Why Evangelicals are Underrepresented in Leadership Roles

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. We have a special guest today,

Aaron Wren. He has been on the podcast before, but we haven't talked about this particular subject, which is evangelical elites and the future of evangelical organizations.

I think Aaron is very smart on this topic. He knows managerial elitism. He knows localism.

He knows institutions. And hopefully we'll talk about all of those things a little bit today.

If you wanna know more about Aaron Wren, you can go to AaronWren .com and check out his book,

Life in the Negative World, Confronting Challenges in an Anti -Christian Culture. With that, Aaron, thanks for coming on.

It's good to see you. Thanks for having me on again. So you wrote an article about this topic, which sparked some thoughts in my mind about evangelical elites and the institutions that they've governed.

And I know I've asked you before, we even started doing this podcast, where you think this is all going?

Like what kind of credibility will evangelicals have in the future? And you haven't had the most positive things to say.

So I think it's important for us to hear the truth from you, but also to know if there is something we could do differently to regain, or maybe gain in the first place, some cultural capital, as it were, and some influence, which is something evangelicals, especially new evangelicals have wanted for a long time.

So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this. I mean, do you think that evangelicals are just suffering from what every other institution has suffered from, which is a credibility crisis, or is there something uniquely or different going on with denominations and missions organizations and so forth that are evangelical?

Yeah, so evangelicals are about a quarter of the American population. I think maybe it was

Ryan Burge who just published a survey, 23%. So this is a lot of people, and yet there are no evangelicals on the

Supreme Court, even though six of the nine members of the Supreme Court were appointed by Republican presidents, and evangelicals are the largest, most important voting bloc in a

Republican coalition. There are basically no evangelicals running major universities or think tanks.

There are very few evangelicals present in the highest domains of the most elite, the most culture -shaping domains of society.

So think about high finance, very few evangelicals at the pinnacles of Wall Street, very few in the pinnacles of media, very few in the pinnacles of Silicon Valley.

Now there are some, I wanna be clear, there are a handful. Glenn Youngkin, who is the former governor of Virginia, he used to be co -CEO of Carlisle Group, major buyout firm.

We can think about somebody like Trey Stevens, who's a venture capitalist and tech founder out in Silicon Valley. There are some.

I'm not saying there are none in these sectors, but remarkably few, and certainly evangelicals are way, way, way underrepresented in the key leadership positions of our society.

And I think we tend to not see that because there are a couple of places where evangelicals do well.

One is electoral politics. There are a lot of very successful evangelical politicians.

Think of Mike Pence being vice president of the United States, Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee, my senator,

Jim Banks from Indiana, tons and tons and tons of very successful evangelical politicians. Secondly, there are a lot of top business and entrepreneurial talent, great business success by evangelicals.

But what I note is that they tend to be what I call profitable but prosaic industries that don't have much cultural leverage.

So think about Chick -fil -A or Hobby Lobby or even oil and gas.

Evangelical billionaires in the oil and gas business, but they're not running places like BlackRock or Google or Rupert Murdoch's Fox empire.

Things that have pervasive impacts on culture and institutions and information flows in society.

So we are dramatically underweight in those domains.

And this is sort of an expanded kind of view, if you will, of historian Mark Noll's observation on the scandal of the evangelical mind from his book from 30 years ago.

The scandal being that there wasn't one. And again, you can even look at it in terms of academia.

Yes, there are some evangelical scholars that are widely respected, but not very many.

And so I think it's a situation where evangelicals have very underperformed versus their share of the population certainly in these areas.

And I'll just say one other thing, and then we can dialogue about this. That is, I think another reason, besides the sort of politics and prosaic businesses,

I think another reason evangelicals don't spend a lot of time thinking about this is that they don't even perceive what it means to be a leader in those terms.

If you ask the average evangelical, who are the evangelical elite? I would guess every name that's gonna come up is gonna be a pastor, theologian, or some type of professional

Christian. In fact, my article, The Problem with the Evangelical Elites was in First Things Magazine.

There was another great article, really good article, by the way, written about the problem of the evangelical elites by Carl Truman that looks specifically at the so -called

Big Eva people. And so I think the average person, they think, who's the evangelical elite?

They're gonna go, J .D. Greer, Al Mohler, Kevin DeYoung, Link Duncan, maybe some megachurch pastor, but it's literally kind of clerical.

And so I think we don't even tend to think about the extent to which, wow, why are we so underperformed in society?

Yeah, even the streaming services, like VidAngel is, I think, Mormon owned, if I'm not mistaken. So even in areas like entertainment, where, yeah, there's a scaling problem, but it seems like there would be a low barrier to entry when it comes to academic achievements and that kind of thing.

We're in coalitions with people that share similar moral points of view, but they tend to be the ones in the driver's seat.

And so in business, it's like Chick -fil -A. You're right, absolutely. Yeah, we have Chick -fil -A and we have

Hobby Lobby, I guess, right? Like that's pretty much it. Yeah, so there's some other things, but yeah, those are the kinds of businesses we have.

And it's really interesting. I think even in political conservatism, which is a domain

I know well, because I worked in it, kind of movement conservatism, it's really been very

Catholic dominated, sort of Catholic normative, at least in its Christian wing. And I think a lot of, to some extent, evangelicals have sort of effectively decided to go along with Catholic leadership.

When I did a podcast on this with Rusty Reno of First Editor of First Things, he talked, he relayed this conversation that he was part of between Richard John Newhouse, the

Catholic editor of First Things and Chuck Colson, the evangelical, in which Chuck Colson said, you supply the ideas, we supply the votes.

And it's amazing that even many educated evangelicals are very enamored with Catholic thinking and Catholic ideas, like Catholic social teaching.

And so I think a lot of evangelicals are like very happy to just be the vote block and not the decider, as you might say.

Yeah, I think that's spot on. Let me give you a few of the paradigms people have used to try to explain this.

And then you tell me what you think, or is it a mixture of these things? I've heard it's a pacifism. So in the

Northeast, where I live on the cusp of that, it seems like the Catholics, whether Irish or Italian, end up being the police officers, the firemen.

And there used to be Protestants in these roles, but as the main lines have declined and evangelicals are the ones that are still present, whether Pentecostals, charismatics, or fundamentalist types, they have, for some reason, adopted a pacifism.

That's a theory I've heard, that they don't wanna get their hands dirty, essentially, with the kinds of things you have to do in these roles that require the use of power.

Another one I've heard is that, well, evangelical beliefs are gatekept, right? Because if you believe in a literal creation, or if you believe in that the

Bible's true in a sense that is not just figurative, or you fill in the blank, abortion, whatever, they are too loud about that.

And the gates of power, the gates of academia, the halls of power, they say, no, you can't come in here.

We're not going to let you ascend, as it were. That's another theory that's out there about this.

And then the other one is just that we did have Protestants at these levels, but they ended up sort of banding together with where their class went, where the elite classes went, and that undermined biblical thinking and confessions and so forth.

And their children just kind of went off the off -ramp. So they're no longer Protestants, and those left are the evangelicals, and they never were that impressive of a group as far as their,

I mean, they were impressive in other ways. I don't mean to make it sound like they have nothing going for them, but when it comes to leadership, which is what we're talking about in a national sense, they've never been the people that have been involved in that.

So is there another option? Is it a combination of these things? What do you think? Well, one of the terms that's become very popular out there is overdetermined.

This might be a problem, but somewhat overdetermined in a sense.

I do think evangelicalism was always a middle -class and populist movement.

As you note, elite Protestantism, when it was present in the United States, and frankly, even still today, was largely a mainline phenomenon.

And it would be common for someone who rose in the world, if you will, who started off as sort of the middle -class and ended up becoming a

Supreme Court justice or something, that they would become an Episcopalian or a Presbyterian or something like that as it moved up in society.

Or certainly kind of their children would move that direction. And of course, then their children would go to better schools. And it was sort of sometimes a multi -generational thing, if you will.

But now, that status escalator, if you wanna call it that, takes you either to secularism or it takes you to Roman Catholicism.

And we see that with JD Vance, raised in a evangelical milieu, went to Yale Law and converted to Catholicism.

I think that's a story we hear a lot of, particularly in sort of DC conservative circles.

I think there's a combination of, it just seems it strikes people as more credible and impressive, as JD Vance would say, but there's also a social and normative element to it, that this is sort of just what you do a little bit when you're kind of in that environment.

So I think that's one. I think number two that really strikes me is evangelicalism, there's a lot of things you could say.

Maybe it's pietistic, it's this, it's that. I think it's overwhelmingly focused on evangelism.

And there's a long streak going back to at least people like Moody, maybe even before that, that basically evangelism is the only thing that matters.

And to the extent that you are doing anything other than evangelism, you better be just making money to fund evangelism.

There's a quote often attributed to Moody, although I think it may have been someone else who actually said it, to the effect of, doing anything other than saving souls is like polishing the brass on a sinking ship.

And this guy wrote a book called Saving the Protestant Ethic, I think it's Andrew Lin, he's a sociologist.

It was his doctoral thesis turned into a book. And basically talks about how there was no theology vocation in evangelicalism.

It's like missionary up here, kind of like evangelist, pastor right here.

And then the only other thing of value is funding. And I was actually at an event,

I think it was the Willow Creek Global Leadership Conference, when somebody on stage said this, you're either one of three things, passionate about doing mission, passionate about funding mission, or disobedient.

And mission here meant basically some type of direct Christian mission work, like being a missionary.

And so there is that. And I think it's unfair a bit to say that conversion is the only thing that matters because I do think evangelicals have always focused on sanctification and life transformation to the gospel of whether it's huge ministries to the homeless, to prison ministries, to people coming out of incarceration, to people dealing with addictions.

All of these things are very, very much part of the evangelical milieu, but they're very focused on sort of individual conversion and transformation and the social theory to the extent that there is one is that you change the world by saving souls.

And the only way to reform society is through Christian revival. And then you add to that the sort of dispensational pre -millennialist view that the earth is destined to burn up in a ball of fire and you're not exactly worried.

And you think the end times could be any day, you're probably not gonna be investing too much in the future.

So I think a lot of those things, they take people away from these things. Then I give one other one, which is the sort of gospel centered movement, which was very big in the new

Calvinist world. I'm always struck that this group of people talks a lot about idolatry.

It's really kind of the main sin in a sense that's kind of talked about in idolatry.

In fact, my own church, there was just a sermon given this exact point that like, you know, idolatry is when you take a good thing and you turn it into an ultimate thing and that, which

I don't think there's anything technically wrong with this.

And certainly I think preaching against idolatry is a valid thing to do, but everything about the way evangelicals talk about idolatry, it has the practical effect of causing you to doubt any high ambitions that you hold or any strong desires that you have.

Oh, you're very, very upset because you're a 35 year old woman who is single and your window to have kids is disappearing.

Well, maybe you have the idolatry of the family. Google idolatry of the family. It's like, I hear this stuff and I just like every, those are the messages, right?

And so I think the kind of culture that that creates is very, you know, not fertile soil for people to say,

I want to be on the Supreme Court. I mean, if I just told somebody, yeah, I want to be a Supreme Court justice. People like, wow, what kind of an idolater is that?

There's like a constant self -doubting that's inculcated through this process. So I think there are many, many things, and of course gatekeeping certainly, you know, let's be real here.

Definitely, you know, a part of it. So I think a lot of things go there.

Yeah, so man, there's so many directions you can go here. Let's talk about this. The largest

Christian university, evangelical Christian in the United States is Liberty University. And I lived in Lynchburg for three years.

I have some familiarity. I went to Liberty. I even worked for Liberty for a little bit. And their motto is training champions for Christ, okay?

And they have a football team. I mean, they pretty much, they have almost every profession represented now at their university.

You can go to law school there. You can go to music school, nursing school. I hear they have a great aviation program.

They do, yeah, actually. And some of these programs are better than others. I think they have a tremendous history program.

That's what I was in. I've really enjoyed my time there. But you know, this is sort of the emphasis the whole time you're there is like, you're gonna come here and you're gonna launch out from Liberty University and become a leader.

And that's going to have a residual effect on everything else that sort of lines up under you, whatever position that is.

And you would think that that is a very inspiring message to produce leaders.

You're literally telling them that you're here to be a leader. And yet, I don't know that Liberty has produced a lot of famous leaders.

I'm sure there's a few, but I can't think of any that are at top tier levels in any of the significant institutions in society.

And so, I don't know if this is a question of like just emphasis. Like this is something that we can just correct and tell people that you're gonna be a leader now.

So I'm wondering what the ingredients are then. Like what needs to come together? What's actually not connecting that needs to connect in order for evangelicals to take real world leadership seriously?

Yeah, I don't know the Liberty situation directly because I have very little familiarity with that.

One thing I would ask again is, when they talk about being a leader, what do they mean by that?

Who do they hold up as paradigms of leaders? What do they hold up as an example of leadership?

And so, I think that a lot of times the examples that we use have a huge role in shaping about how people think about what it means to be a leader.

One of the things that I said we need is a sort of American Protestant version of Plutarch's lives that goes back through American history and just picks out examples of like people functioning at the highest levels of society as essentially

Protestant leaders. And what would it look like? Because we don't have it.

But one of the things that I talk about in my first things essay, the problem with the evangelical elite is

I talk about the theology of faith and work and how basically evangelicalism completely denigrated any sort of secular vocation whatsoever for a very long time.

And then along came the faith and work movement. And the faith and work movement was really designed to reclaim vocation as secular vocation is something valuable and worthy.

And so they sort of started that process and did a lot of good on it.

And then we kind of get to, I think call it the most recent instantiation of that, which was the

Tim Keller faith and work theology as expressed in his book, Every Good Endeavor and embodied in things like the

Redeemer Center for Faith and Work. And the Andrew Lynn sociology dissertation basically said that like Keller's book is the most cited faith and work reference of all.

And I really think he pushed it to the next level in terms of that. But even

Keller's book, I counted up 28 examples and illustrations that he gave in the book.

Not a single one of them involves someone at an obviously elite position in society positively portrayed using the power of their position to structure and order society or some aspect of it.

It doesn't show someone operating like as the

Supreme Court justice who wrote the Dobbs decision or something like that. There's nothing like that.

Instead, there are sort of elites behaving badly. There's some of that. There are also multiple stories of people who stepped back from high powered careers in search of more fulfilling or more ethical work.

There's sort of examples of people in sort of Manhattan occupations that are able through being salt and light in the office to kind of evangelize their coworkers and show them a way that makes

Christianity more attractive. And I think all of those are actually very good and valid things. They're just not complete.

They're missing that element of what does it look like to be that leader?

And that's what we're sort of, we don't even have a model in mind of what it would look like.

Yeah, in every good endeavor, I remember some of the examples he gives are like do an art exhibit at your church where people from the outside come in.

So it's not even Christians who are necessarily displaying their works of art. It's an evangelistic tool.

They come in, now they're within the church building. So maybe they'll start thinking about church things.

And because everything we do, even if we're not believers, mimics the creativity of God, there's sort of a connection to worship here.

And that's what you should do with your church. It's this Kuyperian sort of model.

And I know Richard Mao praises that. And I remember thinking like, that's just weird in my mind.

Like if you're gonna do art, if you're gonna be involved in sports or really any other not church sort of institution in society, why don't you just be a

Christian and go into those things where you're going to probably level up more, you're going to still gain those connections that you can use for evangelistic purposes?

Because I do think that is something we should be doing, obviously. But - I mean, in fairness, I think

Keller's book encourages that. He certainly does encourage people to become artists. And -

Right, right. But to like sort of push everything through this narrow channel of sort of ecclesiastical evaluation where if we're gonna do a bowling club, let's start a church bowling club.

You know what I mean? Like, it's like, well, why don't you just go join the bowling club and be a

Christian as you're just, you don't have to make it weird. You could just be normal. Like you are a

Christian as part of your identity. Your light's gonna shine no matter where you go. And I think evangelicals are very self -conscious of the fact that they are

Christians and feel the need to express that in sometimes forced ways.

And we see this, I think, in the entertainment industry when especially the first, like the Kendrick Brothers movies when they were coming out.

And I think there's some wonderful things they do, but there's always this point in the movie where it's like, okay, this is the altar call moment.

We have to have that. And that's the whole reason this movie even exists is to invite your non -Christian friends to see this altar call moment.

And like, why can't we just make good art? You know, like Christians used to do that. And maybe that is just -

You're hitting something important, which is evangelicals defacto look at everything in life as primarily about opportunities to share the gospel in some way or talk about faith.

I can't say like it's literally stressed. Like I personally see it in like men's groups and other things.

It's like, okay, where's your opportunity in the workplace, in here or in there to share the gospel?

It's very great commission focused. And again, if there's opportunities to share the gospel, we should do that.

What's missing is creation. And in creation, the primary purposes of various activities is not necessarily to create opportunities for evangelism.

I just wrote a piece I'm gonna publish on Thursday. This may be published before this comes out.

I don't know when this is gonna release, but I'm talking about like, well, think about what it means to become police commissioner of New York.

You're being put into that position and elected to it in order to create tangible outcomes in the real world around public safety, right?

You were there to bring crime down and keep crime down while at the same time respecting the citizen's rights and maintaining public trust in law enforcement and all these other things.

But it's fundamentally, that's the job, right? The job is there just like the job of a general is to win the war, right?

It's like the job of the pilot is to fly the airplane safely.

These things have... And I say, when we try to like say, what's the Christian way to fly an airplane?

We end up, and this is like the faith and work movement. They did well, we're more ethical. And I think there is an element of, you know, it's great.

This is how you should conduct yourself ethically. You can do all this stuff. And by the way, you know who talks about all of that stuff?

Aaron Ren and his book, Life in the Negative World. And in fact, I talk about how in a sort of a, increasingly scam society doing business ethically and being known as someone who's trustworthy could create evangelistic opportunities.

So I'm not someone who thinks that's wrong per se to do, but it's like the fundamental, the primary purpose of X, Y, or Z is not creating opportunities for evangelism.

Whereas I think realistically, that's how a lot of evangelicals see it. And maybe you'll get some like flack from people who think that is literally, it's like the only spiritual gift is evangelism.

And everybody is expected to be an evangelist. And there are no other things of real value out there.

I'm glad people are called to be evangelists. And I certainly think we shouldn't, we should be ready to seize opportunities if we have them.

But until we see that the primary purpose of these domains is functional in some way, creating a tangible, as I like to say, as I put in it, it was

Adam's naming of the animals was structuring and ordering the world, continuing the work that God had done when he established the initial structure and order of the day and night, the sun, moon, and stars, the land, the sea, the air, the animals, the plants.

Now, Adam is taking that and extending it further into the world.

And that is part of the creation mandate to structure and order the world. And some people, and again,

I think this is like, could be a point of theological dispute. Some evangelicals think that in essence, this is just what it seems to be practically speaking.

I'm not saying they wrote the theology book on this. Due to sin, all of the creation mandate is basically corrupt and fallen.

Now we have the gospel. The goal is to get people saved and Christ is gonna return.

Everything's gonna be burnt to a cinder. We're gonna have a brand new thing and then it's gonna be great.

We can do all that stuff again. But after the fall, all we are caring about is basically teleporting ourselves off of this rock, getting people saved, and that's it.

And so I think sort of a doctrine of creation is, or thought that like, yeah, creation mandate has not disappeared is something that I think

I would personally say, and what I would personally affirm, and I think we need to do that.

Now, as I say, I think realistically, the vast majority of evangelicals are never going to go for the kinds of things

I'm talking about. They don't have the disposition, even if they have the talent, they don't have the disposition to even want to pursue these sorts of positions.

So in essence, I'm talking to the small sliver of people, because only, let's be honest, only a small sliver of people is ever gonna be a university president or a foundation president or a corporate

CEO or a Supreme Court justice. I'm not even gonna become any of those things.

Realistically, although I can have impact in a certain level of society, but if you don't see that, you gotta have that as, okay, how can we help those people level up into those positions?

And especially younger people and thinking about what it was doing. This is one of the things, I mean, here's like a reality of the world situation that we have to look at too.

If you go to an evangelical college, you are almost by definition saying, I don't want to be on that elite track, because if you want to be on the

Supreme Court, you probably don't go to Liberty University or any other school. And that's a part of it is you do have to understand which pathways take you to those places.

And by the way, that's one of the reasons that Tim Keller and people in his orbit are very influenced by him, made a tremendous push into raising the evangelical presence in things like the

Ivy League institutions. There are entire parallel sets of evangelical infrastructure that serve just Ivy League schools.

So your state college, you might have crew and IVF and navigators in these ministries.

And I'm sure that they have a presence in the Ivy League too but there's also an organization called

Christian Union whose focus is just like Ivy League, Stanford type schools, right?

There's Young Life that focuses on like people who are in like high school, maybe middle school. There's an organization,

I think it's called Focus that focuses on private schools. It's like, this is where the people in like, you know, big time private schools go.

So there was a whole point of like, we need to actually be present in these places and, you know, make

Christianity real there and just actually understand what it takes to operate in those places which requires a different approach.

And so I think there's something there. The one piece of, if I were to say one piece of pushback I got on my thesis from a major evangelical figure, that I think he made a point that I think we can, that there may be something to this a little bit, is, well, basically we made the push into these places and now, you know, evangelicals are going to these schools and they're, you know, they're getting the credentials and they're on their way, but it takes a long time to get to the

Supreme Court. And so we're not gonna know, we're not gonna actually see people reach the top for a while yet, which again, there is a sense in which there's like a long path to get to some places.

So it could be that some person who, evangelical who went to Yale Law will be on the

Supreme Court one day. There's someone I know, he did not go to, he didn't go to per se the elite undergrad college for certain, became a lawyer.

And let's just say he has a very high ranking position in the Trump administration,

Senate confirmed position. He's a millennial. And this guy, if he,

I don't know that he'll end up on the Supreme Court, but I wouldn't be surprised if he ended up on the

Court of Appeals one day. Maybe he's an evangelical guy. So I do think there is a sense in which, if you're gonna take, if you're gonna try to argue the other side, one thing

I would say is we have these rising people who are gonna make it to these high level positions.

But so we've already done, we've already done it. We've already done what we need to do is now we just gotta wait for the crops to grow sort of thing.

And I don't fully buy that, but I do think there's a certain, because I will say one thing, it's not like these things just started last week.

They have been going a while. So, but I do think we will see better results in the future as there's been more focus.

You know, when J .D. Vance told his conversion story, he talked about being at Yale Law and how he met these

Catholics and Mormons who were both very successful at the elite level and very serious about their faith.

And he said, huh, maybe it isn't just some hayseed, rude religion that you leave behind.

And I could just, so he became Catholic. I would like to hope that someone at Yale Law today would run into at least one evangelical who would make a similar impression.

So I think, you know, we're not where we maybe need to be, but we probably have made some advances.

What do you think about this idea? This is sort of how I've seen it for a while. And I don't wanna oversimplify it, but I don't know, when you're dealing with movements that span across a century, there is some simplification that happens,

I suppose. As the main lines went liberal and there was already a revivalistic sort of spirit that existed within America that had dissonance with this, you have two separate movements that react to this.

Obviously you have the fundamentalists who start Bible colleges, which really only train the Bible and it's usually two years tops.

And from that, they pull pastors and missionaries. Word of Life is one of the ones near me that's a good example of this.

My wife actually went there for a year and they did some good things, but it was, for some people it's supposed to be a pre -seminary or a pre -college thing you do.

For others, it just basically became a substitute. And you only focus on the

Bible, really, theology, that kind of thing. And that's really the only institution building I can think of that they did.

And there was a bit of a bunker mentality there. The neo -evangelicals rejected this and wanted to expand into other domains, but the way they ended up doing it was,

I think, trying to take shortcuts. And Fuller Theological Seminary obviously is focused on a lot.

Wheaton College is focused on somewhat in these ways. And there certainly are impressive people that have,

I think, come out of Wheaton at times, but there is this sort of revivalistic undercurrent that they brought with them.

So we're gonna do psychology, we're gonna do business practices, we're gonna even expand the curriculum to include social justice, political activism type things.

But into all of these things, we are carrying a big E on our sleeve.

We're evangelicals going into these domains and trying to form counter institutions.

And inevitably, all these institutions, on some level, seem to have been co -opted along the way.

They became what they were trying to replace. And there's exceptions today,

I suppose, Liberty University being the major one. But the neo -evangelicals haven't done that well with what they were attempting to do.

And so we get this situation where, and I don't know if you've noticed this, but where even pastors think of themselves as primarily gaining influence, which means a large audience, which means large social media footprint, in order to get the gospel message or whatever simple message they're trying to get out there.

And they have to sacrifice some quality for that. And so if they need to look less professional, they look less professional.

I know guys though, who have basically substituted what a pastor is, the description in scripture for what a pastor is, for kind of this,

I don't know, like a speech maker who gives you somewhat of a TED talk, but it's intended to have mass audience appeal.

So it's sort of wedded to a populism of some kind. And that pulls you away from,

I think, impressive institutions and all of that. And so I guess I look at it like, the fundamentalists didn't really, they weren't interested as much in even getting in the vehicle, but the neo -evangelicals were, but they just crashed it into a ditch.

And I don't wanna be too black billed on this. I know what you're saying is true. There are people who are getting into higher positions, but we've never come up with a replacement for what we lost with the main lines.

That's just sort of the big picture. Do you agree with that? Yeah, I would say the whole history there,

I don't know enough to kind of give an assessment of that. But what I would say is

I do think America, lots of people have said that basically the kind of collapse of mainline

Protestantism and what it was in America certainly had a massive and negative influence in our society.

I feel that most evangelicals have basically zero knowledge about mainline

Protestantism. And what they do know is the viral clip of the purple haired

Lutheran priestess reciting the Sparkle Creed with her audience of median age, 80 year old people.

And that's what they think. They take the craziest things they can find that went viral on some webpage and that's what they think about it.

And we attended a mainline church here when we lived in downtown

Indianapolis. It was very theologically traditional. And I really found it like an eyeopening experience.

And I've spent a lot of time visiting, even when I was in New York, I was visiting a lot of mainline churches.

I watched a lot of them online when everybody started streaming, I started studying it more.

And there's definitely a lot that's weak there.

And it's not like these are all awesome congregations that like, wow, you wanna join that or something like that.

But I think that the evangelical impression of what they are is completely false. The main problem with your average mainline church that's most obvious is that it's very boring.

It's full of old people and it has very boring service, which of course they used to mock themselves.

They used to call, mainliners refer to themselves as the frozen chosen because their services were so kind of the,

I might say dead and lifeless. They probably wouldn't have used that. But there's definitely an entirely separate expressive register for even how many mainline people who are people of very sincere faith.

There are very many expressed their faith. Ryan Burge does all the great statistics.

And he's always pointing out like, you know, even the mainline PCUSA, Presbyterian Church USA is majority

Republican. I mean, really other than the Episcopal Church, which is still 30 %

Republican, most of these churches are actually still Republican. That's amazing. And in fact, the congregations, probably less so today, but it's certainly the case that the congregations are much, much more theologically conservative than the clergy.

The clergy are far more liberal than that. And so there are still large numbers of people who basically still believe the

Bible in a mainline churches. Now they may support women's ordination or things like that.

There are a lot of these litmus test issues in evangelicalism that maybe they wouldn't pass in some respects for some people, but still like, you know, believe

Jesus Christ actually was the Son of God, that sort of thing. And so, you know, they're theologically, you know, traditional, they're often like politically like moderate

Republican, and entire churches are basically still faithful churches. You'd be amazed how often you can go into even a liberal mainline church and the actual contents of the service and the sermon are

Orthodox. Right. So, you know, that's what

I, you know, that's kind of what I'd say on that. And here's where I'm gonna flip it.

I'm gonna bring up the gentleman, Redeem Zumer, who many of you may know.

And I'm gonna put a spin on his whole thing, which is, you know, Redeem Zumer is this

Gen Z guy who's basically like, forget evangelicalism, we need to be attending the faithful mainline churches that remain.

We're gonna reconquist of these things and take them over because when all these old liberal boomers die, we're gonna basically inherit the keys to the kingdom.

I mean, that's essential. It's like an overly simplified thing. But if I were to put, if I were to recapitulate what you told me in Redeem Zumer language, here's how

I would put it. Since the institutional trajectory of evangelicalism is very similar to that of mainline

Protestantism, if the kind of founding ethos, theologies, and distinctives of these institutions basically get watered down and sort of decaying and declining over time, why not just become a mainliner?

I mean, why are you gonna be in an evangelical institution if it's literally just at an earlier place in the exact same trajectory as all of these other ones?

And again, you go into the

Presbyterian Church in America. Right now there's another little debate. That's the evangelical Presbyterian denomination.

There's another little debate about women's ordination. And it seems to be that about a third of the pastors in the denomination, at a minimum, support ordaining female deacons.

And who knows how many of them support a lot more than that or more than that. And again, in the

Southern Baptist Convention, it's the same sort of thing. Large number of churches de facto have female pastors or even de jure have female pastors.

And so it's like people like to point their fingers. Oh, these mainliners, they got female pastors.

That's horrible. People will be like, is that really? Because they're different.

And it's like, okay, great. How old is your church? You know, the mainline church I attended was 170 years old.

Now think about that. How many evangelical churches are 170 years old? I'm like, you take any evangelical church and tell me if it's 170, when it's 170 years old, will it be as faithful as that mainline

Presbyterian Church that I attended? I'd say the odds are actually quite low. And so, you know, most evangelical churches are younger than me, okay?

I mean, this is like the reality. And so, yeah, how can they survive generational turnover when their pounding pastor moves on?

And we already see it. We already see like a lot of these older generation evangelical type churches, mega churches, a lot of them are deeply troubled.

They have mainline disease. That is to say they have a model that's tuned to a previous era when they were founded.

The demographics have changed around where they are. They're skewing older, fewer children.

You can see they're not headed in the right direction. There's a shiny new one with the young hip guy who's preaching exactly what people wanna hear today.

They got it dialed for today's preferences. And so I do think there is a sense in which even, you know, and as Dr.

Keller said this, and I'm assuming it's true, that most churches only really make significant numbers of new converts when they're young.

So within the first, a church that's five years older, younger, it's making lots of new converts. After that, they basically stop.

And you even see this with Redeemer. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of new converts in the 90s and probably into the early 2000s in New York City.

Founded, I think, in 89. And you go there today, I think, like a lot of evangelical churches in New York, predominantly people who were already

Christian when they started attending there. They came to New York, they went there, et cetera. And so his voice is, we gotta plant a lot of churches.

And so it's kind of weird to think that our entire model is built on massively planting churches that will be missionally effective for an extremely short period of time.

And then start on a trajectory of essentially fading and probably be gone or, you know, quasi off the rails within 30 to 50 years.

There's something off about that model. And so, it's kind of a little thing.

I'm like, I do think this idea that's often sold is that you must go to X, Y, or Z church or X, Y, or Z institution because of doctrinal fidelity or something like that.

Is that thing really a more faithful organization or is it just younger and earlier and it's gonna follow the same

S curve as everybody else and end up in that same place? And so, you know, what are you gonna do?

Just hop from one to the next and that's gonna be the thing. And again, it's not really related to our evangelical lead issue, but I do think these are things we have to think about.

We have to think about. Yeah, on that jury note, no. I think for each person listening on an individual level, you just have to figure out where it is that God wants you.

Where is he placed you? What can you do? There is at least a debate in the PCA about this. There's not in the PCUSA about women in ordained positions.

So, I think a lot of the people who are trying to, like William Wolfe in the SBC, trying to get all hands on deck, they're seeing it's going that direction.

Can we pull it back? Can we stop it? Because this has happened before with Missouri Synod Lutherans and with the

Southern Baptists. Like they were going that direction and the mechanisms of the denomination allowed for enough of the

PUCITers to come out and pull the whole thing back. And so, if that's possible,

I'm all for it. If it's possible, this is the thing that I've had a hard time with and maybe it's not the podcast to discuss it on, but the

Reconquista situation just doesn't seem to practically be able to work with families.

Like maybe as an individual who's not married or something, you go to that church. If there's a faithful church in a denomination, you can make that work,

I suppose, but you are in a sea of compromise around you.

You can't really partner with other churches. It's just, it's a difficult life and you have to have,

I think, a mission focus. Like I'm here because of the fact that this denomination is gonna die in about 20 years and I wanna be here when that moment happens and have some cachet built up.

You know, I agree that the idea is like, I'm not telling anybody to go to any particular denomination.

I mean, I attend a non -denominational Baptist church, basically.

Well, there you go, Shane. Your classic Baptistic megachurch in some respects.

So yeah, that's great. People can say what they want, but I do think it's like, there is something weird about this whole idea that like, you know, what about your kids or whatever, when we valorize people taking their kids into dangerous third world countries surrounded by no

Christians in extremely hostile social environments in order to be missionaries. And there is a sense in that.

Cachet. You know, there's a little weirdness in how we think about it sometimes, the exact same behaviors.

And again, I think maybe it's not great sometimes to take your kid into the mission field.

I'm kind of like, I'm kind of with you on that, but it is weird that like, some things are considered that.

And I'll just say, like, I'll tell you this, liberals love to come attend conservative churches.

And then they start like agitating for this and this and this and this and this and this and this. And that's why our society is a one -way ratchet because liberals will move to your red state.

They'll move to your conservative church. They'll come here. They'll come to your red suburb and they'll start trying to change it from inside out.

And all conservatives do is leave for the next place. Let's skip town, start a new church, go to the new place, move to Idaho.

And I mean, so at some point, you either got to stand and fight or you got to recapture territory or, you know, something like that.

And, you know, I mean, the psychology, imagine having the psychology of, like the gentrifiers did, who went into these really tough, dangerous, rundown neighborhoods in the city or seedy industrial districts.

And, you know, conservatives don't think like that. Conservatives don't think like that. And so, again, there's a reason, there's a reason why the left wins.

And we have to think about that. All right, well, I wish I had more time, but I don't. So I got to let you go,

Aaron. If people want to check out Aaron's podcast or writings, they go to AaronWren .com.

And I'm sure the books are available there too. Appreciate your thoughts on this. I hope this helped the audience. I hope you can think more clearly about where you want to invest your life and where you want to spend your time and what you want to do.

And there are some great opportunities out there as institutions are failing. And so pray about it, think about it.