I was looking forward to reading Aaron Renn’s highly anticipated new book, Life in a Negative World: Facing the Challenges of an Anti-Christian Culture. The book is an expansion of his much-discussed 2022 essay for First things titled “The three worlds of evangelicalism.” Renn’s argues that American culture has become secularized at an increasing rate since the 1960s. He breaks down this secularization into three stages.
Before 1994, American culture had a rather positive view of Christianity. The public square had long been influenced by Christian (especially Protestant) moral values and it was generally admirable for a person to be Christian. Renn calls this the positive world. From 1994 to 2014, as America became increasingly pluralistic, Christianity lost some of its cultural cachet and was seen as a valid option amid a diversity of worldviews. Renn calls this the neutral world. Since 2014, American society has had an increasingly negative view of Christianity. It is no longer considered morally good, or even neutral, to be a Christian who affirms orthodox theology or ethics. Renn calls this the negative world.
Renn’s burden is reflected in the title of his book: he wants to equip committed Christians to navigate public life in the negative world. Orthodox believers now constitute a moral minority. Our calling is not to be culturally relevant or even to transform culture, but rather to be countercultural with the goal of faithfully proclaiming the Gospel and its implications.
Although Renn discusses education in the negative world, he pays more attention to public K-12 education and its alternatives than to higher education. However, his book offers much food for thought for those of us engaged in Kingdom work in Christian higher education.
Renn champions the value of institutional integrity, by which he means both moral excellence and structural soundness. Such integrity involves divine motivations, ethical actions, and reasonably transparent operations. It also requires a missional orientation deeply enough rooted in faith that the institution is willing to be out of step with messy cultural values. Institutions that compromise on integrity experience mission drift. And in God’s economy, drift occurs in only one direction: away from faithfulness.
For evangelical colleges and universities, institutional integrity means a wholehearted commitment to Christian orthodoxy. Schools should adopt statements of faith or similar guiding documents that promote doctrinal and ethical responsibility among school stakeholders. Such accountability is especially necessary for faculty members, who are tempted by the desire for academic respectability within their respective guilds, and for administrators, who are tempted to focus too much on the bottom line or be too reluctant to take risks when it comes to taking a stand. on moral issues that have become controversial in the negative world.
Renn also commends the value of community resilience among believers who are committed to public and faithful witness to the negative world. He recommends that evangelicals adopt a minority mentality, focusing on the flourishing of our own subculture as we seek to offer the hope of the gospel in the midst of an often hostile broader culture. It is in this context that Renn argues for Christian educational alternatives to government-funded primary and secondary schools and defends the value of “counter-catechesis” against worldly thinking.
If Christian colleges and universities are to cultivate community resilience, we must embrace an educational vision rooted in intellectual discipleship. Christian higher education must be animated by a biblical worldview, integration of faith and learning, and faithful engagement with the best of the Christian tradition. Such a vision of higher education is profoundly formative. Evangelical schools must also maintain close ties to their sponsoring church traditions and establish strategic partnerships with like-minded institutions committed to orthodox theology and ethics.
Finally, Renn advocates an ownership mentality that can help promote an institutional anti-fragility capable of resisting pressure from anti-Christian cultural forces. He focuses his discussion on social, cultural and physical ownership in the business world. But Christian higher education would benefit from a strategic ownership mentality, calibrated to thrive in a negative world.
Christian schools should focus their fundraising on increasing scholarships to keep the cost of education within reach of as many students as possible. Scholarships will become even more important if Christian schools lose access to federal funds because of our commitment to a biblical view of gender, sexuality, and marriage. This is also why it is a bad idea tax the endowments of private universities.
In the negative world, Christ-centered higher education will be even more important to the advancement of the Kingdom. We must be prepared to be marginalized by cultural elites and perhaps even persecuted by those whose erroneous worldview leads them to believe that the negative world is a positive good. But if we remain true to our mission and agile in our strategies, we can provide a countercultural education that glorifies God and prepares graduates to thrive in a wide variety of vocations.
