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.
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Schlafly was beautiful, brilliant, unconventional, hated by her enemies. She may be better than most anyone today. Still, for all her greatness, Schlafly was fighting a rear-guard action that ultimately failed as it took too much for granted to work in her own time (and in ours). Hers was the work of the positive world when women were generally more conservative than men. She lived long enough to recognize that her own project had failed.

Feminism is among modernity’s most successful social movements. Feminists pretend to promote choice, but feminist laws and culture really cultivate a particular kind of womanly character, one economically and emotionally independent of men, family, tradition, and marriage. Feminism’s successes pose an acute challenge. Can feminism, which points women away from the family, and a family-centered society coexist?
Conservatives and Christians have been dealing with this challenge for generations, with only limited and short-lived successes. As feminism determines society’s understanding of an honorable woman, opponents of feminism become by definition anti-woman. Prudence seems to demand accommodation to powerful, widely-held social opinions, but accommodation brings social decay. Resistance, on the other hand, means political oblivion.
One method of accommodation is the “who stole feminism” gambit, to borrow the title from a 1995 book by Christiana Hoff Sommers. “Who Stole Feminism” critics oppose the latest, apparently extreme feminist or gender reform in the name of a supposedly true, more moderate, more pro-family feminist path that once existed or could.
In the beginning, they say, feminists embraced salutary goals like increased female opportunity that would not compromise family life or the sexual dance. Later, however, “radical feminists” warred against men or undermined family life or promoted abortion or transgenderism. Such critics of feminism often disagree about what the good feminism represented, why and when things went sideways, and how to bring back the better brand. But they never disclaim the mantle of feminism: Early feminism, real feminism good; later feminism not good.
Another option is opposition, where the risk is political oblivion. The most successful and famous anti-feminist of the past sixty years is Phyllis Schlafly. Schlafly, who died in 2016, is justly considered the most successful organizer in the modern conservative movement. Her successful opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the 1970s and 1980s also made her, in the words of her daughter-in-law and co-author, Suzanne Venker, “the premier anti-feminist of the twentieth century.”
Schlafly rejects the “Who Stole Feminism” gambit. When asked later in life whether feminism made any positive contributions to American life, Schlafly only saw debits: “No. I think it’s made women unhappy and it’s made them believe that we live in a discriminatory and unjust society, and that they should look to government to solve their problems.” To read Schlafly’s works (as I have the past year) is to hear nary a nice word about feminism (though a fairer disputer thinks Schlafly is a feminist herself).
The woman was a force of nature, such that her legacy guides, inspires, and intimidates opponents of feminism today. Giants walked on the earth then! Helen Andrews took to the New York Times to explain why the next Phyllis Schlafly has not yet arisen. Rebekah Curtis has given “5 Reasons there is no Phyllis Schlafly 2.0” today.
Schlafly was beautiful, brilliant, unconventional, hated by her enemies. She may be better than most anyone today. Still, for all her greatness, Schlafly was fighting a rear-guard action that ultimately failed as it took too much for granted to work in her own time (and in ours). Hers was the work of the positive world when women were generally more conservative than men. She lived long enough to recognize that her own project had failed.
Schlafly launched her campaign against the ERA with a 1972 essay, “What’s Wrong with ‘Equal Rights’ for Women?” Women’s liberation, she wrote, represented a “total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother, and on the family as a basic unit of society.”
Yet “equal rights” already had a basis in American law and culture as Schlafly rose to oppose it. Schlafly accepted earlier feminist reforms and then gave them a most conservative spin. The suffragettes, she concluded, were “family-oriented women who had no desire to eradicate the female nature.” The Equal Pay Act of 1963 accomplished “equal pay for equal work,” which, she said, no one opposes. (Advocates of the family wage do oppose it.) She favored including sex as a protected category in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, though she thought that sex is not the same as race, that the law should allow for reasonable distinctions between the sexes, and that the civil rights framework was destroying male-only spaces.
The ERA’s more radical emphasis on equal rights, she worried, would destroy sex-role realism, the key to healthy family life.
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This world is Babylon—the world in rebellion against the Lord. It presses in on us constantly, trying to squeeze us into its mould. It may seem like God is absent, that he has been ousted by the more powerful gods of Babylon—not Marduk, Ishtar and Adad any longer, but Self, Equality and Freedom. We may find ourselves asking the same question that the exiles asked by the Euphrates River as we are mocked for our out-dated beliefs: ‘How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?’ How can I live for God in the twenty-first century USA?

Can you picture the scene? A group of Jewish exiles have gathered for their daily catch-up by the banks of the Euphrates river at the end of another working day. Everywhere they look are reminders that they don’t belong in this pagan, alien land. Man-made pyramids, called ziggurats, with temples to false gods like Marduk, Ishtar and Adad look down on them. The Sabbath day is unknown and desecrated every week. They are hundreds of miles from their promised land. Many of their loved ones are dead back in Judah. The king’s own sons had been slaughtered in front of him before being blinded taken captive, to end his days tormented by that last horror he ever saw. Other members of the royal family were made eunuchs to serve in the king’s palace. Three tidal waves of destruction swept over Judah altogether, over the course of twenty years. When they closed their eyes they could still see the massacre of their people by Babylonian soldiers, hear the screams that were suddenly cut short by Babylonian steel, and smell the smoke from the fire that engulfed the royal palace, every important building in Jerusalem and above all the holy Temple of the Lord. They could still see the gloating, arrogant soldiers carrying the sacred vessels of the Temple—how dare they pollute those holy things with their unclean hands! Why didn’t God strike them down as he struck down Uzzah all those centuries ago for daring to touch the ark?
All these memories must have been replayed over and over whenever the wretched exiles in Babylon met, as they multiplied their grief by sharing their stories of anguish day by day. The Babylonians showed no sympathy however. Perhaps they came to the Euphrates to gloat or mock or rub salt in the wounds of these devastated captives. Perhaps they were just oblivious to their pain. Either way it was a torture to the exiles. ‘There our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy; they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”’
But the people had no heart for singing the psalms of their homeland while their homeland was in ruins and they themselves were captives in a foreign land. Instead, by the rivers of Babylon, they sat and wept as they remembered Zion. Their instruments hung on the trees untouched.
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