Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Friday, October 25, 2024
Evangelicalism’s culture is not even contiguous with that of mainline Protestantism, much less classical Protestantism. It is very populist and dominated by charismatic pitchman type pastors. It tends to emphasize a therapeutic gospel over a strict ethic. In fact, any type of moral or behavioral code followed too seriously is likely to draw a caution for being legalistic. It’s very aligned with American consumer culture, and American culture generally. And of course it is anti-intellectual, something well-documented in such work as Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

Reading James Davison Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity rekindled a feeling that I’ve had many times before in reading books like this. Every time I read a book that describes the religious history of America that talks about the nature of Protestantism in the country, it strikes me that the Protestantism of the American past is alien to today’s evangelicalism. They are different enough to raise the question as to whether or not American evangelicalism is actually Protestant in important ways.
Hunter writes in his book:
For most Americans—whether deist or Calvinist, rationalist and intellectual or revivalist and popular, high church establishmentarian or sectarian—there was a God more or less active in the universe and in human affairs. Indeed, this God was, for most, Christian and, even more, Protestant. Though hegemonic and certainly oppressive to those who dissented, this belief nevertheless provided a language and an ontology that framed understandings of both public and private life. And yet this was also a culture, following Weber and so many others, that was inner-worldly in its orientation and ascetic in its general ethical disposition, an ethic that shunned extravagance, opulence, and self-indulgence and prized hard work, discipline, and utility. In ethics it was individualistic, to be sure, but informed by biblical and republican traditions that tempered individual interest and moved it toward the public interest and common goods. [emphasis added]
It’s certainly hard to argue that contemporary American culture generally, or evangelicalism in particular, are ascetic and oriented towards a traditional disciplined WASP ethic. Undoubtedly, they are if not opulent, consumerist in orientation. I’d be lying if I said I were any different.
You see this change in ethical outlook on life in basically any book on the topic. It’s a move away from the old Calvinist outlook and behaviors and towards modern American post-bourgeois consumerism.
In his famous The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber describes how Calvinism’s concept of calling and election – which he distinguishes from that of Lutheranism – led to furious activity to attempt to objectively demonstrate that one was among the elect.
The religious believer can make himself sure of his state of grace either in that he feels himself to be the vessel of the Holy Spirit or the tool of the divine will. In the former case his religious life tends to mysticism and emotionalism, in the latter to ascetic action; Luther stood close to the former type, Calvinism belonged definitely to the latter. The Calvinist also wanted to be saved sola fide. But since Calvin viewed all pure feelings and emotions, no matter how exalted they might seem to be, with suspicion, faith had to be proved by its objective results in order to provide a firm foundation for the certitudo salutis….Thus, however useless good works might be as a means of attaining salvation, for even the elect remain beings of the flesh, and everything they do falls infinitely short of divine standards, nevertheless, they are indispensable as a sign of election. They are the technical means, not of purchasing salvation, but of getting rid of the fear of damnation.
He describes how this manifested itself in various ways, such as in the Puritan ethics of Richard Baxter:
Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins. The span of human life is infinitely short and precious to make sure of one’s own election. Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary for health, six to at most eight hours, is worthy of absolute moral condemnation. It does not yet hold, with [Benjamin] Franklin, that time is money, but the proposition is true in a certain spiritual sense. It is infinitely valuable because every hour lost is lost to labour for the glory of God. Thus inactive contemplation is also valueless, or even directly reprehensible if it is at the expense of one’s daily work. For it is less pleasing to God than the active performance of His will in a calling. Besides, Sunday is provided for that, and, according to Baxter, it is always those who are not diligent in their callings who have no time for God when the occasion demands it.
The mention of Benjamin Franklin shows that this was one form in which these values were transmitted to American culture. Again, far from contemporary America, which puts a high premium on leisure and consumption over asceticism and production.
Weber’s book is actually short and readable, so is very much worth picking up.
We see the same in French writer Emmanuel Todd’s provocative book The Defeat of the West, which I wrote about earlier this year. Todd sees Protestantism as the foundation of the modern West, and describes it similarly to Weber:
Let us conclude our review of the main characteristics of Protestantism. It is an ethic of work: we are not on earth to have fun, but to work and save. Here we are at the antipodes of the consumer society. Protestantism has also long been synonymous with sexual puritanism.
He sees the collapse of Protestantism as the core factor in the decline of the West, one which lies underneath many of today’s social pathologies.
The original religious matrix was slowly built between the end of the Roman Empire and the central Middle Ages, and then ultimately thickened by the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation.
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Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Thursday, August 22, 2024
For many of us, we can spend so much time focusing on the problems of men in society, or complaining about the latest attack on toxic masculinity in the media, that we forget how good our own opportunities are. Just because there’s so much bad in the world doesn’t mean you can’t personally succeed. And the more that you succeed, the more you are able to do to help other people and be a positive influence in society. 

Two things can be true at the same time:

Men in general are underperforming in society relative to women, and have a large numbers of struggles in education, employment, with finding purpose in life, substance abuse, etc.
It’s never been a better time to be a man who has his act together.

So much of the discussion of men today talks about their problems. The problems they have, as with Richard Reeves book Of Boys and Men. Or the problems they cause, as with the endless complaints about “toxic masculinity.”
But you shouldn’t just look at the world through the lens of averages, but through the lens of yourself.
What opportunities and challenges does this world provide you personally?
The truth is, for a man who has it together, there’s a ton of opportunity out there. In many ways, it’s a golden age.
Just consider the availability of knowledge. Think about all of the facts and insights that just I myself have provided in this newsletter. The information I’ve posted on attraction, on how relative attractiveness shifts as we age, and on the dynamics of online dating is knowledge people of my generation never had access to. We had no choice but to listen to official messages that sent out a lot of false information, including the equivalent of claiming that women are attracted to servant leaders (hint: not true).
Or think about the vast amount of information available about health and fitness. Yet, there’s a ton of conflicting info, and plenty of “misinformation and disinformation.” You really do have to “do the research.” But at least there’s actual availability of information, something you didn’t have back when the USDA’s food pyramid was telling you to load up on carbs.
Then there’s the products we can get, such as for actually eating healthy. When I grew up, we had delicious vegetables from our garden, but for the most part, everybody was forced to eat mass market, highly processed food because that was all that was available. The 1970s and 80s were a low point for consumption amenities. Today, farmers markets are everywhere. They are all sorts of options for buying fresh, healthy, ethically sourced food. Yes, it’s often expensive. But it’s available. When I was a kid, you couldn’t get a lot of this stuff no matter how much money you had.
Want to start a business? The barriers are lower than ever. Prior to the Internet, I would never have been able to get my message out unless a miracle occurred and some newspaper hired me as a columnist. Until five to ten years ago, making a living from online writing was essentially impossible.
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Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Thursday, August 15, 2024
Rob Henderson’s memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class addresses the reality of how unstable environments permanently hurt children. It’s an especially good read because Henderson not only grew up in such a troubled environment, but is also a Ph.D. psychologist from Cambridge University. You may have noticed that I frequently link to his work, and he has one of the best Substacks out there. Thus he has a mix of compelling personal experience, and the intellectual ability to put this into a social science and cultural context.

It’s a truism that having kids gives you a new perspective on childhood. My son is seven years old. He’s never missed a meal in his life. It occurred to me that the idea that there might not be food to eat when he’s hungry has probably never entered into his head. Similarly, he’s probably never even imagined that his mother and I wouldn’t be there, that he might be taken out of our house and dumped somewhere he’s never been to live with people he’s never met.
As we age, we learn, both intellectually and through experience, that the world is full of terrible things, and that pain and suffering are an unavoidable part of the human condition. Even as adults, some experiences are so traumatic that their effects linger for years or even for the rest of our lives.
When these things happen to young children, so-called “Adverse Childhood Experiences,” it can distort their development and permanently damage them and their prospects in life because they don’t have the mature resources necessary to cope with what has happened to them. In a sense, even if they “overcome” these experiences, they never truly leave them behind.
Rob Henderson’s memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class addresses the reality of how unstable environments permanently hurt children. It’s an especially good read because Henderson not only grew up in such a troubled environment, but is also a Ph.D. psychologist from Cambridge University. You may have noticed that I frequently link to his work, and he has one of the best Substacks out there. Thus he has a mix of compelling personal experience, and the intellectual ability to put this into a social science and cultural context.
Henderson’s life is a case study in crazy. He never met this father, after whom he was named. Later, he learns through a DNA test that his father was Hispanic. His mother was Asian, and deeply troubled, with a serious drug problem. She had already had two other children with two different fathers when he was born, half-brothers he has never met. Henderson was taken away from her and put into a foster care, where he rotated through a series of foster homes.
Here was one such experience:
Months later, Gerri, my social worker, came to the house. It was time for me to go live somewhere else, she said. I’d just turned seven, and this time I didn’t cry. I was dejected, but the tears didn’t come. I’d learned to shut down, sealing myself off from my emotions. Gerri helped me gather my clothes and put them into a black garbage bag. She picked up a shoe box next to my bed, and a bunch of cards fell out…We packed up and walked out to her car. I wondered if this was how the rest of my life would be: moving to a home, staying for a while, and Gerri putting me somewhere else. By this point I knew that other kids didn’t have to do this.
I previously served on the board of Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) for Children of Cook County, Illinois. CASA trains volunteers who serve as special advisors to the judge in cases of children who are involved in the juvenile justice system on account of parental abuse or neglect. These children have done nothing wrong themselves, but are merely unlucky to have messed up parents and home life. Since social service case workers are typically overloaded, and pretty much everybody involved in the case has their own personal interests at stake, CASA volunteers spend time learning about the case and the child and are chartered with acting as advocates for the best interests of the child to the judge.
During our initial board training, someone came into the room and gave us black garbage bags. We were told to put all of our possessions in that bag, and come with her to a place we didn’t know and had never been.
For us, we knew the reality of what was happening, so it didn’t really affect us all that much truth be told. But reading about Henderson’s experience took me back. Imagine being a small child, and a government case worker comes into your bedroom out of the blue and tells you to put everything you own in a black garbage bag and bring it to some strange new place. Unless it actually happened to us, we can’t really relate to that. Children without our intellectual and life perspectives experience these things in completely different ways that we might think they do:
Children believe that if a family loves them, then that family won’t let them be taken away. Adults understand on an intellectual level that this isn’t true—the foster system works the way it works—but little kids don’t fully grasp this.
This happened many times to Henderson, who I believe lived in about seven different foster homes, some of which were candidly exploitative of him. As it put it:
I’ve met some well-heeled people who have attempted to imagine what it’s like to be poor. But I’ve never met anyone who has tried to imagine what it would have been like to grow up without their family.
Being in foster care puts a kid into pretty much the highest risk category in life you can be. Of boys, Henderson notes:
Studies indicate that in the US, 60 percent of boys in foster care are later incarcerated, while only 3 percent graduate from college.
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Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Friday, August 9, 2024
Conservative elites and their institutions are concentrated in New York and Washington. Even some of the ones that are outside of the Acela corridor are in blue areas, like the Hoover Institution, which is at Stanford University. Most conservative intellectual leaders don’t live in red states or redder areas of blue states. This shows a couple of things. The first is that elites are drawn to elite cities. If you want to be part of the elite, then you need to be around other elites and where the institutions of elite society are located. That’s the top tier cities, especially the big four of NYC, DC, LA, and SF. If you want to influence the federal government, for example, you basically have to be in Washington.

Where to live is one of the most critical choices we will make in life. My readership skews conservative. Since I moved from New York City to Carmel, Indiana, you might think that I think all conservatives should leave the cities or move to red states.
But that’s far from the case. For many people, especially those who aspire to succeed at the elite levels, it makes sense to live in big, progressive elite cities – even if you are a conservative.
Vanity Fair just ran a nice and largely favorable profile of the startup community in El Segundo, a suburb of Los Angeles near LAX Airport. I’ve highlighted the scene in “the Gundo” before. It’s a collection of heavily conservative, pro-America, Gen Z, male founders looking to work on defense and other hard tech businesses.
For over two years, in the small, unassuming beach town of El Segundo, dozens of young men have gathered with a singular mission: to save America. They will do this, they say, by building the next generation of great tech companies. They call what they are building real s—t, not like what the software engineers make up north, writing code on shiny MacBooks. Instead, these men have a taste for the tangible: They spend their workdays toiling in labs and manufacturing lines, their nights sleeping on couches and bunk beds….When it comes to “The Gundo,” the technological zeitgeist is, like all of these places, fueled by venture capitalists, who have invested more than $100 billion in defense tech companies since 2021, many of which are located in El Segundo.
…
The founders in El Segundo have settled on an expansive terrain in which to express sentiments that might chafe otherwise progressive sensibilities. They have an outsize respect for their country and men in uniform. They love fast cars, tobacco products, and their Lord and savior Jesus Christ. They are aspirationally blue collar, often wearing blue jeans, clean leather work boots, and dark T-shirts with company emblems embroidered on their breast pockets. By day, the founders often trek to the Central Valley to launch drones into the airspace. By night, they can be found drinking Singapore slings at the Purple Orchid tiki lounge, or burning pallets at Dockweiler Beach, chewing nicotine pouches, and chugging energy drinks.
…
During the three days that I visited companies in The Gundo, I saw three women and spoke to one: the wife of an employee at Valar Atomics who attended the Bible study along with her two young children. She had moved to a house near the beach with her husband three weeks earlier. When I asked if she was meeting many nice people, she laughed and said that she was too busy taking care of her children to leave the house.
…
Sometimes it seems that the El Segundo founders are acting out a studied caricature of nostalgic Americana, especially on Twitter, where they frequently post about smoking cigarettes, bench-pressing, and loving their country. At least some part of the scene is pure performance. “It’s totally intentional. You have to make it cool,” says Cameron Schiller, the cofounder and CEO of the aerospace manufacturer Rangeview. “We’re trying to bring more young people into manufacturing.”
Click over to read the whole thing. It’s a fun article.
As I’ve said many times before, I’m bullish on Generation Z. They have a new kind of positive, can-do, let’s start building attitude that you just don’t see in the older generations. The Gundo is a good example of that.
This article is suggestive of a lot of things.
First, I’m seeing these sorts of lifestyle pieces about the Gundo scene. This is important, because people are drawn to a “scene.” So creating and maintaining the idea that you have a scene is important in catalyzing something real.
At the same time, your scene actually has to produce something of real value, whether that’s music or military drones. The Gundo needs to actually produce real companies with real products and real exits. It’s the nature of scenes to be ephemeral, so they don’t have forever to make this to happen.
Secondly, I’m very struck that the epicenter of the young, high talent, conservative, pro-America, pro-Jesus startup community is…..Los Angeles. That is, they are in what’s effectively a neighborhood of an extremely progressive elite coastal city in one of America’s bluest states.
Essentially all cities are blue cities politically and culturally, so to the extent that you are located in one then you are located in a blue area. But Los Angeles is actually an elite center of progressive wealth and culture creation. It’s one of the elite citadels of progressivism.
Now, Los Angeles is a long time hub of aerospace and defense. That’s why SpaceX was based there. So it makes sense for defense oriented companies to choose Los Angeles. But it’s still notable that these conservatives didn’t even choose a red state, much less a less aggressively progressive city.
The Gundo is hardly the only example of this. There’s the “Dimes Square” reactionary culture and politics scene in New York City. To be sure, these folks are not exactly conservative as has been conventionally understood. But it’s still an interesting dissident phenomenon. And again, it’s in New York City, a citadel of the left.
Even within a red state like Texas, we see that a lot of the higher wattage and leading edge conservatives are moving to Austin, the bluest and most progressive city in the state. The most famous is Elon Musk, who just announced he was moving the headquarters of X to that city. Joe Lonsdale, venture capitalist and founder of Palantir, also moved to Austin.
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Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Monday, July 8, 2024
In reality, this law is almost entirely symbolic, and a highly provocative symbolic act at that, one that will alienate non-Christians and reinforce them in every bad thing the left has said about conservative Christians wanting a theocracy. It reinforces the idea that conservative Christians are basically unwilling to live peaceably as part of the multicultural society that, whatever one might think of it, actually exists today. This is true even for non-religious “normies” who aren’t necessarily inherently hostile to Christianity unless given some reason – such as a move like this made in a country in which only a minority of people are practicing Christians.

The state of Louisiana just passed a law mandating the the Ten Commandments be put on display in public school classrooms in the state.
I believe this law is unwise, reflects a poor understanding of cultural conditions, and shows that a large number of American Christians are still living in a culture war mindset.
In my book about how America has transitioned towards a Negative World for Christians, I wrote about the need to stay prudentially engaged, and that different people are going to come to different good faith conclusions about the right actions to take. I wrote:
Prudential engagement also recognizes that not all evangelicals will come to the same conclusion about where and how to be involved politically and socially. We should be tolerant of evangelicals who make a different decision than we do in this matter. That doesn’t mean we avoid political conversations or refrain from critical evaluations of other people’s approaches. It’s perfectly valid to say, as I just did, that the counsel advo- cating political disengagement should be rejected.
But we should respect those who hold views different from our own and seek to be attuned to them when they’ve honestly made a different decision.
So in this case, I’ll say that I simply come to a different prudential judgment than the folks in Louisiana. I don’t think this is a blatantly illegitimate act. Not only would this have been very constitutional, even normal, for the vast bulk of American history, there are people my age who’ve been noting how they had the Ten Commandments in their classrooms when they were in school.
The courts may very well rule that this law unconstitutional. I choose to view the malleability of our constitution in that way as a feature not a bug. Meaning I too want to change various things that are presently viewed as “the constitution.” There’s no reason for anyone to treat current jurisprudence as settling anything, given that neither the left, nor America’s judges themselves, behave in that manner.
So I don’t think this law is per se illegitimate or outside the American tradition. I just think it’s unwise.
Why do I say that?
First, let’s consider some reasons people might put forth for why this was a good thing.

It’s red meat that energizes the base, so makes good political sense in that way.
It shows a willingness by red states to defy the national cultural consensus and even the federal government – a sort of assertive federalism.
It will actively repel liberals from the state, helping to keep it red politically.
It will have some sort of substantive, evangelistic effect on the viewers or culture.

I don’t personally find these compelling in this case.
Start with the fact that this is a classic “culture war” move. In fact, it’s literally a classic. Attempting to force the display of the Ten Commandments on government property is a longstanding culture war tactic. I seem to recall it even back in the 1990s, and have managed to find references to it on the internet from as early as 2002. In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled against this very practice when it comes to courthouses.
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Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Thursday, June 6, 2024
Economic, technological, and social changes affect the availability and norms of society in ways that make it difficult to avoid adapting to them. I want to dial in on cultural and social expectations. Because these can put pressure on people to upgrade their lifestyles in ways that might be possible to resist, but which are difficult to do so.

I grew up in a small house without air conditioning where I shared a bedroom with my younger brother.
I remember how awful it was on hot summer nights in August. I put a box fan turned to high on a chair about three feet from the edge of my bed to try to get cool. But other than that, growing up there wasn’t bad.
Back in the 1970s and 80s, lots of people did not have air conditioning, or only had bedroom window units. Sharing bedrooms also wasn’t uncommon.
Things have changed today. While plenty of people don’t have AC or have children sharing bedrooms, these are now almost entirely a result of lacking the money to get them.
Air conditioning and one bedroom per child have become socially normative to the point that it’s a point of parental contention to choose differently.
There was a recent interesting article “Why Do So Many Parents Think Kids Need Their Own Bedroom?” in the Atlantic addressing this very point.
When I ask my husband what it was like to share a room as a kid, he shrugs. He didn’t consider it that big a deal. But many parents I’ve talked with who live in metro areas with high costs of living feel the same as I do. Some are stretching their budgets to afford a house with more bedrooms; others are reluctant to grow their families without having more space. As I mull this over, I wonder: Why do so many of us prioritize giving kids their own room?
Over the past half century or so in the U.S., the practice has become what the University of Pennsylvania sociologist Annette Lareau calls a “normative ideal”—something that many aspire to, but that not all can attain. It’s gotten more common in recent decades, as houses have gotten bigger and people have been having fewer kids. From 1960 to 2000, the number of bedrooms available for each child in the average household rose from 0.7 to 1.1, according to the Stanford sociologist Michael J. Rosenfeld’s calculations using U.S. census data. It’s held fairly steady since, the University of Washington real-estate professor Arthur Acolin told me. Recently, Acolin analyzed 2022 American Community Survey data and found that more than half of all families with kids had at least enough bedrooms to give each child their own (though it’s not certain that all of them do). Even among parents whose children share rooms, more than 70 percent say they wish they could give everyone their own.
Economic, technological, and social changes affect the availability and norms of society in ways that make it difficult to avoid adapting to them.
I want to dial in on cultural and social expectations. Because these can put pressure on people to upgrade their lifestyles in ways that might be possible to resist, but which are difficult to do so.
One kid per room is an example of such a standard. When I was a kid, I obviously would have preferred my own room. I knew that kids from families with more money did have their own room. But there was nothing unusual about sharing one.
Over time, as one child per bedroom became seen as the norm, not having that would mark a family as an outlier.
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Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Thursday, May 9, 2024
There’s a copious amount of discussion about family structures in this book, but Todd adds to that an overlay of religion. He sees Protestantism, rather than the market, industry, or technology as the heart of the modern West. Its most critical impact was a drive for universal literacy, so that all the people could read the Bible in their own language. It also created the famed Protestant work ethic. An educated, industrious populous led to the takeoff of economic growth in Protestant countries. Indeed, Protestant countries were the most advanced industrial economies in Europe and basically remain the leaders. (Todd believes France benefitted from being adjacent to a band of Protestant nations).

French historian and demographer Emmanuel Todd was the first person to have predicted the fall of the Soviet Union. He noted that, unusually, its infant mortality rate was rising, and that they had even ceased publishing that statistic. Based on this and other data, he concluded that the Soviet Union had entered “the final fall.”
In something of a parallel to that work, his new book, La défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West), published in January, says that the West is on track to lose the conflict in Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, this was received poorly by critics who accused him of repeating Kremlin propaganda.
What caught my attention was that Todd blames the fall of Protestantism for unleashing a crisis in the heart of the West itself. And that this rather than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the true source of our problems. He writes, “The real problem facing the world today is not Russian will to power, which is very limited. It’s decadence at its American center, which is unlimited.” (You can see why people hated this). I read the book for myself to see what he had to say about Protestantism.
My earliest readers will know that that I’ve been learning French. I’ve mastered enough to essay Todd’s book, but am still sub-fluent. So you should validate the translations I provide here before relying on them, as they are a mixture of Google Translate and my own work.
Much of Todd’s research work has focused on the influence of historic family structures on ideologies. For example, he argues that the Russian family structure created a social state that was amenable to communism. Russian families were strongly patriarchal, and all of the sons lived with their father. This created an ideal of, simultaneously, authoritarianism (of the father) and equality (between the brothers). Communism was, in a sense, an embodiment of this type of social order.
There’s a copious amount of discussion about family structures in this book, but Todd adds to that an overlay of religion. He sees Protestantism, rather than the market, industry, or technology as the heart of the modern West. Its most critical impact was a drive for universal literacy, so that all the people could read the Bible in their own language. It also created the famed Protestant work ethic. An educated, industrious populous led to the takeoff of economic growth in Protestant countries. Indeed, Protestant countries were the most advanced industrial economies in Europe and basically remain the leaders. (Todd believes France benefitted from being adjacent to a band of Protestant nations).
If Protestantism brought positives to Europe, it also introduced the idea of inequality in a profound way, through its idea of the elect and the damned. Hence Protestant countries also created the worst forms of racism (as in the United States) and antisemitism (as in Germany). He cites the fact that Protestant areas of Germany were more supportive of the Nazis than Catholic ones.
The root of the nation state is also in Protestantism, not in the French Revolution or anything of that nature. He writes, “With Protestantism, there appeared peoples who, by too much Bible reading [in their vernacular], believed themselves chosen by God.”
In this analysis, he seems to basically be recapitulating Max Weber, of whom Todd describes himself as a student.
Protestantism Active, Zombie, and Zero
If Protestantism lies at the heart of the West, then the disappearance of Protestantism is a crisis for the West.
Todd divides religions in modern societies into three states: the active state, the zombie state, and the zero state.
In an active state, people attend church regularly. They have families on the Christian model, and they do not cremate their dead. (Christianity has always frowned on cremation as denying the hope of the resurrection of the body).
In a zombie state, people no longer attend church regularly, but still turn to the church for baptisms, weddings, and funerals. Critically, in a zombie state, people still hold to the habits and values of the old religion. So in a Protestant zombie state, people would still have the Protestant work ethic, place a value on literacy (education), etc. They largely retain Protestant practices around family and avoiding cremation. Especially they retain “the ability for collective action.”
In a zero state, people no longer even have church weddings or funerals. They don’t have their children baptized. In the zero state, the habits and values of the old religion have disappeared. People embrace cremation. And they abandon the Christian family structure. Todd sees the arrival of “marriage for all” as marking the definitive point of arrival at a religious zero state.
I did not note exactly when he said the United States entered a Protestant zombie state, but it encompassed the first part of the twentieth century up until about 1965. Todd notes that the zombie Protestant era was very good for America, with an extended period of triumph from FDR to Eisenhower. But that does not mean a zombie state always produces good outcomes. He also sees Nazism as arising out of a Protestant zombie state in Germany.
Around 1965, America entered a transition phase towards a zero state. In his treatment of the UK, Todd illustrates the loss of the habits and values of Protestantism by pointing to a softening of the culture of the English public schools (which, confusingly to Americans, are actually their most elite private schools). The same phenomenon occurred to a lesser extent here at elite prep schools and colleges. We see the transition in a few phenomena. One has been steady grade inflation over time. Todd cites figure showing that students spend significantly less time studying today than they used to as well. Another is the loss of the ethic of public service and self sacrifice. Many of the graduates of those schools fought, and even died in World War II. Rather than go directly to college, George H. W. Bush joined the Navy right after graduating from Phillips Andover to fight as an aviator in the Pacific theater. By Vietnam this became the exception. A recent newsletter from Matthew Yglesias on why colleges students need to study more covers similar territory here.
But just as the positive qualities of Protestantism began to unravel, so did the negative. In particular, Todd see the civil rights movement and the entire subsequent efforts toward full social and economic integration of blacks into mainstream society as a product of Protestant decay. To him, racism and discrimination against blacks were not just regrettable byproducts of a Protestant belief in inequality, but played a core function in structuring American society. Putting blacks into the role of “the damned” in society was what allowed there to be equality among whites themselves.
With the Obergefell decision in 2015, the transition phase ended and America definitively arrived at a Protestant zero state.
I’m more going to present Todd’s theories than attempt to rigorously analyze them, but it is worth noting that there are things one could critique here. For example, while there may have been a base level racial equality among whites, all whites were certainly not viewed as equal, as prewar Catholics and Jews could attest.
Also, the 1950s are supposedly part of the Protestant zombie era, and yet that was the high water mark of church attendance in the United States. Todd pooh-poohs the idea that America has been that distinct from Europe on that front. He says research shows people inflate their church attendance levels in surveys. But no one disputes that the 1950s were an era of high church attendance.
Todd also brutally dismisses the evangelical movement, seeing it as heretical and not really Protestant at all. But the only source he cites for that take is Ross Douthat’s book Bad Religion, which does not suggest he has a sophisticated understanding of American evangelicalism.
That brings up one of the key weaknesses of Todd’s analysis of America. His analysis of contemporary America leans heavily on writers like Douthat, names that are known and are legitimate, but are in an important sense dissident or peripheral. Others in this vein that he refers to are Joel Kotkin and John Mearsheimer. This will weaken the credibility of his arguments with many American readers who defer to mainstream consensus authorities – although those reading here definitely cast a wider net that includes dissident sources. American evangelicals, of course, are likely to discount critiques coming from Catholic commentators like Douthat.
I was particularly struck that Todd’s framework aligns quite well with my own three worlds model. The transition from zombie Protestantism starting circa 1965 is also when I say the status of Christianity (especially Protestantism) starts to go into decline in America. That transition phase covers my Positive and Neutral Worlds.
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Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
So much of the teachings of the urban church flatter the sensibilities of the people in the pews rather than fundamentally challenging them about the way they are living their lives…The pedimental nature of third way rhetoric is very effective, and it’s easy to see why it appeals to the striver class people who populate evangelical urban churches.

“Third way” rhetoric that has been deployed by some evangelicals was once praised but is now often criticized. People are rejecting the idea that the truth is somewhere in the middle of left and right, or is some hybrid thereof. Today, even the evangelical proponents of third way rhetoric have adopted new language like “diagonalizaton” to suggest that the Christian truth is not simply somewhere in the middle but something else entirely. (I believe Christopher Watkin came up with this formulation).
I actually think that a third way approach can be valid in a lot of circumstances in describing truth. For example, Aristotle said that virtue was a mean between two extremes. Not that perfect virtue always was at the midpoint of the two, but that it lies somewhere in the middle.
Similarly, in a theological context, we could say that it’s possible to over-emphasize Christ’s humanity and end up falling into Arianism, or over-emphasize his divinity and end up in Docetism.
Very often in life there actually are ditches on both sides of the road. So in terms of conveying truth, I think talking about a third way can often be accurate.
The real function of third way rhetoric is not conveying a truth claim, however. It is to elevate the status or moral position of the person using it—and often that of his audience as well.
Third way rhetoric is a pedimental structure. I first encountered the idea of pedimental language in reading Mary Douglas’ wonderful book Leviticus as Literature.
A pediment is an architectural feature that looks like this.
While this public domain image has four columns, you often see it with just two. The left and right corners of the triangle serve to emphasize the corner that is elevated in the center.
When used in rhetoric, pedimental rhetoric functions similar to a chiasm in emphasizing the central point. We see this structure in Leviticus. Douglas argues that chapters 18 and 20 have a pair of repeated sexual regulations that emphasize the social justice regulations in Leviticus 19 (which I believe she argues is actually the central focus of the book).
Let’s apply this to contemporary evangelical rhetoric with a simplified example. If I get into a pulpit and say, “Christianity is conservative because it cares about sin, but it’s also liberal because it cares about the poor,” what is the function of this?
Factually, it conveys that true Christianity cares about both sin and helping the poor, which is true. But it also suggests that I am better than both liberals or conservatives, because I have the complete truth in contrast to their partial truths. And because you, my parishioners, are in my church, you are probably better than all those people too.
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Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Wednesday, April 3, 2024
Americans of all stripes need to seriously reassess their relationship with the country’s major institutions in light of how poorly so many of them are performing and the caliber of the people leading them.

William Lind’s 4th Generation War concept is rooted in the decline of the legitimacy of the state. He writes:
At the heart of this phenomenon, Fourth Generation war, lies not a military evolution but a political, social, and moral revolution: a crisis of legitimacy of the state. All over the world, citizens of states are transferring their primary allegiance away from the state to other entities: to tribes, ethnic groups, religions, gangs, ideologies, and “causes.” Many people who will no longer fight for their state are willing to fight for their new primary loyalty.
This isn’t just about the third world. It’s happening at some level in the US, where institutional trust is in long term decline.
How should we think about identification with, loyalty to, and investment in American institutions?
We already see that the left’s loyalty to American institutions is entirely contingent. As soon as those institutions do something they don’t like, they turn to the attack.
For example, when Donald Trump was elected President, a large number of people on the left said he was “not my President.” They declared themselves “the resistance.” Note the use of insurgency language here in line with Lind’s concept. This is a cultural form of insurgency conflict. Law professors from Yale and Harvard decry the US constitution in the pages of the New York Times. Or again, think about how many climate change activists put their cause ahead of any American considerations. Or how many want to “defund the police” or even abolish the police.
Clearly, these people think that America’s institutions are only valid to the extent those institutions are doing what they want.
I’m always struck when reading leftist writers like Herbert Marcuse, how they stridently and fundamentally viewed America as a morally illegitimate regime. The critical theorists understood that there’s great power in being willing to take a fundamentally critical stance against society’s institutions and structures of power.
How should people on the right think about American institutions?
Americans on the right have tended to be patriotic people who salute the flag, send their kids off to serve their country in the military, etc. They’ve had a lot of loyalty and identification not just with the territory of the US, or the American people or American culture, but also with our government and major civic institutions. This is one reason they get so upset when those institutions “go woke” or deviate from what they believe the institutional mission should be.
This is a problem for the right because, as I noted:
Almost all of the major powerful and culture shaping institutions of society are dominated by the left. This includes the universities, the media, major foundations and non-governmental organizations, the federal bureaucracy, and even major corporations and the military to some extent. The one truly powerful institution conservatives control, for now at least, and it’s an important one, is the US Supreme Court. The other institutions conservatives control — alternative media like talk radio, state elected office, churches — are subaltern. They are lower in prestige, power, and wealth.
This situation caused Revolver News editor Darren Beattie to provocatively ask at the NatCon 3 conference, “Can one be an American nationalist?” As he put it, “What does it mean to be a nationalist in a situation in which the nation’s dominant institutions and stakeholders have become fundamentally hostile to the would be nationalist?”
In this environment, people on the right need to rethink their relationship with American institutions.
Make no mistake. I’m an American. I love this country. I love our people—all of our people—even the haters and the losers, as they say. I love the American way of life. I don’t think we’re perfect. We have a lot of things we have done wrong in both the past and present that need to be corrected. But this my country.
At the same time, we need to take stock of reality and the current condition of our institutions.
This is an area where I am personally torn, and continue to think about a lot. But my current view is that we need to take a triage approach to the our institutions.
Some institutions are doing well, and we should reward them, invest in them, and support their leaders.
Others are in some state of decline. Perhaps some are reformable, or would do better with more public support. Others are in terminal decline. Others are not just declining, but have become actively harmful to ourselves or others.
Back in newsletter #24, I talked about how we should respond to failing institutions. One of the tools I included was a 2×2 matrix I created with axes of Invest-Disinvest and Attack-Defend.
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Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Friday, March 22, 2024
Review of  “How Feminism Ends”… “if this is the end of feminism, then it doesn’t quite feel fair. If women are finally “free,” then why is it still so hard to be female? And why, after all of our hard work, are the best parts of history still made by males?”

Ginerva Davis has a very interesting review of French writer Emmanuel Todd’s book The Lineages of the Feminine in the new issue of American Affairs. It’s titled, provocatively, “How Feminism Ends”
Todd is a self-described liberal, and supports the right of adults to change their gender and, to the extent it is now medically possible, their sex. But in the places where our current moment is excessive, or historically aberrant, Todd finds an unambiguous common thread: the presence of females.
Females control the universities where such sex-denying work is produced. Females are disproportionately concentrated in the academic fields—anthropology, biology, sociology—that have most radically changed their ideas on sex and gender (in contrast, history, a more male-dominated field, has stayed largely above the fray). A female sociologist wrote the book about how menopause is a social construct; a different female anthropologist wrote another study Todd cites which argues that females should, actually, have evolved to be taller and stronger than males. (Todd responds that “natural selection is there only to be lamented over.”)
Females increasingly control the levers of cultural power; if a topic feels “ideologically central,” then it is because females made it so. At the very least, they constitute the majority of reporters who cover health, social issues, and family policy. The “gender ideology” Todd abhors runs through numer­ous female-dominated professions: it is promoted by journalists, legitimized by doctors, and codified into law by a growing number of female government officials. Todd also finds that it is almost always “mothers” (i.e., female parents) who have the final say over medical treatment for their children. And so while debates about “gender-af­firming” care tend to be sex-neutral—“parents” making decisions about the bodies of their “children”—much of the contemporary “transgender movement” amounts to a trend of older females helping younger ones escape their sex.
…
The result, Todd argues, is a split consciousness on the status of “women.” Males see women everywhere: women police them in HR departments, mock them in the news, and, to add insult to injury, continue to insist that they are members of a protected class.
Females, however, are still haunted by a lack of female “greatness”—the same problem posed, seventy-five years ago, by Beauvoir. They work under male bosses. Their countries are run by mostly male leaders. Males continue to define the cutting edge in tech­nology and industry, while females play catch-up in remedial programs (“Women in tech!” “Women in business!”). And even the most liberated female must still take her pills, and count her cycle, and watch her fertility “window” while pretending that she doesn’t care. The female condition, one of constant self-monitoring and self-suppression, is now oddly similar to that of the gender-dysphoric, which is perhaps why we females are so obsessed with them (I never felt quite so understood as a female until I read the work of Andrea Long Chu, whom Todd cites as a leading chronicler of the transgender experience). It also seems designed to create a degree of self-loathing: females are constantly set up to compete at tasks at which they are slightly disadvantaged, and are promised a life which, any rational mind will quickly discover, they will never achieve. Social media aside, it is unsurprising that a growing num­ber of women now report that they hate themselves.
Todd argues that the recent wave of Western feminist agitation that we have witnessed in the past decade (#MeToo in America, #BalanceTonPorc in France) is not the result of a massive backslide in female liberation but the opposite—external barriers to female equal­ity are falling by the year. Women are waking up to their new condition and finding it a bit upsetting. And they are looking desperately for something, anything, else to blame—femicide in a foreign country, their still-male bosses, and even the word “woman” itself.
Because if this is the end of feminism, then it doesn’t quite feel fair. If women are finally “free,” then why is it still so hard to be female? And why, after all of our hard work, are the best parts of history still made by males?
In another recent article, Stella Tsantekidou writes on “the desperation of female neediness.”
Do you know what it’s like to be a woman who wants a relationship but can’t get one? It is incredibly common and yet hardly acknowledged.
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