It's always been a Negative World

Aaron Renn's image of a world increasingly hostile to Christians is interesting, but ultimately limited. Why taking the "negative world" hypothesis to include the whole Church is erroneous.

An increasing trend amongst white evangelicals is Aaron Renn’s idea that we are living in a “Negative World.” His book, Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture (Zondervan, 2024), outlines a sociological picture of a world of increasing hostility towards Christianity. Renn’s basic argument is that the Western world has shifted in its attitude towards Christianity, moving across “three worlds” during the turn of the 21st century.

These “three worlds” have shifted chronologically, according to Renn, from 1964-present day. First, from 64-94, Christianity experienced a “positive world,” where Christianity was viewed as a moral good with “a cultural environment structured to be friendly to Christianity, at least Protestant Christianity, and its ethical system” (pg. 5). A “neutral world” followed this (1994-2014), where “Christianity is one valid option among many within a pluralistic, multicultural public square” (pg. 7). And finally, now, a “negative world,” where, “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” (pg. 7).

The book itself is carefully written. I think mostly Renn is right for the limited purview he admittedly decides to take on. In his opening pages, he notes the limitation of this hypothesis: he’s just looking at Western, White Evangelicalism. And for this small frame, I think he’s mostly right.

But it’s a small frame.

The problem with the “negative world” hypothesis, however, is the way I’m hearing this applied by pastors and influencers. Those who use Renn’s work tend to emphasize things I don’t think he emphasizes while they frame the entire problem at a much larger scale than the book does. Pastors referring to a “negative world,” tend to approach this “new world” as an unknown territory we are entering—one that will require a kind of battlefield mentality for the coming headwinds of “culture.” Painfully, this reminds of the 90s Moral Majority rhetoric that swept through the American church.

I think these pastors get this from Renn himself, who acts as if the “Negative World” is some new phenomenon the Church has never seen before. He doesn’t emphasize this, but he does say it plainly in the beginning. This would be my one bone to pick with Renn. He writes:

“We’re in a new territory where there is no map, and it’s a constantly changing and evolving landscape. This means, then, that we have to explore, to find a new path through this new environment under conditions of uncertainty and discomfort” (pg. xv).

The way I hear pastors use Renn’s work is in this framing. We’ve never been in this kind of world, they seem to say, and as the culture becomes increasingly hostile to faith communities, we have to act differently.

But there are so many problems with telling our churches that we live in a “negative world” and that this negative world is novel.

The first thing this does is pit “the world” over and against “the church” when, for the most part, these two things are intertwined. Any person in full time ministry will know that there’s a whole lot of “the world” inside our churches (and a whole lot of the church in the world, for that matter). Not everyone in my congregation is converted—and even fewer are sanctified. “The world,” biblically speaking, is the inculturation of sin inside our societies and families of origin. It is something we rid ourselves of (1 John 2:15-17), crucify (Galatians 6:14), and ask God to free us from its grip (John 17:14).

But the second reason might be more important. When we tell people that living in a “negative world” is new, we lose sight of the larger Body of Jesus Christ—the church global and the church historic—who will tell you very quickly: it’s always been a negative world. It’s just the first time now that Midwestern and Southern American Religious people have felt negativity. Even in Portland, a bastion of secularism, I find Renn’s hypothesis disharmonious with my pastoral experience. My entire life—especially my entire life in full time ministry for the last nearly 20 years—I have never experienced Portland’s posture towards my faith as “positive” or “neutral.” It’s never been a moral good to be a preacher in Portland.

Going deeper than Portland White Protestantism, the thesis gets shakier (and, again, Renn actually admits this, but his fans often don’t). During the era of Renn’s “Positive World” (which he counts as 1964-1994), the “positive” view of the Christian religion in America was inextricably linked to its complicity in creating an alternative “negative world” experienced by ethnic minority churches.

Even when White Christian Evangelicalism profited off of a “positive world” culture, it was only positive because its complicity in subjugating and allowing for a fiercely negative world in the Black Church—not to mention the negativity in Korean, Japanese, Latino ethnic/immigrant church experiences. Renn’s “positive world” occurs just one year after Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was addressed to “My Dear Fellow Clergymen” (White Protestant Pastors). Did Black Church leaders think the ensuing 70s were a positive world? Like I said, for much of “the Church,” it’s always been a negative world.

Any vision of “the Church” that is this limited will always be this problematic. “The Church” is never one socio-economic group couched in one theological tradition. “Christianity” must always be spoken of inside the context of “Christianities”—the various forms our faith takes in this country, around the world, and across history. Even during Renn’s “positive world,” John F. Kennedy would be aggressively criticized for just for being Catholic. Women were not ordained in the United States in any major denomination until 1974. Again, Renn identifies his hypothesis to Protestants, but his fans don’t.

By expanding the range of Renn’s work, we end of completely missing the full picture of how the Church has existed (and currently exists) in the West. Black, female, ecumenically broad church leaders certainly did not experience the world as “positive” in the 60s. It was, for most of our brothers and sisters across racial, gender, denominational lines, a “negative world” the whole way through.

This would be true of the global church as well. It does not take much historical knowledge to know that, for most of the 20th century and into the 21st, the global church has faced remarkable levels of persecution. Just four weeks ago, Open Doors reported that Christian persecution has reached an all-time high.

“More than 380 million Christians around the world now face high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith (up by 15 million from last year’s figure of 365 million) – a record number, representing one in seven Christians worldwide (up from one in eight four years ago). It’s an increase of a staggering 140 million since 2018.”

Renn is right. For a certain, very small group of profoundly historically privileged people, the world feels a bit more negative. But for my pastor friends to use his very limited pseudo-sociological report to present this as some new, never-before-charted territory the people of God are facing—with “no map”—is wrongheaded. There has never been a positive world. Even when we experienced it as positive it was because others did not.

The more interesting invitation for American Christians is not “preparing to battle a negative world” or to “increase our capacity to brave this new world of hostility we’re entering.” I wonder, instead, what it would look like for us to learn from the global and historic church, which has always known the world to be negative—and negative at a far larger scale.

We need a reverse missions effort to get our global pastoral community to speak the truth of the gospel back to the American Church and the American World. And we need a reverse history of allowing the ancient pastors of our tradition to speak across the ages to our age now.

The answer is not in theological development of some new system of thinking. No new system is needed because there is no “new negative world” we’re entering. Instead, the invitation is through theological retrieval and theological ressourcement. Retrieval would be a move across space (global theology)—our ability to go and get that which is helpful right now across the world in different theological cultures—mainly from the Church in the Global South (Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia).¹ Ressourcement (a more Catholic term) would be a move across time (historical theology)—to go “source” that which has been developed outside the muck of American capitalist culture. The patristic pastors and theologians, the medieval monastics, or the Ethiopian or Eastern Orthodox that are far removed from the West can offer us some surprisingly helpful answers.

What might our brothers and sisters in China have to say about living in a culturally hostile world? They’ve been at it much longer than us. How about our brothers and sisters in Gaza, suffering with Christ “in the rubble?” How about Africa? What about the patience of our brothers and sisters in the early church?

Again, I think Renn’s book stands on its own. He is right, after all. But the purview of his study has been co-opted by many and expanded to communicate something I don’t even think he’s saying. Renn is wrong in this one key way: that we have never encountered this before.

The problem is in the pronoun “we” of that statement. If “we” (White Protestants) allow that term to broaden at all to the “we” of Jesus Christ’s global and historic family of believers, we’ll find that “we” have been here before—and are even “here” now. I’ll say it one last time for good measure: for the Church of Christ, it’s always been a negative world.

1. I’m aware this term is mostly used (helpfully, I might add!) by Protestant Historical theologians like Gavin Ortlund and W. David Buschart. I love both of these books and find them so helpful. I think this word might be better used for global theology because we can do get it now. I’m introducing Retrieval here as a way to think about how we access and “gather” global theology for the Protestant Church. “Ressourcement” is better for the Protestant vision of church history: to gather that which can purify the church present and the church historic…not much can be retrieved, but much can be “ressourced.” I’m probably wrong and the historical theologians will probably win, but as least I’m trying.