Food chains have always fascinated me. It wasn’t so much the “kill or be killed” tenacity that drew my attention. It was the interrelation of all things—the delicate harmony that would shatter if just a single creature were removed from the chain. It was comforting to me that God had built a world this way, a place where the significance of the smallest carried weight, where—to use Leonardo Da Vinci’s words—“everything connects to everything else.”
Food chains exist in the public square, too. They just take the form of ideologies and cultural trends. God is Lord over all relations, including where Christianity fits in that chain at any given moment in history. And history shows these chains are fluid. What’s in vogue Monday might be unfashionable by Friday. But not all changes are so light or superficial. Many have serious consequences. As I’ve heard David Owen Filson say, “Ideas have consequences; bad ideas have victims.” Ideologies do not just switch places in the chain of popular opinion. They might also crush or abuse those who find themselves beneath them. And so the principle of natural food chains applies to ideological ones as well: know where you are.
The principle of natural food chains applies to ideological ones as well: know where you are.
This sets the stage for Aaron M. Renn’s book Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture (Zondervan 2024), a work that has already had broad influence in Christian circles. Essentially, the book is about a shift in America’s ideological food chain. Christianity was once a fierce creature here—setting moral standards and shaping legislature. But in the last sixty years, it’s moved down. Those who call themselves Christians today are unsuspecting prey for larger and more widespread ideologies such as secularism, pragmatism, materialism, Marxism, egalitarianism, and a host of others. God is still Lord over these changes. So, despite the particular place Christianity has in a given culture, we know that Christ is King. He may just work out that kingly rule with patience for rebellious hearts. (Isn’t that what he does with all of us?)
Let me set out a synopsis for the book and then offer some engagement with a selection of Renn’s ideas. My goal is not to be analytically thorough but to be
thought-provoking in helping Christians both question and then build on Renn’s work.
Synopsis
Renn argues that we can think of Christianity in America for the last sixty years as falling into three identifiable eras: the positive world (1964–1994), the neutral world (1994–2014), and the negative world (2014–present). His selection of these dates is intentional but somewhat arbitrary. In the positive world, “Publicly being a Christian enhances social status. Christian moral norms are still the basic moral norms of society, and violating them can lead to negative consequences.”
In the neutral world, “Christianity no longer has privileged status, but nor is it disfavored. . . . Christian moral norms retain some residual effect.” But in our own time, the negative world, “society has an overall negative view of Christianity. Being known as a Christian is a social negative. . . . Christian morality is expressly
repudiated and now seen as a threat to the public good and new public moral order.”
Renn uses political scandals to represent each era. Rumors of a possible affair could end your political career in the positive world (Gary Hart, 1987). But in the neutral world, a politician could survive this, appealing to the separation of public and private life (Bill Clinton, 1998). In the negative world, egregious moral failures are overlooked as insubstantial because Christian moral standards and the importance of character have been washed away (Donald Trump, 2016).
Renn suggests a series of causes for the shift from neutral to negative: the collapse of the WASP establishment,
the sixties social and sexual revolutions, the end of the Cold War, deregulation of the corporate sector (allowing a smaller group of large companies to gain dominance), and digitization (financial, professional, and social engagement moving online).
The remainder of the book focuses on strategies Christians might adopt for life in the negative world. After considering which model of Christian civic life you might pursue (culture war, seeker sensitivity, or cultural engagement), Renn reminds readers of the deeper problem: “American evangelicals are largely operating as though they’re still living in the lost positive or neutral
worlds.” Christians today have not truly accepted that we are the real minority now, that we have been pushed down the country’s ideological food chain. For Renn, this means we need to critically assess which models of civic life have worked best in the past, and how we might reconstruct or reapply them in the present. But it also means thinking about how we live personally, institutionally, and missionally.
On a personal level, Renn first calls Christians to obedience. Obeying the truth of Scripture amidst a hostile world is a necessity. We cannot sacrifice biblical orthodoxy for the sake of cultural compromise. Second, Renn encourages Christians to pursue excellence—especially intellectual excellence. He warns of the loss of intellectual excellence in evangelicalism and the exodus of
intellectuals to different realms of Christianity (mainline Protestant Christianity, Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy), or to full blown secularism. But excellence goes beyond the intellectual. Each one of us needs to commit to excellence in our field, whatever it may be. As to how we might learn of and measure this sort of excellence, Renn offers few details. Third, Renn invites evangelicals
to be resilient. This means not only standing back up after being persecuted for our beliefs, but also taking proactive measures to ensure our financial independence (so as not to be reliant on government-based funding).
On the institutional level, Renn asks evangelicals to pursue another triad of traits: integrity, community strength, and ownership of social and cultural spaces.
On the missional level, we should strive to be lights, illuminating God’s natural law and created order. We should also take every opportunity to voice biblicaltruth in public, even in highly sensitive areas such as gender and sexuality. Renn also calls us to be prudentially engaged, that is, to avoid the tendency to withdraw from the political sphere and cultural life. We might not be interested in politics, Renn writes, “but politics will remain interested in” us.
Engagement
Some of Renn’s suggestions or strategies are admittedly broad and abstract. And theologians have criticized this, along with the lack of biblical grounds in his approach (see Brian Mattson’s review for The Gospel Coalition). For instance, Renn does not
present a biblical anthropology to shape and guide his analysis of these “eras” in American civic life, nor does he explore the relationship between biblical morality and progressivism within his chosen sixty-year time frame.
These would likely be approaches for theologians, which Renn admits he is not. But in the interest of being thought-provoking and helping readers to engage with what I believe are helpful elements of the book, let me pose some questions we
might ask ourselves in light of Renn’s thesis—that Christians in America (and in the modern West) are living in
the negative world.
We cannot sacrifice biblical orthodoxy for the sake of cultural compromise.
As Christians, do we know where we are in American thought life? I agree with Renn that many Christians simply don’t want to see themselves as living in a hostile world, especially when the founding of the United States had major Christian influences. But knowing where we are right now is critical for a wise and measured engagement with others in the public sphere. If we parade around like an ideological lion when we’re the equivalent of a house cat, chances are things will not go well for us. That’s not an invitation to trepidation. It’s simply a call to look at your ideological surroundings. What values are prevalent right now? What ideologies and trends? Egalitarianism is certainly big, as are cultural Marxism, materialism, and a de-supernaturalized view
of the world. Like it or not, these things are part of our surroundings, our ecosystem. Our words and actions should enter the arenas of human behavior with intentionality and tact.
For example, I noted to a nurse at a local physician’s practice that surveys for patients now included a question about gender identity. I said, “I noticed that was a new addition.” The nurse replied almost apologetically, “Yeah, I know. It’s something new, and it’s been freaking out a lot of the older patients.” As she said these words, I knew where Christianity stood in America’s ideological food chain, even out in the suburbs. So I replied, “People are deeply confused about identity, aren’t they? And everyone is struggling to understand this new transgender phenomenon.” My point wasn’t to stab through transgender ideology in the moment. It was to acknowledge before another human being that confusion is swirling, and people are trying to figure
out how to respond. My bringing it up was meant to alert the staff that I noticed. This is a new phenomenon, and despite many claims to the contrary, society as a whole is just not sure what to do about it. Evidence for that lies in the differing State responses to policies regarding transgender identity and care. Had the nurse asked me what I thought, I would have moved
beyond empathizing and communicated biblical truth. But, like a good nurse, she was only making sure I was taken care of. These are the sorts of interactions Christians will have in the negative world. I can no longer assume that a nurse in the suburbs knows anything about the Bible, including its anthropology and stance towards gender. I have to start by letting her know that
I see her, that I see where we are as a culture. Communication moves on from that point. We need to know
where we are when we speak.
Do we know how to measure excellence in our respective fields? This is a harder question than it seems. As a writer, I certainly strive for excellence in the craft—in my non-fiction, poetry, and fiction. But how I define “excellence” is very different from definitions we find in the secular world. There’s overlap, of course, but far more differences than similarities in my opinion, and that’s primarily because of telos—the final purpose that shapes my writing.
For instance, it’s common to hear literary critics condemn William Wordsworth’s later poetry as “poor” or “much worse” than his poetry from before his Christian conversion, such as in his Lyrical Ballads. What measurement is being used to make that assessment? There are probably many. But I’ll tell you what measurement isn’t being used: how well Wordsworth’s later poetry conveys biblical truth in creative and meaningful ways. That measurement is not even on the secular literary radar. But isn’t that the most important metric for Christian writers? Isn’t that our telos as wordsmiths for the word
(John 1:1)? This does not mean Christian art must be “explicitly” Christian in its symbolism, as if novelists should not write a story unless John 3:16 gets an allusion somewhere. But the overarching pull for Christian artists should be towards the redemptive, directly or indirectly, even as that redemption blooms amidst a messy and frustrated world.
On the institutional level, Renn asks evangelicals to pursue another triad of traits: integrity, community strength, and ownership of social and cultural spaces.
Or consider the work of the contemporary Anglican poet Malcolm Guite, who has resurrected the classic form of the sonnet but focuses on religious content for his poems: the resurrection, the Trinity,the birth of Christ, and Jesus’s parables. To the world, I have no doubt that his poetry would be condemned as “religiously prosaic.” And yet his poetry is some
of the best I’ve read in recent years. Why? Because he conveys biblical truth in creative and meaningful ways—the Christian wordsmith’s telos. Christian poets need not be as direct as he is in presenting Christianity, but he cannot be faulted for it, in my opinion.
I say all this because excellence in one’s craft is not a matter of simple definitions. Our definition of “excellence”
in a given field must ultimately be defined and shaped by Scripture. And once that happens, we may find our version of “excellence” very different from that of the secular world. That doesn’t mean there won’t be points of overlap. There are plenty of atheists and agnostics who enjoy the prose of G.K. Chesterton because of his skill with literary tools and devices, just as there are non-Christian fans of C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, Marilynne Robinson, and Robinson Jeffers. And there can also be Christian fans of George Orwell, Cormac McCarthy, and a host of other secular wordsmiths. Great writers know how to effect change in their readers, even in readers who don’t share their basic convictions. Christian writers should learn and practice those features of writing that are almost universally appreciated within a given language. But that doesn’t mean our telos is the same as that of secular writers. Our “excellence” is a God-centered, Christ-honoring excellence. And for that, we can assume the world will ridicule us. I would entirely expect non-Christians to condemn Wordsworth’s later poetry: they don’t truly know what he’s writing about!
No matter what people think, they are playing with gifts from God, they are serving him through their lives, and they are ultimately being used to his ends.
Are we trying to influence those above and below us in the ideological food chain? Let me end here. The Apostle Paul wrote something truly amazing about God: “from him and through him and to him are all things” (Rom. 11:36). This goes further than Da Vinci’s “everything connects to everything else.” This means all things are interconnected because of God. No matter what people think, they are playing with gifts from God, they are serving him through their lives, and they are ultimately being used to his ends. That means something important for Christians: God is using us right now to influence those above and below us in the ideological food chain. Because all things are interconnected for God’s glory, non-Christian members of the ideological food chain “stand on” God’s bestowed grace in the ones below them—true Christians. Nowhere is this more apparent than in modern secular culture’s continued reliance on Christian values and moral norms. As books such as The Air We Breathe and Remaking the World make clear, the ideas higher up in America’s food chain are still standing on values and truths that are distinctly Christian: things such as equality under God, individual freedom, justice for the wronged, love for the poor and broken, and generosity of spirit. As Tom Holland wrote in Dominion, “To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions.”
Given that reality, Christians should make personal efforts to communicate biblical values despite the pressure to keep silent. We are the true heirs of Christ, but we are also heirs of the biblical value system that undergirds our culture. The more we voice that truth, the more we encourage others to see the roots of our own culture and the roots of the modern West. People can disavow the Christian faith, but we would be hard-pressed to find someone who would disavow the values of Christianity.
Despite its shortcomings (and every book but the Bible has them), Renn’s book is helping Christians reexamine their place in America’s ideological food chain. But it’s up to readers to begin using or reforming his advice and setting it into action. That seems to have been Renn’s main purpose all along. Time will tell where the country goes from here. But Renn is right that we live in a negative world. The question is how, exactly, we’ll have a positive influence on it for the glory of the self-giving God.