Guest Post: Welcome to the Negative World
Guest Post: Welcome to the Negative World
The final talk from our Christ & Culture event on Negative World engagement.
[Hey friends. Today I’m bringing you the final article derived from the Christ & Culture event I participated in back in August. If you want to catch up on the talks presented by me and Jeff Caldwell, you can click the links below to check out “The Gospel and the War for the Cosmos” and “How Should We Then Live?”
This last talk I’m sharing was actually the first one delivered that night, and it comes from Pastor Greg Hill. Greg holds a Master’s of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and is currently the Lead Pastor at Living Faith Alliance Church in Vineland, NJ. Greg’s pastoral insights and approach to this topic are unique to him and allowed him to frame this conversation by identifying why this issue was so important for Christians to take seriously, which I think he accomplished in spades.
It would be difficult for me to overstate the impact Greg has had on my life over the years, and it was a privilege to share the stage with him that night. I hope his words here will bless you as they have blessed me so many times before. Take it away, Greg.]
Introduction
American evangelicalism is deeply divided. This conversation is especially essential because we are feeling the strain of that division on a daily basis. I am not talking about a war on evangelicalism, rather a war within evangelicalism. It is a civil war. There are many examples of this civil war framework. Within the evangelical churches, church leaders are abandoning historic Christian teachings on sexuality, and denominations themselves are splitting. Furthermore, they are not splitting over finer points of theology and practice, but over foundational beliefs that were broadly accepted within the whole of our culture only 50 years ago.
Where once there was a culture war between Christianity and secular society, today the culture war is within evangelicalism itself. The culture war between Christianity and secular society is over, and there is little evidence to support a victory for the church. We now find ourselves in a far more personal and disorienting civil-culture war.
I read an article this week celebrating the fact that, for the first time, a drag queen has both the number-one single and the number-one album on the iTunes Christian music charts. Now, I don’t know what iTunes means by “Christian,” but I remember the days when the discussion was about whether you can be a Christian and have drums and an electric guitar. Now, under the label “Christian,” an openly gay man who dresses like a woman is a celebrated hero under the label of Christian Music.
I have felt the weight of this personally. An example of this is that my spirituality, (or more accurately my commitment to Jesus), has been measured against the level of support I publicly do or do not signal for the organization of Black Lives Matter. My spirituality is not measured against how much I love black lives, but rather how quickly I would move to being a social justice advocate for a particular organization.
Even here at our church, I once made the simple claim that God’s design for children is that they are raised by a mom and dad, and that this is the best for their development physically, socially, and academically. This actually caused someone to walk out of our church, never to come back. I did not say it caustically or angrily. I was just establishing the Biblical design on my way to make another point. I am not naive; I know that there are people within our world that would disagree with that statement. The part that signaled to me that this was a deeper issue was this: In the statement that that person made by walking out of our church, I am being accused of something like “hate speech” because I communicated something that, 25 years ago, would have been a message that popular culture would have believed. The statement that I made is something that I would have heard from Dr. Phil and Oprah, and it now brings great offense.
Why is this conversation essential?
We need to understand the world we live in, and we definitely need to understand the challenges that the next generation faces. The good news of the Gospel is that the timeless and unwavering doctrines of God’s Word are unyielding in the truth that they communicate. However, the shifts in cultural norms and the loss of historic common ground between the current culture and the evangelical church has placed a heavy weight on the evangelical church. This weight is contributing to the cracks that are splintering the foundations of evangelicalism in this civil war.
This reality must have implications on how we communicate that timeless, beautiful truth within our current cultural context. We want to offend only where the truth of God offends, and we want to be able to love without compromise. So how do we do that? How do we accomplish this within our culture? How do we do that within our own denominations and local churches?
These are some of the questions, points of pain, and frustrations that led me to appreciate and explore this topic. What I am saying in “Welcome to the Negative World” is that it is critical that we discern the times we are in for the sake of the Gospel and for the sake of the Bride of Christ. These thoughts are a reflection on (and in many ways a reiteration of) the First Things article entitled “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism” by
. In fact, large sections of what I have written below are right out of the article. As with all articles, you eat the fish and spit out the bones. So while I don’t agree with everything he says or how he says it, I have found his framework incredibly helpful in both mapping my own experience of being a pastor over the last 20 years, and understanding the current pressures the church is facing.
Defining Our Terms
There are a couple of terms that are worth defining as we explore this article and topic. My goal is not to be exhaustive in defining these terms but to give us a functional definition to help us understand the scope and the gravity of the Negative World.
Evangelicalism
First the scope. The scope is evangelicalism. That is not to say that some of these things are not influencing mainline churches or high church movements, but the scope of this article concerns itself with the Evangelical Church. Evangelicalism is not a denomination, but a movement in church history that dates back to the 1700s with the birth of Methodism in England. This happened under the leadership of John and Charles Wesley. Other early leaders included Anglican cleric George Whitefield and New England's Puritan pastor Jonathan Edwards.
Historically evangelicalism has 4 main distinctive features:
The centrality of the Word of God.
Belief that the Gospel is good news about the atonement, or what Jesus accomplished on the cross.
The importance of faith; personal faith in the work of Jesus as the necessary expression of a regenerated heart for salvation.
It is incumbent upon all Christians to share that good news in word and deed.
It is this bond of evangelicalism that is being threatened today as it navigates the storms of our culture.
Culture
The original and primary definition of culture is that it is a word that is derived from cultivation. This refers to tilling the ground in order to grow things. That means that, in a culture, individuals are being cultivated and formed, and this creates a type of civilization. Every civilization is a result of their specific intellectual and moral cultivation.
There are still remnants of this concept in the reference to an individual as being “cultured.” It is a dated term, but it points to the idea of an educated, mature, and civilized person. The person that was considered ‘cultured,’ was a person that was cultivated in terms of a particular ideal. A cultured person was one who had an ideal state of being. The cultured man is an ideal man.
When someone starts using the language of an ideal they are now making statements about something's meaning, design or purpose. That means that we have just entered into a religious discussion. This naturally makes the issue of culture a profoundly religious question. We retain this basic association of culture and religion in our use of the related term “cult” to refer to a system of religious belief (cultus). Culture has been accurately described as “religion externalized.”
This becomes obvious when we move outside of the religious pluralism of the United States. If you visit Saudi Arabia, you will experience Islamic culture, specifically made manifest by its law and education and customs. If you go to certain parts of India, you will witness Hindu culture with its mythology and the resulting caste system. Yet, when we return to the West, you will now witness a dominant humanistic culture with strong remnants of Christianity in people’s language, literature, beliefs, and other cultural artifacts.
The basic argument that Renn is making is that our culture is changing, and, consequently, the core beliefs about the church are shifting. We are in a unique cultural moment. However, this is not entirely new. Cultures historically rise and fall as beliefs take concrete shape in the laws, education, art, architecture, economics, literature, and customs of a people. Then, under various stresses, they collapse and fail.
So, as we discuss the change in culture, we are discussing a shift in religion, which includes a shift in our belief about the ideal of what a human should be. It is our culture’s beliefs externalized, and this shift has caused the culture to relate to the evangelical church in new ways. This shift will naturally become the default worldview of the next generation of Jesus followers.
Three Worlds of Evangelicalism
Within the story of American Culture and the Christian Evangelical movement, we are suggesting that there have been three distinct stages:
The Positive World (Pre-1994):
In this world, the society at large retains a mostly positive view of Christianity. To be known as a good, churchgoing man remains part of being an upstanding citizen. Publicly being a Christian is a status enhancer. Christian moral norms are the basic moral norms of society, and violating them can bring negative consequences.
To be clear, in his article, Renn is not suggesting that this was a unanimous belief, or that this was true of everyone. Rather, he is saying that in Western Christianity in the United States, it was generally true. The Division of the Three Worlds represents the way in which our cultural context “at large” has viewed and related to a Christian worldview. It is not referencing how it aligns with the Gospel, but rather how the culture aligns with the evangelical church and its doctrinal clarity.
The Neutral World (1994–2014):
In this world, society takes a neutral stance toward Christianity. Christianity no longer has privileged status, but is not disfavored. Being publicly known as a Christian has neither a positive nor a negative impact on one’s social status. Christianity is a valid option within a pluralistic public square. But it is a valid option among many valid options. I can be a Christian and you can be a vegan and we can grab a latte at Starbucks. In the neutral world, Christian moral norms retain some residual effect within the culture at large, but the power is waning.
The Negative World (2014–Present):
Society has come to have a negative view of Christianity. Being known as a Christian is a social negative, particularly in the elite domains of society. It means you are narrow-minded, probably xenophobic, intolerant, and probably ignorant. Christian morality is expressly repudiated and seen as a threat to the public good and the new public moral order. Subscribing to Christian moral views or violating the secular moral order brings negative consequences. You are sued, publicly maligned, and canceled. A core tenant of the Negative World is that we are untethered from objective truth or transcendent reality, and we are captive to the subjective emotive morality of Western individualism.
Dating the Three Worlds
Why does Aaron Renn date these three worlds the way he does? Renn makes it clear that the dating of these transitions is out of necessity, yet their bounds are impressionistic. So don’t get hung up on the dates that he provides because these transitions did not happen in a moment; rather they happened over time.
The transition from the Positive World to the Neutral World is not very precise, as Renn himself admits. However, there are some signposts along the way. In the 1980s, you could use language like the “moral majority” and it had some cultural grounding, but in its politicized state, you would see a culture that is literally voting on it. The collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War in 1989 was clearly a point of major change. A few years after that would represent the high-water mark of the Republican takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives. This was arguably the peak of evangelical influence within U.S. conservatism. But, yet again, it was a movement that America was voting on, and thus majorities and positions were changeable. Furthermore, in 1994, Rudolph Giuliani became mayor of New York City, signaling the urban resurgence that would have a significant impact on evangelicalism reclaiming its Gospel impact in urban centers.
The transition from the Neutral World to the Negative World is a bit more specific. Let me give you two signposts from circa 2014 in order to date the movement to the Negative World. Both of these are clarified by Nancy Pearsey in her book Love Thy Body, which I consider to be a must-read.
The first signpost took place just before 2014. In the 2013 Windsor Decision, the United States Supreme Court ruling struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which was a federal law recognizing that marriage is between one man and one woman. The argument was that the DOMA was unconstitutional and that the federal government cannot discriminate against married lesbian and gay couples. To be clear, DOMA was about marriage, not civil unions for lesbian and gay couples.
The majority opinion accused DOMA supporters of being motivated by “animus” (animosity, hostility, hatred). The majority opinion claimed that the DOMA supporters’ purpose was to “disparage,” “injure” “degrade” “demean” “humiliate” and “harm” people in same-sex unions. They argued that DOMA supporters had a goal to brand them as “unworthy,” to “impose a disadvantage through stigma” and to “deny them equal dignity.”
In short, the Court did not just say that the people who supported the claim and believed marriage to be a sacred institution designed by God between a man-woman were mistaken or wrong. Rather, it denounced them. People that affirmed the same things we have been affirming for hundreds of years were now declared to be hostile, hateful, and mean-spirited. This denunciation is a clear indication that we, as evangelicals with a traditional view of marriage, are not respected or even welcomed into the discussion.
The second signpost on the road to the negative world is dated in 2015 with the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision. Almost 2 years after it ruled against DOMA, the Supreme Court had another relevant ruling that institutionalized Christianity’s new low status.
The Obergefell decision took place when the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment requires states to license and recognize same-sex marriage. When Justice Anthony Kennedy penned the rationale for the majority decision of the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision in June 2015, he was boldly striking down the marriage laws of more than half the states.
Here is the rationale, and it is stunning. A Supreme Court judge literally wrote that “religious or philosophical premises” are not legitimate in law and public policy. Judicial decisions must be based on “neutral” grounds.
So, now neither Religious nor philosophical premises are legitimate foundations for law and policy. The ruling then proceeds to advocate for the value of neutrality. I wonder how you can advocate for the value of neutrality without either a religious or philosophical foundation. Setting that question aside, the language here is significant because it begs the question: “Is the Obergefell ruling itself neutral?” The answer is not at all. Rather, the decision inserts the majority’s own religious and moral premises into the law. The Supreme Court justices asserted their own moral, and religious, and philosophical worldview through the trojan horse of neutrality.
The real issue here is not neutrality, but rather the use of the courts to impose a liberal worldview on the entire nation. It solidified the new state religion. Yet, its position seems untenable since it forces the Supreme Court into a spot where it will, by logical necessity, need to rule against the Declaration of Independence; the very same Declaration of Independence which does not shy away from basing legal matters on both religious and philosophical principles: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” Do you notice the language here? “We have been endowed by our Creator.” Recall again when I said that the core creed of the Negative World was to live untethered to any transcendent truth.
However, for now, the Obergefell decision is written into case law by our Supreme Court, which marks yet another historical moment that signals that there is a new world for the evangelical church.
How Did the Church Engage Culture During the Positive World?
As culture has shifted in the manner by which it relates to the evangelical church, the evangelical church has responded. The evangelical church has not been passive, but rather it has historically reacted to the cultural shifts. I think that it is this adaptability that is creating the internal tensions in evangelicalism.
During the Positive World, there was a movement that emerged in the second half of the 20th century that was known as the culture war strategy, or the “religious right.” It is arguably the best-known movement of the Positive World era. The very name of its leading organization, “Moral Majority”, speaks to a world in which it was at least plausible to claim that Christians still represented the majority of the country. They arose during the so-called “New Right” movement in the 1970s, in part as a response to the Sexual Revolution and the general moral deterioration of the country through the 60’s and 70’s.
Interestingly, up until and through the 1970’s, evangelicals and fundamentalists voted predominantly for the Democratic party. Jimmy Carter, a former Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher, was the first evangelical president. He won the Southern Baptist vote, 56 to 43 percent. Newsweek magazine actually proclaimed 1976, (the year of his election), the “Year of the Evangelical.” As late as 1983, sociologist James Davison Hunter found that a large percentage of evangelicals continued to identify as Democrats.
But, under the leadership of people like Jerry Falwell, this group realigned to the Republican party during the 1980s, and thus became the religious right. Evangelicals remain one of the Republican party’s most loyal voting blocks, with 80 percent supporting Donald Trump in 2016. The religious right culture warriors took a highly combative stance toward the emerging secular culture. Major culture war figures include Jerry Falwell of Moral Majority (Lynchburg, Virginia), Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network (Virginia Beach), James Dobson of Focus on the Family (Colorado Springs), Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition (Atlanta), and televangelists Jimmy Swaggart (Baton Rouge) and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker (Portsmouth, Virginia).
A second strategy of the Positive World movement was named seeker sensitivity, and was likewise pioneered in the 1970s at suburban megachurches, such as Bill Hybels’s Willow Creek (Barrington, IL) and Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church (Orange County). This strategy was, in a sense, a prototype of the Neutral World movement to come. But the very term “seeker sensitive” shows that it was predicated on an underlying friendliness to Christianity; it’s a model that assumes that large numbers of people are actively seeking. Bill Hybels walked door to door in suburban Chicago, surveying the unchurched about why they didn’t attend. By designing a church that appealed to them stylistically, he was able to get large numbers to come through the doors.
Seeker-sensitive churches downplayed or eliminated denominational affiliations, distinctives, and traditions. They adopted informal liturgies and contemporary music. Seeker sensitivity operated in a therapeutic register; they focused on felt needs. They were approachable and non-threatening. Today, there are many large suburban megachurches of this general type in the United States, which to some extent represent the mainstream in evangelicalism.
How Did the Church Engage Culture During the Neutral World?
In the Neutral World, by contrast, the characteristic evangelical strategy was called cultural engagement. The Neutral World cultural engagers were, in many ways, the opposite of the culture warriors. Rather than fighting against the culture, they were explicitly positive toward it. They did not denounce secular culture, but confidently engaged with culture on its own terms in a pluralistic public square. They believed that Christianity could still be articulated in a compelling way, and that it had something to offer in that cultural environment. These evangelicals tended to downplay flashpoint social issues such as abortion or homosexuality. Instead, they emphasized the Gospel (often in a therapeutic register) and prioritized things such as helping the poor and more specific forms of social activism. They were also much less political than the Positive World Christians—however this distinction broke down in 2016, when many in this group opposed Donald Trump.
The political manifestation of the cultural-engagement approach can be seen in politicians like George W. Bush, who touted “compassionate conservatism” with an evangelicalism less threatening to secular society. For example, less than a week after 9/11, he made the first-ever presidential visit to a mosque to reassure Muslims that he did not blame them or their religion for that attack. He opposed gay marriage but supported civil unions and pointedly said he would not engage in any anti-gay rhetoric. It is important to stress, however, that pastors and other cultural-engagement leaders within the evangelical religious world were typically studiously apolitical. They consciously did not want to be like the religious right.
Most of the urban church world and many parachurch organizations embraced the cultural engagement strategy, and some suburban megachurches have shifted in that direction. Major figures and groups include Tim Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian Church (New York City), Hillsong Church (New York City, Los Angeles, and other global cities), and Christianity Today magazine (suburban Chicago),
What Renn concludes is that the deterioration of the standing of Christianity in the 1970s led to the development of the culture war, and the culture war led to the seeker-sensitive strategies of the later stages of the positive world. The transition to the neutral world then led to the emergence of the cultural engagement strategy. So, now what? How does the church respond to the Negative World?
How Will the Church Engage Culture in the Negative World?
Renn is pleading with the evangelical church to embrace the realities of living in a negative world. In short, he is calling for the church to come up with better strategies of engagement by considering our current reality. Although evangelicals have not yet developed a negative-world ministry strategy, the transition to the negative world has had major consequences for evangelicalism. The shift has put different types and different degrees of pressure on different evangelical groups. Let's frame this discussion by using the gauge of the right and the left to describe political ideology and social philosophy. This will be a way for us to understand two extremes within the current evangelical response.
You can easily see the two extremes within evangelicalism that have emerged. On the left, the progressive side includes some who are explicitly progressive evangelicals, or part of the Christian left. Many will frequently refer to themselves as “ex-vangelicals” who have left evangelicalism, or even Christianity, behind. This group has gone beyond the cultural engagers by becoming, for example, largely LGBTQ-affirming. Remember the trans individual at the top of the Christian music chart - he got a lot of support from prominent Christian artist Derek Webb, who is someone that would fit into this category.
On the right, the conservatives, (largely the “culture-warriors” or “religious right”), that have persisted through the Neutral World, have now evolved toward Trumpism in the Negative World. They have also abandoned some of the historic touchstones of the religious right, (such as a concern for personal morality and character in political leaders), in favor of a more realpolitik, or a practical-over-moral approach. Traditional social issues such as abortion do remain very important to them. As shown in the 2016 exit polls, this group accounts for the majority of evangelicals, and it also includes the most fundamentalists and Pentecostals.
These divisions are ripping churches and other evangelical institutions apart. One reason is that these institutions are not perfectly divided among the various groups. Some fundamentalist churches within evangelicalism may be purely culture-war churches. Some progressive-leaning urban churches under the evangelical umbrella may be almost entirely aligned with the cultural engagers. But other churches are a mix. Evangelicalism is in flux, and its future as a coherent movement is seriously doubted.
In part, this crisis is a result of the failure of evangelicalism to develop strategies that are designed to approach the Negative World; the world where Christians are a moral minority and secular society is actively hostile to the faith. The truth is, the previous strategies are not adequate to deal with today’s realities. I don’t believe that they are irrelevant, but I do think they are insufficient. So, rather than extend existing strategies forward into the future, evangelicals could, (and should), grapple seriously with what it means for them to live in the Negative World. What strategies should be employed for this era? Unlike previous eras, the Negative World necessitates a variety of approaches to match the diversity of situations in which American Christians find themselves. Negative World strategies will have to grapple with the “rise of the nones”: People with no professed religion, who may be unfamiliar with Christianity, and who find it quite odd or even offensive. One-third or more of Americans in the younger generations fall into this category,
Here is some good news: Adaptability is a major part of evangelical history. Each model that I highlighted is evidence of how evangelicalism has adapted to changing times. Christians may indeed be declining and viewed as an unpopular moral minority, but that is no reason to assume that evangelicalism’s day is done. Having adapted so many times before, evangelicals can do it yet again to thrive in the negative world. It will require discernment, courage, commitment to the Holiness of God, humility, and repentance, but it is so worth it.