In February 2022, First Things published an article titled “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism.” Written by management consultant and author Aaron Renn, the piece argued for a new schema to describe the decline of Christianity in modern America, one depicting that decline in terms of status. Subscribing to orthodox evangelicalism in 2024 is low status. How did we get here?

Renn’s thesis in that article would become his new book, Life in the Negative World. In it, he fleshes out the “three worlds” of evangelical Christianity: the positive world, the neutral world, and the negative world. In the positive world, roughly from the 1960s to the early 1990s, being a Christian gave one prestige and non-Christians were viewed with suspicion. This era was followed by the neutral world, from around 1994 to 2014, when being a Christian no longer bestowed positive benefits but neither did it make one an outcast. The neutral world was followed by the negative world, the one in which we now live. In the negative world, the same faith that once made an American man great is his greatest stigma. 

While Renn is not the first to argue that American Christians are at a disadvantage in recent years, he is one of the first to propose a timeline for how this change has occurred, laying out concrete incidences of how Christianity has been treated economically, socially, politically, and institutionally before and after each era of decline.