Aaron Renn. Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Reflective, 2024. 272 pp, $26.99.
It has been more than two years since Aaron Renn wrote the “Three Worlds of Evangelicalism.” Since then, it has easily become the most cited article in First Things. Renn’s framework has been discussed and dissected at length. However, the controversy with his views lies not in what he’s saying, but in what it means, namely that the past forms of Christian witness, from Billy Graham to Tim Keller, do not know how to address the cultural moment.
So it was not surprising when James Wood applied Renn’s thesis to challenge Keller’s model of the way forward, a flurry of pushback came from the highest representatives of Evangelicalism. The essence of this pushback lies not in rejecting the reality of the negative world but its particular uniqueness. So Keller would respond to Wood by claiming that New York was in a “negative world” when Redeemer was planted. Likewise, Patrick Miller has responded to Renn by saying that the “negative world has always been around.” Miller’s response is particularly helpful, because he summarizes the central theological critique of Renn’s framework: The Church has always been in the negative world from the time of the Apostles, because the Church is always in the midst of Babylon. “Do not be surprised, brothers, that the world hates you.” (1 John 3:13). The Church has always been exiled in Babylon. He says: “When you realize that Jesus expected his followers to be joyful outsiders in every era—sojourners, pilgrims, exiles—you become much less reactive to the negative world around you… Jesus gave us everything we need to respond wisely”. The problem isn’t the negative world, but the Church who has forgotten that it has always been in the negative world.
However, this take misunderstands Renn’s paradigm. In fact, I believe that even people sympathetic to Renn’s framework misunderstand its implications. The release of his book, Life in the Negative World, is important because it offers a full picture of what living in the negative world means. His prescriptions are more than just good advice. They prove a robust operating paradigm for Churches. What James Hunter’s To Change the World was to a previous generation of evangelicals, Renn’s Life in the Negative World promises to be for a new generation of evangelicals where faithful presence feels too neutral.
The comparison to Hunter’s To Change the World is apt for reasons besides it being another work on Christian Engagement. Hunter is a sociologist, whose training in culture and theory allowed him to show a generation that cultural change functions not by moving a majority but by a coordinated effort of elites – a concept foreign to the revivalist impulse of Evangelicalism. Renn, by contrast, is not a sociologist, theologian, or even a historian.
He is a consultant. Unlike academics and pastors, consultants are paid to analyze dysfunctional systems and make recommendations for improvement. The training of a consultant isn’t to be precise but practical, straight-to-the-point, actionable. In the same way that Hunter’s sociological training makes him a one-of-one in Evangelicalism, so Renn’s consultant experience makes him a one of one as well. Much of the initial pushback against Renn’s three worlds stems from misunderstanding the value a consultant delivers. Critics of Renn, who say that we “have always been in Babylon”, offer a theological response to a non-theological observation.
Likewise, responses that point out instances of the “negative world” in the 80s or 90s, or point out the effectiveness of “neutral” or “positive world” strategies for their own churches, misunderstand that a consultant isn’t a historian or a pastor. Instead, consultants offer leaders simplified frameworks for understanding complex realities for the purpose of better outcomes. One irony I believe behind much of the critique of the three worlds idea is that it introduced a framework and outlined the problems but never offered a solution…. until now.
But first, we must see what Renn’s three worlds model really means. Here are the three worlds as he presents them in the book:
Most readers have read this ad nauseam. However, Renn offers three incidents that clarify how Christianity operates in these different worlds. In 1987, senator Gary Hart having a woman stay overnight when his wife wasn’t there, caused such an uproar that he dropped out of the presidential race. In 1998, Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky sparked controversy, but the Democrat party rallied around him, and he maintained his presidency. Finally, in 2016, Donald Trump ran for the presidency, and one month after a leaked tape of his crude comments about women, he proceeded to win the presidency with overwhelming Evangelical support.
These examples show that transitioning from positive to neutral and negative doesn’t merely mean progressive capture in culture. Rather, the transition indicates an opposition to Christian values norming society. Positive world means something like: “Christian morality” forms the substance of our leaders and guides our mission. Neutral world is indifferent. Negative world is suspicious at best and hostile at worst.
Hence, the emergence of numerous right-wing movements suspicious or hostile to Christianity (the populist right, Nietzschean right, etc.) is itself an outcome of the negative world. These movements may even show outright hostility to traditional Christian emphases, such as the solidarity of the human race under Adam and the importance of social justice. Negative world is not a respecter of parties.
Moreover, negative world generally leads to a pervasiveness of vice in general. I can’t watch any sport without being flooded with gambling ads. I can’t walk down a street in New York City without passing by a marijuana dispensary. I can go to any local deli and get what I need to smoke, drink, have sex, and gamble all in the same place! I go on the subway and see ads promoting everything from birth control to polyamorous dating. This is my daily life, and I can experience all of these things and not bat an eye. That is negative world.
Now we could stop right there and map negative world to Babylon or Rome, Positive world to Israel and Christendom, and proceed. But that would still not take into account the type of negative world Renn is describing. Instead, we must examine not just Christianity’s relation to society but the type of outcomes the Church and Christians in general have in each world. By combining Renn’s descriptions of positive, neutral, and negative world with Hunter’s observations on the nature of cultural production and influence, we get a clearer picture of the negative world that has eluded many.
Examining the positive world is a useful benchmark. Positive world is a state in which being a Christian enhances social status, and not being a Christian or violating Christian norms can bring social risk. First, it is critical to understand there is variation in the outcomes in the description. What Renn is saying is that on average, in the positive world, being a Christian is a good and expected thing in society’s value structure.
There might be subgroups that aren’t Christian, or for whom being a Christian would be a net negative socially. Still, these people do not determine nor enforce the majority of society’s values. Using Hunter’s language, we might say that in a positive world, the centers of cultural influence such as law, media, entertainment, and finance actively reinforce Christian values, shaping the rest of society. Groups with non-Christian values are seen as an outlier/underground/countercultural.
Now what I am describing here is a distribution. In fact, I believe the entire misunderstanding hinges on the understanding that these “worlds” describe different types of distributions with different risk profiles for Christians.
Hunter’s work in To Change the World could be summarized in two different distributions. First, Evangelicals believe that cultural influence is a linear function of population. More Christians means more Christian influence. Like the graph below:
However, cultural influence doesn’t really work that way. In reality, it is more like 20% of the population hold 80% of cultural influence. It is these few whose reinforcing network effects determine how the rest of the population functions. A soul is a soul, but for culture, what matters is not the majority, but the select minority who hold an outsized amount of cultural capital. The distribution is something economists call a pareto distribution:
The difference between these two distributions is stark.
Now “positive world”, is a world where the people who hold cultural capital promote Christian values. What this means for the rest of the population is that not being a Christian poses a certain level of social risk for the average person. The more proximate people are to power, influence, etc. in the positive world, the more risk they expose themselves to by not being a Christian. This distribution would look like this:
It is “negative skewed” because it reflects negative outcomes for non-Christians in positive world. Moreover, it shows a simple point looked over in Renn’s description: there will be many people where there is little existential risk posed to not being a Christian, but for some, there is in fact a very large amount of risk. We might say that what happened to Gary Hart would lie at the tail of this distribution, being one of the more visible outcomes. However, Gary Hart dropping out reinforces the value structure and incentivizes everyone else to uphold Christian values.
Conversely, being a Christian would be a positive thing, and for some, it would allow them to gain outsized upside. We can think here of the opposite of Gary Hart, let’s say someone like Reinhold Niebuhr, whose education and training lands him on the cover of Time and who remains a respected thinker in international relations, public policy, and theology. This too is an “extreme” in positive world, being a Christian won’t lead you to become a Niebuhr. But again, his example reinforces the value structure. On average, being a Christian would expose you to greater social trust and influence. We can say that the average outcome in positive world is the faithful pastor who has gained the respect of his entire community despite not being well-educated.
Now one might say, that there were negative outcomes for Christians during these days or that there were still issues in the culture that stood against Christian teachings. However, these statements do not rebut this description. To rebut this description, one must challenge the claim that Christian norms shaped public life in positive world and that there was in general, considerable risk to being hostile to Christianity in public society. These challenges must not rely on “outliers” in the time, since that precisely confirms the thesis that the general trend was pro-Christianity!
Now, in a ‘neutral world”, the holders of cultural capital were on average “neutral” towards Christian claims. Which is to say, that the production of culture didn’t actively promote Christian ideals, but they weren’t opposed either. One could be proximate to cultural power while having and advocating for Christian ideals publicly, so long as you are seen as credible. Moreover, people in cultural influence are actually open to being convinced of Christianity. Ministries like Veritas Forum flourish in neutral world, partly because of their audience’s quintessential neutral world qualities - college students who may or may not be religious but are open to embracing Christianity, if it can be shown to be relevant to them. In the case of Veritas, and indeed much of Keller’s ministry, this looks like showing Christianity as intellectually credible and awe-inspiring (Christianity tells a better story). In the seeker-sensitive movement, it looks like showing Christianity as personally comforting and therapeutic. For the politically concerned, it looks like showing Christianity as politically impactful. The diversity of these responses, all of which Renn mentions, describe what happens in a normal distribution.
In this distribution, the majority of outcomes are in average range. There is equal variance positive or negative. This distribution in fact could describe the state of “unbelievers” in neutral world, with the majority being “seeker/sensitive”, with only a few being avid atheists or overly sympathetic to Christianity. On average, being a Christian or a non-Christian would have minimal hindrance to one’s social status. The strategy of cultural engagement is the best strategy for Christians in neutral world. Witnessing and appealing to the cultural elites who are on average, open to Christianity would likely draw in people who have an outsized impact in promoting Christian norms.
The central nerve of Renn’s argument then, is that we don’t live in these distributions. If the neutral world was a normal distribution, negative world is a skewed distribution with Christian status being a source of outsized, extreme risk. In positive world, being against Christianity was the outlier in civic society, in negative world being a Christian is.
However, the roles are not simply reversed. Negative world is not just the inverse of positive world. While Renn understates this, it is an essential point to draw out. The caveat has to do with the type of culture negative world creates. The holders of cultural capital have not simply substituted Christian values with an alternative set but promote the very loss of order itself. The only values are no values. That is, our culture promotes libertinism, everyone doing what is right in their own eyes. Sociologically, Hunter calls this the process of dissolution: “By dissolution, I refer to the deconstruction of the most basic assumptions about reality.” Our culture doesn’t enforce any guide to who or what we are, nor what we should do. Instead, what is promoted is turning inside ourselves and determining our own values. This process results in the fracturing of society alongside tribes/enclaves of people with similar values. In other words, positive world is a more integrated culture because it possesses a narrative that can unite a people together. Negative world, in contrast, is fragmented, which means mass disintegration.
So, whereas we might see in positive world 20% of the population holding 80% of the cultural capital, we might see something like 30% of the population holding 60% in negative world. Simply put, negative world inherently erodes public norms. Moreover, Christianity is viewed with suspicion or sometimes with active hostility precisely in its attempt to claim that there are public norms!
Therefore, there should be no surprise that there is a wide variance in how Christianity interacts in current society. This is why Renn acknowledges that there are parts of the country that operate with positive and neutral world backgrounds. Industries such as professional sports and nursing welcome expressions of Christian faith. Large swaths of the country still encourage or wouldn’t be opposed to encouraging Christian values. However, he warns that negative world will eventually reach them. Dissolution spreads like like wildfire when it is not addressed: a little leaven leavens the whole lump.
This is precisely the problem with “neutral” world strategies in the negative world. As they seek proximity to cultural influence, Christians become exposed to substantial and even hostile social risk, which incentivizes them to either not mention their faith or only mention the parts of their faith that don’t require pushback against liberal claims. Being quiet and agreeable is the “play it safe” strategy. This causes everyone else to want to play it safe.
For instance, Jack Phillips being sued for making choices in accordance with his Christian conscience automatically introduces the possibility of substantial legal risk in every Christian’s mind. Princeton Seminary's withdrawal of the Kuyper Prize speech from Tim Keller signals to every Christian that they can be faithful, charitable, and thoughtful, but they can still be rejected. The occasional Twitter storms in reaction to a pastor’s sermon signal to every pastor that their sermons could be mined, edited, and employed in a campaign to discredit them.
These are the type of phenomena that reinforce the stifling of Christian witness. Consequently, the norms of liberalism take greater hold, making Christian moral outliers. In negative world, Christianity must justify itself to the various social strata in society, not the other way around. Yet, there is no organized, central, particular opposition to Christianity.
The combination of pervasive risk and a decentralized environment suggests that the majority has gotten it wrong.
We are not in Babylon. We are in the era of the Judges.
The parallels are striking. For one, the pace at which society has forgotten biblical norms is just as quick. The era of the Judges describes a time where liberalism reigned: “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” (Judg 17:6). The people of Israel undergo volatile times between rest and oppression, sometimes at the same time! Moreover, the judges themselves prove to be progressively liberal themselves – becoming increasingly compromised and pragmatic. Most of all, the end of Judges shows us that there is a loss of leadership, causing everyone to blame everyone else for the misfortunes of Israel.
We don’t live in Babylon, our land is more chaotic, and that should sober us. Let me explain.
Babylon is an organized world with low variance.
Babylon is able to enforce its will effectively. It has its own norms and promotes its own values. Judges is an unorganized world with high risk.
The world of Babylon is a fragile world, it takes effort to maintain. Cultural capital must be stewarded and gate-kept to preserve Babylon’s power. The world of the Judges is not fragile. It is chaos. Without a divinely ordained figure that unites the tribes and introduces order (like Samuel), the era of the Judges simply continues.
Renn’s negative world should be taken to refer to the enhanced risk Christians face in society because of dissolution. Those who say we have always been in Babylon or that the Church has always been in negative word, risk overlooking the unique acidic effect libertine liberalism plays on society. Judges captures the eeriness of being a stranger and at risk in your own homeland. Babylon doesn’t. The strategies that work in Babylon may not work as well in Judges. Babylon has a concentrated enemy – a city, a king, or an institution. Judges is a spread-out amorphous minefield with extreme outcomes, like having a compromised Samson provide victory or the near slaughter of Benjamin. Neutral world strategies ignore these downside risks.
At the same time, those who suggest that the way toward Christian renewal is the institution of a Christian prince also discount the great variance in the land of the Judges. Perhaps in a Babylon model, a Christian prince would have outsized change (think of, say, Xi Jinping becoming Christian). But in Judges, there is little chance such a figure might unite diverse and hostile groups together - save for a broad revival that fundamentally unites the culture.
In fact, such a figure might bring on more hostility and expose all Christians to ruin. Judges tell us our problems are not simply who is in charge or what the laws are, but that we are disposed to reject any restraint on our freedom. The response of politicians, voters, and counties in favor of abortion post-Dobbs reveals the culture’s rejection of restraint. I am not in any way rejecting the justness of the decision; I am merely noting that there is no single silver bullet, whether a prince or a law, that can break through a negative world.
Instead, Judges tells us that before we can focus on getting out of negative world, we have to first figure out how to survive in it. The priority is, above-all, survival in a contested environment. This is how Renn frames his prescriptions as what the Church needs to do to protect itself from “negative world”.
He simplifies all this analysis above and gets straight to the point:
“How should we live if there's always the possibility of social rejection or being fired from our job for our Christian beliefs? We have obvious biblical answers—-walking by faith in God's promises…but I want to focus on a practical strategy for structuring our lives in a negative world…One answer is to restructure our lives to reduce our exposure to risk from negative events…We should work to be resilient when faced with these negative shocks.”
This is the type of state that trader Nicholas Talab calls “antifragile”. While he mentions this concept briefly in this section, “antifragile” summarizes Renn’s prescriptions personally, institutionally, and missionaly. Being antifragile is how Christians should survive in a world with great uncertainty. For each of these components, Renn provides three prescriptions that roughly embody three principles: have skin in the game, make it costly for the world to attack you, and be protected when it does.
The first section, living personally, gives us three terms to latch onto: Obedience, Excellence, and Resilience.
The first prescription is to “become obedient”:
“The first challenge for American evangelicals living in the negative world, then, is to examine ourselves, consider our ways, count the cost, and commit to denying ourselves, taking up our crosses and following Christ in everything.”
Now, I hardly imagine anyone would say we should not become obedient. However, Renn helpfully points out that in negative world, the “cost” of discipleship might require forsaking our jobs, social status, and vision of success. But Renn gives this prescription as part of the strategy of living in the negative, which is critical. Aside from the direct Christian duty to obey Christ, beginning with obedience in a world of uncertainty amounts to saying you need to have skin in the game. You can’t navigate negative world, unless you have something to lose. He is telling us to actually take on the risk of being in the negative world, to be true to what the Gospel says we are, despite the cost. To not take the risk is to let negative world win. Stubborn, dogged commitment to Christ is the first part of surviving negative world.
For instance, none of the disciples ever recanted their belief in the resurrection despite the tremendous risk in believing it. Indeed, all but one suffered martyrdom for this one belief. But their stubbornness and frank intolerance of any opinion to the contrary led to the spread of this belief throughout the ancient world. Christians in ancient Rome counted the cost but simply refused to accept the Roman pantheon. Though they suffered for their intolerance, it was the precondition to surviving through persecution and eventually converting the empire.
Though we are not being killed for the faith, the negative world parallels Rome’s desire to placate Christianity into just one part of the pantheon of its gods. This compromise is the negative world’s true defeat against Christianity, and being obedient to Christ requires being against it. To make that commitment, that whatever the world throws at us, we will not fall away, is not just obedience to the scriptures, but the first step in changing the culture. Evangelicals should latch on wholeheartedly to what Renn is saying here. We live for an audience of one. The first step remains: “If would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”
Second Renn tells us, “become excellent”, which roughly corresponds to saying: pursuing being the best in every domain God has placed you in, to his glory. He devotes a substantial amount to pushing back against the Evangelical disposition against ambition, citing biblical and sociological implications of shying away from reaching cultural elites. However, I believe this disposition has lessened to some extant by those who came up in neutral world since they understand the importance of reaching the cultural elite in changing an entire culture.
Yet besides being a strategy for cultural change, pursuing excellence acts as a great deterrent against the risks of negative world. When someone is truly excellent at what they do, they can be public and even forthright about their faith. Think of an incredible singer like Justin Bieber, a top designer like Jerry Lorenzo, or a top executive like CEO of Intel, Patrick Gelsinger. These people all have publicly spoken about their faith, and have been afforded more opportunities because of their excellence. The world incurs a cost in attacking them.
This phenomenon is commonplace in American sports – athletes naturally talk about their faith in Christ, motivating their desire to be the best in their sport and credit God for every one of their wins. This mentality, applied at the personal level, amounts to gathering cultural power by simply being the best, which exposes you to the upside (cultural renewal) and potentially minimizes the downside (social ostracization). Even in a more “Babylon” like world, pursuing excellence appears to be a divinely blessed strategy. From Joshua to Daniel to Ezra and Nehemiah, those who pursue excellence will eventually gain cultural influence. How much more then, in the land of the Judges, can someone who promises and delivers the best in their field be afforded opportunities, resources, and the like. And even if the world purposely attacked Christians despite their excellence, they would resign themselves to mediocrity and eventual dissolution.
Finally, Renn tells us to “become resilient.” If excellence means finding the upside and mitigating the downside, resilience means protecting oneself from the possibility of an extreme downside. In the land of the Judges, extreme events happen; there are high highs like Othniel and Shamgar but there are low-lows like Jephthah and Samson. However, the low-lows risk extinction. Renn’s goal in proscribing resiliency is to help us avoid ruin. We cannot have skin in the game; we cannot sacrificially love and pursue excellence…if we are dead. We should not resign ourselves to being attacked by the culture but instead best optimize our chances of surviving short of disobedience. This amounts to saying: can we survive the worst negative world throws at us?
Renn’s practical suggestions, ranging from financial frugality to working in less high-profile jobs, are geared toward minimizing costs to livelihood for having a socially disapproved opinion. He even advises Christian to build or work at small, diversifying capital and sources of employment. Ownership of land, business, and capital is indeed the ultimate form of protection against “negative world’s” risk. Even Renn’s suggestion to consider living in a more conservative town, should be read not as an escape from negative world, but a strategic minimization of extreme risk. However, pursuing this strategy does come at the expense of excellence and cultural change.
Hence, there is a tension here that lies at the heart of Renn’s advice, but it reveals the tension at the heart of Christian discourse today. Resilience and excellence can be thought of as two distinct strategies. Resilience corresponds to the “Benedict Option” approach of becoming functionally independent from larger society. Going all-in on resilience means functionally creating a parallel society where members can survive ostracization, educate their children, and lead them to healthy marriages. However, this approach doesn’t capture the upside of becoming integral in society. “Benedict Option” is a strategy built for survival, and survival alone, it can’t produce culture change.
Likewise, excellence might correspond to “neutral world” strategies to change the culture by changing the elite. This strategy is the correct one for cultural change, but it ignores the fact that being a Christian in negative world entails substantial risk and incentives. We can have all the Christians in elite spaces we want, and I have seen many. It means nothing if they are discipled into being Christians only personally but never publicly.
Renn’s solution to these two competing strategies is to say, “pursue both, and see what God does.”
A multifaceted approach is needed for the high risk land of the Judges. Pursuing resiliency at the expense of excellence renders Christians a class permanently subjugated to cultural norms. Pursuing excellence without resiliency exposes us to a highly fragile environment – you could be doing great one day and then canceled the next without anywhere to go. The best approach is a combination of both, attuned to where you are.
For instance, a church in a coastal city might already attract the cultural elite. The church's best strategy would be to devote more time to resilience. The church itself can offer resource city life to resist the “negative world” pressures on marriage, career, and family. Moreover, it can go so far as to encourage its members to support and provide for each other.
Likewise, churches living in more conservative locales should pursue excellence through communal strength. From becoming reliable owners of key communal practices to providing role models in relationships to education. Becoming a pillar in your community makes it costly to cancel and establishes the Church as a serious community pillar.
In any case, the combination of obedience, resilience, and excellence will be the best way forward. Renn’s vision is for the Church to not just survive a chaotic environment but benefit from it and emerge as leaders.
While Renn's recommendations aren’t new (Kevin DeYoung calls it helpful advice, Miller calls it things he would do already), the insight comes from his framing. What he is advocating is a mindset shift. Excellence, Obedience, and Resilience are all part of one strategy: surviving and transforming a chaotic land. He says, “negative world prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist and be firm.” These are the sobering words for our moment.
In the land of the Judges, we await the appearance of our king. In the meantime, we must be obedient, excellent, and resilient. We do not know what tomorrow brings, much less how cultures will change. Yet there is great promise that the Church can thrive. “In the world you will have trouble. But take heart, I have overcome the world” (Jn 16:33).