the way you're talking about. I would have hoped that Aaron would communicate that better in person, but am I just defending slander of Tim Keller? I don't mean to be.
Yeah, I'm drawing from an in person conversation, so it's kind of meaningless for me to defend what I said or what Aaron said. I don't think Keller is untouchable, but I was disheartened that Renn's critique of some things Keller has very carefully argued for exegetically and practically, Renn boiled down to: "He was just trying to please the libs." He also, frankly, made some incredibly racist remarks to our staff, essentially saying the same thing about the black church: if evangelicals care about the critiques of the black church, they're cowards. Is that what we call a "nuanced" critique of culture?
On slander: to me, attributing false motives to someone - especially when they've carefully outlined their views from scripture - in such a reductionistic way, whether you agree or no, is slander. If that's not slander, what is?
Joel, I didn't perceive you have defending Renn. I thought you did a good job.
I don't think you're being fair to Aaron Renn. He's actually spoken very highly of Keller despite having a following that doesn't generally care for Keller. It's one thing to disagree with his analysis, but if even Renn's careful, particular critiques in the context of general admiration are beyond the pale and "slanderous" then I think we're in "touch not the Lord's anointed" territory.