Living in Pottersville when you're used to Bedford Falls

Why Aaron Renn Wrote *Life in a Negative World*

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, with a great interview. You're gonna enjoy this today. We actually have had Aaron Wren on before, but not to talk about his new book.

And Aaron is a senior fellow at the American Reformer. He's the author of Life in a Negative World, which is the book we're talking about. And you can find out more at aaronwren .com. Welcome once again, Aaron.

Good to see you.

Thanks for having me on.

My pleasure.

I'll hold up a copy of the book so people can see it.

Oh, there you go.

There you go.

Yeah, I can't do that because I have it on my Kindle phone.

I guess I could drop it. I got the same issue. Every author that I interview, I've got the ebook copy. So I always tell them they have to have a physical copy if they wanna hold it up to the camera.

Yeah, very wise. So if people want the hard copy, then get that. They can get it on Kindle. And I noticed Audible as well. And I don't know if you're reading that.

There's an audio book. I did not read it.

Okay.

So, but

You hired someone to do it. Morgan Freeman, Red Knife, Life in a Negative World.

So

That would have been nice.

I have to ask you, because I was on the airplane yesterday reading your book. And I guess I've lived this to an extent and I probably would be categorized as the culture warrior in your book.

Right.

Kind of the new, very suspicious of elites and institutions and that kind of thing. And so I feel like I've kind of lived through this and I'll just really quick aside illustration just to illustrate what we're gonna talk about.

But I was coming home from a conference and without giving too many, I don't want to give too many details about this at all. But one of the things that I ran into at this particular event is I was doing some work for the event and I happened to, and this is a conservative organization.

At least I thought that. I have been somewhat involved for years. And I thought, you know, they would be fine if I used a little B-roll image of like a rainbow flag to illustrate something that was negative.

But you know, this is, you know, gender confusion is where we're going. And so, and I was told, no, can't have that in there. And it just, it confused me. Cause I thought, you know, I've heard speeches where this kind of thing's been talked about.

And now I'm reading your book and I'm thinking, okay, this is what I'm literally living what I'm reading. That, and the fear is that losing 501C3, you know, we can take a stand, but it can only go so far.

And we gotta be careful because the federal government's gonna come in and then it'll kill our organization. That's how we raise money. That's exactly what you're writing about in this book is that the negative world that we're entering.

And so, so maybe I don't even need to ask this question, but I'll ask it cause that's the typical question you ask at the beginning of a book interview. Why'd you write it?

The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism

Well, I, this idea of the three worlds is really the most popular thing I've ever written. And, you know, I've been writing about things, you know, even going back to the 1990s, I published a newsletter about public transit in Chicago.

This, I originally, I kind of started developing it in 2014. Then I published a version of it in my newsletter in 2017, and it really took off then. It went viral then. In fact, it's the only reason I'm still writing on this topic is because that thing went viral and Rod Dreher and others wrote about it and sent me a few thousand subscribers overnight.

First Things asked me to update it and turned into an article in their February 22 issue called The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism that was one of the biggest articles in the history of the magazine, really went super viral.

And so I really wanted to take that and turn it into a book, both to be able to expand on the thesis a little bit and also to address the, what should we now do? So it's like one thing to give the framework, it's the next thing to do, you know, what should we do?

And so I wanted to do that. And I thought the book might reach some people that like articles and things don't. There's sort of book people, there's article people. And so here we are two years later.

Yeah, I remember actually reading this and I actually thought that Rod Dreher had come up with the idea, because I thought I remember Rod Dreher talking about this before you, but you actually were the first one to talk about this and he took it from you, Dennis, because that's what I'm understanding.

Right, well, I mean, his Benedict option sort of has a similar sort of, you know, kind of predicate, if you will, similar ideas. You know, I think my three worlds was definitely my idea that I came up with.

So he liked it, but it was very similar to ideas I think that were out here that he was already talking about in kind of his own lingo, if you will. Yeah, he was very instrumental in promoting it. He's been a huge promoter of my work, you know, and as you know, it certainly helps to have people with established or larger audiences, you know, saying, go buy this, go read this.

And so, you know, I'm very grateful to him for doing that.

Well, one of the things I like about your book is you do attempt at the end to get practical and what do we do about this as Christians? And so I think maybe before we get there, because I'm just sort of assuming everyone knows what these three worlds are, maybe you can just briefly explain what they are and why you date them the way you do, because you kind of defend that and why you have the ranges that you do for negative world, neutral world, and a positive world.

Absolutely. So, you know, we never had a state church like in Europe, but we did have a sort of softly institutionalized generic Protestantism as the de facto national religion of America for most of our history.

If you think about the 1950s, half of all adults attended church every Sunday. We had prayer and Bible reading in our schools. We were adding in God we trust to our money and under God to the Pledge of Allegiance.

There's an image, I'm sure you've seen it because it goes viral on social media periodically. It's the skyline of New York with the lights in the skyscraper windows lit up with gigantic crosses for Easter.

That picture was taken in 1956. Then in the 1960s, this sort of Protestant consensus started to go into decline and Christianity started to go into decline. Decline in terms of attendance in church, decline in terms of personal adherence, and the calling into question of Christian moral norms.

So that really kicks in around 1964. And I divide that period of decline from 1964 to the present into three phases or worlds that I call the positive world, the neutral world, and the negative world.

So the positive world lasts from 1964 to 1994. And I want to be clear, this is a period of decline for Christianity. All is not well. Church attendance is down, right? The sexual revolution is happening.

And yet Christianity is still basically viewed positively by society. To be known as a good church-going man makes you seem like an upstanding member of society and Christian moral norms are still the moral norms of the country.

And if you violate them, you could get into trouble. 1994, we hit a tipping point and enter what I call the neutral world, which lasted from about 1994 to 2014, in which Christianity is no longer seen positively, but it really isn't seen negatively yet either.

It's just one more lifestyle choice among many in a pluralistic public square. So we might meet. I'd say, I'm a Christian. You'd say, great, I'm a vegan. Let's talk. And Christian moral norms had a sort of residual effect at this time.

Then in 2014, we had a second tipping point and enter what I call the negative world, where for the first time in the 400 year history of America, sort of official elite culture now views Christianity negatively, or perhaps maybe skeptically, might be a better way to put it.

And again, national elites, going back to the founding fathers, many of them have always been skeptics of Christianity and religion in private, but they felt obligated to promote it publicly. What's different now is that kind of the official culture feels that it can actively reject this.

And again, the Christian moral system is now expressly repudiated, and in fact is viewed as the new leading threat to the new public moral order. And this has been a very dislocating experience for a lot of people in the American evangelical world, to say the least, over the last decade.

Now, of course, the question is why those years? Again, 1964, I picked, somewhat arbitrarily, I just said, you know, the Kennedy assassination seems to be when the craziness of the 1960s started to become unleashed.

Clearly, there was a lot of upheaval in the late 1960s. 1994, you know, we can have a debate about that, because I think you could have said 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall, because the collapse of the Soviet Union was really a critical event here.

But I picked

That's what I was expecting, actually.

Yeah, you know, I picked 1994 for a few reasons. One, it was the Gingrich Revolution, the Republicans captured the House of Representatives for the first time in forever. And that was really, in my view, the high watermark of the influence of the religious right in America.

1984 also was kind of the start of the baby boomer takeover of America. Really, 1992 was sort of that, where, you know, it's now Bill Clinton who's, you know, stepping onto stage, right? The boomer president.

This is when the boomers are starting to take over society. And really, a critical event that I had in mind as well was 1994 was the year that Rudy Giuliani became mayor of New York. And crime collapsed, and cities came back.

And this led to the development of this new, sizable, urban, progressive, highly educated demographic that has been so culturally influential in America and the church. And so I really think kind of that Gingrich Revolution and the, you know, Giuliani election were really big events in the culture.

And then 2014, I think is a little more dialed in. The Obergefell decision was in 2015. The so-called Great Awakening, people like even, you know, left-wing secular analysts like Matt Iglesias have dated it to 2014.

Jonathan Haidt, the NYU professor, said 2013 was the year that campuses started to go crazy. Clearly, there was a major rupture during President Obama's second term that predated Donald Trump. So this was not a response to Donald Trump.

In fact, I would even view the election of Donald Trump as essentially a signal that we were now in the negative world, a product of it more so than a cause of any of these things. And I think, again, I think the election of Donald Trump really tells us that there's been a sea change in America because he would not have gotten elected, you know, 16 years previously, for example, someone such as himself.

He had talked about running for president for 30 years, but he never actually did it because I think he knew, look, a guy like me is simply not gonna be viewed as a credible presidential candidate. And I think he did like run on the Reform Party or something like that, but it wasn't a serious candidate.

He came down that escalator in 2015 because he knew the world had changed and now was his time. And so I think what this shows is the entry into the negative world is not just about the church and it's not just about sexuality, it's pervasive in our society.

You know, this isn't really in the book. I wish I'd added it. In fact, I was writing a piece this morning about this and something I've talked about a lot, which is the way that we've sort of had the metastasization of vice in our society.

You know, when I was young, it was controversial for states to even legalize lotteries. Now states can't legalize phone gambling on sports fast enough. You remember when Pete Rose was banned for life from baseball for betting on games?

And now the leagues are actually getting a take off the gambling and, you know, sort of clean cut all American boy types like Peyton and Eli Manning are flogging the gambling apps, pot legalization, the repeal of all the usury laws, and now we've got a payday loan store on every block in the inner city, vast pay disparities between CEOs and the median workers.

This is all an expression of an essentially elimination of the old, you know, sort of Protestant moral order in America. And, you know, again, it's not just about the church and it's not just about sexuality.

It explains a lot about what's going on.

The Collapse of the Protestant Moral Order

Yeah, and I mean, I remember I live in New York and when they started putting in the casinos and that was super controversial and, you know, the Christians were all trying to prevent that from taking place and now it's not even an issue.

We don't talk about it and there are casinos. I don't even know how many there are.

Yeah, you know, in Indiana, like the Methodist church was big against gambling. You know, the other thing is all the, you know, the elimination of the so-called blue laws that prohibited trade on Sunday.

You know, I think it was not long ago that the last state now legalized Sunday liquor sales. Indiana was one that for a very long time, I live in Indiana, had not allowed alcohol sales on Sunday and when they repealed it, you know, just a few years ago, just a couple of years ago, it was interesting.

The governor of the state did a photo op where he was the first person in the state to ever buy beer legally on Sunday. So he clearly wasn't worried that there was some constituency out there that didn't like this.

Wow.

And I think, you know, a lot of the things, you know, I think there's a great error that a lot of evangelicals make and even many of the critics make, which is that, oh, Republicans are still winning elections.

You know, Indiana's a solid red state. Ohio's kind of now a red state. Donald Trump won in 2016, you know, came within a whisker when he's leading in the polls right now. And I think the key is, you know, the Republican Party has a future, but it's not going to be a party that necessarily advances evangelical priorities.

Right.

You can't say, so the reality is we saw this in Ohio in these last elections. Yeah, they're going to vote solid red now, but they're voting to, they want abortion to be legal, just passed, and they want to vote to approve pot, legalize pot.

So it's a difference.

It's a post-Christian right.

But you said something in the book, and I didn't realize this, but every single ballot initiative that was pro-choice won.

Yeah, I can't name one.

I can't name one time in the post-Dodds world where a actual public vote on abortion has come down on the negative abortion side. Poor abortion sides won every time.

Yeah, and yet, well, what we get from pro-life, you know, groups is that we are the pro-life generation. That's what we keep hearing that drumbeat. And we're not.

No, no, I don't think so either. I mean, the one that really got me was Kentucky, because Kentucky is definitely in a, you know, a deeply conservative state, more so than Indiana.

Right.

And their ballot initiative was not to even ban abortion. All they were going to say is that the Constitution of the state of Kentucky does not include a right to abortion. Well, guess what? It failed.

And that's like, you know, there's the thing there. I think you gotta realize, like, you know, you know, the public doesn't necessarily support, you know, support what a lot of evangelicals would like.

There's so many directions we could go on this. I want to go here, though, first, if it's okay, just because you talk a little bit about urbanization, secularization, modernization, all these things kind of get, like, lopped into one thing.

Is, like, what is primarily to blame for this? Or, I mean, is it just multiple converging factors? Like, how complicated is this?

Well, I would say this, I'm not a subscriber to the where-did-it-all-go-wrong thesis. If you read Rod Rear's Benedict Option, you know, he's like William of Ockham and nominalism.

Right, right, right.

You know, I think it was maybe Richard Weaver, the guy who wrote Ideas Have Consequences, he might have invented that, or maybe it even predated him. Some people say it, of course Catholics say it was the Reformations where it all went wrong, the Enlightenments where it all went wrong.

There's always some where-did-it-all-go-wrong moment. I don't subscribe to that. You know, I read Charles Taylor's The Secular Age. It tells, it's a 900-page story of a 500-year narrative of the outworking of various forces.

So I see this as sort of a contingent outworking of various historic forces. And so when I say contingent, what I mean by that is this was not inevitable. This is not like some Marxist analysis where there were certain structural forces that predestined this outcome.

You know, it could have gone in different directions over history, but this is the one that it actually did go. I do think there were a couple of key events. One of them was the collapse of the old Protestant establishment that sort of ran the country up through the 19, you know, up around 1960 or so.

The collapse of the establishment in the 1960s really removed a major bulwark that had sustained a sort of Protestant identity among America's elite. A second one was, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I mean, why were we adding, in God we trust, to our money? We're under God to the pledge. It's like whole war is happening in the 50s. You know, communism is this atheist materialist system and Christianity is deeply bound up with America's moral campaign against the Soviets.

With the Soviet Union now gone, you know, after, you know, 1989, you're getting into a different world and it sort of frees up America, American elites, American cultures to essentially unbundle Christianity from what it means to be, you know, a Western liberal democratic society.

Trump, Evangelicals, and the New Culture War

Yeah.

So let me ask you this. You mentioned Trump and evangelicals. You actually say this, this is on page 36 in your book. You say the culture warriors and the religious right who persisted through the neutral world have evolved towards Trumpist populism in a negative world, which I think you're right about.

One of the things you'll hear from the left, even the evangelical left, if that's a thing, is that, you know, evangelicals have sold their soul to support Trump. And I don't know whether you, it seems like some of the things you say, I'm wondering if you're kind of backing that up or if you're just saying that this is, this is just the world we live in and the options are limited.

But I want to ask you about that because I guess the way that I've seen it is that it's more of a culture siege and the inner ring has been taken and, you know, that this ship on sexual ethics has kind of sailed.

And so evangelicals are now part of this coalition. They're not running the ship, but they want to be on the ship that has their best interests in mind. And maybe that's the best we can do. And I don't know if you have an opinion on that, but how do you see it?

Well, again, you know, I do think it's important to say, you know, the culture warriors have changed. I mean, during Bill Clinton impeachment, they would have said, you know, Monica Lewinsky scandal, character is paramount in a political leader and a guy like Bill Clinton simply lacks the requisite character to be president.

Full stop, nothing else matters. And of course, when it, you know, now today, all of those people, you know, are essentially Machiavellian in, you know, some sense. And it's like, well, you know, there's no good choices out there and, you know, we can't let Hillary win, can we?

So I think there is a sense in which, you know, there are not going to be any candidates that, you know, meet with, say, evangelical approval, really, in many cases. And so what are you going to do? So you do have to kind of operate in that kind of world.

And I think, you know, there are a lot of people who sort of said, look, you know, Roger would be a guy who's like, he's like, look, I don't like Trump, but the reality is I'm going to vote for him because the alternatives are much worse.

So there's sort of people that said that. And I, but I think, you know, here's what I would say. I think there are people who have just gone all in on Trump, you know, in ways that are very unseemly.

Sure.

You know, and I cite an example in the book, you know, of Rick Perry doing this, the former Texas governor. People talk about Trump in literal messianic terms, you know, as in, you know, Trump himself, you know, released an ad that was a sort of a takeoff, if not really a parody, but a takeoff of the famous Paul Harvey, God Made a Farmer.

Only it was God made.

He released that? I thought that was someone, a fan made that. That was him?

Well, somebody made that.

I think he made it.

Okay, he retweeted it.

Well, whatever it is, whether he made it or somebody else made it, it tells you. And the whole idea is God made Trump. And it's very messianic in the way he talks. It talks, so, you know, he, God created someone who would never fail them or forsake them.

It's God made Trump. You know, that's just totally ridiculous.

Right.

And so, I think that, you know, people, there is a group of people who've sort of, you know, gone all in on defending, you know, defending Trump in ways that I think are unseemly. I really do think, candidly, you know, I read Tim Alberta's new book, The Kingdom, The Power and the Glory.

And although I think, you know, he's clearly over the top and, you know, deeply hostile towards, you know, conservative evangelicals and completely unfair. I think we ought to acknowledge, you know, there are some issues there that are legitimate.

And, you know, plenty of hucksters, you know, plenty of Paula White type people. Michael Flynn. Yeah, plenty of grifters on these tours. I mean, totally, totally insane people out there. And there's more than just a handful of them.

This is not the Westboro Baptist Church or somebody like that, that you can look at them and say, look, they don't represent any constituency. They truly are an outlier. This is like clearly several million people, right?

There are a lot of evangelicals who are into QAnon. Now, what I would say is the sort of left evangelicals, you know, I think that they're completely unwilling to criticize themselves, you know? And I was looking through, I don't know if you know who the Veritas Forum is.

Yeah.

Yeah, so they, you know, they're one of these neutral world organizations founded in the early 90s. They do these little events on, you know, elite campuses and things like that. And they were going to do one on critical race theory with this guy named Neil Shenvey, who's sort of an apologist.

And they had to cancel it because he got attacked. And I'm like, okay, they won't have this guy who's a critic of critical race theory. Who else have they looked at? And I saw that they hosted an event with Peter Singer.

And Peter Singer literally leaves. Yeah, they hosted it. I mean, it's on there, Peter Singer. I assume it's the Peter Singer. This is a guy who supports post-birth infanticide.

Yeah.

I mean, it's like, they'll do it. It's like, you can believe, and you can be anything on the far left extreme and still be somebody who's worth engaging in a sort of good faith way, while they go crazy on the right.

And, you know, you see it, they go insane. So like, and so I think that these people themselves, and one of the things I clearly say in the book, I mean, I think they are basically working towards synchronizing with the culture as much as they can.

They're doing everything they can to align themselves with, not against the culture, and are deploying a whole slew of sort of rhetorical tricks and, you know, in order to, you know, soften anything that might get them in trouble with that.

And so I don't think their critiques are entirely invalid, to be quite honest. On the other hand, they themselves have a lot of logs in their own eye that they need to take out.

Sure. No, I agree.

I agree.

And yeah, the Trump thing, I don't want it to all be about Trump, but I know that's the sticky issue this year that evangelicals again are navigating. And I just, I think that, I guess the expectation is set for some, as you've just articulated, that group that there's maybe millions of them, that Trump's going to reverse all of this, that like he can solve all these problems and take us back to a positive world somehow, which is crazy.

But, you know, I guess I'm wondering whether or not it's just something that evangelicals should just accept, that we live in Pottersville, basically. Like we were in Bedford Falls. Maybe you could have called your book, I guess, you know, living in Pottersville or something.

From Bedford Falls to Pottersville.

Exactly. How do we survive in Pottersville? We know that our guy is not even going to make, he's not going to get out of the primaries if we have an actual evangelical with evangelical convictions. So who do we rally behind to try to just preserve our daily lives?

No, I think that's like legitimate. And I think, you know, frankly, most evangelicals are going to come down on the side of voting for Trump. And I don't think, you know, I don't think that that is a beyond the pale decision by any means.

And, you know, there are some people who are just, they're absolutely, you know, the Trump derangement syndrome is real, you know, for a lot of people. And they're crazy. You know, the other thing is, you know, I do, you know, I spent most of my adult life in Chicago and Manhattan.

So I feel like I have very good insights into how people think there and what's going on in those cities. And the reality is, I mean, I can understand the why, the incentive for those evangelicals who are in those urban centers or college towns is to behave in this way, you know, because if you were living in sort of rural Indiana, you know, a place like that, and you're like all in for Trump, that's kind of no big deal for you.

It's unpopular, but you were never that popular to begin with. You know, but if you're an urban, you know, if you're, you know, elite city, urban evangelical, and the evangelical brand is 80 voting for Trump, you are like gonna get some serious static from that.

And so I think they, you know, they're very keen to put as much daylight as possible between them and other evangelicals. And one of the things, I think one of the things I'm good at is like articulating and kind of putting a framework around some of the ways people, what's going on in the world.

I mean, again, it's not a perfect descriptor, but it kind of gives us a sense. And I wrote a piece last summer where I said, look, here's what's going on in the evangelical worlds, particularly in this sort of big Eva, you know, elite realm.

They are basically trying to redraw the bounds of orthodoxy, if you will, and redraw the boundaries of their community in such a way that essentially the complementarian gender theology that for example, was constitutionally written into the gospel coalition, in which many of them there, is now downgraded to essentially a secondary issue.

It's not that, you know, these people are themselves saying I'm now an egalitarian, although some like Rick Warren did, you know, and he was famous, you typically wouldn't call him big Eva, but you know, there are some people who did change their mind.

And there are some people, but what you're seeing is really this shift. And we really see it in Russell Moore, for example, wrote this column about how the old, you know, old patriarchy bro, Russell Moore was wrong, and now I love Beth Moore and all this other stuff.

And so they're basically saying, we gotta get rid of that kind of, the kind of unpopular gender theory's gotta go, but what are they replacing it with? They're replacing it with what I call anti-fundamentalism.

And what you see, you see it in Tim Alberta's book, and you see it throughout much of the cultural engagement world is, it is now a core part of their identity to say, those people over there are bad.

We are not those people. We are better than those people. And, you know, so I think they're almost, they're almost feeling, you know, obligated to sort of use the Trump voter as a foil to elevate themselves morally.

And, you know, I put this out in the He Gets Us campaign. Now, the family behind it certainly is not what I would call cultural engagers, the financiers, probably the creative people you would put, you know, you start looking at the creative teams, they're probably very much in the cultural engagement mode, you know, people with pronouns and their bios and all kinds of stuff like that, right?

That's just kind of what they are. And of course that Super Bowl ad, you know, the foot washing one, I think it's very telling that, you know, the abortion clinic one, they've got a woman sort of washing the feet of the girl who's probably just had an abortion.

And there's a group of abortion protesters in the background, all sort of, you know, talking with each other, ignoring the girl. And so the point is, I mean, if you look at like last year's Super Bowl ads, they didn't, you know, they didn't, it was pretty even handed, quite frankly, you might not like it or whatever, but it wasn't obviously political.

Now we see that they cannot talk about what Christianity is without talking about the conservative evangelicals that they hate. They must, and I've noticed it's becoming harder and harder for them to just say, here's what we're for.

They have to work in, here's what we're against. Here's those bad people. We have to present ourselves in contrast. They have now what I've called a negative identity in that they define themselves by who they're opposed to, not what they're for.

And you certainly see this, I think this shift is sort of ongoing in kind of the world, which was very different. I mean, if you go back to the old neutral world, like Tim Keller, Tim Keller didn't spend much time talking about the culture war people.

He tried to avoid those issues as much as possible. He very much kind of promoted his vision. And so I think that now we've moved away from that approach.

There were definitely times he did that, but it wasn't his main.

A little bit, it wasn't his main, it wasn't his main shtick, right? And it was actually one of the last things he wrote, which is this decline and renewal of the American church. Maybe the last thing he ever published prior to dying is actually the piece that really laid out the strategy of we have to divide from these people over here, these fundamentalists.

We just have to divide from them and we have to sort of make common cause with these sort of more conservative-leaning, egalitarian gender people over here. And so he sort of laid out this strategy and I'm sure he talked about it with a lot of people because, I mean, if you're gonna read Tim Alberta's book, these people are all talking to each other.

They're all friends. So he may have actually provided some of the intellectual underpinning for this, but it wasn't how he conducted himself in ministry by and large. He really had a positive agenda for what he wanted to do.

Now, you might disagree with it, but he had a positive vision. I think today, increasingly, it's very hard for these people to just articulate their agenda. It has to be, it's deeply hostile. And again, Tim Alberta's book is a great encapsulation of this, I think.

Tim Keller, Cultural Engagement, and Negative Identity

Yeah, and one of the things, I mean, Tim Keller, we could use as an example, but I don't think it's just him. This is maybe a larger strategy. Most people don't know this about him. I'm sure you do, but he was a pastor of kind of a small town church in Virginia before he went to Manhattan.

And one of the things that seems to me like he offered, and I think maybe evangelicals more broadly who are in those circles would like to offer, is kind of this comfort, this place of belonging kind of down home feel, because we know we've lost something.

And so providing that core basis, but without offending urban sensibilities. And so, because the people in the city seem to know that they're missing something, but they don't want all the things that are attached to that.

They don't want all the moral framework. And so he provided maybe a path forward there. And now that's getting exported into rural communities. This is a strategy, not just for the urban areas, it's now, and maybe that's where it started getting more controversial and the podcast you're on right now.

I mean, people like myself have been critical of that because perhaps it was more rural and small town and suburban churches who somehow now felt like, this isn't us. Why are we being forced to not take stands that we've taken for a long time or take new stands that really aren't relevant to us on social issues.

And I'd be curious to find out from you where you think that strategy, whatever you wanna call that, where does that take us eventually? Because I think we're still in this. I mean, you're right. This is on page 33.