Evangelicals are cringe. I have personally been dealing with this problem ever since I had to convince my parents to let me listen to Creed in middle school, but you can find Francis Schaeffer talking about it several decades ago and the most important contribution to the question was probably James Davison Hunter’s book To Change the World (2010).
Aaron Renn is not the first person to observe evangelicalism’s cringe problem, which he helpfully observes is not merely behaving in uncomfortable or tasteless ways, but as a tendency to “view evangelical culture as inferior to mainstream elite culture, particularly in its urban variety, and see that as the standard.” He will surely not be the last to observe this, either.
I don't lose sleep over evangelicalism’s cringeiness (at least not nearly as much as I did when I was a teenager and being cringe was more offensive to me) because God did not let being cringe stop him from getting stuff done culturally back when the Church was mostly made up of illiterate fishermen and he will bring about his work in the world regardless of whether or not there are sufficient numbers of evangelicals among the elites. This is the most important reason, but it’s worth talking about the issues Renn raises because some of the reasons are actually good things that we should celebrate and others are bad things that we should do something about if we can.
Renn is fundamentally correct about the reality of evangelical cringeiness and the matching problem of evangelical elites. The high tolerance for cringe leads to evangelicals accepting mediocrity, which then hinders our ability to produce elites. But Renn is wrong about why this is.
I think there’s a good argument to be had for at least being somewhat intentional about cultural impact for a wide variety of reasons, most of which have to do with wanting the Kichijiros of the world to be singing hymns in church rather than gambling on their phones while they’re waiting for their appointment with the transgender surgeon. As Renn notes, there should be a pipeline of evangelical elites—so where are these people?
Evangelicals have a peculiar incentive structure compared to other subcultures jockeying for cultural influence. They have a mandate, in very practical but not entirely synonymous ways, to treat elite tastemakers the same as they treat people with no cultural influence or even people with profound intellectual disabilities. They also have a mandate to find the most remote, hostile, and uninfluential people in the world outside of their own culture and tell them that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
If you’re talking to Mr. Lazarus Bigbucks and you want him to support your new foundation that is training Christian lawyers to become influential in the federal court system, he is equally likely to give you the money as he is to give to someone who is building a hospital for disabled children in Central Asia. This is only a problem if cultural influence is the most important goal for Christians, which it is not.
Renn mentions the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) as a positive example of a truly insightful institution with culture-shaping potential that nonetheless never broke into mainstream consciousness. As someone who was part of the effort to get CCDA into the mainstream, I’m disappointed that it didn’t work out, but I know that there are a lot of great CCDA people who are still doing good work nonetheless.
Renn is concerned that evangelicalism deliberately hobbles itself by making “secular” vocations seem second-class, and while there are a few small spheres where this is the case, I don't think it's nearly as big a deal as he makes it out to be. If there's an evangelical out there who could be a Supreme Court Justice or a missionary, he or she is probably going to have a doctrine of vocation sufficient to recognize that those are both good things that God could want for them to do.
Evangelicals are very content with cringeiness, in part because it’s a lot easier to appeal to ten cringey people than one non-cringey elite tastemaker. The incentive structure that moves evangelicals who could be elites to spend their lives taking care of disabled children in Central Asia also leads them to build things that are of questionable cultural influence like a life-size replica of Noah’s Ark full of information about why the world is 6,000 years old.
This is probably the most important thing to consider about Renn’s critiques, because a lot of evangelicals who could be influencing the culture for good are content to say and do things that only get them a lot of cheers and subscriptions from fellow evangelicals. They also tend to accept that mainstream culture is going to be better and are content to create preachier versions of whatever is popular in the mainstream. This is bad.
Regression to the cringe is a real problem in every subculture. The lowest common denominator will generally predominate unless there is strong pressure otherwise. Mainstream cultural elites of the sort that Renn cares about are generally people that have risen to the top either because they are very good or because the culture is very bad.
One of the most prominent history newsletters on Substack is more or less Infowars for liberals. Infowars itself was incredibly successful as a business and as a cultural product because someone can be really, really successful at appealing to the minds, hearts, and pocketbooks of the lowest common denominator.
This is a broader cultural problem and I would love for evangelicalism to help lead our culture out of it. I am not sure how to do this, and, quite frankly, I’m not sure that anyone does. With the oncoming tsunami of LLM-driven hollowing out of our culture, I think we’ll be lucky to not slide into an abyss.
Cultural elites already represent unicorns who rose to national or international prominence through an odd combination of talent, skill, and luck. At the highest level, we’re talking about a few hundred or thousand people in a country of millions and a world of billions. Why is The Wingfeather Saga less popular than The Hunger Games even though the Wingfeather books are clearly superior? Maybe it’s marketing, maybe it’s just the vagaries of the times.
One could also spend an inordinate amount of time discussing whether or not someone counts as an elite. Ross Douthat, who Renn mentions, is a fair standard for comparison because he’s also a Christian who believes things that secular people find abhorrent yet they still take him seriously because they have to. David French is also an NYT columnist. Is he elite enough? Lyman Stone is a writer with a popular Substack. Is he elite enough?
At the end of the day, such debates get silly quickly without really invalidating Renn’s point, which is that it is hard to think of evangelicals who are taken as seriously as Boss Ross. The fact that there are many evangelicals who are worth being taken as seriously as Douthat is a different argument altogether.
Standard evangelical beliefs and opinions like “it’s morally wrong to have sex outside of marriage” or “the Bible is inspired and inerrant” are laughable in elite circles. Even if someone’s got the intellectual horsepower to be an elite, they might get unfairly tarred by association because some gatekeepers seem to assume that every evangelical is Jerry Falwell in a skin suit and will pronounce a fatwa against fornicators if you give them a column in the New York Times.
The same bias also applies to Catholics, but somehow it doesn’t land on them nearly as hard, perhaps because they are better at obfuscating or because the average non-elite Catholic does not like to talk about six-day creationism or fornication and so the average gatekeeper doesn’t worry so much about Catholics pronouncing fatwas. Evangelicals also lean on Catholic elites when the going gets tough, which is arguably a crutch but that’s an argument for a different day.
While evangelicals are a forgiving and loving bunch, there are a few rules that you have to follow. Even Donald J. Trump is only considered “one of us” by delusional people; most evangelicals think of Trump as an auxiliary that has been delegated to be their attack dog against the forces of evil.
Most elites aren’t lucky enough to have that sort of status; someone who states a belief that’s outside the bounds of evangelical orthodoxy or lives a life incompatible with moral strictures can’t be considered an evangelical anymore. This is sometimes self-selected; a lot of elites “move on” from evangelicalism at the point where being an evangelical becomes a liability in their path to elitism, and because of elite biases against evangelicals, there’s immense pressure for people at the cusp of elite status to reject the distinctives that make them evangelical.
There’s plenty of arguments about whether or not someone’s ejection from evangelicalism was fair or not, Evangelicalism has a hyperactive immune system designed to chuck out false prophets, even though it is not always very good at this. Thus, when someone steps on enough toes or says things that are perfectly consistent with orthodox and historic Christian practice but violates other sensibilities, they get chucked to the curb.
When an evangelical elite actually values humility, they are naturally going to go against the grain of elite culture. Evangelicals like Chuck Colson have been incredibly influential in a wide variety of ways, but they don’t like to hog the megaphone. Many evangelicals rise to positions of power and then do Hunter’s “faithful presence” in a non-cringe way.
Evangelicals are biased against elitism because becoming an elite often requires grueling work and sacrifices. If you have a family and you are an evangelical who listens to God, God is often going to tell you to prioritize your family over doing the work necessary to rise to the top.
Okay, this one’s a bit silly but it’s true. I can think of lots of people who are worth reading just as much as Ross Douthat but they’re just not popular enough. Brad East’s blogroll of 100 people always worth reading has a ton of evangelicals on it. I would count Brad himself among this crowd.
I would like to live in a world where it's easier to be good and I think it's perfectly fair and good for Christians to strategize about how to best do that. There are a lot of ways to do this badly, though. Avoiding cringe is more or less impossible if you're building anything that's designed for everyone, and grasping for elite status and power so that you can help others is famously a dangerous path.
In my lifetime, various poles of evangelicalism swung between holier-sounding ambitions like those expressed in David Platt’s Radical, desires for earthly power in Republican politics, and more grounded yet still heavily spiritualized ideas like Tim Keller's Every Good Endeavor.
I doubt we can ever really escape the swing between these ideas because they're all expressions of Biblical faith; our best hope is to avoid getting into scenarios where we're obnoxiously judging people in one camp or the other or creating cliques that exclude the billions of normies who are never going to be missionaries or Supreme Court justices.
After all, no elite evangelical will be able to forget that the little children are going to enter the Kingdom of Heaven before us.