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.

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.

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.  

excerpts from John Neville Figgis' Churches in the Modern State

https://archive.org/details/cu31924020347351

John Neville Figgis, Churches in the Modern State (1911 lectures given in Gloucester)

 

...  We cannot eat our cake and have it. We cannot claim liberty for ourselves, while at the same time proposing to deny it to others. If we are to cry "hands off" to the civil power in regard to such matters as marriage, doctrine, ritual, or the conditions of communion inside the Church—and it is the necessary condition of a free religious society that it should regulate these matters—then we must give up attempting to dictate the policy of the State in regard to the whole mass of its citizens. ...

pages 112-113

...

What is clear to me is this fact. Even if some are unconvinced by the arguments for freedom, and look either backward or forward to a day when men shall be organised in society on a basis of religious unity, it must be plain that we do not live in such an age; that there is nothing to be gained by pretending that we do; that whatever unity of opinion may underlie or come to underlie any probable polity, it will not be that body of doctrine which we know as the Catholic Creeds. What we have to face is a hurly-burly of competing opinions and strange moralities—" new thought " from the West, theosophies from the East, Pantheism all round us. Paganism revived, and unbelief in all its arrogance. All we can claim, all we can hope for, is freedom for ourselves as one society among many. It seems to me in a high degree dishonest, and even more imprudent, to go about and proclaim the rights of freedom and variety in the matter of education, if in other matters we seek to deny it. Liberty does not mean the right to punch the heads of those who disagree with you.

pages 119-120

 

Tt is the essence of the Church to be different from the world, and her mission to proclaim that difference. Whenever men try to sanctify the world by raising it to the level of the Church, they commonly succeed only in lowering the life of the Church to accommodate it to the practice of the world. The two centuries which began with Pope Boniface VIII ended with Alexander VI.

pages 133-134 

 

... We must seek to make our theories grow out of and co-ordinate with the life of men in society as it is lived. We must distrust abstract doctrines of sovereignty, with which the facts can be made to square only by elaborate sophistry. Above all, we must be willing to put liberty above other ends as a political goal, and to learn that true liberty will be found by allowing full play to the uncounted forms of the associative instinct. We are fighting not only our own battle but that of the liberty bf all smaller societies against the tendency to mere concentration, which in one way is a marked feature of our time. Much has to be learnt both by ourselves and others from the mediaeval guild system. Further, we must learn to allow to others that liberty we claim for ourselves as a corporate society, and fairly face the fact which I have called "the religious heterogeneity of the modern State." ...

pages 170-171

A lot of what I have seen in Christian Nationalist discourse fits firmly into what Figgis would have called abstract doctrines of sovereignty with which the facts can be made to square with them only by way of elaborate sophistry. The internet has given us an era in which people can bloviate at blogs about theories of sovereignty for regimes which only exist in their own individual and collective imaginations, which is, of course, not the same thing as having to deal with flesh and blood people here in the world.

When Figgis gave these lectures he was considering legal issues related to the fact that Parliament had decided to issue a command that Anglican clergy had to officiate the weddings of divorcees who wanted Anglican wedding ceremonies regardless of what individual clergy thought, believed and felt was most congruent with the teachings of Jesus.  Figgis' appraisal was while Christian clergy had every right to say what rites they would and would not officiate they did not have the right to impose that will on the masses of society at large or to insist that the state compel everyone to go along.  This was back in 1911.  

In other words, Neville Figgis made these observations a bit more than 80 years before the end of the era that Aaron Renn called "positive world". 

Aaron Renn on New Calvinism in 2025--they should recognize they are a not-very-influential subculture, and would be healthier if they stopped trying to play referee for everyone outside their ranks now that their superstars are dead, disgraced or absent from the movement (retired or moved on and such)

Ironically, perhaps, the Mere Orthodoxy link was just a springboard for the Aaron Renn post.

https://mereorthodoxy.com/new-calvinism-in-an-age-of-enchantment-and-ai

Aaron Renn sounds off on the virtue of Boomer self-confidence by way of John Piper and Mark Driscoll, while Louis Menand contended back in 2019 the Boomers consumed pop culture history rather than made it

Someone ran this one by me and it’s too weird to not share.  Aaron Renn has written one of the more bonkers Substack posts I’ve come across in a while.  I was never really a fan of John Piper.  I first heard of him from a number of zealous advocates for his work back in the days when I attended Mars Hill.  A guy was stoked about Confessions of a Christian Hedonist back circa 2000.

 

I was underwhelmed.  Piper seemed to have a lot of people eager to hype him but I wasn’t getting any sense there was something there to fuss about. I was more into reading Gordon Fee and N. T. Wright, Bonhoeffer, I was just discovering Richard Bauckham somewhere in that period of my life.  I guess Piper was supposed to be a big deal but I remember asking a friend of mine who was a Christian studies major what he thought about some idea by Piper and my friend said “Who’s John Piper?” 

 

Over thirty years I have stayed in Reformed circles (though Anglican these days) and the New Calvinist movement, the Young, Restless & Reformed scene, seems to have been both “real” as a media presence and kind of over-hyped, like a “movement’ of men who were sure they were going to shake things up.  Maybe Renn feels that Piper had a big impact.  I am not going to wade into my never-was enthusiasm for Piper or what I found off-putting about him.  No, I only even thought about Piper for the first time in years because Aaron Renn blogged about him at Substack and somehow Piper is an exemplar of Boomer traits.  So …

links for the weekend, riffs on celibacy at Mere Orthodoxy, Freddie deBoer on the mania for the sexual orientation of cartoon characters as a wrong kind of entitlement, Alastair Roberts on the probably not-helpful nature of Aaron Renn's `negative world' taxonomy

A bit unusually for a weekend of posting I decided to retroactively make this the penultimate post of the night rather than the formal close.  I just felt that what I wrote in "You can't fix a cracked window by staring at it through a mirror" is more what I wanted to close the weekend with in publication order even if I 'technically' wrote this links for the weekend later.  That's how choosing a publication time can work.

There's variations on a theme for this one, though in the new iteration of Mere Orthodoxy you might not even be able to read the first link by the time you see this.  Stuff is now visible for a week and if you didn't catch it the week of you have to be a subscriber to read older entries.  Such is not the case with the materials in the chain. 

some doubts about Aaron Renn's "three worlds" taxonomy, reactions to it, and a propensity for evangelicals (and exvangelicals) to fixate on bloviating about just political power and sex as though humanity were nothing but those things

That title kind of signals that this is (I hope) a gentle rant.

I have not been in a rush to blog about this but since I’ve come back to blogging I thought I would finally get this off my chest.  Conservative Christian bloggers have been discussing the “three worlds” expostulated by Aaron Renn over at First Things over the last few years.  Have you never heard of this before?  Well, here you go: