He Gave a Name to What Many Christians Feel

U.S.|He Gave a Name to What Many Christians Feel

In the two years since Aaron Renn moved to Carmel, Ind., he has become a kind of unofficial booster for the unusual suburb of Indianapolis.

For Mr. Renn, Carmel is proof that “we can have an America where things still work.” Run by Republicans for decades, with the same mayor from 1996 to 2024, the city has built big and beautifully, often in traditionalist architectural styles. The streets — bikeable and walkable — are almost eerily free of trash. Police officers enforce traffic laws strictly, and drivers behave with a noticeable lack of aggression. It’s Mayberry, or Bedford Falls.

I traveled to Carmel in February to talk with Mr. Renn about the ideas that had made him a new star in conservative Christian intellectual circles. But we ended up spending almost as much time talking about the city. Mr. Renn arranged a tour of the Palladium, a huge limestone state-of-the-art concert hall inspired by classical Greek and Roman temples. He led me into an elaborately decorated local cake shop that he pointed out had received attention from Oprah Winfrey and Disney. Over lunch at a “seasonally influenced” restaurant nearby, he pulled out a sheet of typed notes he had prepared, reminding him of all the other qualities of the city that he wanted to mention.

Mr. Renn loves city life, and has lived in Manhattan, Chicago and Indianapolis. Carmel is different. Here, church bells chime full hymns over the town square. It’s a place where it’s easy to forget Mr. Renn’s best-known idea: his warning to Christians that America is in an era of distinct hostility to believers like them, and that they must gird themselves to adapt to, as the title of his recent book put it, “Life in the Negative World.”

Mr. Renn’s schema is straightforward. Modern American history, he argues, can be divided into three epochs when it comes to the status of Christianity. In “positive world,” between 1964 and 1994, being a Christian in America generally enhanced one’s social status. It was a good thing to be known as a churchgoer, and “Christian moral norms” were the basic norms of the broader American culture. Then, in “neutral world,” which lasted roughly until 2014 — Mr. Renn acknowledges the dates are imprecise — Christianity no longer had a privileged status, but it was seen as one of many valid options in a pluralist public square.

About a decade ago, around the time that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges made same-sex marriage legal nationwide, Mr. Renn says the United States became “negative world." Being a Christian, especially in high-status domains, is a social negative, he argues, and holding to traditional Christian moral views, particularly related to sex and gender, is seen as “a threat to the public good and new public moral order.”