For those not familiar with the phrase “negative world,” it comes from Aaron Renn who wrote a piece for First Things in early 2022 titled, “The Three Worlds of Evangelism.” He lays out his assessment of where American culture was at the time:
As I laid out back in 2017 and refined for my recent article in First Things, I divide the period from the 1960s to today into three phases distinguished by the way official American culture viewed Christianity: the positive, neutral, and negative worlds.
In the negative world, which we live in now and in which came into existence around 2014, official culture now views Christianity negatively. To be known as a Christian is a social negative in the elite domains of society, and Christian morality is expressly repudiated and treated as a threat to the new moral order of society.
I would argue it officially goes back to 2008 with Obama’s election, but by 2014 negative world was entrenched in all areas of elite American culture and government. This is true throughout the West because when America sneezes, the world catches a cold, and Western culture and the Anglosphere had it bad.
According to Renn, Americans and American culture saw Christianity as a net positive for society through the 1980s. Christians were generally viewed positively in the culture. He says that began to change in the 90s into what he calls neutral world, where Christianity was seen as neither good nor bad, just one religious choice among many, as long as it stayed personal within the church or the home. Even before Obama was elected he had to pay lip service to whatever Christian faith he possessed, and politically felt the need to leave the church of the Marxist, “God damn America,” pastor Jermiah Wright. Then with his election, and the leftist radicals who filled his administration, Christianity became the enemy of all that was decent and good. That was always the plan of the “Community Organizer” and his Marxist desire to “fundamentally transform the United States of America,” as he said near the end of the 2008 election. America was born a Christian nation full of bigotry and hatred and misogyny, and that just wouldn’t do for the Utopia he had in mind. As the “transformation” in government and law started, the media made sure it became entrenched in the culture as well.
I became a Christian in the fall of 1978, as those of you familiar with my writing know because I say it all the time, and after finding Francis Schaeffer a year or two later realized I was a conservative. Being a Christian who is, as they called us at the time, a “social conservative,” I was painfully aware of the media biased against people like me. The idea of objective journalism was a 20th century invention starting with Edward R. Murrow who became famous reporting on World War II from Europe, eventually making the transition to TV in the early 1950s. He was every journalist’s hero, including Walter Cronkite who was on in our house every night during the 60s and 70s. He would famously end his broadcasts with an affirmation of Murrow type objectivity claiming, “That’s the way it is,” and giving the date. Of course the mainstream media was never objective, and when Rush Limbaugh came on the air on August 1, 1988, it was a shock to conservatives all over the country. Someone on national radio who is a conservative? He mocked liberals for over 30 years and unmasked their bias every weekday until the Lord took him too soon.
Until Obama, the media played the game nobody believed, that they were objectively reporting the news. If they were accused of bias, they would call their accusers “right wing extremists.” Funny how there has never been a reference to “left wing extremists” in the media, ever. With Obama, the veneer of objectivity was officially dropped, the mask not just taken off but thrown to the floor and stomped on for good measure. The media now showed its true leftist stripes, but still pretended they were down the middle, until Trump, when they effectively became Pravda, an embodiment of 1984’s Ministry of Truth. This is not anecdotal or just my opinion either; we can measure this empirically.
In the Spring 2020 journal Academic Questions, Dr. David Rozado did a word frequency usage study on New York Times articles written between 1970 and the end of 2018. He was looking for progressive/Marxist buzzwords used by groups with an ideological agenda. He discovered in 2010 and the years following such words and phrases exploded in frequency. There are numerous charts in the article graphically displaying the jump in terms such as climate change, sexism, patriarchy, transphobia, homophobia, white supremacy, and so on. Apparently, all these things became such critically important issues around 2010 that America’s “paper of record” found it necessary to endlessly report upon them. In fact, they were doing what the left always does, driving “the narrative,” but in this case it went into overdrive. Joseph Goebbels would have been impressed.
If the media bias in the Obama Era was becoming undeniable, it went full-on steroids when Trump came on the scene. Because of Trump, the term “Fake News” stuck, but fake doesn’t begin to describe the blatant lying which has been the media’s stock in trade ever since. Everything started to be seen through the lens of hurting Trump or not, which was fine for most liberals because, well, Trump. But for many honest liberals who are not leftists, who still believe in and care about truth, this move by their media buddies, normal allies, was raising red flags. Woke culture, long tyrannical on college campuses, was taking over newsrooms and corporate board rooms. Covid and the 2020 election season, with the silencing of free speech and big tech de-platforming, made the globalist totalitarian nature of the threat to Western civilization undeniable to a growing number of liberals, let alone conservative Christians. The narrative now became, Christians bad, Christians immoral, Christians unenlightened, Christians homophobic, Christians anti LGBTQ+, or whatever, Christians racists, Christians narrow minded, Christians tyrannical, Christians bad, bad, bad! Negative world was in full flow.
The Overnight Transition to Positive World, Or Not
The one day I reference in the title was November 5, 2024, with the election of Donald Trump to his second term in office, only the second president in American history to serve two non-consecutive terms in office, the other being Grover Cleveland in that late 19th century. While “the vibe,” as we say nowadays, has certainly shifted in a positive direction toward sanity, vibe shifts in culture don’t happen in one day. The cultural and intellectual influences of wokeness given to us by cultural Marxism have been developing in their current form since the 60s, inspired by a group of intellectual Marxists in the 1920s and 30s called. The woke revolution only seemed to have happened quickly, but this toxic mentality had been brewing for some time even though almost overnight it came to dominate cultural and governmental elites and their media allies. It was never as strong or widespread as it appeared because only a tiny minority of the cultural and political elites are true believers. How did woke become discredited so quickly when it seemed so strong? A move back to positive world for Christianity is part of the reason, which didn’t seem to be a possibility too long ago.
Most of us remember the so called New Atheists who were active in the first decade of the century bringing their old worn out arguments against God and Christianity to a Western culture disconcertingly receptive to it. Seemingly everywhere, they sprouted messages like, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, in the title of Christopher Hitchens’ book. I had just started a blog in 2004, and their spouting’s were often topics of my rants. But something funny happened on the way to their God-less, secular Utopia. They disappeared. Justin Brierly, who was host of the popular long running podcast, Unbelievable? Published a book in 2023 with the provocative title, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again. In hindsight it isn’t all that surprising.
I wrote about this in some depth in my book Going Back to Find the Way Forward if you’re interested in a more detailed explanation, but briefly, secularism, a several hundred year experiment in human history, proved to be a colossal failure. It was based on two lies. One called the myth of neutrality presumes a society could be irreligious, which is impossible because human beings are by nature religious beings who live by faith. Vishal Mangalwadi in his wonderful book, The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, states an unalterable fact of existence:
Every civilization is tied together by a final source of authority that gives meaning and ultimate intellectual, moral, and social justification to its culture.
What is secularism’s final source of authority? That’s not a hard one to answer: The state! Which has become readily apparent in the last 15 years, especially with a fake pandemic.
The other lie is that religion, specifically Christianity, is what causes division and violence in a society and wars among nations, not sinful self-centered human beings. Developing in the age of the so-called Enlightenment, secularism promised a God-less nirvana, and produced nothing but misery, suffering, and death, including an America where 50,000 people every year successfully kill themselves, and triple that number try. Not to mention the massive number of people on anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medication. By the time woke came on the scene and was in the process of discrediting everything the left-liberal-progressives ever believed, secularism was sucking air, on its deathbed, and soon to be dead. Of course it isn’t going anywhere soon because culture’s don’t fundamentally change quickly, but Christianity and Christians are now getting the attention culturally once given to atheists, especially as the Internet and social media have become ubiquitous. Even some of those angry “New Atheists” are declaring themselves to be “cultural Christians,” something we could never have imagined 15 years ago.
The change toward “positive world” started happening because of a transformational event, Donald Trump coming down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his run for the presidency. This caused a hysterical reaction from the left, and driven by Trump Derangement Syndrome, wokeness came out of its shell with a vengeance like a rabid dog with rabies, foaming mouths and all. At the same time all of this was happening, secularism as I said was showing its age, and itself being exposed for the fraud it always was. As my book was an exercise of grappling with this event and its stunning aftermath, I started it with this sentence:
When Donald Trump started his descent down the escalator at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, there was a rip in the space-time continuum.
For me and millions of others, Trump’s trip down that escalator began a dizzying red pill journey. And it wasn’t just the failure of secularism setting the table for this, but also the character of the American people. As we go back to the founding of this country, we see a unique series of historical events. It starts with the Puritans fleeing persecution in England from the 1620s into the 1640s coming to America, and a British people founding a country while developing a civilization on a wild and dangerous continent. Nothing like it had ever been done in the history of the world, and it produced a one-of-a-kind people and nation. Because of their unique character, Americans en mass could never be turned into communists, even through the Great Depression, nor into woke leftist who hate their country in the 21st century. This was the big mistake of the left, thinking average Americans were like them and buying what they were selling. Not a chance.
I realized this after I graduated from Arizona State University in 1982. Even then America-hating leftists were common among the faculty, especially in the social sciences. It was common enough that later in the decade after getting my masters at Westminster Theological Seminary, I decided against getting a Ph. D because I didn’t want to deal with the widespread liberalism in academia. I kept my college experience throughout my life as I got older, and it would bubble up every Fourth of July celebration while I attended fireworks celebrations in the communities in which we lived. I would look around at the multitudes and think to myself amid all the red, white, and blue festivities, “There is no way any of these people hate America like the lefties do.” And my unpleasant experiences with liberal professors would flood back into my mind’s eye.
I had become increasingly positive and optimistic in the run-up to the ’24 election season and finishing the book. The entire book is an argument for God being the author of all of it, which is why the subtitle is, Trump, a Great Awakening, and the Refounding of America. The question I was trying to answer in my argument is, why? Why was all this happening? The answer is God’s providence at our unique time in redemptive history.
Personal and Societal Flourishing in Positive World
Unlike secularism which had a nice several hundred year run but is now bankrupt, Christianity is only 2,000 years in and just getting started. It doesn’t hurt that it is the truth about the ultimate nature of reality, and the only answer to the conundrum of life daily delivering on its promises of meaning, hope, and purpose for a humanity desperately needing it. Not to mention its massive explanatory power, meaning Christianity enables us to take the puzzle pieces of life and fit them together in a way that makes sense of the bigger picture of existence. But it’s far more than merely psychological and emotional power to make sense of life for us; it is transformational at the very heart of our being. In other words, the changes aren’t just on the surface, some rudimentary outward changes in our habits, mere morality. The change is ontological, the transformation of our inner being, who we are. This is most powerfully illustrated by God’s revelation through the prophet Ezekial, specifically chapters 36 and 37.
God is proclaiming Judgment on Israel for its evil deeds, and in the middle he promises to save them from their own sin in this powerful image pointing to their ultimate redemption in Christ:
24 For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. 25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. 26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.
Although there is historical referent in these chapters for God bringing Israel back to the land, the image is about far more than a people in a plot of land. Rather, it’s about the transformation of God’s people Jesus came to save (Matt. 1:21). Jesus is at the right hand of God reigning “above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that can be named” (Eph. 1:18-23), and by his authoritative power transforms spiritually dead hearts of stone to spiritual living hearts of flesh living to the Glory of our great God. He sent his Holy Spirit to make sure of it. Put starkly, secularism can’t compete, nor can any other religion. And the Lord makes the point even more strongly by giving Ezekiel a vision of a valley of dry bones, very dry bones. Before his eyes these bones are slowly clothed in flesh, then God breathes life into them, and they come back to life as a vast army. That, brothers and sisters is us!
This third decade of the 21st century is a time of revealing contrasts. One side is God-less, be it in its virulent woke version, or just your average agnostic American going about their daily lives. This we call secularism. To see how pathetic this is, watch any TV show or movie dealing with the deep, existential issues of life where God is persona non grata, unwelcome and invisible. Without God in Christ, all you get is the blind leading the blind, life as a Woody Allen movie leading to despair or resignation. On the other side is Almighty God revealed to us in creation, Scripture, and Christ. This option brings ultimate and eternal meaning, hope, and purpose to life through a Savior who in the prophetic words of Isaiah tells us over 700 years before it happened what Jesus of Nazareth did for us, his people:
4 Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
6 All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
This story, this narrative, the miracle of the incarnation in Christmas, to the inconceivable suffering of the cross, to the hope of the resurrection in Easter, is again grabbing people in a powerful way exactly because of the death of secularism. It offers but failed promises, while Christianity is the only option available to humanity for true personal and societal flourishing. It delivers. As America’s Founders knew, obedience to God’s law is the means of blessing, and the American republic could only succeed with a religious, i.e., Christian people. It is positive world again, and that gives us a chance to Make America Christian Again!
Show notes:
https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/the-three-worlds-of-evangelicalism-7fc
https://www.amazon.com/Life-Negative-World-Confronting-Anti-Christian/dp/0310155150
https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/what-caused-the-negative-world
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/a_window_on_the_orwellian_dystopia_of_america_.html
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