DG Hart on Aaron Renn on evangelicalism and elites

I had heard of Aaron Renn over the years and have generally heard about ideas that I consider bad ideas.  The idea that there’s positive world, neutral world and negative world is untenable to me as a Christian.  In apocalyptic and eschatological terms the current age has always been negative world.  Christianity is not the same thing as Christendom West or East, and so I just can’t take Renn’s categories seriously. When Renn wrote that there is no cultural script for marriage I have to scoff at this proposal because I was part of Mars Hill Church for about eight or nine years and have read evangelical and Reformed writers across about twenty-five years and there’s hardly anything they’re more concerned about than promoting a marriage and family script, unless we’re talking about some variation of political theology.

 

That Renn is on the right isn’t even especially hard to infer.

https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/the-curse-of-the-right

But as with McCarthy, Trump’s flaws risk discrediting many of his ideas, and harming some of his followers and supporters.

The 2020s form of "where are the evangelical intellectuals?" question, and the question of whether there is or can be an evangelical elite in the United States, a sampling from Mere Orthodoxy, Old Life and Aaron Renn's Substack and First Things article

https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-promise-of-a-christian-small-magazine

January 26th, 2026

By Jake Meador

 

... Really, the best way to read Schaeffer is not even to regard him as an intellectual himself, so much as someone who attempted to relate to intellectuals in the same way that someone like Hudston Taylor related to the Chinese. In other words, Schaeffer was less an intellectual himself and more a very sensitive and shrewd missionary to readers of the intellectuals.

 

That reminds me … of something from years ago …

https://mereorthodoxy.com/francis-schaeffer-and-christian-intellectualism

and how D. G. Hart wrote a response to Meador’s older piece saying:

 

https://oldlife.org/2016/08/23/was-francis-schaeffer-an-intellectual/

 

I wasn’t reading Time in 1960 but fifteen years later I was reading Schaeffer and the better description of the apologist is not as missionary to intellectuals but missionary to would-be intellectuals.  …

 

Francis Schaeffer as a missionary to would-be intellectuals is pretty blunt but probably also very true.  

at the Acton Institute, Darryl Hart expresses some skepticism about the coherence and viability of contemporary Christian Nationalism and the credulity with which contemporary academics appraise it

 If you know who D. G. Hart is then this link falls into the "no surprise at all" idiom.

https://www.acton.org/religion-liberty/volume-36-number-1/existential-threat-anti-christian-nationalism

I actually have his book A Secular Faith in my reading backlog, though, and have actually enjoyed some of his books over the years.  His observation that conservatives should've realized the Reagan coalition of anti-communist hawks, libertarians and social conservatives that barely held together during The Gipper's two terms unraveled as soon as Bush Sr. got to the Oval Office seemed like a reasonable assessment.  

Having read some of Martin Marty's work over the last couple of decades, yeah, Hart kind of has a point that Marty was more even-keeled than some newer scholars in seeing that Christian nationalist impulses across the spectrum have always been a mixed bag.  

Then again, had John Neville Figgis' warning about the prominence of the UK having become both a secular state and a pluralist state by 1911 gotten more traction among some Christian scholars ... Christians might not have the same level of panic about "taking back America" these days in some circles as some secularists have about the not entirely surprising persistence of American civic religious impulses in red state regions leaning on Christian tropes.

Walter McDougall's schematic of promised land/crusader state seemed on point highlighting how "everyone" in the U. S. takes the crusader state paradigm for granted since roughly Woodrow Wilson.  The fights seem to be less over whether the United States ought to be a crusader state than what crusade the crusader state should be fighting.

But obviously I've digressed. 

R Scott Clark visits the role of the PCA in formative years for Acts 29 and Mars Hill--there's still a pretty live question whether or not A29 and Spanish River were a tangential "accidental" role in the history of MH

https://heidelblog.net/2021/12/an-overlooked-aspect-of-the-story-pca-influence-on-acts-29-and-mars-hill/

https://presbycast.libsyn.com/deconstructing-2021-and-big-eva-media-wdg-hart

I have felt pretty alone in attempting to discuss the early Acts 29, David Nicholas, Mark Driscoll and what seemed to be a PCA connection (that last part was just not on my radar because I'm just me and only have so much energy and attention). 

I'd hazard a guess that from Driscoll's side of things his earlier influences were John MacArthur and Doug Wilson (clearly if the men served on a panel together representing a rightwing perspective on censorship and the arts in 1992 ... ). David Nicholas didn't seem to come along until a few years into the life of Mars Hill. Cosper seems to have shortchanged us by not saying just how many people he talked to who had accounts of how and why Nicholas and Driscoll parted ways within Acts 29.  What is clearer is Nicholas founded and bankrolled Acts 29 and Mark Driscoll kinda was there to take it over.