How can Christians livie in a negative world?
Everybody’s been talking about Aaron Renn’s “Three Worlds of Evangelicalism” thesis as well as the various uses to which it’s been put by folks like James Wood and others. The nutshell is that in the pre-1994 U.S., we lived in a “positive world” where being a Christian was a net social positive; post-94-2015ish, it was a “neutral world” where it was, well, a social status neutral. Now, post-2015, we live in a “negative world” where, again, obviously, it’s a social negative. I won’t rehash everything because if you’re reading this, I’m going to assume you’re up on things. In a perhaps predictable “third way” fashion, I’ve been of a both/and, or “this side has a point, but also so do they over here” mindset about it. For someone who has had the opportunity to revisit his own progressive university 16 years after having left it as a student to minister to its students as a pastor, it’s obvious that something has changed. Whether that is simply the furtherance of a trajectory lo...