There are two sides to every breakup. This includes the split between Christianity and American culture.
Conservative commentator Aaron Renn has created a taxonomy for understanding the country’s transition from what he terms Positive World, where being a Christian was socially desirable, to a pluralistic Neutral World, where Christianity was an acceptable option among many faiths, to the current Negative World, where he says conservative evangelical Christians are social pariahs.
What’s left unsaid by Renn, and the recent New York Times profile of him, is that the Negative World in which conservative evangelical Christians find themselves is largely one of their own making.
“The Negative World in which conservative evangelical Christians find themselves is largely one of their own making.”
Renn is an expert in urban policy, but it is his observations on contemporary Christianity that have endeared him to Christian conservatives. What would come to be known as the Three Worlds of Evangelicalism theory first appeared in his 2017 newsletter, “The Masculinist,” among his conservative musings on the “intersection of Christianity and masculinity.”
After an endorsement from Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option, hater of same-sex marriage and fan of Viktor Orban, the conservative religion journal First Things published Renn’s revised “Three Worlds” piece in 2022. It was the magazine’s most popular print article that year.
To illustrate Negative World, Renn tells the story of how “secular elites” behind the True/False Fest documentary festival in Columbia, Mo., “bowed to community outcry” and severed financial ties with The Crossing, a local megachurch, after a pastor there preached against “blur(ring) genders.” What Renn neglects to mention is that, in that sermon, Pastor Keith Simon compared cultural acceptance of trans people to the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. As the screen behind him cut to an image of hundreds of thousands of uniformed Nazis at a 1937 Nuremberg rally, Simon said, “Here, in this culture in Germany in the 1930s, the culture said something that was horrendously wrong. Be careful where culture will lead you.”
Many in the Columbia arts community felt personally betrayed by The Crossing and thought the church may have been sponsoring the festival to hide its fundamentalist beliefs. One former festival employee told reporters, “I don’t think it’s a mistake to reach out to people who have different beliefs, or that that is a bad thing … (but) you keep talking to them, and 10 years later (the Nazi comparison) comes out as a sermon?”
Pastor Simon then posted a tone-deaf video on Facebook emphasizing his compassion for the “brokenness” and “confusion” of trans people, which did little to heal the breach.
Renn’s portrayal of The Crossing as a congregation ostracized for its “traditional beliefs” is not only overblown, it also completely ignores Simon’s culpability in the matter. So, when evaluating his Three Worlds theory, it’s as important to pay attention to what Renn omits while tracing the decline of Christian cultural power and the rise of secularism.
Renn is less interested in why Christians lost cultural cachet than he is how evangelicals have responded and what they can do going forward, now that Negative World is upon them. On the one hand, it represents the kind of think-tank frameworking that enables strategic engagement and organizational adaptability. On the other hand, it also can function (as it certainly seems to be) as an exercise in self-justification rather than self-reflection.
Positive World
Renn begins his narrative of the Three Worlds with Positive World, which he dates from 1964 to 1994. In this golden age of American Christianity, he says, “to be known as a good, churchgoing man” was part of “being an upstanding citizen.” The country’s morals were “Christian” and “violating them (could) bring negative consequences.”
Overseeing this world and enforcing its moral laws were the elite White Anglo Saxon Protestants or WASPs. As their influence waned, so did Christianity’s cultural status.
This was hastened by, in his view, “liberal excess of the ’60s and ’70s” and the “sexual revolution.” According to Renn, some evangelicals in Positive World responded to the decline of Christian influence by harnessing the culture and creating seeker-sensitive churches like Willow Creek and Saddleback. Others waged war on the culture itself.
“Renn ignores the ways in which their actions and antics turned people against evangelicalism”
While he acknowledges these “culture warriors” possessed a measure of influence and notoriety within American society, Renn ignores the ways in which their actions and antics turned people against evangelicalism and undermined the reputations of Christians more generally.
The arrival of satellite and cable television gave viewers all over the world a front-row seat for Jerry Falwell’s plunge down a waterslide, Oral Roberts’ prayers for his life and $8 million, Jimmy Swaggart’s tearful confessions of infidelity, Jim Bakker’s perp walk and Pat Robertson’s rebuke of a hurricane and subsequent presidential run.
According to Renn, the Positive World ended in 1994 with the Republican Party’s “takeover” of the House of Representatives, which he deems “the peak of evangelical influence within U.S. conservatism.”
Evangelicals had grown from 18% of the population in 1988 to 27% in 1994, and 76% of them voted for Republican House candidates. The victory was short lived.
Neutral World
During Neutral World (1994 to 2014), Christianity continued to lose more cultural status, becoming just another lifestyle choice, he says. Renn blames the lax morals of secular elites but ignores the impact that The Rush Limbaugh Show, the rise of Fox News, denominational sexual abuse scandals, the cruel protests of Westboro Baptist Church and the rise of the internet had on perceptions of Christianity in the Neutral World.
“It’s impossible to overstate the influence of Limbaugh on evangelical Christians.”
It’s impossible to overstate the influence of Limbaugh on evangelical Christians. Many of the 659 radio stations that aired The Rush Limbaugh Show were Christian radio stations. The juxtaposition of Limbaugh’s program with James Dobson’s Focus on the Family and Contemporary Christian music lent his views credibility in Christian circles.
Christians gleefully laughed along with Limbaugh as he mocked dying AIDS patients, made vulgar jokes about women and LGBTQ people, engaged in blatant bigotry and demonized Democrats.
As the late Rachel Held Evans observed, “When you publicly support a man who uses crass language to shame a woman, you are making it hard for non-believers to see anything lovely or redemptive about Christianity.”
Renn instead focuses on the response to Neutral World by those he calls “cultural engagers.” These churches and organizations interacted with “elite secular media and forums” while avoiding controversial topics like abortion and homosexuality. They were largely concentrated in urban areas and had some “social gospel” ministries.
Redeemer Presbyterian Church’s Tim Keller, publications like Christianity Today, the Hillsong empire and George W. Bush with his “compassionate conservatism” are Renn’s examples of these “cultural engagers.”
Neutral World lasted about 20 years, until 2014, the year before the U.S. Supreme Court declared same-sex marriage constitutional in 2015. In Renn’s judgment, the Obergefell decision “institutionalized Christianity’s new low status.”
Negative World
In Negative World (2015 to the present), Christian morality is a threat to the “public good,” and being known as an evangelical Christian is a “social negative, particularly in the elite domains of society,” Renn claims.
Many of Neutral World’s cultural engagers, having succumbed to pressure from “secular elite culture,” are now siding with them on issues of race and immigration. Renn, who insists “Social Gospel style Christianity is a gateway to apostasy,” is not surprised. Some cultural engagers have fallen so far as to become “progressive evangelicals,” “LGBTQ affirming,” or have left the faith altogether.
“Renn insists Social Gospel style Christianity is a gateway to apostasy.”
Renns sees Tim Keller as an example on the right of someone who, in his attempts to be “winsome” and correct the damage done to Christianity’s reputation by Christian culture warriors, went too far and “synchronized” too much with secular elites.
To some evangelicals in Negative World, “winsome” is just another word for “weak.”
At The Crossing, a proponent of the “winsome” church approach, staff member Patrick Miller says they received the most pushback from Christians on the right who didn’t think Simon’s sermon went far enough in rebuking trans acceptance. He worries the Negative World framework puts people on the defensive and “justifies extreme measures in the present.”
Faith leaders like Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress, Doug Wilson and Eric Metaxas are evangelicals who Renn admits have “jettisoned some historic touchstones of the Religious Right, such as a concern for personal morality and character in political leaders.”
The Trump Era
However, nothing has damaged the reputation of evangelical Christianity more than the broad embrace of Donald Trump. This political alignment coincides with a precipitous drop in the percentage of Americans who say religion was the most important thing or among the most important things in their lives, down from 72% to 53%.
According to David Campbell at Notre Dame, who along with Geoffrey C. Layman and John C. Green wrote the book Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics, the Christianity of the MAGA movement is actively driving people away from religious affiliation and toward identifying as “nones.”
In an interview with PBS, Campbell said, “If people don’t think of themselves as being Republican or conservative, then they don’t think of themselves as being religious, or they don’t want others to think of them as being religious.” Campbell has traced this trend all the way back to the 1980s when those early culture warriors first began to mix politics and religion.
Renn, however, doesn’t see Trump’s election as the product of a gradual erosion and ultimate abandonment of Christian tenets by conservatives who exchanged their birthright for a mess of political pottage. Instead, he blames leftist elites and LGBTQ acceptance.
Speaking with Al Mohler he said, “The great irony around Donald Trump, that all of these secular leftists just horrified by Donald Trump, but I’m like, you are the people who promoted the social changes that made it possible for him to become president.”
“His rationale seeks to deflect responsibility for Trump’s election away from the throngs of evangelicals who turn out for Trump.”
His rationale seeks to deflect responsibility for Trump’s election away from the throngs of evangelicals who turn out for Trump at rallies, not just at the polls. Perhaps the greater irony is Trump’s ability to manipulate just this kind of conservative Christian grievance for his own ends.
According to Renn, Trump’s reelection is not the end of Negative World.
While the overt hostility to Christians may be waning, society still views them with suspicion, he says. The fact that the sexual revolution has not been reversed, and there is support for abortion and for marijuana legalization in red states is proof to him that the “underlying de-Christianization trend still continues.”
Only a wholesale return to what Renn perceives as the social and spiritual order of Positive World will set things right.
Did this world ever exist?
What becomes obvious once one scratches the surface of his historical gloss is that Renn’s Positive World only ever existed for able-bodied, affluent, white heterosexual men. As his critics have pointed out, the mid-20th century was not a “positive world” for minorities.
Renn has countered that Black Protestants faced “discrimination and violence not because of their religion, but because of their race.” This oversimplification ignores the influence of the African American church in the Civil Rights Movement.
It’s also worth remembering that Renn’s original newsletter trumpeted the virtues of traditional masculinity, the perils of no-fault divorce and the necessity of being a “high-value man.” When Renn refers to the decline of “Christian morals,” what he means specifically (and more or less exclusively) are traditional norms around sex and gender.
“It’s an extremely narrow worldview that leaves no room the movement of the Holy Spirit.”
So, as with race, the trajectory of the Three Worlds also does not reflect the experiences of women, LGBTQ people and a good many other Americans. It’s an extremely narrow worldview that leaves no room for the movement of the Holy Spirit or the interpersonal growth that comes from exposure to those with different ideas and identities.
That cultural elitism is not necessarily something Christians should strive for or deserve is not an argument Renn entertains.
New strategies
In his 2024 book, Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture, which expands on his original Three Worlds blog post, Renn proposes strategies to replace the worn-out culture warrior and cultural engager methods of the past. To become the new elites, WASPs 2.0 as it were, evangelicals need to pursue “excellence in intellectual endeavors, the arts, sciences, medicine, law and institutional leadership.”
These goals are admirable at face value, but achievement has proved historically challenging for groups that typically eschew doubt, curiosity and the validity of diverse viewpoints — all qualities necessary for creating great works of art and advancing science.
A silver lining of Negative World is that, with the cultural Christianity of the 1950s out of the way, Renn says, “We don’t have to have a least common denominator Christianity anymore and we can raise the bar on what it means to be a Christian.”
“Christians, he says, should lean even harder into sexual purity, traditional marriages, traditional gender roles and fertility.”
Christians, he says, should lean even harder into sexual purity, traditional marriages, traditional gender roles and fertility. Because these are no longer the dominant views of American culture, evangelicals who adhere to them need to follow the examples set by other cultural minorities, such as Jewish immigrants or Roman Catholics, and create their own schools, businesses, publishing houses, civic organizations and communities rather than try to fit into secular spaces.
According to Renn, Business owners should hire, even on a bivocational basis, fellow Christians so they can stand against the secular culture without fear of being fired for their beliefs. Evangelicals should focus less on the common good and engage more transactionally with the Negative World, including abstaining from service in the U.S. military.
Common roots
It’s no coincidence these proposals mirror the Highland Rim Project of aligned communities, with their own schools and small businesses, that Josh Abbotoy has under way in Kentucky and Tennessee. Abbotoy and Renn, along with venture capitalist/ammunitions manufacturer Nate Fischer, who Renn says in the Times piece is his “biggest financial supporter,” are all founders of the American Reformer. Renn and Fischer were the original founders, Abbotoy was later promoted to “founder” after the fact.
American Reformer, which Mother Jones calls the “unofficial magazine” of “TheoBros,” is a nonprofit that promotes evangelical Protestant thought and seeks to reshape and create evangelical institutions. Interestingly, one institution on their project list is the Southern Baptist Convention.
American Reformer is the organization behind creation of the Center for Baptist Leadership. As Matthew Milsap, librarian at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, posted on X, the two groups share the same Employer Identification Number.
While Center for Baptist Leadership says it is an “independent center supported by American Reformer,” some Baptists might balk at having Presbyterians pulling the strings and collecting the funds donated to the Baptist center.
Fischer and Abbotoy also are part of New Founding, a conservative venture capital firm with ties to groups such as the Trump legitimizing Claremont Institute and the Society for American Civic Renewal, a sort of Machiavellian Moose Lodge for those in search of fraternity and “political and social dominance.”
New Founding is listed on the Project 2025 Advisory Board. It partners with and shares a business address with American Reformer.
Another view
Renn and I hold few views in common, aside from a love of opera. However, I do agree with him that there has been a breakup between American culture and Christianity. Like two witnesses of a car crash standing on opposite sides of the street, we may see and interpret the causes of the collision from different angles, but there can be no doubt that between us sits a smoking heap of wreckage.
Renn says his Three World’s theory is meant to be a tool, and while it is clearly flawed, those of us on the other side of the street might benefit from some of his suggestions for living in Negative World. After all, it’s a world of our own making as well.
Mainline and moderate churches spent much of their time during the eras of the Three Worlds focused on denominational politics and the worship wars, thereby ceding influence in the public sphere to the loudest voices on the right. They failed to offer a meaningful alternative vision of Christianity to the “nones” turned off by culture warriors and MAGA apologists.
“Renn is right: We need to go hardcore, just not in the Puritanical way he advises.”
Renn is right: We need to go hardcore, just not in the Puritanical way he advises. Meeting the moment must be about more than meeting for an hour on Sunday morning. The early Christians overwhelmed prisons with their generosity, tended to plague victims at great personal risk, and so won people over through their behavior more than with their words.
Many of the people directly hurt by evangelicalism’s patriarchal authoritarianism or repulsed by its MAGA zeal will never return to a traditional church, no matter how winsome. For them, spiritual engagement will need to look completely different. How will we offer that?
Renn and the TheoBros are encouraging Christians on the right to think deeply and intentionally about what living out their faith and values looks like. We may not agree with their conclusions, but we should take note of the democratic (little “d”) scaffolding they’ve created to facilitate the sharing of ideas and the turning ideas into actions.
One reason Renn’s theory has gained so much traction is because the Religious Right has a vibrant ecosystem of online journals, podcasts, blogs, think tanks and fellowships accessible to clergy, academics and laypeople alike. Cooperation between content creators who appear on one another’s podcasts, review each other’s books and boost each other’s blogs keeps the conversation churning through the ecosystem. Wealthy donors like Fischer are investing in this network to ensure conservative ideas reach as many receptive people as possible, especially influential ones.
There’s nothing comparable on our side of the street.
In the past, religious and secular institutions offered us a modicum of stability and protection. However, with Trump threatening traditional news outlets, universities and public schools and sending ICE agents to churches, Negative World may be ending for conservative evangelicals, but it could be just beginning for the rest of us.
Kristen Thomason is a freelance writer and journalist living outside Edinburgh in the United Kingdom. She has produced educational and promotional media for national and international religious organizations and public television. Kristen also worked with local churches in Metro D.C. and Toronto, Canada. With a master’s degree in communication and undergraduate degrees in media studies and classics, she is interested in the intersection of politics, religion, history and the arts.