links for the weekend: a thread of Aaron Renn and Anthony Bradley on the lack of an evangelical elite, the failures of the YRR; and some links on alt-right publishing

Prepare for a bit of a weekend sprawl known as the links for the weekend.

https://firstthings.com/the-problem-with-the-evangelical-elite/

The problem with the evangelical elite is that there isn’t one. All too few evangelical Christians hold senior positions in the ­culture-shap­ing domains of American ­society. Evangelicals don’t run movie studios or serve as editors in chief of major newspapers or as presidents of elite universities. There are no evangelicals on the Supreme Court. There are hardly any leading evangelical academics or artists. There are few evangelicals at commanding heights of finance. The prominent evangelicals in Silicon Valley can be counted on one hand. There are not even many evangelicals leading influential conservative think tanks and publications, despite the fact that evangelicals are one of the largest and most critical voting blocs in the Republican coalition.

 

Two domains are exceptions that prove the rule: politics and business

 

https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/the-problem-with-the-evangelical-elite

Renn has been exploring riffs on these ideas throughout the year, including guest posts from around Substack.  Here’s a guest post by PCA minister Anthony Bradley

https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/evangelicals-cubicle-men

 

Aaron Renn has spent considerable energy documenting the absence of evangelical elites from the commanding heights of American culture. His diagnosis is serious and worth engaging. His Washington Post piece and his longer First Things essay point to weak institutions, thin intellectual networks, and cultural retreat from public life. These observations are accurate as far as they go. But Renn’s framing stops one level too shallow, because it focuses on what evangelical culture lacks rather than on what it systematically and reliably produces. The problem is not an absence. It is an output. Evangelical culture has spent generations overproducing risk-averse men, and risk-averse men do not build, disrupt, or lead at the levels Renn is describing. They fill cubicles.

 

Renn, for his part, suggests that evangelicalism has a business mindset that governs everything they do, the sweaty start-up, the car dealership or local franchise mentality:

https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/the-evangelical-business-mindset

Subtitled, aptly enough “Evangelicals are remarkably good at making money and remarkably bad at turning it into cultural power.”

 

In my essay on the lack of an evangelical elite, I noted that business was an exception that proved the rule. Despite being almost a quarter of the national population, there are few evangelical top academics or artists, university or foundation presidents, but there are many top flight evangelical entrepreneurs and business leaders.

 

This evangelical business success hasn’t translated into cultural influence, however. One reason is that evangelicals are concentrated in profitable but prosaic industries like restaurants, retail, or oil and gas. They rarely run key companies in culture shaping industries like high finance, technology, or major media.

 

One might argue that they’ve been gatekept out of culturally influential domains. I’m sure that’s true to some extent. But the way evangelicals are taught to think about business plays a key role too. Evangelicals have a business mindset problem.

 

Businessman and influencer Nick Huber has crystallized and articulated this mindset in a very clear way through a model he touts called the “sweaty startup.”

 

There’s more but the gist is that evangelicalism fosters a local entrepreneurial culture in its applied ecclesiology and sense of cultural contribution.  The local car dealer and the local evangelical pastor have more in common with each other than either would have with a non-tenured professor in a liberal arts department.  Aaron Renn suggests that it’s not bad that evangelicals have the localist car dealer mentality, necessarily, but this unexamined mentality could explain why they have failed, generation after generation, to generate any lasting cultural impact.

 

Decades ago I remember some guy I met (it was Mark Driscoll) made a point of saying that if you get the young men you get everything (the women, the children, the real estate, the culture, the money) and if you don’t get the young men you get nothing.

 

Well, what has that led to?  When Mark Driscoll disavows having ever meaningfully been connected with the Young, Restless Reformed when he was happy to be featured in the last chapter of Colin Hansen’s book. To go by the reports of how Driscoll has handled things in Scottsdale, Arizona, it sounds as if there is a double bind at the heart of his ministry.  He tells men they need to step up and be ambitious and go change the world everywhere else but within his own church, where he wants them to be cubicle men.   But this was functionally how he ran Mars Hill. 

 

https://anthonybbradley.substack.com/p/doug-wilson-didnt-change-evangelical

 

https://anthonybbradley.substack.com/p/my-response-to-lecraes-john-piper

 

https://x.com/drantbradley/status/2073398272102641846

Brilliant post by @lecrae! Sadly, the YRR movement was a pietistic and revivalist movement. They have never been good at Christian social thought. Had these rappers by formed by Kuyper/Bavinck theologians rather than the Puritan lovers, this wouldn't been a different story.

1:27 PM · Jul 4, 2026

 

I gave up on revivalism back in my late teens when I still self-identified as Assemblies of God!  I do get the idea that American Christians who are fixated on revival and revivalism don’t tend to accomplish a lot by way of metacultural theory and speculation.  And I agree Dutch Reformed theological aesthetics is a rich field for Christians to consider for engagement with the arts.  I’d throw in Gerardus van der Leeuw and Nicholas Wolterstorff and Hans Rookmaaker with some gentle caveats for each I won’t get into here.

 

The thing is, a guy like Doug Wilson can say he’s being the real Kuyperian by being a Christian Nationalist.  I’ve read him off and on for twenty years (not with much enthusiasm, I admit, because I have come to regard him as a preening self-involved bloviating attention whore).

 

But as someone who’s been in PCA and conservative Anglican settings for about 18 years I can both appreciate Anthony Bradley’s critique of the New Calvinists and have some questions whether going all in with Dutch Reformed theology might have been an alternative.  That’s a big counterfactual account and I don’t put stock in counterfactual accounts for geopolitics and denominational politics most of the time.

 

I also wonder whether or not the problem with the New Calvinists was paradoxically that they were all Social Gospel and only Social Gospel.  That Social Gospel skewed center-right to alt-right over the last twenty years—perhaps most notably guys like Doug Wilson and Mark Driscoll self-identify as variations of Christian Nationalist now even as Driscoll eschews the idea that he was a mover and shaker in New Calvinism.

 

Coming up with a New Calvinist variation of Catholic social teaching seemed to be one of the fixations of the YRR movement.  I was at Mars Hill for nine years and didn’t hear about Dutch Reformed thinkers at all … unless you count a Plantinga or two, and I met someone who did work on Cornelius van Til.  But in all my years at Mars Hill (by default a New Calvinist, YRR scene) I don’t remember people talking about, say, theological aesthetics at all.  Wait, a friend of mine who went on to get ordination in a PCA context mentioned Hans Rookmaaker but he was one of the few men I ever met at Mars Hill who, when I think about it now, I thought was actually fit to be a pastor.  He resigned his membership and elder candidacy in the wake of the 2007 terminations of Petry and Meyer and that’s about as much as you need to know.

 

I can’t help but come back to a John Neville Figgis quote:

https://archive.org/details/studiesofpolitic00figgiala

Studies of Political Thought From Gerson to Grotius 1414-162

John Neville Figgis

The Birkbeck Lectures delivered in Trinity College, Cambridge 1900

Cambridge: at the University Press 1916

 

... The existing arrangement of political forces is dependent at least as much upon ideas, as it is upon men's perception of their interests. If we allow little to the theorist in momentary influence we must admit, that his is the power which shapes the "long result of time." The normal value, in fact, of political theories is a "long period value." The immediate significance of an Algernon Sidney or an Althusius is small and less than nothing as compared with a practical politician, like Maurice or Jeffreys. But his enduring power is vast. Hildebrand, Calvin, Rousseau, were doctrinaires, if ever there were such. Yet neither Bismarck, nor even Napoleon has had a more terrific strength to shape the destinies of men. In literature as in life, the thinker may be dull; but it is with a significant dullness. [emphasis added]

 

Evangelicals probably won’t have any elite contribution in the United States because they produce the kinds of men who want everyone to get straight to the point; bring it down to the bottom-line; and get a good ROI within two or three years.  What these kinds of men don’t tend to do, and here I speak from a lifetime of experience, is express any interest in thinking of the ways that reflection on the Trinity in Aquinas and John of Damascus, or Charles Twombly or T F Torrance might be cross-referenced with Jeremy Begbie, Roger Scruton, Theodor Adorno and Jason Yust; and then cross referenced to work by Charles W Mills, Nell Irvin Payntner and Adam Gussow and Leonard Meyer on ways to think about how our preconceptions of musical time and space and pitch systems (thanks to Kyle Gann and the writings of Ben Johnston on that front!) could be used as a way to explore the possibilities of sonata and fugue informed by African American vernacular styles—in other words, showing that it’s possible to write blues sonatas and ragtime fugues to show that Adorno was wrong.

 

For the kind of self-selecting evangelical mover and shaker who is like Mark Driscoll, I know that these kinds of guys would see all that as not “on mission”.  The mission is franchise expansion and return on investment.  Spiritual warfare talk is still subordinated to those kinds of goals.  The possibility that theologians who aren’t even in evangelicalism as such could write a book like Beyond Ontological Blackness is beyond the capacity of the aspiring evangelical thought-leader and influencer to even conceive.

 

I was talking with a friend of mine from the Mars Hill years about a decade ago about how, looking back, it’s like we didn’t realize how many wheels we were pointlessly reinventing.  A good chunk of that pointless reinvention DID come from a lack of familiarity with the Dutch Reformed Christian traditions.  So I’m not actually dissenting from Anthony Bradley’s point about the YRR being too neo-Puritan and not enough Dutch Reformed.  But I could also say that the YRR guys would probably have benefited from reading at least some of the dialectical theologians, too (I’m leaning more Brunner and maybe even a little Bultmann rather than Barth). 

 

I recently slogged through Walter Wink’s Powers trilogy and while I did like some things about it, I was struck by how finally anodyne and American the whole trilogy turned out to be.  When the WASP establishment has crumbled in the wake of the Cold War’s end it remains to be seen whether and how much American evangelicals should want to be members of a cultural elite.  I’ve been saying off and on at my blog for years that pax Americana is over.

 

Dwight Macdonald made a point that has stuck with me about the early 20^th century modernists, that they did not really even see themselves as avant garde. They were trying to break free of the conceptual constraints of Victorian era post-Romantic sentimentality.  I can share an appreciation of a desire to actually break free of the residual Romantic mindset. 

 

Aaron Renn has a point in wondering whether evangelicals will produce a cultural elite, and I wonder if we shouldn’t wonder if the whole world would even want there to be a cultural elite of American socially conservative Christians if they come by way of Vance and Hegseth.  I’ve self-identified as a Burkean conservative resembling Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield (Republican, of a kind that the GOP has had no space for since roughly the time of Newt, let the reader understand).

 

Instead we have situations where Christian conferences have to deal with the blowback of having welcomed niche publishers who have re-published actually Nazi works. 

 

https://protestia.com/2026/06/15/new-christendom-press-under-fire-after-conference-vendor-promoted-hawked-nazi-books-and-pro-white-groups/

 

In keeping with that kind of linkathon theme, Brian Auten has a guest piece at Mere Orthodox reviewing a Routledge book on the origins of the dissident right that might be of interest.

 

https://mereorthodoxy.com/understanding-the-origins-of-the-dissident-right/