A Positive Response to Life in the Negative World
Aaron Renn's Book provides both helpful analysis and hopeful solutions
For the last 16 years, the amazing performance of one financial asset has sent sharp pangs of regret in the guts of countless investors, who repeatedly dismissed it as a passing fad. The smart ones eventually ate crow and bought in, while for others, the experience continues to this day, every time bitcoin hits an all-time high.
Anonymously released on the heels of the 2008 financial collapse, the bitcoin whitepaper states its simple purpose clearly: “A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.” Its decentralized protocol was aimed not only at banks and networks, but government treasuries and central reserves.
The rise of bitcoin has been volatile, with its success spawning countless imitators, pump and dump day trades, and big cash outs at each new surge. But one crucial metric has consistently risen since its inception, with noticeable jumps after successive financial crises– the number of long term holders. For the true believers, the reason is clear. Bitcoin is designed to minimize or eliminate our need to trust in broken human institutions.
Similar comparisons can be made to social media's takedown of legacy news outlets, the growing distrust of academia, the medical industry, and the success of MAGA populism. The common factor across all platforms is the erosion of trust, as leaders of longstanding institutions have gradually cashed in generations worth of hard won credibility for short term gains.
It’s no surprise then that trust in institutional religions, including Christianity, have also fallen to an all time low. There are signs of hope, as people disillusioned by the failures of consumerism seek something deeper to build their life on, but the overall mistrust of institutions is fueling an embrace of self-determined spirituality over familiar religious traditions.
These trends have not been even across the board. Churches have held up better in areas where trust in markets and media first began to wane, and skepticism towards evangelicals has existed far longer in big cities and coastal states. But at a certain point, the overall attitude hit a tipping point, shifting from neutral to negative.
This was the thesis of Aaron Renn’s well known essay The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism. Renn points to a time in 2014, right before Obergefell legalized same-sex marriage, as the beginning of a new era:
“Society has come to have a negative view of Christianity. Being known as a Christian is a social negative, particularly in the elite domains of society. Christian morality is expressly repudiated and seen as a threat to the public good and the new public moral order. Subscribing to Christian moral views or violating the secular moral order brings negative consequences.”
Having read the essay on which it was based, I was initially hesitant to pick up Life in the Negative World for a couple reasons. Although I thought his analysis was spot on, and clearly important, it was also a bit of a downer, and I felt like I had more than enough confirmation of a negative vibe shift. Secondly, I was quite repulsed by the solutions put forward by certain online influencers who gleefully embraced his diagnosis.
This group consisted of several Reformed voices who latched onto the “negative world” moniker, and concluded that the answer was to fight fire with fire. These figures employed Doug Wilson’s concept of the serrated edge, gutted of all subtlety and cleverness. The negative world morphed into “trashworld”, run by a “globohomo” elite, whose necessary destruction served to justify all manner of crudity, including tribalistic political attacks on evangelical stalwarts like Tim Keller.
Upon reading the book, I quickly realized that I was wrong, and quite pleased to discover that Renn offers clear and helpful directions for addressing the problems of the negative world. With the negativity towards Christianity being pushed by an urban monoculture that insists on the acceptance of insanity like 2+2=5, the straightforward truth is clear as day: The best response to a negative world is a positive Christianity.
This is not a call for performative positivity, or a mere positive attitude (although that is vital for Christians in the trenches), but a deep, embodied faith, expressed in thick relationships and strong communities. The negative world forces will continue to winnow the wheat from the chaff within our pews; but what remains, and what flourishes after the shaking, will be a church with the power to reshape culture towards a vision of the Kingdom.
This change will require a renewed embrace of trust, one that may require the continued dissolution of tribal boundaries within evangelicalism. Liturgical and doctrinal differences may need to be set aside in missional pursuit:
“Creating models for the evangelical church in the negative world will thus involve a large number of people exploring various parts of the landscape. It will involve a lot of trial and error. It will involve experimentation.
It will involve false starts and the ability to adapt and adjust quickly. It will require wide but loose alliances and networks with a lot of information sharing.” - Life in the Negative World, Ch. 2
These practices are already happening in many spaces, especially online. I first discovered Renn’s work through Pastor Paul VanderKlay, a Christian Reformed minister whose YouTube channel has spawned a community of misfits and exiles from many denominations. His channel grew exponentially through his commentary on Jordan Peterson’s biblical videos, a figure too quickly dismissed by Evangelicals for his reluctance to publicly affirm faith in Christ.
Pastor Paul’s online “ministry” has spilled over into the real world through his Estuary project, a church-adjacent discussion protocol that has spawned local meetings across the US and abroad, as well as several conferences like the one planned in Chicago, featuring Jonathan Pageau, and Rod Dreher. Many of these figures, along with Peterson, have inspired exiles from evangelicalism to embrace more ancient forms of the faith, like Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and high-church Anglicanism.
Although these traditions are very institutional, this move reflects the general attitude of mistrust towards institutions, since these have proven resilient enough to weather scandals and survive. Such stability is a balm for weary souls, and I am grateful for the solace they provide. But their role in shaping the future will likely be limited by their slow embrace of change. In Renn’s analysis, Evangelicalism’s adaptability provides a distinct advantage to shape the culture of the future – if it overcomes its current limitations.
My own negative world experiences lead me to develop an autodidactic approach to studying the problems in Evangelical culture, resulting in a self-published book. As a result, I often discover the expert analysis of a problem and its potential solutions after I have puzzled out similar answers on my own. Renn’s book was just such a case, which is not surprising, since his blogs have highlighted many problems rarely discussed in the Church. Aiming to wise up those behind the curve, Renn follows the neutral world pattern of highlighting problems in his blog, while publishing the solutions in his book, or behind a paywall.
In many ways, I am a native of the negative world. Growing up in the post-Christian environment of suburban Massachusetts, the costs associated with following Christ were readily apparent; mainly financial, with some social implications. We weren’t exactly persecuted, but my siblings and I knew that our experience as the poor kids in a well-off school system was the result of intentional choices.
My parents lived sacrificially for the sake of our well being. Dad taught at Christian schools and took on a slew of odd jobs during the summer. He later became a bi-vocational pastor, a job that provided a parsonage and little else, Mom began homeschooling us while taking on as much part time work as she could to help pay the bills.
We celebrated holidays with elite relatives on both sides of the family, a state rep on Beacon Hill, a union president in Hartford, and multiple cousins at the kids table who would later secure PhD’s. Our old used station wagon stuck out like a sore thumb in the driveway.
While there were moments of envy, (my cousins had video games,) by the time I reached adulthood, I realized that my siblings and I had received the better inheritance by far. The values embraced by my extended family provided them with no lasting meaning. The sincere Catholic faith of my grandparents had devolved into the pursuit of wealth and status by my boomer uncles, and an embrace of Marxism and progressive ideology by my cousins.
The pervasive influence of secularism presented an ideological bulwark against which faithful churches of all denominations could unite. Doctrinal differences could be overlooked (or relegated to friendly debate) in a fellowship forged through life in the trenches. There was no hesitation on my parent’s part towards us attending youth services at another church our church could not provide, or attending a Bible college outside our tradition.
While my father fulfilled a role that will become increasingly common in the negative world, overseeing the needs of an older, dying congregation, the bigger Pentecostal church down the street stumbled across many of the negative world solutions highlighted in the book, out of sheer necessity. One of those was an embrace of ownership:
“One of the problems evangelicals face in America today is that they exist almost entirely inside space owned by others-legally owned in many cases, but more importantly, socially and culturally owned.
This may include the places they work, shop, and dine. Evangelicals who live in urban centers are typically surrounded by people who overwhelmingly embrace secular progressive beliefs and perspectives, and they "own" the culture of that area.” - Ch. 8
One of the great assets of my former church community was their embrace of ownership. Our pastor’s wife was a stellar real estate agent, who had a penchant for finding amazing deals. One instance was a nearby church that had been sitting on a not-quite-finished building for over a decade. After a church split, the congregation had dwindled, barely filling a small chapel built into the parsonage, lacking the funds to finish the building project. They were willing to offload the building for extremely cheap. After fixing and finishing the building, it was used for outreach, until it could be sold to another growing congregation in need of a home at very fair price.
The church was able to use the profit for several similar deals over the years, as well as investing in staff housing, an asset that allowed them to hire many more people than a typical church of their size. The ministry duties of those staff members were offset with other opportunities to teach at a k-12 school run by the church, thrift stores, a coffee shop, and office space for the “for profit” side business of Church’s media production staff.
While this church centric approach was quite successful, Renn highlights how a similar ethos can work even better from a business first standpoint:
Spiller decided to start Maddox to disrupt the electrical transformer business. He wanted to make money, yes, but for him, starting a business was about more than just earning money for his own lifestyle or for traditional philanthropy. He said, "I wanted to be able to invest in people who are investing in building families, churches, and communities."
With the emergence of the negative world, Spiller also saw the need for Christian communities to control more of their own economic destiny. He believed the market for electrical infrastructure was a great place to be because it's a critical, essential service. "They gave us the road map with COVID," he said, referring to how essential businesses were allowed to continue operating during lockdowns. "We need to be in these essential businesses." - Ch. 8
This business driven approach resonates with a key take away from my own experience working in ministry. While I was extremely proud of the work we were doing as a church, my wife and I were totally dependent on the housing provided as a part of our compensation package. We earned enough to pay the bills, but not much more. Consequently, when we moved to Texas, we had no equity and very little savings. Fortunately, we were able to live with my parents for a couple years while we worked towards buying our own home, something that would have been incredibly difficult with the high cost of living in New England. But making sure people can afford to put down real roots is crucial to growing a community long term.
However, the Church’s ability to subsidize much of life’s necessities did allow for the growth of a community large enough to stand in opposition to the cultural onslaught of progressivism. The strong Christian counterculture between local churches placed a high priority on marriage and children without compromising Biblical values. As Renn points, repairing the sexual economy of the church is an absolute necessity in the negative world:
This is an important element of strengthening our own communities, but it's also about the church having something that people are struggling to find for themselves. For instance, many people have intentionally rejected marriage and chosen not to have children. But others want marriage and children; they just can't figure out how to get them in today's world. They've lost a narrative that leads to health and happiness and are looking for a new pathway, preferably one that others have trod and has visible evidence of success.
The simple act of building healthy Christian families in churches where marriage with children is the norm will be increasingly countercultural in the negative world. Yet doing this will demonstrate that it's not only possible but provides evidence of a different way for people to live their lives.
Evangelicals, then, should be willing to help others find this way of life for themselves instead of affirming them in choices that take them further from where they want to go. But to do it in a way that isn't condescending or communicated with a judgmental spirit … Many people simply don't believe it's possible to get married without first living together or at least having premarital sex. But it very much can be done, and that "old-fashioned" approach still has something compelling about it, even if many people would never admit it publicly. Evangelicals who embrace a Christian sexual ethic and courageously live it out publicly let people see not only how but why they're doing it. - Ch. 10
My wife and I count ourselves fortunate in this regard, and even more blessed to know many more couples that have achieved the same goal. Some of the initial impetus for waiting for marriage stemmed from the flawed teachings of purity culture, which can lead to problems with intimacy in marriage, especially for women; while most men, despite making it to the finish line, have to cope with sexual expectations shaped by exposure to pornography.
Churches need to get over some squeamishness and discuss these areas with frankness and facts. But they ought to be able to do so with confidence, because what they have to offer is in high demand. The body of evidence that has emerged from researchers like Brad Wilcox, makes it quite clear, the biblical sexual ethic is the real winner for long-term happiness.
The possibility of Churches to serve as matchmakers could be a real gamechanger, but it probably will take a bit of effort. Evangelical churches tend towards an abundance of single women (likely a lot of millennials), and with a lack of men in their congregations, there seems to be a lot more affirmation and justification of singleness coming from the pulpit. Gen Z men are far more interested in religion than Gen Z women, but they are also going hard for the Trad movements of Orthodoxy and Catholicism.
Some cross-denominational mixers might do the trick, but it would require Pastors to place the needs of their local towns and cities (and the individuals within their congregations) before their concerns over attendance numbers. Personally, I think it’s a fear that underestimates the degree to which wives influence the choice of where to worship, especially once kids arrive. But it does raise another issue regarding Evangelicalisms ability to reach men. As Renn points out:
A decade ago, I was already seeing young men turning to online influencers and secular men's gurus in droves, looking for guidance in life there, not in the church. As I mentioned earlier, it has long been known that the church has struggled to attract men.* But the rising influence of these gurus shows that men aren't detached and disinterested; they're looking for someone to guide them in life. They just aren't looking to the church or its leaders for that guidance. - Ch. 10
I’ve noticed far too many Evangelical pastors exhibit signs of insecurity around competent, masculine men. Such men exist, and many still attend church, but they are far too often underutilized. The vacuum of positive male role models is both deep and wide. Young men don’t need much; any man that has succeeded in maintaining a marriage, holding down a job, and raising kids has a lot to offer. Even those who have failed in those tasks have gained valuable experience. All it would take is some simple organization to get young men connected with older men who can teach them a few useful skills, and give them some much needed affirmation.
This would in fact address a connected issue that Renn identifies, the over-reliance on pastors and other official leaders:
Evangelicals perhaps expect too much from pastors, who are expected to have the Christian answer to everything. But let's be honest. They're not equipped to provide this kind of relationship advice. In fact, it can be dangerous for them to try. The Bible doesn't lay out a clear model for dating relationships, for example, and approaches to dating vary widely across cultures. Dating is an extremely culture-bound activity. So when pastors venture into giving dating advice or seek to provide other forms of life-coaching apart from Scripture, they may inadvertently call the gospel into question if their advice turns out to be bad. Even if it's 100 percent right, sometimes the best advice can still produce bad results. - Ch. 10
This might be a byproduct of Boomer hubris, but from my own experience, I learned the most about how to lead from the pastors who regularly confessed their own mistakes, and lack of expertise. Those pastors also did the most to bring out the best in others within their community. As Renn continues:
We also need to become less dependent on pastors for life applications by encouraging greater integration of laypeople's vocational expertise with Christian faith and practice. We need a generation of lay evangelicals who can convey information from within their own area of expertise but from a Christian metaphysical and moral point of view and with an eye toward pointing people to Christ.
We need genuine Christian psychology experts who can speak on the behavioral differences between the sexes just as authoritatively as Jordan Peterson does. Where evangelicals don't have expertise, people are instead turning to secular gurus who are better informed and unafraid to share their viewpoint.
This final point is perhaps the most crucial of all, because while those experts speak with greater authority, they also stand on shaky ground.
My move to Texas in 2018 was a shift from the negative world back to neutral. The competition for Sunday mornings was fueled by consumerist gimmicks by churches with money to spare. But COVID brought the negative world crashing in, sorting people and churches between those who remained open and those who closed, with further divisions splitting people along the lines of what was deemed safe practice, followed by how much or how little politics played a role in Sunday sermons. Many pastors lost members by trusting the wrong experts, or being overly dismissive of concerns.
In hindsight, no one was really prepared with how to deal with the information on hand, but it exposed the foolishness of thinking that things will just keep going on like they always have. Most Pastors have a better game plan for dealing with a similar health crisis, but whose to say what other kinds of crises might occur?
Church leaders need to broaden their knowledge beyond the theological and ecclesiastical domains, but they must do so with humility, respecting lay people with greater expertise, and elevating those with competence to positions of leadership.
With so many public institutions in a state of flux, few churches are equipped to handle the variety of needs that may arise. But by strengthening their networks, both within their congregations, and across their local communities, they can summon the resources, knowledge, and tools needed to weather a future storm. The question is, are they looking towards the horizon? If not, Life in the Negative World might provide just the wake up call they need.