He Gave a Name to What Many Christians Feel

New York Times

06-03-2025

In the two years since Aaron Renn moved to Carmel, Ind., he has become a kind of unofficial booster for the unusual suburb of Indianapolis.
For Mr. Renn, Carmel is proof that 'we can have an America where things still work.' Run by Republicans for decades, with the same mayor from 1996 to 2024, the city has built big and beautifully, often in traditionalist architectural styles. The streets — bikeable and walkable — are almost eerily free of trash. Police officers enforce traffic laws strictly, and drivers behave with a noticeable lack of aggression. It's Mayberry, or Bedford Falls.
I traveled to Carmel in February to talk with Mr. Renn about the ideas that had made him a new star in conservative Christian intellectual circles. But we ended up spending almost as much time talking about the city. Mr. Renn arranged a tour of the Palladium, a huge limestone state-of-the-art concert hall inspired by classical Greek and Roman temples. He led me into an elaborately decorated local cake shop that he pointed out had received attention from Oprah Winfrey and Disney. Over lunch at a 'seasonally influenced' restaurant nearby, he pulled out a sheet of typed notes he had prepared, reminding him of all the other qualities of the city that he wanted to mention.
Mr. Renn loves city life, and has lived in Manhattan, Chicago and Indianapolis. Carmel is different. Here, church bells chime full hymns over the town square. It's a place where it's easy to forget Mr. Renn's best-known idea: his warning to Christians that America is in an era of distinct hostility to believers like them, and that they must gird themselves to adapt to, as the title of his recent book put it, 'Life in the Negative World.'
Mr. Renn's schema is straightforward. Modern American history, he argues, can be divided into three epochs when it comes to the status of Christianity. In 'positive world,' between 1964 and 1994, being a Christian in America generally enhanced one's social status. It was a good thing to be known as a churchgoer, and 'Christian moral norms' were the basic norms of the broader American culture. Then, in 'neutral world,' which lasted roughly until 2014 — Mr. Renn acknowledges the dates are imprecise — Christianity no longer had a privileged status, but it was seen as one of many valid options in a pluralist public square.
About a decade ago, around the time that the Supreme Court's ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges made same-sex marriage legal nationwide, Mr. Renn says the United States became 'negative world." Being a Christian, especially in high-status domains, is a social negative, he argues, and holding to traditional Christian moral views, particularly related to sex and gender, is seen as 'a threat to the public good and new public moral order.'
As one example, Mr. Renn shares the story of the Crossing, a large evangelical church in Columbia, Mo., that sponsored and supported a local secular film festival for years. The close relationship between the conservative church and the progressive arts institution was noted positively in national publications, including The New York Times. The church worked hard to win trust and cultivate a relationship with the local creative community. But when a pastor at the church preached in 2019 that 'God is not pleased when we blur genders,' the film festival bowed to a community outcry and cut those ties.
It's just one instance of what Mr. Renn depicts as a pattern: Christians who hold traditional beliefs about a range of social and political issues have come to be treated as pariahs by secular elites even if they have made an effort to avoid gratuitous offense. The phenomenon goes beyond 'cancel culture' to describe a kind of wholesale skepticism of many Christian beliefs and behaviors in domains like academia and the corporate world.
'It just instantly connected with my experience,' Josh McPherson, the pastor of a large church in Washington State, said of Mr. Renn's 'negative world' construct. For him and other conservative pastors, he said, 'it explained the world we're living in: 'Oh, this is why this is happening.'' Mr. McPherson and another pastor in Texas recently released a podcast series intended to equip pastors for ministry in 'negative world.'
Mr. Renn's notion that Christians have no choice but to exist as a countercultural presence in 'negative world' sparked a furious and continuing intra-evangelical debate. His critics say Christians should be a countercultural presence regardless of the prevailing cultural atmosphere, because true Christian values do not map neatly onto partisan politics. They also point out that Christians remain the country's dominant religious group.
But 'negative world' is now the dominant framework for many people trying to understand their place in contemporary America. The idea has inspired conferences, sermons, and countless response essays and blog posts. A reviewer in Christianity Today called it 'among the most thought-provoking ideas pertaining to American evangelicalism this century.'
'Negative world' has turned Mr. Renn into a kind of Malcolm Gladwell of conservative Christianity, a skilled taxonomist known for distilling and naming a phenomenon that many were feeling but none had articulated.
'You know you've got a winner when people adopt the vocabulary without attribution,' said R.R. Reno, the editor of the journal First Things, which published a version of Mr. Renn's argument in 2022 that became one of the publication's most-read articles in years. (The essay now has its own Wikipedia page.) 'He's got a real gift for that pithy, direct social analysis.'
And these days, Mr. Renn is wondering whether a new epoch is dawning.
Shaped by the City
Mr. Renn has an unusual profile for someone who has captured the attention of American evangelicalism. He is not a pastor, an academic or a politician. He has no institutional affiliations with high-profile evangelical organizations. He is a mild-mannered former consultant with a wide-ranging Substack whose topics include urban policy, self-improvement and masculinity.
He was born in 1969 in rural southern Indiana, almost in Kentucky. He comes from 'Catholic peasant stock,' he said, although his mother was drawn into fundamentalist Pentecostalism when he was a child. He was raised with his brother in what he describes as the last gasp of truly rural American life. The family had a party-line telephone, got their water from a cistern and burned their trash. His parents divorced when he was 5.
Mr. Renn was his class valedictorian and an obviously intelligent student, but no one around him suggested that he apply to any prestigious colleges. (The failure of evangelical culture to develop elites who are deemed worthy of the Supreme Court or top think tanks is another major area of interest.) He chose Indiana University because he was a fan of their sports teams, and majored in finance because he wouldn't have to take a foreign language. After graduation, he moved to Chicago and began working for Anderson Consulting, which later became Accenture.
At Anderson, Mr. Renn stood out as a 'very alive person,' his supervisor at the time, Frank Modruson, recalled. Mr. Modruson introduced his young employee to the opera, and Mr. Renn quickly became a devotee, reading the libretto before each performance.
Once over dinner in the early 2000s, Mr. Renn unspooled a grand indictment of Chicago's city government that left Mr. Modruson feeling unnerved about the city's future. He said that a few years later, as the city's woes were becoming conventional wisdom, he read a similar article in a magazine, and recalled thinking, 'Aaron could have written this two years ago.' Mr. Renn, he said, is someone who is often thinking about things that other people catch up with later.
College had not been 'some great mind-expanded experience,' Mr. Renn said, but living in Chicago was. The trains and tall buildings made him feel as though he was in a movie.
Mr. Renn started thinking of himself as a city guy, and began a popular email newsletter about Chicago public transportation. In 2009, he won $5,000 in a Chamber of Commerce contest soliciting new ideas for the city's public transportation system.
In Chicago, he began reading and listening to sermons by a Presbyterian pastor in Manhattan, the Rev. Tim Keller, who was popular among urban creative-class evangelicals. Mr. Keller held that Christianity was politically neither right nor left, and that the church could minister and appeal to urbanites without compromising its core beliefs.
Mr. Renn, who had always been politically conservative but dipped in and out of serious faith, was convinced. He sought out a Presbyterian church in Chicago and settled in, following a trajectory described by the 20th-century sociologist E. Digby Baltzell: The typical American is born a Baptist or Methodist, becomes a Presbyterian once he is educated, and then, after ascending to the heights of economic success, 'joins a fashionable Episcopal church in order to satisfy his wife's social ambitions.'
Mr. Renn was married for eight years in Chicago, a relationship he has a policy of not talking or writing about, explaining that it's 'not a good look.' What he does write about with some frequency is the fact that women initiate a distinct majority of divorces.
In the wake of his divorce, Mr. Renn said, he was in a low moment professionally and personally. He credits his recovery in part to the 'manosphere,' the sprawling network of masculinity influencers that he identified as a serious cultural phenomenon long before it burst onto the national political scene. From a podcast hosted by the right-wing social-media personality Mike Cernovich, he learned about strength training, and began feeling better about his body. From another influencer, he honed his eye contact, a skill he said he was still 'maybe not the best at.' He said this just as I was thinking to myself that it was so intense I wasn't sure how or when to look away.
As an evangelical, Mr. Renn began wondering why contemporary American churches had so little to say about so many fundamental realities he was encountering. Online dating was a marketplace, and it turned out that nice Christian women wanted more than a nice Christian guy, contrary to the shallow dating advice of megachurch pastors. Evangelical churches lamented divorce even as they criticized the same forms of traditional masculinity that the manosphere was instructing him to hone, in order to improve his marriage prospects.
'These guys have cracked the code on reaching young men, and they're actually giving a lot of practical advice,' Mr. Renn said. 'And by the way, some of the things that the church is telling these guys is just wrong.'
This realization led him to further questions. Was Mr. Keller right about the evangelical church's place in 21st-century American culture? Could a winsome Christian with conservative views on sexuality and gender, or one who asserts that belief in Jesus Christ is the only path to salvation, be welcomed by the liberal establishment the way that, say, Billy Graham was invited to speak to the country after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001?
One answer came in 2017, when Mr. Keller was selected to receive a major prize for 'Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Witness,' to be awarded at Princeton Theological Seminary. Students, alumni and faculty at the liberal seminary quickly protested, because Mr. Keller's denomination does not ordain women or L.G.B.T.Q. people. The school backed down, and Mr. Keller ultimately delivered a lecture but did not receive the prize. (He died in 2023.)
Mr. Renn sketched out the first public version of his 'negative world' framework in his email newsletter later in the fall of 2017, which went modestly viral when the conservative writer Rod Dreher shared it online, calling it 'one of the most insightful things I've read in a long time.' Mr. Renn had told his friends that he planned to shut down the newsletter at the end of the year if it did not reach 500 subscribers. He had only gotten about halfway to that figure in October when Mr. Dreher's boost brought in more than 1,000 new subscribers.
Mr. Renn's description of the contours of 'negative world' range widely, and include the spread of sports gambling, legalized drug use and even tattoos. But the framework might not have electrified evangelical America if not for the perception on the right of a new secular orthodoxy around sex, gender and race. When you ask someone who embraces the term to discuss their own experiences in 'negative world,' the answer is almost always connected with this cluster of issues.
For James Wood, now an assistant professor of religion and theology at Redeemer University in Ontario, the 'negative world' concept immediately resonated. Mr. Wood had been deeply influenced by Mr. Keller; he bought all the groomsmen in his wedding party a copy of one of the pastor's books, and named his dog Keller. Mr. Renn helped him conclude that the pastor's approach was right for 'neutral world,' but insufficient for 'negative world.'
'I felt it didn't face up to this reality, that it didn't provide the resources to stand firm in the face of increasing hostility, where you'd be called hateful,' he said.
Many Christians were used to being called 'stupid' for their supernatural beliefs, he said. But when it came to being called hateful and hurtful for holding the same beliefs about marriage and sexuality that they held for decades, 'I don't think a lot of Christians were ready for that stuff.'
When Mr. Renn adapted his newsletter essay for First Things in 2022, Mr. Wood contributed a response that was also discussed widely within evangelicalism: 'How I Evolved on Tim Keller.'
On the Christian right, then, a thesis is emerging: If conservative Christians are no longer a 'moral majority' but a moral minority, they must shift tactics. They ought to be less concerned with persuading the rest of the country they are relevant and can fit perfectly well in secular spaces. They don't. Instead, they must consider abandoning mainstream institutions like public schools and build their own alternatives. They must pursue ownership of businesses and real estate. And they must stop triangulating away from difficult teachings on matters like sexuality and gender differences. Resilience over relevance.
'Like the Hebrews crossing the Jordan after 40 years in the desert, evangelicals have entered unfamiliar territory,' Mr. Renn writes in his book, issued by a major evangelical publisher in 2024. 'Finding a path in this fundamentally unknown world will require a different approach from the strategies of the past.'
A Dissident Opinion
Mr. Renn said his own goal was to influence the 'mainstream middle,' and his political vantage point was the 'commonplace center.' It stands out, then, that many of the people drawn to his work might be better described as occupying the 'combative right.'
Andrew Isker, a pastor who cowrote a book on Christian Nationalism with the founder of the far-right platform Gab, has used Mr. Renn's theory as a launchpad for his own description of the current American landscape as 'Trashworld, bugworld, globohomo, and this disgusting world of filth.'
Nate Fischer is a venture capitalist in Dallas whose current projects include a rural real estate development in Tennessee and Kentucky that he has marketed to conservatives. (Mr. Isker has said he planned to move there.) Mr. Fischer has been reading Mr. Renn's work since around 2019. He asked Mr. Renn to have a drink with him in Manhattan when Mr. Fischer was there taking a weeklong course in 'real world risk' organized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a thinker both he and Mr. Renn cite frequently.
The two men kept in touch, and in 2021, Mr. Fischer named Mr. Renn as a co-founder of American Reformer, a journal that quickly became an important engine for the Protestant wing of the young New Right, a loosely organized reactionary movement that pits itself against mainstream conventional wisdom on a range of issues. Mr. Renn calls Mr. Fischer his biggest financial supporter.
'I saw him as someone who is onto something,' Mr. Fischer said recently. Mr. Renn, as he saw it, knew how to have 'a significant impact in a space where he's clearly a dissident opinion, which was very much how I classified myself.'
Mr. Renn's many critics argue that some Christians have always lived in 'negative world.' The Civil Rights movement was led by a minister who was imprisoned and assassinated for activism that was founded on Christian principles. (Mr. Renn replies that activists like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were persecuted because they were Black, not because they were Christians.)
'That's the dangerous part, thinking that we're living in a unique, unprecedented historical moment, as if we're the first Christians in the last half-century to face serious restrictions on their faith,' said Patrick Miller, a pastor at the Crossing, the church whose experience with the film festival Mr. Renn wrote about in his book. 'It has a tendency to justify more extreme measures in response.'
Haroon Moghul, a Muslim commentator, found Mr. Renn's work during the 2016 presidential campaign, when he sensed that many of his fellow Democrats were not taking Donald J. Trump's appeal seriously. (Disillusioned since then by the Biden administration's support for Israel in the war in Gaza, Mr. Moghul said he no longer considers himself a Democrat.)
He has traveled to see Mr. Renn speak, and the two men have met a few times over the years. He said he saw Mr. Renn as a 'measured voice' on pressing questions around what it means to be a person of faith in a pluralistic society.
As a rubric, the 'negative world' framework is helpful in a descriptive way, in Mr. Moghul's view. But as a member of a religious minority for whom the United States has never been 'positive world,' he said he did not see neutral- or negative-world occupancy as catastrophic.
'Just because wider society isn't embracing me or rejoicing over me doesn't mean I get to lash out in response,' he said. 'The culture may be opposed to you, but that doesn't mean you're not legally and politically secure.'
'These Are My Politics'
From the perspective of a certain kind of conservative Christian, the last few months in American politics and culture have frequently been exhilarating. Donald Trump became president. Tech companies are pivoting to the right. Bible sales are booming. The decline in the share of Americans who say they are Christians seems to have stopped, or at least paused. Celebrities, activists and former atheists are publicly converting.
In January, a young evangelical apologist, Wesley Huff, appeared on 'The Joe Rogan Experience' in what one admirer called the 'furthest-reaching gospel broadcast in history' — the kind of cultural event that went largely unnoticed by most Americans but reverberated widely among conservative Christians.
A few days before Mr. Trump's inauguration, Mr. Renn devoted an installment of his newsletter to the question on many of his readers' minds: 'Is the Negative World Coming to an End?'
Mr. Renn is not ready to answer definitively yet. It's far too early, he says, and the 'vibe shift' is too fragile. But he says he does see a clear new openness to Christianity among some people, and a broader course correction to the right.
'The Overton window of what you can say and do is much wider,' Mr. Renn said. People on the left are more comfortable criticizing what they describe as the excesses of diversity and inclusion programs, for example. And Mr. Renn noted that when an employee of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency resigned following the discovery of racist online posts he had made in 2024, Vice President JD Vance wrote online that the man should be reinstated, referring to the posts as 'stupid social media activity.'
Mr. Renn condemned the employee's racist posts. But he said the context for forgiving the employee was important, coming after years in which, he claimed, 'you could say anything you wanted about white people, but you could have your life destroyed for anything slightly out of line regarding minorities.'
It is a familiar theme: Things may be bad, but liberals started it. The election of Mr. Trump as president is only possible in 'negative world,' Mr. Renn said. In 'positive world,' an extramarital affair tanked Gary Hart's presidential campaign. In 'neutral world,' Bill Clinton was damaged by his infidelity but survived politically. In 'negative world,' with the safeguards of 'Christian moral norms' out the window, it was too late for liberals to make any coherent critique of Mr. Trump's open licentiousness.
'The very people who were the most supportive of tearing down all the old moral standards and rules of fine society that they didn't like are the ones who are most horrified by Donald Trump,' he said, with what looked like a flash of satisfaction. 'You think you're going to get a multi-culti paradise or something, and instead you get Donald Trump.'
He would prefer to return to a culture of shared social norms: against racism, but also against the cruel, the tasteless, and the boorish. But he's not counting on it. The broad erosion of the old moral order is probably permanent, in his view. The pushback in the 1980s against the liberal excesses of the '60s and '70s did not undo the sexual revolution. The task for Christians of adapting to 'negative world' remains urgent.
In Carmel, however, it was possible to glimpse a slice of 'neutral world,' where all are welcome but 'there's no shame in being a conservative Christian.' After lunch, Mr. Renn drove me around his new hometown and pointed out the city's religious diversity: The Coptic Orthodox church, the synagogue shared by two congregations, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints temple, the Muslim coffee shop. He mentioned the city's meager but growing minority population, too. Carmel has 'diversity that works,' he said.
Mr. Renn moved to Carmel with his second wife, Katy — they met in church, through a friend — primarily because of the school district's special-education offerings for his 7-year-old son, who has autism. But the city has proved inspirational in other ways as well.
'People ask, what are my politics?' Mr. Renn said as we walked along a rail trail that winds through downtown. The city has installed more than 150 roundabouts and has almost completely eliminated traffic lights, making Carmel, as Mr. Renn has written, 'one of the few growing American cities where traffic is better than it was 20 years ago.' He gestured to the playgrounds, charging stations and a bocce court that stud the trail, and the pedestrians who were enjoying the trail even on a chilly day. 'These are my politics,' he said.
Carmel is thriving, in Mr. Renn's view, because its Republican leaders have focused on things like public safety, low taxes, and excellent infrastructure and amenities, while avoiding the distractions of what he called 'extreme ideologies,' like D.E.I. hiring practices or banning gasoline-powered lawn equipment.
It's a place where things run the way they ought to everywhere — and why shouldn't they? 'When you look at America,' Mr. Renn said, 'the potential we have is unlimited.'