Living in Pottersville when you're used to Bedford Falls

Welcome, once again, to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, with a great interview.

You're going to 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 read your book. 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 Kindle, 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 e -book copy. So I always tell them they have to have a physical copy if they want to hold it up to the camera.

Yeah. Very wise. So if people want the hard copy, then get that. Then 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. OK. 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... Real quick aside illustration, just to illustrate what we're going to 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 they would be fine if I used a little

B -roll image of like a rainbow flag to illustrate something that was negative. But this is...

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 because I thought 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. And the fear is that losing 501c3.

We can take a stand, but it can only go so far. And we got to be careful because the federal government's going to 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 maybe I don't even need to ask this question, but I'll ask it because that's the typical question you ask at the beginning of a book interview.

Why'd you write it? Well, I... This idea of the three worlds is really the most popular thing

I've ever written. And I've been writing about things, 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 turn it 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 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.

I, you know, I think my three worlds was definitely my idea that I came up with.

But 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 his own lingo, if you will.

Yeah, he was very instrumental in promoting it. He's been a huge promoter of my work.

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 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 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 the 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. In 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.

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 like, look, a guy like me is simply not going to 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 candidature. 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 when I was young, it was controversial for states to even legalize lotteries.

Now states can't legalize, you know, 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, it's it's again, it doesn't it's not just about the church and it's not just about sexuality.

It, you know, it explains a lot about what's going on. 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's there are casinos. I don't even know. You know, in Indiana, like the Methodist Church was big against gambling. You know, the other thing is, 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.

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 is a solid red state. Ohio is kind of now a red state.

Donald Trump won in 2016, you know, 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.

I think 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. in the in the post Dodds world where a actual public vote on abortion has come down on the negative abortion side, abortion size one every time.

Yeah. And yet what we what we get from pro -life groups is that we are the pro -life generation that we keep hearing that drumbeat.

And we're not. No, no, I don't think so either. I mean, I the one that really got me was Kentucky, because Kentucky is definitely in a, you know, 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, you know, there's the thing there. I think you got to 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 OK, 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 Roger's Benedict Option, you know, he's like William of Ockham and nominalism.

Right, right, right. You know, I think it was maybe maybe Richard Weaver. Yeah. The guy who wrote Ideas Have Consequences.

He might have invented that or maybe even predated him. Some people say it. Of course, Catholics say it was the Reformations where it all went wrong.

The Enlightenment's 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's like it tells 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 or under God to the pledge?

It's a Cold 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 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 a Western liberal democratic society.

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 in the religious right who persisted through the neutral world have evolved towards Trumpist populism in the negative world, which

I think you're right about. One of the things you 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 but I want to ask you about that, because I guess the way that I've seen it is 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 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 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,

I, you know, Roger would be a guy who's like, I didn'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 said that. And 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, 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 he released that. I thought that was someone, a fan made that. That was somebody made that.

I think he tweeted it, 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. So, you know, he

God created someone who would never fail them or forsake them. God made Trump. You know, that's just totally ridiculous.

Right. And so I think that, you know, people, there are, 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 have 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. 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, 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, OK, they won't have this guy who's a critic of critical race theory. Who else have they looked at?

I saw that they hosted an event with Peter Singer. Peter Singer literally believes. 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.

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 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. 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 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 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. 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. Yeah. 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 in the

Trump derangement syndrome is real, you know, for a lot of people. And 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 they're 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 percent voting for Trump, you are you are like going to 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.

And 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 there is 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 would you typically wouldn't call him big

Eva. 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 got to get rid of that kind of the kind of unpopular gender theory's got to 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, mode, you know, people with pronouns and their bios and all kinds of stuff like that.

Right. That's 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.

Right. 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 and that they define themselves by who they're opposed to, not what they're for.

And you certainly see this. I think the shift is sort of ongoing in kind of the world, which was very different.

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 his it was actually his 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 the strategy. And I'm sure he talked about it with a lot of people, because if you're going to 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. 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. 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 want to 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. You say, evangelicals are largely operating as though they're still living in the lost positive and neutral worlds.

And that's what I'm really describing. Where does that take us if we don't get real about the world we actually live in?

Yeah, well, right now, what we're seeing is intra -evangelical conflict.

As I said, what I label the cultural engagers, the sort of urban Christian crowd, they've now declared their own culture war, but their culture war is actually against the culture warriors.

Their culture war is against other evangelicals. And then there's been a lot of also a lot of realignment.

You know, David French is a guy, you would have said he was a culture warrior a decade ago. Hardcore, super hardcore guy, actually.

Now, all of a sudden, he's a New York Times columnist that devotes every other one to like bashing conservative evangelicals.

So it's been a lot of shifting around and intra -evangelical conflict. There's been a lot of deconstruction of, you know, people abandoning it.

There's a lot of people who are trying to, again, sort of synchronize with the culture. I think there's been the adoption of this sort of Machiavellian approach by sort of the culture warriors.

And it's like, you know, obviously evangelicalism is essentially, you know, disintegrating as anything, you know, resembling a coherent movement.

And so how that ultimately plays out, I don't know. It's not going to be like the fundamentalist modernist controversies, like in the early 20th century, which played out within denominations.

You know, the reality is that the majority of evangelicals are some kind of like, you know, congregationalist type polity, lots of non -denominational churches, lots of Baptist polity churches.

And so it's, you know, even if the quote unquote denominations, you know, go in directions people don't like, that doesn't necessarily affect our church, you know, in the way that the

Northern Presbyterian Church would have been, you know. So, you know, most evangelicals are not in those environments.

So, you know, who knows what's going to happen, but it's certainly, you know, certainly kind of cracking up, you know, as we see.

– So let me pull you out of the neutral observer, Aaron Wren, who's making his diagnoses and pull you into the opinionated

Aaron Wren, because you talk about in this basically half the book almost, like what we should do as Christians in Pottersville, and you have a whole list of, if I can pull it up here,

I know I made a note of it, and it's a number of things. You talk about, let's see, that we need to look at economic, well, taking, not taking,

I shouldn't say taking, owning, owning land, owning property, excelling in business enterprises and intellectual enterprises, and, you know, coming up with, it's really a multi -pronged approach, coming up with alternatives where we can, using power where we can.

So, you know, if we could boil it down to just a few things for this audience that, you know, Joe, who's driving a truck right now might be listening, let's say, and he's homeschooling his kids or his wife is as much as they can, and he's just like, what can

I do? I feel helpless. What can Joe do? – Well, he's doing one of the things right now, which is opting out of the mainstream institutions of society in favor of, you know, his own alternative, say, homeschooling, for example.

So I'm expecting that a number of evangelicals are simply going to withdraw from some of these institutions like public education that are considered kind of corrupt.

One of the things that I say is, that I think is critical, and there's a lot in the book,

I sort of give a set of starter ideas across three dimensions, personal, how we should live as individuals and families, institutional, how we should operate as churches, ministries, businesses, and then missional, how do we do mission?

But there are a handful, there are basically three things I will put out there.

One is what I call adopting the posture of exploration. The truth is, you know, like the origin story of Willow Creek Church in suburban

Chicago, like almost like the mothership of seeker sensitivity, was that founding pastor Bill went door to door in suburban

Chicago, asking people why they didn't go to church. And then he built a church that was designed to, you know, answer all the objections to people going to church, and it worked.

I think we're in a more fundamentally difficult situation now. You know, we're in a more unknown, complex, rapidly changing environment.

And therefore, we're not going to be able to create a 50 point plan to get us out of this thing. And we're going to have to be, we're going to have to like really live out those verses around things like walking by faith, not by sight, you know, or trusting in the

Lord with all your heart and leaning not to your own understanding. You know, because I think we're really getting into, the example

I use is the Israelites crossing from the wilderness into the promised land. These are people who had, all they'd done was the wilderness, that wasn't necessarily great, but it was familiar.

And they had some nice things like manna showed up every morning, you know, they have to worry. Now they're going into the unknown, and that's us.

And so there's that line from Joshua, follow the ark, because you have not been this way before. And I think that's sort of the way we got to be thinking.

A second one is to sort of strengthen our own churches as a sort of counterculture or new moral economy, moral community.

You know, culture war was very focused on transformation, on trying to, you know, bring the moral economy of the world into alignment with the moral economy of the church through politics.

The seeker sensitives and the culture engagers were trying to be relevant to people, trying to lower the barriers to get people in the door.

And so I don't, you know, I think we shouldn't necessarily abandon those efforts completely, but we need to have a shift in emphasis towards being a counterculture, towards having our own culture that is distinct.

If we're living in Pottersville, how can we create a pocket of Bedford Falls in our own communities, in our own churches, where we operate by a set of different principles and paradigms than the place around us?

You know, I think it's very important. In fact, again, I was writing a piece on this this morning. I think one of the things we have to do, and this is hard because it's hard because for evangelicals who are very, you know, biblicist, if you want to call it that, if you don't have a proof test that proves something is a sin, you know, it's kind of hard to tell people not to do it.

But I think we need to reject vice. You know, we just shouldn't, you know, we shouldn't be gambling.

We shouldn't be smoking pot. You know, we shouldn't be watching porn.

That's an easy one. Well, I think there's a lot of things that we should reject. Not in the sense that we have to go out and pick fights with other people who are doing them, but like, that's not what we're doing.

We're living by a different standard. Profanity. Profanity, that was one of my things. We don't do profanity. And maybe my controversial one, you know, we shouldn't get tattoos.

That'd be one I'd say, let's not get a tattoo, you know? And it's like Paul said, all things are lawful, but not all things are profitable.

I think we should adopt that. And you could easily say, well, look, you know, is it a sin to buy a lottery ticket?

I don't think that it is. You know, you could say that. You know, other people may differ.

And you might say, well, you know, can everybody, does everybody who smoke pot, like, turns into a criminal?

Or it's like, no, like there's lots of people who smoke pot and they're fine. But here's what I would say. Just even think about it this way.

Do you want to live in a neighborhood, right, full of tatted up potheads who, you know, are always watching porn when they're not gambling on their phone with the big game?

And when they walk down the street, every other word out of their mouth is the F -bomb. That's probably not a great community.

You know, I don't think realistically most of us probably don't want to live there. And, you know, we're already seeing this, like, you know, the exit from the cities.

Like, I'll tell you one reason families are leaving cities. You get kids like pot smoke everywhere.

Clouds of pot. You can't walk, you walk down the street. You don't know how often you go into New York City. It's like pot is everywhere.

No, I don't need to go into New York City because where I live, I can cross the bridge into Poughkeepsie, New York, which is about an hour and a half north, and I get the same experience.

Yeah, it's like, you know, and I'm not saying that there's literally no pot smoke that I ever smell where I live now, but much, much less.

I mean, do you really want to, you know, do you really want to be pushing your stroller through a cloud of pot smoke in your neighborhood?

And I don't think so. So I think that there's a reality is like those are the sorts of things, right?

It's like it's just here's a different way of life that we have that is different from the rest of the world.

This is a question on my mind, because I love I love hearing this, because I mean, I think we do need to be more aggressive and realize that the world around us is hostile to what we believe and take a stand.

It's not even just hostile to what we believe. It's hostile to living a healthy, flourishing life and a good community.

Yeah, it's not good for anyone. It's not good for anyone. And that's why basically a lot of the anti -vice push that I see is actually coming out of secular society.

You know, there's a lot it's it's kind of hip now to say you don't drink. You've probably noticed like every like every cool restaurant now has an extensive mocktail list.

You could buy your $15 mocktail and, you know, then all the kind of online right guys are like so anti -porn.

No seed oils. No, it's like it's like the whole thing. It's like, well, it's crazy. Like, why are they the ones doing that?

Yeah, why can't you know? And again, maybe your list isn't my list. But maybe there's, you know, you could make your own list, you know, and I didn't put on there no drinking, you know, but I think it would be straightforward to kind of say, you know, a lot of places that come from these

Baptistic backgrounds already kind of have a sort of culture of like not drinking. And I think a lot of it's still true, mostly of people who work for the church.

I think a lot of people actually do drink, you know, but if you're like, you know, a pastor, you work for a seminary, you don't drink.

But I mean, I'm not that's not going to be personally on my list, although certainly drunkenness should be avoided completely.

Nevertheless, you can say this, look, we're people who don't drink. That could be something for your community. I don't think every community is going to come to the same list.

Obviously, you need to get a reject sin. That would be commonality. But there might be other ways like this is how we choose to live in order to sustain a healthy life for ourselves and our children in this world we live.

Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, my list might even look different. I think video games would be, you know, you know, we don't really we're not addicted to video games.

We're not gamer types like that's one thing that I and nothing against gamers, you know, innately.

But I just think how much time is actually wasted when you get too addicted to those things.

So, I mean, there's no video games. So now that you've been properly paid, the fundamentalist curmudgeon,

I this is the question I have, though, because we have to be in the world, not of the world. And my wife and I were actually just having this conversation because we have a little one on the way, our first.

And we're just thinking about the world that our child is going to grow up in. And I'm thinking like, OK, when I was a kid, right,

I was able to go and I was homeschooled, by the way. So I already there was a separation, but I was still able to play soccer in the town league.

I was able to be in Boy Scouts at that time because this is before all the LGBT stuff.

You know, if I wanted to be a volunteer fireman, my brother was I could have been. And it wouldn't have been a terribly corrupting influence.

I could have I mean, there would have been some rough characters, but I can maintain my Christianity there. And there's just a lot of things that I could do to be involved.

And I think that's a good thing. We want to be involved in our communities in positive ways. But now

I couldn't if my child was of age right this second, I couldn't really in good conscience probably let them be in the

Boy Scouts. You know, I'd have to find an alternative. I couldn't really let them probably I don't even know about town sports anymore.

Are they just going to smell weed and, you know, people showing them porn and profanity like what is

I don't even know what it looks like. So that's my my question. I don't know if you've thought about this deeply, but like we have to somehow maintain a connection with the world.

Yeah, I mean, I don't view that we need to be, you know, like Amish, like withdraw from society.

I think, you know, in some cases, you know, we do need to withdraw from some mainstream institutions.

You know, people are going to make that choice. And I think the key is it's not that you must like I'm not one of these people who says you can never send your kid to a public school.

You know, what I would say is, though, we should feel free to view these institutions sort of transactionally.

That is to say, does it work for us? Does it not work for us? And there's a lot of gaslighting of people to try to keep sort of, you know, you know, evangelicals or even like quite apart from being, you know, evangelicals, kind of like, you know, conservatives invested in these mainstream institutions.

So you hear a lot of talk about the common good, you know, the idea of pursuing the common good. Well, that's like, you know, it's kind of like saying you need to be invested in these institutions.

Well, I don't think we're under any obligation. You know, when you're a minority, you're not responsible for the institutions of society.

There's institutions of the responsibility of the people who are running them. And again, what we're seeing with education, people are opting out.

Again, I don't think this is per se an evangelical thing, but like, look at military recruitment.

People are just like, we're not signing up for that. Like white enlistment in the military, which probably highly overlaps with like conservative.

It's probably mostly like conservative white men going into it. They're like, I don't want to go into the woke military.

You know, I don't want to get killed or maimed in the service of the globalist American empire.

I don't want to do that. You know, so why would I? So we're out. And of course, they're freaking out. I mean, like the military is now freaking out.

They got a problem. And so, you know, so I think that, you know, that's an example of like, oh, you should serve and like, look, you know,

I'm always going to support our troops for people who do choose to go in. But I have this idea that like, you know, we should be encouraging our kids to serve in that way.

This old ideal of service when you're being exploited, you know, wealthy, you know, hedge fund managers aren't sending their kids, you know, to get to get their arm blown off by an improvised explosive device.

They're the people who are demanding that your kid, your kid gets sent there to have that happen to them. Let them let them send their kids.

So it's a matter of discernment then. I mean, if you had three kids, I was one of three, and they may have different capacities, abilities and temptations, and some of them may be able to join the fire department or be involved in certain community things, some of them perhaps not.

And that's a parental decision. I mean, I think that's kind of where you're tracking here is that where we can be involved, let's be involved.

But where we can't and where it's detrimental, we don't and we have no obligation to. Right. I mean, that's what

I would say, you know, I mean, look, I'm looking for places to make a positive impact in society. I would love to do that, you know, but there's just fewer and fewer, you know, opportunities to do that today.

Yeah. You know, and, you know, and so I think that's, you know, being willing to say no.

I think is is an important thing that we we need to learn. No, by the way, doesn't mean hate.

It doesn't mean cheering for other people to suffer. I mean, you could still wish the best for people and just say, look, you know, you're going in a direction that I just can't support.

I mean, I don't want bad things to happen with you, but I just can't, you know, I can't go there with you.

I think those are things that we need to, you know, and I think we can think about it in a whole lot of ways, you know, so here, you know, even here in Indiana, it's like, oh, you know, the the future of downtown

Indianapolis is so critical to our region. Everybody needs to be invested in that. And I'm like, well, that may be true that it is critical to the future of the region.

But what does it mean to invest in it when, you know, the people who are running it are not doing things right?

Gamora, Gamora is so critical. Yeah, well, it's almost like, you know, it's almost like, you know, the mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, a lot of these people, you know, they're pursuing, you know, deep leasing agenda.

They're not serious about dealing with some of their own problems. I'm like, at what point do you just say, I need to send my money and support into that?

Don't they have an obligation to to step up as well? Don't they have an obligation to do something?

What they want is for everybody else to keep their mouth shut and just send checks with no strings attached.

And I think we could say, look, we're not going to do that. You know, if if if we want to have like a, you know, if they want to do some things, maybe they won't do everything that I want.

Maybe they'll do at least, hey, they'll show that they're moving in the right direction, something we could get behind. Not just like, oh, you must support, right, sort of thing.

So I think we should all we should all feel free to say no. And I think what's happening, you know, there's a line from Tom Wolfe's book,

The Bonfire of the Vanities, which is written in 1980s New York. OK, this is like, you know, New York is extremely dangerous, dysfunctional, a lot of it in the 1980s.

It's like if you want to live in New York City, you have to insulate, insulate, insulate.

And so this is something we're seeing like this isn't a Christian thing. This isn't a conservative thing.

This isn't everybody thing. Everybody today is trying to insulate themselves from the dysfunctions of our society.

They're trying to insulate themselves from fentanyl. They're trying to insulate themselves, you know, from crime.

They're trying to insulate themselves from all this public disorder that's going on. And it's very hard to insulate yourself today.

The son of the former YouTube CEO, you may have just seen this student at Berkeley died of a fentanyl overdose.

Even though I didn't see that. Happened yesterday. It was just talked about like here's like someone who comes from the richest, most privileged background at elite school still dies of fentanyl.

Like this idea that these things are just dysfunctions of people at the bottom of society is not true.

And, you know, so everybody is now looking. They're saying, how do we insulate ourselves from this?

And I think this sort of insular privatized approach to life is not what's healthiest society.

It's better to have a high trust society where people are contributing and investing to that society because it, you know, it's good for everyone.

It builds up society. But unfortunately, it's like the prisoner's dilemma. And this is what happens in a lot of countries around the world.

They're low trust societies. And when you have low trust society, you know, it, it dramatically inhibits, you know, economic growth, many other things.

And again, this is far beyond my book in Christianity, but like, that's where we are. We're in a, we're in a society where trust is eroding.

People are turning away from the public towards the private. They're trying to insulate themselves from dysfunction.

And that's what happens when you let your country turn from Bedford Falls into Pottersville.

You know, when you live in Pottersville, there aren't going to be any more George Bailey's stepping up to start building a loans and try to make better things.

They take a look at that and say, there's no chance, right? There's no chance. You don't have a chance of trying to start the building alone today.

And so they retreat to their gated subdivision. And, you know, that's what happens.

So a ridge runner, you know, alternative communities like that, which now has gotten major media publications have noticed.

You know, it's not just them, you know, the tech guys who raised $900 million to try to build their own city on the fringes of San Francisco.

Right. That's an example that's like, we want to create like our own city out here because the existing ones are too dysfunctional.

Yeah. That's not utopian. That's just survival. Right. You know, they're not exactly. It's like, well, we need to, we need to bypass all this dysfunction.

Of course they may or may not get that off the ground. But I think that's like an example. This is not a, why did every, and you see it like in general, like, why does every tech billionaire have a bunker somewhere?

Why has prepping and sort of survival skills become such a huge thing?

You know, again, even among non -religious people, you know, there's so much stuff out there.

You know, it's like urban progressive people, you know, turned against corporate food and things like that.

It just goes to show that like across our society, a tremendous lack of trust in the mainstream and this belief that we need to figure out, you know, how do

I, how do I isolate and protect my family from the worst of our industrial agriculture and food production system?

And it's like, again, the wealthier you are, the more you're able to insulate yourselves from that.

And of course there's a lot of talk about high housing prices. High housing prices is the number one way communities insulate themselves.

They adopt policies to make it impossible to people to move there who don't have money. And so, you know, that filters, that filters it out.

Yeah. Yeah. But they, well, it doesn't actually filter it out, but it's, you know, it filters some things out.

And again, you know, if you, if you rolled the clock back 50 years, that would have been a purely racial decision that people would have said, it's like white people want to insulate themselves for black people.

Today, it's much more of a class issue. You know, a lot of these wealthy communities, they don't care what race you are, as long as you're rich, you know?

And in fact, many of them, you go look, I was looking at some of the upscale suburbs of Dallas, like Plano, Texas and things like that.

They're at best 50 % white. Some of them are majority minority. And so it's like, you know, they don't,

I'm not saying there's no, you know, that, you know, these are completely post -racism communities, but at the same time, it's like, they don't want like low downscale white people moving there anyway.

You know, when I was a kid, if you lived in a sort of white working class community, it might have been a little rougher than, you know, the wealthy communities, but it was still a socially intact functional community.

And now that is not the case at all. And people just don't want, they don't want that.

So they're trying to insulate. Yeah. Well, one of the things, I know it's beyond the scope of your book that I'd love to see some more work on is identifying industries, perhaps that are still, have cultural power and relevance that people who are

Christians can actually get involved with. And I'll identify one for you now, because I was talking to my brother about it, teaching

ESL, not many people do it, you know? And so you have Christian convictions, you get involved with teaching that in the public schools, there's a high chance, even if you have

Christian convictions and you're public about it, you keep your job because they just don't, there's a shortage of people who do that kind of thing.

It's interesting you say that, you know, at my church yesterday, literally the pastor said, he was talking about a nearby elementary school that now has so many, you know, students who are

English language learners. And he's like, there's no ESL services available to their parents.

And so that is the opportunity for us in ministry is actually ESL. And of course, lots of churches have always been very involved in ESL.

But yeah. Yeah. And I mean, the advantage too, is that all the people coming over here that we're concerned about showing up at our

Southern border, this is a way you can try to influence kind of what direction they're going to go, whether politically or otherwise.

So yeah, I just, I don't know where all the places are because I mean, so many doors have been shut in the faces of Christians, but there are still places that we can get involved and we don't necessarily need alternatives, maybe other places we do.

But I think there are a lot of businesses, you know, I use in the book, the example of this company Maddox Industrial Transformer, where they sell heavy industrial electrical transformers.

It's exactly what you said. And I don't know if you know, it's like hard to get a transformer.

And so if you're like an industrial facility and you need a new transformer, you're not going around doing a bunch of searches on what the owners of this company believe.

You just got to get one. And so this idea of going into these essential industries like that, fabric of the economy industries, you know, a lot of the, a lot of the legacy hard tech and sort of called legacy industries, construction, you know, machine shop work, you know, all of that stuff is like there's massive shortages of talent going into that.

You know, try to get a tradesman to do something on your house today.

You need to call a plumber. You need to call electrician. Right. Need to call a roofer. Need to call a tree trimmer.

Two, what's going to happen? One, you're going to pay through the nose. That's right. Secondly, it's going to take, you're going to have to wait.

Yeah. There's going to be a delay to get that thing done. And so those are things like, I think there's a ton of like Christian guys going into the tree trimming business.

Where I grew up in Southern Indiana, my church operates sort of a halfway house type thing for ex -offenders.

They do a lot of work with ex -offenders. A lot of those guys are going into the tree trimming business. There's huge demand for it.

It pays well. You get to be your own boss. And, you know, there's a lot of stuff like that, that, you know, the reality is, right, when you have a plumbing problem, you don't have the luxury of being able to, you know, discriminate.

You got to like bring in somebody to fix it. Right. And so I think there's huge opportunities throughout the economy in many of these kinds of businesses.

So identify those in the area you're in and get to work. Well, I appreciate the book.

I think it really opens this conversation and it gives us what I guess I appreciate the most is it gives us a healthy dose of reality.

And that's what we need. We can't keep pretending that we live in a neutral world. We don't. And that may change the way we live.

So if people want to find out more and get your book, then go to AaronWren .com.

And I appreciate it. Thank you, Aaron. Yeah. Thank you very much. Everyone. Thanks for listening to the podcast.

I want to take a moment to share with you a little bit about Ridge Runner. We're at one of the properties right now. There's a number of plots actually before us, as you can see, that border the

Cumberland River. So we're in an area where this plot would be, I think, more for people who want to garden.

Is that right, Josh? Yeah, this plot that we're standing on, it's over five acres. So you can have some livestock on it and garden here.

And it's not on the river directly. But one of the virtues of stepping back from the river and getting a little elevation is that you can see this sort of panoramic view here.

So you've got almost 270 degrees of fluff running around where we're standing.

So, you know, any house built here, it would be breathtaking, I think. Oh, it's breathtaking right now.

What about the local government situation? People who are trying to move to a place like Kentucky, maybe escaping a place like Nashville or L .A.

or New York, they want to make sure that their freedoms are protected, that the local government's not going to be tyrannical like the place they came from.

I mean, well, this is the local government. You don't think much about the government.

I mean, you don't get taxed very much. You don't interact with them very much. It's not a lot of crime here.

You don't need to interact with police very often. People govern themselves out here to a large degree. You're in the country.

People out here are great. They take care of themselves and they take care of each other. And the government is pretty far away in a lot of ways.

You don't think about them in your daily life. You know, it's all, of course, you know, this whole area is deep red, very

Republican, low crime, all of that, like you can imagine. But even more than that, people govern themselves out here.

It's country living. You learn how to fend for yourself and take care of your neighbors and they take care of you. Now, you obviously have a vision for all of these plots being filled,

Lord willing, with Christians who are of like mind and faith, want to build a community together.

That's all the things you just talked about, low on crime and honoring the

Lord and their social arrangements. Is this going to have like a neighborhood, like some communities have like rules, right, that the community must abide by?

Have you thought of any of that? Yeah, I mean, look, there's going to be some really basic rules like you have a lot of places, you know, some basic rules about not leaving a bunch of trash out in your yard and things like that.

Don't make a nuisance. So we'll have some of those rules in place. You know, we, you know, we can't discriminate in who we sell to and we don't we don't do that.

But we do hope that the community that grows up here is a very high trust, virtuous community, the kind of community where you don't need to lock your door, where you don't need to, you know, worry about your kids going and playing next door and coming back trans.

Just, you know, community of people who have traditional values, who want to live out in nature and get back to a more natural way of life.