two links for the weekend: Aaron Renn has the stupid idea that there should be a playbook for marriage, Anthony Bradley says that the era of private Christian colleges is ending soon

So, a short links for the weekend in terms of links.

https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/playbook-for-marriage

There's a Playbook for College. There Should Be One for Marriage.

The costs of putting off marriage and children don't show up for decades — and by the time they do, the window to choose otherwise has often closed.

Aaron M. Renn

Jun 03, 2026

 

Not only has there been a playbook for marriage, it has been one of the only things relentlessly sold from pulpits and Christian publishers for half a century at the level of popular literature.  Even just within my own lifetime and picking one self-selected celebrity preacher, Mark and Grace Driscoll have cranked our Real Marriage (2012), Real Romance (2023) and Real Relationships (2025). At the start of 2026 it struck me that I had been reading Mere Orthodoxy for literally twenty years and its two tracks were variations of political theology and Baylor grad school program variations of what Mark Driscoll (via the pseudonym William Wallace II) called “using your penis”.  The idea that there needs to be a playbook for marriage seems absurd. 

 

I had already had my doubts about the salience of Renn’s taxonomy of positive world, neutral world, and negative world.  Such a taxonomy automatically fails to account for the millennia of apocalyptic literary idioms that have shown up in Abrahamic religions.  But for Renn to write in 2026 as though there needs to be a playbook for marriage as though no playbooks have been on offer seems ridiculous.

 

The problem is that plenty of people can’t afford to play by that playbook. 

 

Churches have not been very good about formulating a playbook for the people for whom the “window” of choosing to get married never even opened. 

 

It may be that within the confines of metacultural punditry it doesn’t occur to guys that there can be decade after decade of “Don’t awaken love until it desires” combined with “America is going to hell because young people are putting off marriage.”  This kind of double bind has been more of the story of my life than I would really like to elaborate. 

 

https://anthonybbradley.substack.com/p/the-evangelical-college-era-is-over

I Watched an Evangelical College Die From the Inside

The autopsies blame leadership. The autopsies are wrong and conducting more of them won't save the next one.

Anthony B. Bradley

Jun 02, 2026

…

Here it is plainly: the evangelical college system that emerged after World War II is structurally finished. Not declining. Not under pressure. It’s a wrap y’all and we’re going to see many Christian colleges close over the next few years. What we are watching across the country is systemic unraveling. The conditions that made these institutions possible have changed, and most of them are not coming back.

This is a structural argument, more so than an anecdotal one. Every declining system produces visible outliers. Late-stage contraction often concentrates enrollment in a shrinking number of institutions as weaker ones disappear. The presence of thriving schools does not refute this analysis some would argue that actually confirms it. Growth inside a collapsing pipeline is not evidence of health. It is evidence of consolidation, mergers, and shifts in brands.

The question before Christian higher education is not how to reverse something that cannot be reversed. The question is what faithfulness to God and neighbor requires inside a reality we did not choose.

…

…

Evangelical colleges were never designed to operate as standalone businesses. They were embedded in a dense ecosystem of denominations, local churches, and families that functioned as a coordinated pipeline. Parents sent their children to these schools because the church had shaped them to value this kind of education. Pastors recommended these institutions because they saw them as extensions of the broader Christian formation project.

 

That ecosystem has evaporated. Non-denominational churches, now the dominant expression of American Protestantism, are locally oriented and institutionally unconnected. They do not have the structural investment in higher education that denominational systems once maintained. Add to this the decline of students wanting to be pastors, the collapse of ministry as a culturally honored career path, and the reality that pastoral compensation has not kept pace with the cost of an advanced degree, and you have a broken pipeline at every stage.

…

 

 The long-term viability of private Christian education has been a topic that is probably more salient to those who are within it but it's interesting to me.  I did go to a private Christian university decades ago and while I was glad to have been educated there I also wouldn't think of suggesting anyone actually go to a private Christian university simply because of the expense of it.  Seminary is another matter but there's a whole different kettle of fish on that.  

I think back to how Mark Driscoll wanted his movement to start a Bible college. That was back in the Mars Hill years.  Well, Mars Hill has been gone for more than a decade and while a good number of the spin-off campuses in the wake of the demise of Mars Hill are still functioning that Bible college thing didn't pan out and neither did the music label.

To go by the recent reports of a split within The Trinity Church, Team Driscoll decided that personal charisma and apprenticeship beat book learning right up to the point that the apprentice reportedly turned on the master.  I guess that's the way of Sith lords in the Star Wars lore?  

UPDATE 9:51pm

Apropos of nothing, I do have a response post incubating for Ethan Hein's very fun post on Aretha Franklin and Gospel but I do a lot of reading for those kinds of posts.  I grew up Pentecostal and so I don't just have thoughts about that church upbringing with respect to musical cultures, I am also reading books by Adam Gussow and Andrew Hickey podcast transcriptions (relieved to report that he gets the big points about Pentecostalism right enough I don't need to be picky about the smaller details).  

When I have been thinking about the kinds of binary impasses Ted Gioia wants music to overcome I think music is where the binary impasses can seem worst.  The triple impasse in music scholarship seems to go something like this elite high liturgical white Anglo-Catholicism set against lumpenproletariat black storefront church Pentecostalism; a.k.a. personal sacramental gnosis vs group spirit possession.  I don't see that these dualisms have to be regarded as impermeable.  That's because I'm half Native American and half white through my dad and mom, at one personal level; but also by dint of having been influenced by Reformed/Calvinist theology on dad's side and Pentecostalism on mom's side.  I've been threading needles on stuff like this my whole life and certainly it's full of intellectual, cultural and artistic challenges but I think that breaking past the stereotypologies fed into LLMs can be done.  

It's fascinating to read how there was animosity towards blues and guitar music in the black Protestant mainlines that basically didn't exist in the black Pentecostal tradition.  There could be tons of research done in that whole field of topics!  I'm still reading Sacred Steel, though, and so my response post isn't ready yet.  :(  Ethan, if you read this post I have to belatedly say that Robert L Stone's book is fun reading for the history of the lap steel and steel guitar traditions alone, but Stone has also turned out to do a great job of breaking down how collaborative Pentecostal musical traditions are at what would be called epiclesis in rank scholastic terms.  :)  You might have read the book already, though.

I still have to get my copy of William Dargan's great book on lining out traditions in Black Methodist and Baptist churches back from the music director at my church.  That'll happen at some point.

Er, anyway, truly tangential riffs.