Today, centrists and those on the right are more fertile soil, I believe, because they are more open to reality. They recognize that the cultural revolutionaries’ projects to rewrite reality are destroying civilization. These refugees crave clarity about basic moral realities because of how much confusion the negative world has produced. They are looking for voices who stand up to the civilizational destroyers—maybe even voices who boldly proclaim supernatural truths.

Aaron Renn’s “negative world” thesis broadly posits that in contemporary America the primary forces of culture are turned against Christians and Christian moral teaching. Identifying as a Christian and following the Bible’s moral teachings is viewed as regressive and antisocial, and even invites ostracism.

In recent months, however, several high-profile former critics of Christianity have pivoted to openly confessing the need for Christianity due to its social and civilizational resources, as Paul Shakeshaft has noted. While researching for his blockbuster book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, non-Christian popular historian Tom Holland became convinced that most of our cherished values in the West are indebted to Christianity. As a result, he realized that in his “morals and ethics” he is “thoroughly and proudly Christian.” Joe Rogan, the freethinker who hosts the most popular podcast in the world, and who has in the past repeatedly denounced Christianity as unreasonable and intolerant, admitted in February that “We need Jesus” to bring social and moral order out of our contemporary chaos. In a viral essay this past November, former New Atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali narrated her conversion to Christianity, inspired at first by its ability to resist the authoritarian, woke, and Islamic forces that threaten Western civilization. She also credited Christianity as the source of our greatest values in the West. And arch-pop-atheist Richard Dawkins recently came to similar conclusions, referring to himself as a “cultural Christian.”

These high-profile “conversions” to cultural Christianity (and, in Ali’s case, genuine faith) don’t so much challenge Renn’s thesis as press us to consider what might be on the horizon. I am convinced Renn’s analysis remains essential for that task.

First of all, the negative world itself sparked the backlash represented by Dawkins and the others. The moral chaos, tribal hostility between identity groups, and loss of classical rights that now characterize the post-Christian West have made many nostalgic for the time when our social norms were rooted in Christianity. The very real threat of losing permanently the substantive goods of the classical liberal order has led them to recognize that that order cannot sustain itself apart from its foundation in living Christian faith. The figures mentioned above are merely high-profile examples of a broader phenomenon (evidenced, for example, by the flattening of the growth of “nones,” especially among Gen Z). Regular people know things have gotten crazy. They rankle at the destructive lies peddled by the woke. They crave common sense, the affirmation that they are not crazy, stupid, or bigoted. They recognize the need to labor together to build a society that promotes the true, the good, and the beautiful, not the fake, depraved, and ugly. This does not mean that we aren’t living in the negative world. Rather, it means we have reason to hope that that world’s days are numbered.

Read More