Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture Aaron Renn. Zondervan, 2024.
How do Christians navigate the dramatic changes in Western culture that has shifted into a much more aggressive secularism?
Aaron M. Renn has written an insightful book, “Life in the Negative World,” that explores those changes and recommends wise Christian responses to the often hostile world around us.
Renn is co-founder of and senior fellow at American Reformer and a former senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. He and his family live in Indianapolis. This book started as a 2022 article for the journal First Things and was titled “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism.”
In that article, and further developed in this book, is the idea that American evangelical Christians faced a largely positive world in the 20th century until about 1994. Christianity was viewed as generally acceptable and had at least some respect in much of American society. In the 1990s this began to shift to what he calls “neutral world.”
This era stretched until about 2014. During this time, Christianity garnered a mixed reaction in much of society. It was neither a great benefit nor was it a significant detriment to be known as an evangelical Christian.
Life in the ‘moral minority’
Renn is clear that these are not exact dates, but he highlights some historical events that indicate a cultural transition was happening (p. 8). Since around 2014 to the present time we have lived in a “negative world” in which it can be a serious drawback to be known as an evangelical Christian in popular culture.
Renn explores ways that Christians should understand living as a “moral minority” (p. 46).
“One of the things I love about the Bible is its realism, how it’s true to life. … Christians today should not ignore our cultural reality but rather be realistic about the negative world environment we live in. … We can do many things to start adapting. … There are ways for us to create churches that can thrive in this world” (p. 50).
Renn recommends living lives of personal excellence, being communities of faithful compassion and developing strategies for being resilient in hard times. This is a thoughtful and intriguing book. Not everyone will be convinced on every level, but Aaron Renn helps believers see new ways to serve Christ in an adverse culture.
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