(RNS) — Aaron Renn, until recently a provocative but mostly unnoticed Substack writer, has been thrust onto the national stage with the release of his book, “Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture,” in which he portrays American evangelical Christians as a group in an unfriendly pickle. Conservative Christians, he argues, enjoyed halcyon times from 1964 to 1994, which he calls “Positive World,” when society had a positive impression of Christianity, and being seen as a “good, churchgoing man” was part of being an upstanding citizen.
After 1994, Renn writes, social views of Christianity shifted, and evangelicals fell into “Neutral World,” in which being Christian neither helped nor hurt one’s reputation. But for the past decade, Renn believes, Christians have endured “Negative World,” in which American Christian values are overtly rejected, and social elites, especially, regard Christianity as a threat.
Renn is sensitive to the current negativity despite writing for the last two years from his idyllic Carmel, Indiana, neighborhood, which he describes as a spotless, artistic and generally conservative community. There, he claims, things still work, and his praise of the place reminds the reader of the Jim Carrey movie “The Truman Show.”
It hardly needs pointing out, then, that Renn sees Negative World as a crisis. In a recent interview, Renn told me, “If you have a majority Christian society that is not positive towards the Christian faith, then something has gone badly wrong.” Nor does he take hope from President Trump’s election. “It’s hard to tell what the long-term impact will be,” he said. “But clearly the culture is continuing in a definitively post-Christian direction, which we see in everything from the normalizing of gambling to pot legalization.”
Not every conservative Christian has agreed with Renn — not in his reading of society’s attitude toward Christianity, necessarily, but whether society’s disdain is new.
“The ‘Negative World’ notion resonates with Christian teaching in so far as Jesus himself warned his followers about the world’s hatred and taught that the values of the kingdom of God ran counter to that of Caesar,” said Abson Joseph, dean of Indiana’s Bethel College. “To treat this as a novel idea may be more of an indictment against American Christianity’s search and desire for comfort instead of embracing its role and implications of being a prophetic witness.”
Renn’s points are also challenged by data from Lifeway Research’s survey of 1,001 Protestant pastors that was taken in the fall of 2024. Church attendance, it showed, is up approximately 4% since Lifeway’s 2019 study. Conversions show the same growth. There is also increased interest in church planting. A new Pew Research Center survey, meanwhile, found that 51% of Americans have a positive opinion about religious institutions, and only 29% have negative opinions.
Christian Askeland, an eminent biblical language scholar and senior researcher of the Green Collection, the Hobby Lobby stores’ holdings of rare biblical texts and artifacts, rejects Renn’s view of a faith suffering at the hands of a hostile culture. “The growth of Christian communities historically has never followed a constant linear progression, but instead happens despite occasional massive declines,” Askeland told me.
Askeland noted that 21st-century evangelical Christians have watched many congregations among their mainline counterparts “evaporate,” he said, and have themselves been labeled racists, misogynists and totalitarians. “Netflix in 2025 feels different from Disney 1990. Real life, however, offers fewer obstacles than it did to Christians who fled to Plymouth Rock in 1620 or when Williams College students prayed in a haystack in 1806,” he said.
Has the world ever been positive toward Christians? One leading evangelical I spoke with, wishing to remain anonymous, asked of Renn: “What does negative mean? Is the world supposed to be positive toward the Christian faith? Whose Christianity?”
Joshua Swanson, editor of the magazine Worship Leader, told me in an email, “From the beginning, the Church has thrived not by winning cultural favor, but by embodying a radical love that confounds the world. The early Church didn’t survive Rome by retreating — they transformed the empire by living as citizens of another Kingdom.”
According to the Gospel of John, Jesus prayed in the garden shortly before being arrested and crucified. His prayer focuses on his disciples who are “still in the world,” a phrase that makes clear that the church began at odds with the world’s views.
Fifty miles up I-65 from Renn’s Carmel is the prominent pulpit of College Wesleyan Church, on one of the nation’s strongest evangelical campuses, Indiana Wesleyan University (where I am a professor). College Wesleyan’s senior pastor, the Rev. Steve DeNeff, reflecting on Renn’s thesis, said it “conjures up all kinds of reactions, from ‘atta boy,’ to ‘so what?’” He calls Renn’s book valid, but dated, pointing out that Christians have “been talking about exile for years.”
But Renn sees “exile” as a red herring. “In my observation, ‘exile’ language is part of the rhetoric of political and cultural disengagement and is never applied in a complete or consistent manner. If God’s kingdom is not of this world and we are just strangers and exiles here, why would intra-mundane justice be a concern of the church?” he asked, using a term for real-world justice.
The question, some say, is not whether the church is welcomed, but what Christians should do about it. Tim Larsen, the prolific church historian at Wheaton College, said that the phrase “negative world” has real meaning in the current culture. “But love, kindness, patience, self-control, reasoned discourse, service, turning the other cheek — those are not tactics which should only be deployed in favorable conditions. They are unconditional Christian values and practices in season and out of season.”
Even embedded in idyllic Carmel, Renn has the chance to practice those unconditional values. The brilliant musical performer Michael Feinstein serves as artistic director of Carmel’s Allied Solutions Center for the Performing Arts and as the town’s unofficial mayor. Since 2008 he has been married to his longtime partner, Terrence Flannery. The two men’s marriage doesn’t make Carmel any more of a negative world for evangelicals than was the world of the first century. Rather, it is an opportunity to navigate with grace, being greatly appreciative of a great artist’s contributions to the community, all while not compromising on his own historic community’s beliefs.
Perhaps here’s the rub for many with evangelicals. Their goal isn’t only to coexist peacefully with those who hold different views, even in an idyllic community, but to preach to them. Jesus says, “My prayer is not for them alone (his disciples). I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message.”
(Jerry Pattengale is a senior adviser for the Museum of the Bible and the author, most recently, of “The World’s Greatest Book.” In 2024 he was named a Sagamore of the Wabash by the governor of Indiana. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
