NC Family Staff | May 25, 2024 | SHARE: 
It used to be that identifying as a Christian and going to church were respected traits in American society. Now, however, Christianity is often viewed as a threat to society and the modern world. Christian Nationalism has even been called the “single biggest threat” to America’s religious freedom. How did this drastic change happen?
This week on Family Policy Matters, host Traci DeVette Griggs welcomes Aaron Renn, Senior Fellow at American Reformer and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, to discuss how society’s view of Christianity has declined in the United States and how people of faith can live in the new anti-Christian culture.
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TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. We have seen a dramatic shift in the relationship between culture and Christianity over the past 60 years. But how did this shift happen? And how should Christians respond to it? Well, Aaron Renn is a senior fellow at American Reformer in the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. He joins us today to discuss these and other important questions explored in his newest book, Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture. Aaron Renn, welcome to Family Policy Matters.
AARON RENN: Thanks for having me.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: All right, we’ll start off, why do you call today’s world negative and anti Christian?
AARON RENN: Yes, well, it used to be to be known as a good church going man made you seem like an upstanding member of society. People used to go to church, maybe because they weren’t especially devout, but because that was the thing to do. Well, today, being known as a Bible believing Christian does not help you get a job on Wall Street or Silicon Valley. It may not stop you from getting a job, but it’s certainly not going to be viewed as a positive. We also open the papers every day, click online, and see some article about Christian nationalism. And you just see, in many ways, Christians and Christianity sort of treated as sort of a threat to the new public moral order, if you will. I would say, though, that it’s probably more accurate to say skeptical than necessarily negative. Merely identifying as a Christian doesn’t necessarily get you in trouble. After all, we have a Democratic senator from Georgia who’s extremely liberal and is a pastor of a church, and nobody attacks him, as you might have noticed. But the key is the contents of your Christianity cannot conflict with the ideologies of the new secular elite culture. And if they do, you’re gonna find yourself in trouble. Sometimes it can be a bit difficult to determine if the real motivation of some of these people is religious or political. You know, I think maybe a lot of evangelicals are more disliked, because they are supporters of Donald Trump, for example, than necessarily because of their theology, you know, so it’s hard to disentangle the two right now. But I certainly don’t see the culture going back to anything like the way that it was.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: So do you think that we are somewhat at fault for entangling ourselves in situations like support of a president or some other policy that might be overtly political?
AARON RENN: Well, what I would say is, you know, we can always repent. I think evangelicalism definitely has a lot of things that it has gotten wrong and needs to correct. You know, I think the same is true of Catholicism, etc. But I don’t buy the idea that’s promoted by some that the reason society doesn’t like Christians is because Christians were bad, and they did the wrong things, and all of that. It puts the blame there. In fact, if you look at this with a bigger lens, what we see is, in fact, kind of de-Christianization and the decline of Christianity in America has been going on for a long time. And it started well before there was sort of any overt politics and religion of the type that we have today. So I think there’s certainly a debate to be had about politics and religion, but I simply do not view that as the cause of any of these things.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: All right, you talk about the three worlds of evangelicalism. What do you mean by that?
AARON RENN: Sure. This is really where the word “negative” comes from, in my title. If you think back, we never had a state church like Europe. But for most of our history, we had a sort of softly institutionalized generic Protestantism as our default national religion. As recently as the 1950s, half of all adults went to church. That was actually the high watermark of church attendance in America. We had prayer and Bible reading in our public schools in the 1950s. We’re adding In God We Trust to our money, under God to the Pledge of Allegiance. But starting in the 1960s, the status of Christianity began to go into decline in America, and that’s a decline that continues to the present day. We’re talking about declines in attendance, decline and adherence, etc. and I divide the period between 1964 and the present this period of decline and the three phases are worlds that I call the positive world, the neutral world, and the negative world. So the positive world lasts from 64 to 94. And I want to be clear things aren’t all positive for Christianity, Christianity is in decline in America, church attendance is going down. At the same time, you know, Christianity is still basically viewed positively. Christian morality is still the basic morality of society. And if you violate Christian moral norms, you could get in trouble.
Around 1994, we had a tipping point and entered what I call the neutral world, which lasted from 1994 to 2014, in which Christianity is not seeing positively anymore, but it’s not really seen negatively yet either. It’s just one more lifestyle choice among the many in a sort of pluralistic public square. And then, you know, the Christian moral system sort of has residual impact and society residual hold. But around 2014, we enter what I call the negative world where for the first time in the 400 year history of America, official elite culture views Christianity negatively, again certainly at least skeptically. Again, being known as a Bible, believing Christian is not a social positive in the elite domains of society. Christian morality is expressly repudiated today, and in fact, is now viewed as the leading threat to the new public moral order. And so this has been very dislocating to evangelicals, especially who’ve been prone to see themselves as the moral majority, which was a positive world institution, note, but in fact, now that it’s clear that evangelicals are a minority, it’s been difficult to figure out how to react to that.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: In your book, you talk about personal, institutional, and missional. Explain that to us.
AARON RENN: I originally wrote this three worlds model in my newsletter in 2017, actually, but it was published in First Things magazine in February 22. It was a hugely popular article. So I turned it into the book. And the article mostly talked about the framework and like the recent history of evangelicalism, so what I wanted to do with the book was not just talk about what’s going on in the culture, but try to give people some ideas about how to start responding to it. And again, I look at it in terms of three dimensions, again, personal, institutional, missional. How should we live as individuals and as families? How should our churches, ministries, schools, maybe even businesses respond? And then how do we do mission? How do we continue to carry out the Great Commission and evangelism? And how do we think about social, cultural, political engagement? And I don’t pretend to have all the answers. I say, we don’t, we’re kind of an unknown territory. We have to, in a sense, be explorers, but I wanted to give people some starts at thinking, Okay, if we’re now in this new negative world, what are the implications for how we live our lives? How we do church, how we do mission?
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay, great. So we see how you’re organized here. Start, then, with personal. What can we do on a personal level to address this different culture?
AARON RENN: One of the things, you know, I just say is the era of sort of being average and your faith is a little bit over. Maybe like the Bible talks about being lukewarm as bad, when Christianity was high status in America, it was a good thing to be known as someone who went to church every Sunday. So it was, it was easy to kind of be like a generic pew warmer Christian. But now that being known as a Christian might cost you something – you probably won’t get thrown in jail, I reject the idea that Christians are being persecuted in America, and we probably won’t be – but even just, you know, some dirty looks, you know, or some, you know, angry tweets, you have to make sure you’re committed, you have to make sure hey, do I really believe this? Am I all in? I think really resolving that is the most important thing. The other thing is, I say we have to become a little more resilient and many of the things that we took for granted in the past, I think we need to think more intentionally about today. And that doesn’t mean we make any particular choice. But we have to think about them. For example, what career should we go into? You know, there are some careers today where it is becoming very difficult to live as a faithful Christian. I’ll give an example, you know, Canada legalized assisted suicide. And basically, if you’re a physician in Canada, it is illegal for you to refuse to refer someone to a physician assisted suicide option if they request it. And so your rights of conscience in that profession are being essentially stripped away.
So you have to think, Am I someone who has the characteristics that would enable me to thrive in that profession? I’m not saying don’t become a doctor. But if any of these kinds of, you know, domains, wow, there’s got to be more pressure for certain things now. So we have to think intentionally about that. We have to think intentionally about where do we live? Do we have a strong Christian community around us? Are we in a place that’s more friendly to Christianity, less friendly to Christianity, again, doesn’t mean we live any particular place. But we have to be more intentional. Where do we live? What do we do? How much debt should our church have in an era when Oh, we might lose our tax exemptions. Just thinking about maybe we should adopt a more conservative financial profile, because we don’t know when the shock might hit us. We don’t know if we might lose our job because the hate mob comes after us. So those are just some of the considerations on the personal side.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay. How about institutional then, what are some things we need to consider there?
AARON RENN: I think the key thing that I’ll highlight is that we need to focus more on becoming a counterculture and stewarding the strengths of our own community. Back when Protestant Americans were a majority of the culture, and there was prayer and Bible reading in school, you know, we can at least understand that the culture was friendly to us, probably at least, it wasn’t totally teaching things contrary to many of the basics of the faith. But when you’re a minority in a country, you have to think like a minority, which means as a minority, the institutions of society writ large, they’re not designed with you in mind. They’re designed with other things in mind. And so you don’t have to hate other people. But the idea being, if you want to live faithfully as a minority in a culture, you have to self consciously steward the health of your own community.
So the example I give here is early 20th century Catholicism. Pre-war America was an anti-Catholic country, basically. And so all these Catholic immigrants who are here, like my ancestors, you know, they had to say, if we want to live as faithful Catholics in America, how do we do that? We need parish schools, we need Catholic universities, we need Catholic fraternal societies, they built the whole infrastructure to sustain Catholic life in America. We historically didn’t have to do that, because the mainstream institutions of society were our institutions, they were our infrastructure. That’s no longer the case. So we have to be very intentional about creating our own infrastructure and our own practices to demarcate and sustain community life. And this is somewhat happening organically, great example would be homeschooling, the classical Christian schooling movements, other forms of Christian schooling, creating, like the Catholics did, our alternative educational infrastructure. That’s an example of what I’m talking about, because we can’t just rely on mainstream society to do that for us.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: So are you suggesting then that Christian parents send their kids only to Christian schools and Christian colleges? Are we there now?
AARON RENN: No, I’m not saying that. I’m not one of those people that says you can’t go to public schools by any means. Because you know, some people are going to make those choices. Again, the key is not that I’m telling you, you must do XYZ. The key is, in the book, I’m trying to give you ideas and thought processes. I will say you simply cannot outsource moral and religious formation of your child to institutions that aren’t aligned with your beliefs, and may even be promoting things that other beliefs. So you have to have an intentionality towards how you form your children, maybe in a way that you didn’t have to have in the past. But how you do that is going to depend by person. The key is we have to think about and intentionally, maybe in a way more than we did. And this isn’t even true just in society. You know, when I was a kid, this idea of picking where you went to school just didn’t exist. Like now it’s like, well, we want to enroll this charter school, that special program this, this is just the world we live in now where like much, much higher degrees of intentionality are required.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay. Well, the final point is on being missional. So how do we do that? How do we go about fulfilling the Great Commission? Sometimes we hear quite often we’re supposed to be sharing the hope that is within us. But has that changed the way that we need to do that in society? Has that changed because of all of this cultural change?
AARON RENN: Well, one thing that certainly changed with the collapse of the old cultural Christianity is we can’t assume that people know anything about Christianity. It used to be, like a guy like Billy Graham, in his crusades, you can probably take advantage of the fact that people knew some basics about Christianity. They probably had a vague sense that there’s a God and that if you’re not a good person, maybe you go to hell. There’s a whole lot of things there. You know, now today, young people literally know nothing about Christianity. They probably heard of Jesus Christ, but they can’t tell you anything about Jesus Christ. And how often do we read an article in like the New York Times, even, that shows a reporter just doesn’t even know the basic facts of Christianity? So there’s an article, I think it was in the New York Times a couple years ago, there’s this article about the Church of the Holy Sepulchre over in Israel. It’s like, this is where Christians believe Jesus was buried. I’m like, that’s not what we believe about that, you know, they don’t know anything. And so we have to do more work. You know, that’s an example of all the categories that used to sort of pre-evangelize people and don’t exist anymore.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay. Well, we’re about out of time, and I know we’ve just barely scratched the surface. And if people want to dig deeper and learn more about this issue, and also get your book Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture, how would they go about following you and finding that book?
AARON RENN: Well, definitely buy the book. You can buy it anywhere books are sold, but also go to my website, AaronRenn.com, sign up for my newsletter and you’ll get all my stuff there. I’m constantly engaging with issues like this.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay, and that’s A A R O N, and Renn is R E N N. Aaron Renn, thank you so much for being with us today on Family Policy Matters.
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