Positively Pagan

Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture by Aaron Renn

Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come by John Daniel Davidson

reviewed by J. Douglas Johnson

Two new books appeared recently that got me thinking so much about their implications that I asked both authors to speak at our 2024 Touchstone conference.

The first is Aaron Renn’s Life in the Negative World, which is a follow-up to a 2022 article he wrote for First Things, “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism.” Both Renn’s article and his book have received considerable attention, and his book has the potential to frame how Christians and non-Christians think and talk about American Christianity in the coming years.

The most enduring Christian works of the last century, such as Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man, C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, and Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, have all begun and ended on the note struck in Weaver’s first sentence: “This is another book about the dissolution of the West.” Weaver published those words in 1948, a year that many of us today would associate with the zenith of American culture. Lewis and Weaver were describing where cultural dissolution was heading; Renn announces that we’ve arrived, through three phases.

The trajectory Renn describes applies to the United States over the past sixty years, a period he segments as follows:

• Positive World (1964–1994), when society had a relatively positive view of Christianity.

• Neutral World (1994–2014), during which roughly the same number of people saw Christianity as a negative thing as saw it in a positive light.

• Negative World (2014–present), when Christianity has, for the first time in our country’s history, mostly been seen as bad, immoral, and imposing a threat to the nation and the world in general.

Evangelical Remedies

What sets those earlier eras apart from today is that in past times, no one, not even most non-believers, viewed or could imagine Christianity as a morally bad thing. The question was almost beyond comprehension.

But later, in the still-positive-world 1980s, conservative Evangelicals saw a strong cultural decline amid a still-Christian-majority culture and got behind Jerry Falwell Sr.’s Moral Majority. The Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition were primarily political movements bent on saving the nation, with confidence that the numbers were there to pull it off.

J. Douglas Johnson is the executive editor of Touchstone and the executive director of the Fellowship of St. James.

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more on America from the online archives

30.5—Sept/Oct 2017

Passions' Republic

The Christian Cure for What Ails Modern Politics by David Bradshaw

29.2—March/April 2016

Family Phases

The History of Family Strength in America May Reveal Good News by Allan C. Carlson

29.4—July/August 2016

Deep Roots

Russell Kirk: American Conservative by Bradley J. Birzer by Hunter Baker