We do live in a negative world and we are not alone. The primary cause of this significant negative is not primarily our faith—after all, we stand aside those who deny Christ—but the ideological takeover of higher education, and coastal and urban businesses, publications, and institutions by the latest and most fashionable ideas about sex, sexuality, and gender. As such, our church’s story really is the platonic ideal of a more narrow thesis: middle-class, non-coastal, college-educated evangelical churches are viewed less positively in their communities than they were 10 years ago. This is undeniably true. So I write that with no smugness. These are my people. I love them, and I’ve experienced the pain of this negative world firsthand. 

In the introduction to Aaron Renn’s new book, Life in the Negative World, he cites my church, The Crossing, as the quintessential illustration of his three worlds framework. He tells a painful, decade-long story I participated in firsthand. In a way, our story does support his thesis.

Unless you know our full story, that is.

Renn’s telling highlights both what is so helpful about his framework—namely, the way it narrowly describes the intense pressure produced by a pervasive LGTBQ and progressive politics—and also what is so unhelpful about it (more on that later).

But first, our story.

The Church and the Festival

In 2008 one of our lead pastors, Dave Cover, forged a relationship with a local, progressive documentary film festival, called True/False. The partnership ran deep: We sponsored the festival’s yearly charitable cause, church members volunteered at the festival, and many supported it by buying passes and attending. Renn writes that we hoped to “build bridges to those who were not Christian” and believed “the films featured were asking the right questions about the human condition and what was wrong with the world.”[1] 

Exactly.

The partnership eventually drew national attention. In 2014 and 2016, the New York Times and Christianity Today wrote positive pieces about our friendship, “which highlighted how the two groups were able to work together while disagreeing on some matters.”[2] For Renn, our collaboration was a shining example of what Christians could do in the neutral world: act as faithful, non-threatening presences without fear of retribution for our regressive views on LGB (T and Q weren’t on the list in 2008) issues. Indeed, the “T” was precisely where our partnership with True/False took a turn.

In 2019, Keith Simon preached a sermon affirming that there are only two genders. Renn details the fallout,

This sermon caused a major controversy in the Columbia community. As the Crossing stood by their position, institutions in town came under pressure to drop partnerships with the church. The True/False Film Fest decided to do so, cutting ties. An art gallery in town did likewise. A church that had worked hard never to offer gratuitous offense suddenly found itself a pariah in parts of the local community it had been trying to reach.[3]

By 2019 we’d entered Renn’s negative world, and unwittingly stepped on a landmine that made us untouchables in circles that once welcomed us. Renn summarizes the lesson we supposedly learned,

Regardless of their approach, the world wasn’t willing to accept their beliefs. The fact that Christians like these are at risk of being ostracized for their beliefs reveals that we’ve now entered a new and unprecedented era in America, one I call the “negative world.” That is, for the first time in the history of our country, orthodox Christianity is viewed negatively by secular society, especially by its elite domains. This shift to the negative world poses a profound challenge to American evangelicals and their churches and institutions.[4]

At first glance, our story is the perfect encapsulation for Renn’s thesis: Progressives are systematically shoving Christians out of public life at great cost to their reputations and livelihoods.

But let’s take more than a glance.

What Renn Gets Right: The Three Worlds of Sex, Sexuality, and Gender Ideology

Things have changed for Christians, especially in regards to LGBT issues. Just 15 years ago, views of gender and sexuality now considered retrograde, were thoroughly mainstream. As a result, those who held to traditional views of marriage and gender, were not considered beyond the moral pale in most college-educated, non-coastal circles. If you preached the sermon that got us attacked in 2019 in 2010 instead, it would’ve been considered weird, not immoral. Weird, because hardly anyone in mainstream culture was discussing trans issues. Not immoral, because most midwestern democrats would’ve had no problem with the statement, “There are only two genders.”

But nine years later, that same sermon generated death threats, indiewire articles, and the explosion of a decade-long partnership. It was painful. Renn is right: We felt like pariahs. When different evangelicals scoff at the idea that the world is negative—“You think it’s hard now? What if you lived in…?”—they simply prove that they’re out of touch with how local institutions are weathering the changing winds of the sexual revolution.

Indeed, when you apply Renn’s three worlds framework to public discourse on sex, sexuality and gender, his timeline makes rough sense.

From 1964 to 1994 American ideas about sex outside of marriage underwent dramatic changes, especially in elite, urban, coastal cities. But most Americans believed that sex belonged in marriage. Schools taught abstinence. It was a changing world, but on the whole a positive one for the Christian sex ethic.

Between 1994 and 2014 America began to undergo yet another major transformation. After the more radical gay liberation movement, launched during the 1969 Stonewall riots, failed to move the dial on the average American’s conception of homosexuality, the much more palitable gay marriage movement, led by people like Andrew Sullivan, normalized same-sex relationships. Shows like Will and Grace began to normalize gay relationships in the mainstream, but as late as 2010 not even Barack Obama—a private supporter of gay marriage—could publicly endorse it. But by the end of the era, most Americans had changed their position. They supported gay marriage, and this ultimately culminated in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015. In this period, Christians were “neutral,” considered prudish for their commitment to abstinence, but not regressive, because most Americans agreed with them on LGB issues.

The post-2014 world, or what Renn calls the negative world, marks the moment when Christians stood outside the mainstream on both sex and sexuality. It’s also the point at which transgenderism entered rapidly into the cultural mainstream. Vanity Fair’s Bruce turned Katelyn Jenner cover was a sea change, pointing toward the moment when—especially in the widespread protests of 2019 and 2020—anyone (not just Christians) holding views out of step with the most progressive ideologies risked exclusion from elite circles: Fortune 500 companies, Hollywood, journalism, and eventually the Biden White House.

If we consider the three worlds as a narrow lens for describing the experiences of anyone out of step with the developing sexual ideology of each era, it makes tremendous sense. (Perhaps this is why Renn’s book is focused primarily on the risks people take for remaining faithful in this one era—there is a bit on CRT, but little on far right politics, and nothing on greed, materialism, or consumerism.) In truth, it’s not just a negative world for evangelicals. It’s a negative world for anyone who will not affirm far left ideologies—whether you’re Al Mohler or Andrew Sullivan, Rosaria Butterfield or Bari Weiss.

That said, the negativity of the post-2015 negative world is most keenly felt by those who, in the pre-2014 world, had easier access to power and influence: middle class, college-educated, non-coastal evangelicals. I’m not doing identity politics, I’m just observing that if you lived on the coasts as an evangelical before 2014, you didn’t feel like you lived in a “neutral world.” You were an outsider who spent the last few decades with divergent views on sex/sexuality. But middle class, midwestern and southern evangelicals enjoyed a sense of being normal. Many were insiders who had access to power denied to those of lower social strata, and (often) different skin color.

For example, it’s hard to imagine black or white Christians teaching orthodox views of race in Selma, Alabama in 1964 calling it a “positive world.” So-called “Christian” segregation academies, like Bob Jones University, didn’t desegregate until 1971, and didn’t lift their ban on interracial dating until 2000. They were reflective of the negative world of the south throughout the so-called “positive world” era.

Back to the main topic: Just as changing sexual mores galvanized the evangelical purity movement of the 90s (would they have described their world as positive or neutral toward Chrisitanity?), changing views of sexuality and gender became the issue for non-coastal evangelicals like me in the mid-2010s, because for the first time they were dictating the terms of my participation in certain parts of mainstream culture. We experience today as a particularly negative world—as compared to 10 years ago—for the same reasons non-evangelicals like Andrew Sullivan and J.K. Rowling do.

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