Is America truly living in a post-Christian culture? And if so, what does that mean for the Church? Today, we chat with Aaron Renn, urban analyst and author of Life in the Negative World, who shares his framework for understanding how Christianity's cultural standing has shifted from positive to neutral to negative over the past several decades.

Explore how generational trends, shifting moral frameworks, and the collapse of cultural Christianity are reshaping the landscape for evangelism and Christian faithfulness, plus discover why classical Christian education may be one of the most important responses the Church has to offer.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode.

Introduction

Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again, and welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today, we have with us Aaron Renn. Aaron, welcome.

Aaron Renn:
Thanks for having me on.

Marlin Detweiler:
I was going to in your introduction, I was going to mention what you do for a living, but I'm going to ask you to tell us because you know better than I do. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your career, your family, and your education to give us some context for our conversation.

Aaron Renn:
Sure. So I grew up in rural southern Indiana. My family is actually Catholic on both sides of my family, but my mother got involved with the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement in the 70s and left the Catholic Church. I was actually raised in the Assemblies of God church, kind of a rural Pentecostal church.

Went off to college at state U. Indiana University, then moved to Chicago and had career number one, which was management consulting. I spent about 18 years in that field, mostly with Accenture, helping companies implement new technologies and adapt to changing business environments. Then I made a big pivot where I went into actually urban policy, where I sort of studied cities of the Midwest and the Rust Belt and like, why don't we get any love?

And that actually led me to being a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York City. So to study the Midwest, I ended up moving to New York City. There's probably something there. And then I sort of.

Marlin Detweiler:
That most people don't do that. Yeah.

Aaron Renn:
And then, you know, as I started studying cities, people introduced me to Tim Keller. He was a famous Presbyterian pastor from New York. And I was so impressed that he really knew what he was talking about when it came to cities. I said, whatever that guy is, that's what I want to be. So that's how I ended up becoming Presbyterian.

Then I sort of had another pivot, really, about a decade or so ago, a little more than a decade actually. I saw young men turning away from traditional authorities like the church and looking to online influencers for life advice. And this is now known as sort of the manosphere. And it's gigantic today and still remains a huge phenomenon.

So I wanted to start writing about that and help the church become more competitive and winning the affections of young men. So that sort of led me into becoming essentially an independent journalist writing about Christianity and culture more broadly, although I still cover a few other things around urban policy and such as well, but essentially kind of the cultural dynamics around Christianity and evangelicalism in America. And the men's issues are still a big part of that.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, we're recording this in the year 2026, not too long after a wonderful football season for Indiana University. That's right. Did you get involved in that in any way?

Aaron Renn:
Not really. I remember thinking to myself, if you'd told me back in 1992, when I graduated, which of these is less probable, Donald Trump becoming president of the United States or Indiana University winning the national football championship? I certainly would have said IU becoming national champs was less likely than Trump becoming president.

Marlin Detweiler:
Oh that's funny.

Aaron Renn:
One of the least most improbable events in my lifetime.

Why is America Considered a Post-Christian Culture?

Marlin Detweiler:
You needed none of the above in that question to have something you're willing to commit to. Yeah. That's great. Well, you've written a book called life in the Negative World: Controlling Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture, and I don't think that people would think that we – it's hard for me to believe that we now live substantially in an anti-Christian culture.

And I think that it was probably slightly more true. It feels that way to me two years ago than today. But tell me and maybe comment on that observation, but also tell me what problem you were wanting to solve as you wrote the book.

Aaron Renn:
Sure. I developed this framework in 2017, which was actually the first time I published it, and I came up with the idea in 2014. So keep that in mind as I tell it to you. So unlike Europe, America never had a state church. But for most of our history we had a sort of softly institutionalized generic Protestantism which after World War Two sort of morphed into a generic Judeo Christianity as our default national religion.

So as recently as the 1950s, half of all adults attended church every week. That was actually the high-water mark of church attendance in America.

Marlin Detweiler:
Those years were higher than the early, 20th, early or yes, early 19th century. Late 18th?

Aaron Renn:
Yeah. We've never really had a time when a majority of people went to church every Sunday. Believe it or not.

Marlin Detweiler:
That surprises me.

Aaron Renn:
Yeah. And yeah, we had prayer and Bible reading in our public schools. We were adding In God We Trust to our money under God to the Pledge of Allegiance. You know, as we sort of confronted the Soviet Union, that's sort of a country. It was. And this began to become unraveled starting in the 1960s, in the status of Christianity went into a decline that continues to the present day.

And I would divide this peer to decline into three eras, or worlds that I call the positive, the neutral, and the negative world. So the positive world lasts from 1964 to 1994. And this is a period of decline for Christianity. All is not positive in that sense. A church attendance is down. For example, 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, makes people more likely to vote for you.

People may say what churches they attend, and Christian moral framework was still the basic moral framework of society. If you violated those rules, you could get into trouble. Then in 1994, we had a tipping point in the neutral world, which lasted from 1994 to 2014. And the neutral world, Christianity is not seen positively anymore, but it's not really seen negatively yet either.

Marlin Detweiler:
What happened in ‘94?

Aaron Renn:
Yeah, I think a lot of things were happening. One at some point is you decline. You just sort of hit a tipping point. But what I would say is there are a couple of big events, once the collapse of the Soviet Union in the end of communism, which had really been a bulwark of sort of Christianity as part of what it meant to be a Western liberal democratic society, because communism with this avowedly atheist materialist system.

So with that but of anti-communist bulwark removed that sort of kicked one of the legs out from the stool. I also hit it for a couple of reasons. I think this was sort of the peak of the religious right influence in America. And it was also the year, and this is where I put my urban stuff in.

Rudy Giuliani became mayor of New York City in 1994. Crime collapsed. And this is when we start to see the emergence of that certain urban, educated, progressive demographic that has become so culturally influential in America, this sort of new sensibility. And so in the neutral world, Christianity is not really seen positively anymore, but it doesn't seem negatively at either.

It's just like one more thing you can do in a sort of multicultural, diverse world. Then in 2014, we had a second tipping point and enter the negative world. We're sort of the first time in the 400 year history of America. Official elite culture now views Christianity negatively, or certainly at least skeptically. That's probably a better way.

Marlin Detweiler:
What were some of the tipping elements that were some of the elements that created the tipping point in 2014, or the identification that you've made of going to negative?

Aaron Renn:
I put it into that one. I think the obviously, the Obergefell decision on gay marriage in 2015 was a watershed moment. So this is right before that. It's also the year of the so-called “Great Awokening”, which happened.

Marlin Detweiler:
I have never heard that term.

Aaron Renn:
Yeah, that was actually I think it was actually coined by some people on the left, but sort of this major upheaval, I think on race in America, you know, Jonathan Haidt, the NYU professor, also says 2013 is when things started to get crazy on campus. 2015 is when Donald Trump came down to escalator to run for president.

There's just a big cultural rupture in America during the second Obama term. And I think in general, a lot of the sort of conservative energy dissipated in America generally. And we had a sort of a great leap forward of a sort of more progressive approach. And I think, there was sort of a especially when it came to sexuality, of course, a big change in the culture that sort of like finally went beyond Christianity and to some extent, you know, especially these traditional, you know, sexual ethics and things like that became perceived as a threat to this new public moral order.

And I think this is a very different world than and it really kind of put evangelicals in a little bit of an uncertain position, because they've been used to thinking of themselves as a moral majority. Well, now you have to face the fact that you're not a majority. And so I kind of came up with this model in 2014, right as I thought we were having a shift in the cultural moment when some of the apologetics and cultural engagement and processes that were being used would no longer be as effective. And so that sort of prompted me to develop this.

Now, you also hit the so-called vibe shift of the last couple years. And I do think in part resulting from the 2024 election, there has been a decline in overt anti-Christian, anti-religious sentiment in America.

There may have been an actual rise in anti-Semitism, but the sort of hostility to Christianity has abated. You even see some articles talking about people coming into the Catholic Church or whatever.

Marlin Detweiler:
Is that reflex of the extreme finally just being one, one stick too many on the back of the mule?

Aaron Renn:
Yeah. Well, I think it's like the stock market. It never goes just like this. It always zigs and it zags. And I think, look, I use an example of Ronald Reagan. Yes. There was a sort of conservative movement in the 80s with Reagan and some of the maybe the more extremes of the left positions of, you know, the new Left positions and things of the 60s and 70s were sort of rejected by society.

And yet ultimately, that institutionalized some of the changes that have come about, like Reagan didn't touch the divorce revolution. He didn't really try to roll the sexual revolution back in a lot of ways.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, you didn't hear the talk of Christian influence from Reagan the way that we have in the in the 24, 25, 26 time frame.

Aaron Renn:
Yeah. And I feel like what we have here is a little bit of a call it a, you know, it's a little bit of a pullback in some respects. But I would say we live we continue to live in a definitively post-Christian America. You know, if you think about some key traditional positions, you know, let's put sexuality aside.

Abortion since we're all versus Wade was repealed every time abortions been on the ballot, the pro-abortion position won a majority of the votes. Now, there were only a couple votes that didn't go their way, like Florida Amendment four. But that was only because there were supermajority requirements. They actually got a majority of the pro-abortion vote in Florida. Look at what's happened with the normalization in mainstreaming of gambling, casino gambling, or the pot legalization.

By the way, these are broadly popular. People want drugs to be legal, certainly pot. They want gambling to be legal. You know, the sort of mainstreaming of pornography again, at like insane levels on your phone. And so you start looking at sort of all of the old sort of anti vice positions have totally collapsed, which is not to say that like, there aren't some qualms.

I mean, the New York Times just wrote a big editorial about the problems with pot legalization. And so there will probably be some adjustments on the dials from especially the sports betting. They'll probably be some adjustments, but we're not going back to anything like that. And I think the reality is, I think it is a day where, like if you said, yes, I'm a Catholic, I'm a Christian, you may get less hate than you would have gotten, say, four years ago or something.

But if you try to, quote unquote, legislate morality in any way, you are going to, you know, you're going to see a blowback, right, of major proportions. And I think the deep association of evangelicals with the Trump administration is not going to be good for evangelicals when Trump eventually passes from the scene. And we're back in a more progressive cultural moment.

Marlin Detweiler:
So you’re saying that we're on a long-term trend line, that we are simply seeing a temporary correction to it?

Aaron Renn:
That's what it looks like to me. Again, you can't predict the future now.

Predicting the Decline of Christianity in America

Aaron Renn:
Ryan Berg, this great quantitative scholar of religion, you know, he makes this point all the time for about the people who say there's a huge Gen Z revival of Christianity. He says it's just not true in the numbers. And what you have to understand is it is baked into the cake, that there is going to be a significant decline in Christianity in America in the coming years, because the baby boomers are the most religious generation.

Generation X is less religious, millennials are less religious, Gen Z even less religious. So the truth is, generational turnover alone, as the baby boomers pass on, is going to produce a dramatic decline in the numbers of Christians active, practicing Christians in America. Even if Gen Z starts going up at some level, is from a much, much lower base than where the baby boomers are today.

So we're essentially it's like it's sort of like the birth, low birth rates, it's structurally baked into the cake, what's going to happen to the demographics of religion in America. We're going to have a much smaller share of the population. That's this question.

Thoughts on Cultural Christian Values

Marlin Detweiler:
There are several questions bouncing around in my head, and I want to go a slightly different direction.

You know, obviously you're working in a policy-oriented world in some senses and reporting on that sort of thing. But what I would say is the reality of a culture that is based on Judeo-Christian values is a good thing, but it's not biblical Christianity.

Aaron Renn:
No. I’d agree.

Marlin Detweiler:
But I want to make this clear because I want to hear you comment on this. In fact, the idea of thinking in terms of Judeo-Christian values is simply another form of religion that thinks it can be good enough to satisfy God the Creator. And as we would refer to him in biblical language, the Triune God of the Bible.

And so I'm old enough to remember the 60s well, the 70s even better. And while Judeo-Christian values predominated much of my childhood and the area that I grew up in. I remember still suffering from an element of isolation, an element of marginalization for wanting to live the biblical faith. As I saw it. Now, it was complicated by one element, and that is, I was a Mennonite kid in a public school, and that was something that was a little bit it wasn't yet by the time I was in high school, it wasn't something that I was ostracized for.

But I remember in grammar school, not wanting my friends and the kids I went to school with to see my mother wearing her prayer covering and her cape, dress and that sort of thing because I was embarrassed by it. I'm sorry to say that I was, but I was. And so not making this too personal, but trying to hear your comment on it, what are we losing?

What are we gaining if we're really thinking in terms of biblical Christianity as opposed to a Judeo values based cultural sense that ultimately thinks in terms of I just need to be good enough and really doesn't understand the faith of redemption through the blood of Christ.

Aaron Renn:
Yeah. So there's a lot going on there, and this has been a big source of debate for a long time. You know, H. Richard Niebuhr wrote a famous book called Christ and Culture, which was all about the different schools of thought about how Christianity relates to the surrounding culture. Now, one of the models was Christ Against culture, which was the model of sort of the Anabaptist tradition that you came out of, which was very much like Christ doesn't have much to do with culture at all.

And we are to be creating a Christian sort of parallel community, living out the authentic kingdom of God. But the world outside is sort of to be rejected. And so transforming culture, seeing sort of, you know, Christian values in the culture that might be viewed as either unimportant or even negatively in a sense there.

And so there is part of that. And if you go back to the 1950s, half of all adults are attending church each week. And yet it was a time of extraordinarily shallow faith. This was even remarked on at the time, probably a very good chunk of those people were there, because that's just what you did in.

Marlin Detweiler:
That they got it from their parents in some respects, and their parents lived through the liberalism of the early 20th century but didn't get weren't raised in it. But then they were.

Aaron Renn:
Yeah. And this is like, how many of those people were, in fact, genuine believers? I think there's good reason to think a lot of them were not genuine believers in Christ, followers of Christ. Now, some people kind of say it's actually better if the culture is sort of anti-Christian, because, you know, that forces you to elevate your game in a sense and be serious.

And there may be some of that, but what we're losing, I think with that Christian culture, in a sense, is an entire understanding of the world that made it very possible to evangelize people. You know, Billy Graham could have a crusade and preach the gospel, and not maybe not everybody who came down that I'll ended up being a Christian person, but a lot of them did. A lot of lives were transformed. That's true. And he was able to take advantage of the fact that most people had a latent understanding that Christianity is probably true.

I probably, you know, there is a heaven and hell and a god. Maybe the basics of the Christian story, the Bible stories, and he could sort of preach the gospel and, you know, people could respond to it. Whereas today, a lot of young people don't even have the categories to understand the gospel. You would have to do a lot of tremendous upfront work.

Marlin Detweiler:
Ground work below foundational work, the kind of work that, well, it's a matter of rebuilding something from the dirt and not having a foundation to work with. Right?

Aaron Renn:
It's often said, you know, that the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. And, you know, a lot of the culture today is sort of just indifferent. Tim Keller, back in 2013, I saw him give a talk where he I think he saw some of these trends coming a little bit. And he said, as an example of an apologetic that no longer works is my own book, The Reason for God.

He's like nobody today even cares if Christianity is true or not. Back then, even just in 2007 when he'd written it, it's like this idea is, oh, let's argue about religion. But like now it's almost like, why are we even talking about this? It's so unimportant. You have to convince people that they should actually care whether or not Christianity is true, before you can argue that it is true.

So he actually wrote another book, I think. I can't remember what the name of it was, but it was sort of applying some Charles Taylor philosophy and other things. But the point of it is evangelism is a lot more complicated. In a world where people don't understand about don't believe there's a God. If a purely naturalistic understanding of the world don't really believe all that much and you know, right and wrong, maybe a very different ideas about the world.

And this is where, like the British historian Tom Holland wrote this book, Dominion A History of Christianity in the West, and basically like how our entire understanding of the world was sort of shaped by Christianity and how alien the thinking of like Roman society was before Christianity came along. Like, why would you even care about the weak or the sick or whatever?

And you know, of course, the legends, you know, like, you know, it's not legend, it actually happened. People tell the stories of one of the reasons Christianity did well in Rome is they didn't abandon people who caught the plague. And so Christians, people who were Christian, were more likely to survive. And that helped their numbers, of course.

What do we see now? We see, you know, Canada, you know, euthanizing tons of people in the minute. You know, the minute your life has like negative financial value to the state, you're going to be, you know, pressured to kill yourself. And we have not yet begun to see like the bottom of like how low that's going to get.

Yeah. And so, you know, it's going to be a completely different view of the human being in a completely different view of everything. And I don't think that that's helpful. Either for the flourishing of the world, which again depends on a lot of people think the flourishing of the world doesn't matter, because this world is destined to be burned up in a fireball.

Or for evangelism, to be quite honest, it's a lot harder to evangelize people, even domestically, when increasingly the cultural concepts are just going to be so – Christian is going to be so foreign to the world that we're in. And because we're in a sort of a post-Christian culture, you know, some of the Christian concepts unlike, say, Buddhism, which might seem a little cool and exotic, I think some of the Christian concepts are going to seem, frankly, very negative and offensive to people.

Christianity Isn’t “Going Out of Business” in America

Marlin Detweiler:
Interesting. What do you offer as hope and solutions in that context?

Aaron Renn:
A lot of people think that Christianity is going to have like going out of business sale in America, just like it did in Europe, essentially, that eventually it's just going to we're behind the curve, but we'll eventually get there. I don't believe that's true. I think we're going to have a lot of Christians in the United States for a long time to come.

And I do think it's the good side of this is that it's an opportunity for us to examine ourselves, consider our ways, and take stock of, like, how committed we actually are and to in fact increase our level of commitment today.

I think the New Testament sort of suggests that when you encounter opposition, there's the opportunities for rewards in the age to come. Maybe we have opportunities to gain, to gain treasure in heaven, that other people haven't had any United States in the past. And so I think there's opportunities there. And I think that the world that we're living in is actually producing so much pain that the pain of the world is, by itself, going to present an opening for people to share the gospel with a lot of people.

I mean, I grew up in a Pentecostal environment. I'm not a Pentecostal today, but I greatly appreciate how the Pentecostals are able to talk to the person in the county jail and in the halfway houses, and the substance abuse people and those who are just dealing with very serious life problems. And unfortunately, that's a lot of our population today.

And these people know that sin kills. That's not just a theoretical statement, right? That can be a statement that they know that they are going to personally be dead of a drug rug overdose, right? If the Holy Spirit doesn't set them free from their addictions. And so I think there are going to be opportunities in a world where, you know, secular culture is a little bit crazy sometimes just being willing to just be a steady voice for truth and have an open door for those who are in suffering, I think is going to give opportunities for evangelism.

Marlin Detweiler:
But before we started recording, we talked about classical education a bit, and I have seen classically educated kids entering adulthood, the workforce, the raising of families, and I've seen them be able to engage that culture in good and I mean good in a capital G sense, an important and biblical sense, and see it be able to lead and thrive in ways that honestly give me hope.

And I do appreciate the cultural roadmap that you have put in front of us. And the challenges associated with it are sobering.

Aaron Renn:
Yeah. And if I might give you a plug for classical education, it's one of the things I highlight in the book as ways that Christians have, in fact, been responding to these cultural changes. You know, you could say in the 50s, maybe we didn't have Christian schools, but they were reading the Bible and praying, and it probably wasn't teaching you much contrary to Christianity, you know, whereas today you might get a very different point of view.

And so people are like, we have to be much, much more intentional about the formation of our children, both in their Christian faith and in just the things that they learn. And so no surprise that the classical Christian education movement has exploded.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for that plug, too, by the way. It's been great to have you on there is your drawing attention to this cultural regression is a very sobering thing to think about, and something that we who believe that God created and God superintendence and we are as vice regents, we've got to take seriously as to how we take seriously.

Well, I've said it twice, but how we take seriously the responsibility that we have in light of where we are.

Aaron Renn:
I agree.

Thank you for having me. It's been great and best of luck championing the classical Christian education movement. I want to see it get a lot bigger.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. And I think it will. And folks, thank you for joining us this episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian Education. We hope to see you next time.