At the heart of Life in the Negative World is practical advice for individual Christians and for Christian institutions as they seek to be faithful in a changing cultural landscape. Renn groups his advice into three parts: living personally, leading institutionally, and engaging missionally. The outline is easy to follow, and the advice is down to earth and full of good sense.

On June 2, 1987, the National Enquirer published a photograph of Donna Rice sitting on the lap of Gary Hart. When, earlier that spring, rumors surfaced of an affair between the actress and the Democratic Senator, the backlash had been strong enough to end Hart’s promising campaign for president. The photograph captured Hart wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Monkey Business”—that unfortunate phrase being the name of the yacht on which he and Rice had sailed on an overnight trip from Miami to Bimini. Hart’s political career was over. Later that fall, Gail Sheehy was to publish a long expose of the scandal in Vanity Fair. Sheehy wondered, “How could a man so dangerously flawed come so close to persuading us that he was fit to lead a superpower through the perils of the nuclear age?” Sheehy was dismayed that so many people failed to grasp the real issue. “The key to the downfall of Gary Hart is not adultery,” Sheehy wrote. “It is character. And that is an issue that will not go away.”

To read Sheehy’s article today is to visit a foreign land. Written decades before the #MeToo movement, the article refuses to turn Rice into a victim, focusing instead on “the world of Donna Rice [that] is much darker than it seemed.” (It should be said that Rice later returned to her Christian roots and championed, among other causes, the opening of the Museum of the Bible.) As for Hart, Sheehy paints him as a man torn apart by an unhealthy, almost devilish obsession with sexual escapades. Sheehy takes for granted that a president devoid of basic integrity and self-control is a danger to himself, to the country, and to the world. “If character is destiny,” Sheehy opined, “the character issue predicts not only the destiny of one candidate but the potential destiny of the United States he seeks to lead.”

By contrast, when news broke in 1998 of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, much of the country wasn’t convinced that private sex acts had much bearing on whether the president could do his job or not. And in 2016, in the wake of the leaked Access Hollywood tape, most conservatives concluded that Donald Trump’s sexual sins did not disqualify him from holding the highest office in the land.

These three sex scandals are mentioned in the first chapter of Aaron Renn’s new book, Life in the Negative World, and they highlight what he has labeled “the three worlds of evangelicalism”—the transition from a society that retains a positive view of Christianity (1964–1994), to a society that takes a neutral stance toward Christianity (1994–2014), to a society that has an overall negative view of Christianity (2014–present). The different political fallouts for Hart, Clinton, and Trump illustrate well how things have changed.

In the positive world, having an affair or being part of any sex scandal could be a career or campaign killer, even well past the era of the sexual revolution. In the neutral world (Clinton’s time), it would be damaging but probably survivable. In the negative world, violations of traditional Christian moral norms are no big deal unless they involve transgressions of one of the ideological taboos of the new public moral order, such as a feminist stance toward gender relations.

Renn’s argument is not that America used to be Christian or lived faithfully by Christian norms. Critics of Renn’s framework have been quick to point to America’s poor record on race, even when the country was much more “Christian.” But Renn’s “three worlds” thesis isn’t a way to grade the overall Christianity of the country. It’s a framework for understanding how society views the reasonableness of Christian truths, the validity of Christian arguments, and the obligation we all have to live up to a basic standard of Christian virtue. Renn claims that we are living in a negative world, one that is deeply suspicious of Christianity (especially when it comes to issues of sexuality). He makes a persuasive case.

I started following Aaron Renn—listening to his podcast, reading his articles, getting his newsletter—several years ago, a little before his article “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism” was published in First Things. He’s different from the usual pastors, theologians, and historians I follow. When he veers into theological or church matters, I take his insights with a grain of salt (as people might do when I veer outside of those lanes). But I listen to Renn because he is a serious Reformed Christian layman. With experiences and expertise different from mine, he invariably has opinions and insights I hadn’t considered before.

For example, Renn argues that none of the familiar models of Christian engagement works in the negative world. The “culture war” strategy, as he calls it, specialized in decrying the erosion of our moral character. This strategy is truly effective only if our views are in the majority. In the positive world, it might be possible to raise the standard of Christian virtue and hope that a winning coalition will rally to our side. By contrast, the “seeker sensitivity” strategy argued for maximum personal and ecclesial flexibility so as not to turn off the suburban would-be churchgoer. This strategy often functioned as if aesthetic style and personal relationships were all that stood in the way of non-Christians’ embracing Christianity.

Read More