‘Negative World’: Still A Silly Theory For Silly People

Ruth Graham’s long profile of Aaron Renn for The New York Times has put Renn’s “Negative World” silliness back in the spotlight.

“He Gave a Name to What Many Christians Feel” the headline to Graham’s article says of Renn’s theory. That’s true, provided that you understand “Christians” to mean “white evangelical Christians.”

And also that you understand “many” to mean “extremely divorced old white guys seething with resentment over that time somebody corrected them for saying ‘colored people’ instead of ‘people of color.'”

I’ve written about Renn’s sad-memoir-projected-onto-world-history “theory” several times before, see:

But I still struggle to convey how deeply shallow, narcissistic, self-flattering, incurious, and semi-consciously blinkered this whole construct is. It’s a fourth-rate attempt to imitate H.R. Niebuhr as written by the main character of a fourth-rate imitation John Updike novel.

Here was my first attempt to summarize it, three years ago:

Renn’s scheme proposes a grand sweep of history in which white evangelicalism (conflated throughout with All of Christianity from Antioch to Mara Lago) was first viewed positively (CE 321 to 1994), then briefly neutrally (1994 to 2014), and now negatively (Obergefell and Black Man in White House through the present). It reads a bit like an undergrad paper on Berger’s Sacred Canopy written by an earnest student who, alas, did not finish reading the book or consider the possibility that the conversation may have continued and expanded since that book’s publication in 1967.

It’s the kind of Grand Scheme that makes sense as long as the undifferentiated plurals remain abstract and unexamined and as long as a fuzzy passive voice construct keeps essential nouns and subjects and agents obscured. The kind of Grand Scheme, in other words, that either breaks down entirely or hastily turns into something very different as soon as one asks something like “viewed positively by who?” or “whatcha mean ‘We,‘ kemosabe?” or “What, to the Slave, Is Your Fourth of July?”

Renn’s piece is getting a lot of buzz among institutional white evangelicalism and it’s worth noting as a good example of a growing trend of such pieces circulating there on this theme of “I’m Beginning to Suspect That Not Everyone Perceives Us as Their Moral Betters.”

The idiosyncratic details that make Renn’s variation stand out are those weirdly specific dates of 1994 and 2014. He isn’t suggesting that the lynchpin moments in all of church history were the Major League Baseball strike that spoiled the Expos’ best season and the subsequent release, 20 years later, of Taylor Swift’s 1989. But he may as well have been. He may as well be attributing these purported changes in how “society” perceives all of “Christianity” to the nefarious rise of Elvis. Aron. Presley.

The only things you need to note about Renn’s strange choice of those dates is how very, very recent they are* and how intensely parochial they require this framework to be. I mean, if you managed to exhaust my objections about History & Culture Not Working Like That and about “What part of ‘Give us Barabbas’ don’t you understand?” to the point where I became willing to start attempting to offer specific dates after which “society” came to view Christianity “negatively,” I suppose I’d toss out suggestions like, say, 1789 or 1619 or maybe, again, 321. And if you narrowed down the question to the particular, parochial consideration of white evangelicalism in America as perceived by American popular culture I suppose I’d start answering with a guess like, I dunno, May 2, 1963 or maybe three weeks later, or, at the latest, March 7, 1965.

But what Renn and Hale and their fellow institutional white evangelicals are really getting at here is fuzzier and more subjectively personal than that. They’re talking about a vibe.

This argument really boils down to, “Hey, remember back, years ago when you’d tell the person next to you on a plane that you’re an evangelical minister and they’d react positively? That seems to have changed, somehow, and I’m uncomfortable with that.” It’s the Principal Skinner meme above in essay form (with a handful of half-understood Alasdair MacIntyre references thrown in).

Graham’s article barely scratches the surface of Renn’s theory itself or engages with any of the many criticisms of it: the ignorance and dismissal of 1,975 years of Christian history, the lack of any supporting evidence beyond assertion and furiously spun anecdote, the parochial solipsism of collapsing all of Christianity into white American evangelical Protestantism, the conflation of multiple distinct meanings of “the world,” etc. (I think Graham hints at some of that when she describes Renn as “a kind of Malcolm Gladwell of conservative Christianity,” but I’m not 100% sure that was intended as such a brutal burn.)

But Graham gets down into the subtext, providing some of the biographical details underpinning this “theory.” These are the details that everybody had already guessed about the mid-life crisis that shaped it:

In the wake of his divorce, Mr. Renn said, he was in a low moment professionally and personally. He credits his recovery in part to the “manosphere,” the sprawling network of masculinity influencers that he identified as a serious cultural phenomenon long before it burst onto the national political scene. From a podcast hosted by the right-wing social-media personality Mike Cernovich, he learned about strength training, and began feeling better about his body. From another influencer, he honed his eye contact, a skill he said he was still “maybe not the best at.” He said this just as I was thinking to myself that it was so intense I wasn’t sure how or when to look away.

Phew. The SDE that pervades Renn’s theorizing is something he studied from the masters.

Renn is 55 years old. His Grand Historical Scheme divides all of Christian history into three epochs. The first epoch (pre-1994) takes us through his teen and college years. The second grand epoch of Christian history lasts for only 20 years, until Renn is undeniably “middle aged.” This ushers in the final grand epoch of Christian history, “negative world,” which characterizes Renn’s life in his late 40s and 50s. Is this “theory” about “the world’s” perception of “Christianity”? Or it it about Renn’s anxiety about women’s perception of his attractiveness?

Yes.

And also how his anxiety about his attractiveness to women is linked to his anxiety about his own loss of virility as a proxy for his anxiety about his own increasingly evident mortality.

What he and all the guys enamored with his theory need, more than anything, is for Olympia Dukakis to look them in the eye and tell them, “Cosmo, no matter what you do, you’re gonna die, just like everybody else.”

The whole creepy psychosexual aspect of this also helps us understand another of the frustratingly vapid aspects of Renn’s scheme. It treats “the world’s” perception of Christianity as something causeless and inscrutable, attributable to sudden gusts of worldly hostility and malice toward Christians and wholly uninfluenced by any of the actions, choices, words, or character of those representing “Christianity.”

“The world” here, on one level, is women. Chicks. Babes. Bitches. Like, bro, what do they even want from us? Why are they so negative? Why won’t they let me f/m/k them as I like? Why won’t they submit to my leadership and desires and my biggest fantasy, which is me getting to reject them as revenge for the way they’ve rejected me?

It’s creepy. And even at its least creepy, it still treats “the world”/women as baffling and capricious because it doesn’t respect them enough to listen to the reasons for their positive/negative views.

Graham’s article also shows Renn doing the sleazy “1960s” two-step, defending the assertion that “Christians” were all properly aghast about “the liberal excesses of the ’60s and ’70s.” He insists he’s only talking about the “sexual revolution” there, and that his “Christian” duty and “Christian” vocation of fighting to roll back those “liberal excesses of the ’60s and ’70s” just accidentally resulted in the gradual erosion and repeal of every aspect of the Civil Rights Movement and the current effort — which he enthusiastically supports — to reestablish legal segregation.

Since Renn repeats that transparently racist bullshit in Graham’s article, I’ll repeat what I wrote about it last year:

Christianity Today’s review of Renn’s book says he offers a “framework for describing Christianity’s fall into cultural disfavor since the 1960s.” Here again that elastic cipher — “the 1960s” — prevents white evangelicals from understanding how and why others perceive them negatively. CT and Aaron Renn and all of the white evangelicals wringing their hands about “negative world” tell themselves it’s because of “the 1960s” — meaning hippies, free love, Woodstock, sex, drugs, and rock & roll. If “the world” views them negatively, they think, it’s because “the world” is a dirty hippie.

But that ain’t “the 1960s” that matters here. This is about “the 1960s” meaning the Civil Rights Movement — the “1960s” that forced white Americans to take sides. White evangelicals did exactly that. And they picked the wrong side — the blasphemously immoral side.

And they’ve been doubling down on that ever since.

That strikes most of the world as ugly, immoral, and shameful — as disgraceful in the fullest theological sense.