It is obvious now, looking back at the post-9/11 and pre-Obergefell era, that the leftward drift of this movement was inevitable. The end of Renn’s “neutral world” and the beginning of a negative world hostile to Christianity began soon after the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision in 2015  and accelerated rapidly with Trump’s 2016 victory. Changed circumstances undermined the attractive witness model as previously practiced. The neutral-world ethos could not hold in the negative world; the era of open debate was gone.

I converted to Christ in the year 2000, leaving behind my atheistic contrarianism. I entered American Protestantism completely unaware that something unique was occurring. In the 1980s, Calvinism reemerged as a potent intellectual force in evangelicalism, spearheaded by Baptists John Piper and John MacArthur and Presbyterian R. C. Sproul. In the early 2000s, young Gen X seminary graduates and writers who were influenced by these men became a movement known as the Young, Restless, and Reformed (YRR). New personalities and publishers emerged, and megachurches were formed. Centered on Calvinistic doctrines of salvation, these Baby Boomers and Gen X Calvinists achieved a good deal of theological unity. 
Their cross- and intra-generational unity was most evident in the Together for the Gospel conferences (T4G), which began in 2006 and held every other year. It was organized by four friends, already well-established in their own  circles in the pre-social media days—Mark Dever (Baptist), Ligon Duncan (Presbyterian), Albert Mohler (Baptist), and C.J. Mahaney (Charismatic), along with three invited speakers: Piper, MacArthur, and Sproul. What unified them were belief in biblical inerrancy, male headship of families, and the “five points” of Calvinism, which can be reduced (albeit simplistically) to the traditional Reformed doctrine of predestination. Thus, they were opposed to feminism, modern “critical” biblical scholarship, and the freewill doctrines of Arminianism. The conference grew over the years to include younger pastors such as David Platt (Baptist), Matt Chandler (Baptist), Kevin DeYoung (Presbyterian), Thabiti Anyabwile (Baptist), and others. 
I attended the 2008 T4G in Louisville, Kentucky, seeing the men I had read for several years joyfully sitting on panels together, despite their important differences. This togetherness was real. But it was also entirely a product of the time. It was in the middle of what Reformed writer Aaron Renn has labeled the 20-year “neutral world” period from 1994 to 2014—a world in which Christianity no longer had a privileged status but was not disfavored. Most everyone in these evangelical circles was a political “conservative” or typical evangelical voter, against abortion and homosexual marriage. Nevertheless, on political questions, the YRR leaders approached politics very differently. Piper was an outspoken Christian pacifist who would have even refused to defend his own family against violence. MacArthur regularly proclaimed his sentiment that “government can’t save you.” In contrast, Mohler (along with thePresbyterians) devoted attention to “engaging” the culture. But in the neutral world these differences were seemingly less pertinent; the glue of their unity was opposition to theological liberalism.
The late Timothy Keller also rose in prominence at this time in communicating the Gospel to coastal elites. His neo-Calvinism spread far and wide among the Gen-X world, establishing an ethos centered on “winsomeness” and a “third-way” politics above (not between, so he claimed) the political left and right. 
Under Keller’s influence, the YRR era was not retreatist but activist—pursuing “cultural engagement” by demonstrating that orthodox faith is the key to a coherent, good, and complete life. The purpose of “public theology” was more evangelistic than political; and most adherents, even if they disapproved of “neutrality” language, still approved of the possibility of debate within a shared public square. That is, entering public discourse offered Christians the chance not so much to win politically as to demonstrate their serenity, through a politics that appeared attractive, heavenly, and pleasantly aloof, and devoid of anxiety, overreaction, and anger. To the urban liberal, this was a quirky but safe political stand that checked the boxes on most “social justice” concerns. 
Hence, Christians who followed Keller’s approach could downplay or overlook questions of political power and focus instead on verbal and aesthetic persuasion. The principle regarding politics, especially for followers of Keller, was that political commentary and activism was an extension of “witness,” not fundamentally a means for good political outcomes. Every decision in ministering this witness tended to defer to whether it resulted in making Christianity attractive to non-believing urbanites. Politics was an extension of cultural apologetics, built around “authenticity” as opposed to the kitschy, suburban “seeker-sensitive” movement of the ’90s. The assumption was that secular people will become dissatisfied with the secular identities on offer and look for a coherent alternative. This approach made sense in that neutral world that no longer exists, where the Christian identity was one viable alternative among competing identities.
The Gospel Coalition (TGC), founded in 2005, exemplified this approach. A “coalition” of likeminded mostly neo-Calvinist churches, TGC served mainly to platform rising stars and to establish an elite evangelicalism. TGC’s long-time (and current) editor in chief, Collin Hansen, who wrote the book Young, Restless, Reformed in 2008, credited Keller’s works on “cultural apologetics” as a driver of the movement. Subsequently, the target engagement-audience for TGC (and neo-Calvinist apologetics in general) has always been urbanites, or at least non-rural residents. Few talked about the need for ministries to rural, working-class whites.
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The story of the West is so bound up in the story of Christianity that it is easy to forget the water we are all swimming in. This is true of the moral values we deem worth fighting for: “when we exalt humility and compassion, or champion the equality and dignity of every human being, we are walking in the footsteps of Jesus Christ.” 

If anyone should tell the story of how secular thinkers are considering Christianity again, it is someone with a front row seat to the show.
Justin Brierley fits that bill.
As host of Unbelievable?—a podcast which regularly brings Christian and secular thinkers together— Brierley ponders the flaws and strengths of different answers to life’s bigger questions.
Over his career Brierley has noticed a trend: New Atheism has grown old and many are giving Christianity a fresh look. In his own words:
I believe we are seeing the firstfruits of the returning tide in the lives and stories of a number of public intellectuals who are finding themselves surprised by the continuing resonance of the Christian story. (4)
In The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, Brierley considers why.
The Pipe Dream of New Atheism
Many people lost their religious faith while reading Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and other bestselling “New Atheists” in the 2000s. Today over half the people in the UK—where Brierley lives and works—claim no religion. It’s similar in Australia—almost forty percent of people reported “no religion” in our last national census.[1] Yet Brierley asserts that New Atheism is “a largely spent force, relegated to corners of the Internet … It has faded from public view as a serious cultural phenomenon” (25).
What caused the New Atheism craze to fizzle? For starters: public distaste for the arrogance of its most vocal proponents, and schisms within the movement itself (it turns out New Atheism has heretics and denominations of its own). But the main reason for the fizzle was that “atheism was shown to be a very thin worldview, not one that could provide a reason for living” (28). It fails to provide the mental and spiritual resources needed to navigate the meaning crisis of our current day. Even when it tries, it tends to borrow from Christianity:
New Atheism’s religion-less utopia has proved to be a pipe dream…many modern atheists fail to recognise the degree to which their vision of the good life is a product of the Christian culture that preceded them. (56)
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The Christian life has many ebbs and flows. Among the flowing, we find patterns of our own life and that of our brethren which are reflective of our Savior. We see patterns of grace, obedience, conquering, acquiring heaven, and perseverance. When the world, flesh, and devil tell the Christian that his life is a fake, that Christian may promptly respond, “It is not a fake—it remains a masterful work.” It is the work of Christ in us and to us, and for his glory. He is doing a masterful work.

For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: Romans 8:3
Among the years of fruitfulness in the ministry of Thomas Manton, an unknown Dutch artist was completing a painting in 1650 that would be titled, “An elderly man with a gilt helmet.” That painting hung in Amsterdam until 1898, then purchased for a German collection in Berlin. For the whole of the nineteenth century and a good part of the twentieth, the painting was attributed to the Dutch master, Rembrandt van Rijn. An art expert recently discovered that the work was not Rembrandt’s, but by the hand of a skilled, yet unknown student of his.
As word of the “elderly man” spread, the news that the painting was a fake became well known. “It is not a fake…it remains a great masterful work,” responded Jan Kelch, the German art historian that discovered this truth. The student had reflected that which the teacher put forth—to the point where the world saw the pattern of the teacher, rather than the student.
Thomas Manton, looking at the life of Christ in the greatest chapter, saw “Jesus condemning sin in the flesh” as a means of giving the Christian a pattern to follow in the Christian life. The pattern would not be redemptive, of course, but one of godliness and encouragement in living out the Christian life. Manton said, “Christ, by taking our flesh is become a pattern to us of what shall be done both in us and by us (Works of Manton, 11.425).”
Manton put forth five ways that Christ, our master, was a pattern for us and in us, His students.
1. Pattern of Grace
The first of the patterns is that of grace. Manton said of Jesus, “His own holy nature is a pledge of the work of grace, and the sanctification of the Holy Spirit… (Ibid).” When the Christian looks to the life of Christ and sees the work of the Holy Spirit and the outpouring of grace upon his life, the Christian can be certain that God will provide grace and the work of the Holy Spirit to all who call on him by faith.
Grace is a gift of the Spirit, and that same Spirit working in us was first working in Christ. Manton makes that connection by saying, “For the same holy Spirit that could sanctify the substance that was taken from the virgin, so that that holy thing that was born of her might be called the Son of God, can also sanctify and cleanse our corrupt hearts (Ibid).”
The Apostle Paul said in I Corinthians 6:11, “And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.” The Spirit gives grace for sanctification, even over our “such were some of you” sins. Christ has promised grace and patterns grace as well.
2. Pattern of Obedience
Secondly, Christ’s life is a pattern of obedience for the Christian.
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