The Aaron Renn Show

The most consequential conservative Protestant victory of the last 100 years was likely the battle to expel liberal theology from the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod's Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. 

Concordia Seminary was the center of modernist theology in the LCMS, and its faculty ignored numerous denominational resolutions against their position. When a newly elected conservative leadership in the denomination suspended Concordia Seminary's president, 90% of the faculty and most of the students walked out. The LCMS let them go and rebuilt the seminary from nearly nothing. The liberals created their own institution, the Concordia Seminary in Exile, or Seminex, which failed after only about a decade. Also, 200 liberal congregations left the LCMS and created a new, liberal denomination that ultimately merged with today's Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

In this battle, the opposite of every similar episode to date, the conservatives won and the liberals departed, leaving the LCMS the conservative denomination we know today. This battle was a key inspiration for the similar conservative resurgence effort in the SBC.

Rather than studying institutional losers like Gresham Machen, today's conservative Christians would be better served to study examples like Seminex where conservatives actually won.

The Concordia-Seminex Affair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seminex

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Conservatives have long tended to underestimate the value of institutions, and to get out maneuvered by liberals in institutional battles. As a result, it's usually conservatives who exit from institutions in order to form new ones. But because nothing has changed with them, their new institutions frequently undergo a reprise of the same problems that plagued the original ones they left.

The proposed United Methodist Church split is a good example of conservative thinking on institutions. Although the conservatives won the previous rounds of denominational votes, it is they are who are heading for the exists and leaving all the denominational infrastructure in the hands of the liberals.

Their split protocol is also a terrible deal for conservatives. It establishes the liberal position by default, and sets possible supermajority thresholds at every level to get out. This suggests many fundamentally conservative congregations will end up trapped in a now officially liberal denomination with no way out.

United Methodist Split Protocol: https://www.umnews.org/en/news/diverse-leaders-group-offers-separation-plan

Indianapolis Plan for Separation: https://indyplanumc.org/

This week's episode is a look at how major coastal elite cities have created an economic model that depends on the exploitation of a largely immigrant labor class who serve the wants and needs of the upper middle class in these cities. 

Urban dwellers heavily rely on minority or immigrant nannies, nail technicians, maids, Uber drivers, food delivery workers, laundry people, etc.  Rarely are these people paid a living wage. Many of them are not even employees, with zero benefits, and who are illegally paid cash under the table. And unlike with the Ellis Island generation of immigrants, many, perhaps even a majority, of their children and grandchildren will not experience upward economic mobility. The growth of this model with an upscale class at one end and an exploited labor class at the other has fueled political discontent, with rising left-wing populist politics and the election of people like NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio who explicitly campaigned on a theme of "two New Yorks," one rich, one poor.

Members of upscale churches in these cities often depend on and profit from this system of labor exploitation. And their pastors talking about justice do not often speak against this system.

No one is more associated with the rise of the urban church than Tim Keller, founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in NYC. Increasingly, however, Keller has been a source of controversy and target of criticism online.  What accounts for this? Is Tim Keller selling out?

Tim Keller's actions today need to be seen in the context of his entire ministry. Keller has proven himself over many decades by serving faithfully in a small town church for seven years early in his career, not publishing any books until his 50s, being willing to start Redeemer at a time when every rational person would have said he was crazy, and demonstrating high levels of competence in what he's doing. He's also shown generosity to those less famous than himself.

The root of Keller's problems today stem from a change in the times. The link below talks about the three eras of Christianity in modern America, the positive, neutral, and negative world. His ministry was perfectly tailored to the neutral world, but after the transition to the negative world he's become increasingly ineffective as he keeps pushing his neutral world formulas into a negative world context.

Keller will hopefully survive his fight with cancer. Assuming he does, he has many years of fruitful work ahead of him as a minister. But should he continue pushing neutral world themes as a public intellectual in today's world, there's a risk he could damage his reputation. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and former Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar provide cautionary examples of what could go wrong.  Hopefully Keller manages to avoid their missteps.

The positive, neutral, and negative world: https://themasculinist.com/the-masculinist-13-the-lost-world-of-american-evangelicalism/

Catholic neoreactionary writer The Social Pathologist drew on the work of G.K. Chesterton to note how and de facto form of Buddhism had grown in the Christian church, more as a result of a loss of balance or a particular temperament or feeling than outright theological error. 

This manifests itself concretely in many parts of both the Catholic and Protestant Churches today, including the urban church. We see it in how any desire that causes people to become upset can be defined as a form of idolatry. This is true especially for the supposed "idolatry of the family."  A large number of people, especially women, in churches who deeply desired to be married and have children did not. Their grief over this is not evidence of idolatry but of legitimate loss. Similar things are true of teachings about dealing with things such as career failures or not getting into someone's desired college.

In essence, to be very hurt or upset by desires unfulfilled is treated as evidence that we've put our hope in something other than Christ. The answer is thus to purge ourselves or desire or to moderate them to low levels so that this does not happen. Thus the path of righteousness is similar to the Buddhist emptying oneself of desire

The Social Pathologist on Christian Buddhism
Part One: https://socialpathology.blogspot.com/2019/06/christian-buddhism.html
Part Two: https://socialpathology.blogspot.com/2019/07/christian-buddhism-ii.html
Part Three: https://socialpathology.blogspot.com/2019/07/christian-buddhism-iii.html
Part Four: https://socialpathology.blogspot.com/2019/07/christian-buddhism-iv.html

The Litany of Humility: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/christianity-rachel-held-evans-the-power-of-being-wronged/

In this concluding episode of the series "Urban World, Urban Church" we look at several odd things about the urban church.

The first is how nationalism is increasingly disparaged in Christian circles today, while urban church people want us to strongly identify with our city. How many sermons or articles have warned about making an idol out of the city vs. making one of your nation? They seem to be encouraging us to transfer our allegiance from our country to our city.

The second is how the urban church world is very focused on starting new churches, while rarely trying to renew old ones. This is very odd in light of how they often explicitly transform an entire city. Can you transform a city of you can't transform a church? The Catholic Church is an exception in this regard, having successfully transformed many parishes as neighborhood demographics changed.

The third is how tribal these urban church groups seem to be. At the elite levels, they seem to have virtually nothing to do with each other (e.g., Redeemer NYC and Hillsong NYC) and avoid even commenting on each other.  They argue against nationalism by saying that our identity as fellow Christians should trump other loyalties, yet they seem to not even be in active fellowship with the church down the street.

Donald Trump shined a light that exposed a fundamental rift inside Evangelical Christianity which was previously hidden to most people. This shows the value of events that divide people in unexpected ways; they allow us to gain unexpected insights.

In identifying himself with the anti-Trump Evangelicals, Christianity Today CEO Tim Dalrymple acknowledges that the urban church elites, although they have achieved high socio-economic status, have failed to achieve cultural influence. 

Contra Dalrymple, these churches have frequently explicitly sought to obtain cultural influence, which is revealed in their transformationalist vision statements around bringing "cultural renewal," "wholeness," etc to cities.  While they've achieved a lot in other areas, they have not made much progress here. Instead, they have primarily acquired power and influence over the rest of Evangelicalism, which they are using to remake it in their own image.

Tim Dalrymple: Why Evangelicals Disagree on the President: https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/november-web-only/trump-election-politics-church-kingdom.html 

Tim Dalrymple Tweet: https://twitter.com/TimDalrymple_/status/1323025271226847234 (archived at: https://archive.is/FEBR1 )

The Testosterone-Cortisol Ratio: http://www.aaronrenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/The-Masculinist-29-The-Testosterone-Cortisol-Ratio.pdf

Contrary to the popular belief that elite global cities are extremely secular, they are often much more religion-friendly than commonly advertised. New York City in particular is very friendly to religion and may be what journalist Tony Carnes has labeled "the first post-secular city."  In particular, there large Christian populations in immigrant and ethnic communities that can go completely unnoticed by many. There may be as many as 1.2-1.6 million Evangelical Christians in NYC, mostly in these under the radar groups.

The religious heritage and environment of each city is distinct, so blanket conclusions can't be drawn about their friendliness to Christianity.  But it's a mistake to assume that these places must be highly secularized.

A Journey Through NYC Religions: http://nycreligion.info/

An Evangelical Revival in the Heart of New York: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/nyregion/central-park-festival-to-highlight-new-yorks-vibrant-evangelical-movement.html

Christian Cultural Center: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/style/reverend-ar-bernard-new-york-megachurch.html

One characteristic of large coastal, elite cities, and their international brethren, is high population churn in their gentrified precincts. People are constantly moving out, with new arrivals coming in behind them.

This high turnover has several implications for the churches there. One is that they have to be constantly attracting new members in order to avoid shrinking. Another is that it's very difficult for them to sustain community.

In general, it's more difficult for people to make an sustain long term, deep friendships and personal connections in those cities than it is in most places. They are good places to move for certain kinds of people: the young, people originally from there or from a nearby town, wealthy people, and people with personality types that allow them to live mostly autonomously. 

The people in these cities are shallowly rooted, as we saw during the pandemic when large numbers of their most affluent residents abandoned them. This calls into question how real the notion of "in the city for the city" really is.

Escape from New York: https://arpitrage.substack.com/p/escape-from-new-york

Joan Didion's essay "Goodbye to All That" can be found in her book Slouching Toward Bethlehem.  

Because elite cities have such a big role in creating and shaping culture, it's easy for Christians in them to fall into a theology of pride. They can end up believing not only that they are doing more important work than Christians but that they are better in many ways too.

We'll examine this by looking at how James Davison Hunter's book To Change the World flatters the urban church world, how the urban church uses "third way" rhetoric to implicitly position themselves as better people than flyover country Christians, how the church church validates rather than challenges the way people in big cities are living their lives, and how seldom the church ever speaks prophetically about the sins of elite city industries like finance or entertainment.

Works referenced:

Kathy Keller on lessons learned from 30 years of ministry in New York: https://medium.com/redeemer-city-to-city/lessons-learned-from-30-years-in-ministry-e580d4afb846

James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: https://www.amazon.com/Change-World-Tragedy-Possibility-Christianity-ebook/dp/B003TWNDVY/

Preachers 'N Sneakers: https://www.instagram.com/preachersnsneakers/