Aaron Renn's commentary and insights on our 21st century world, along with his conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers on the issues of today. Covering culture, media, economics, politics, Christianity and men's issues.
John Moody is Kentucky a homesteader with an M.Div. who founded an organic food buying club in Louisville. He joins the show to talk about equipping your family for the 21st century world through creating a fertile and productive household by acquiring skills, growing food, etc.
Using the recent celebrations of Reformation Day and All Saints Day, I discuss why the church (especially the Protestant evangelical church) needs to be more attuned to its history and cultural patrimony. This includes things like the great English language hymns, but also simply a greater awareness of the incredible legacy of faithfulness and sacrifice that previous generations made to bring us into being and enable us to be Christians today. Links: American Reformer: Evangelicalism's Second-Cl...
There's been a recent flurry of articles and podcasts discussing the failure of evangelical elites, whether they have in fact failed, wondering who these so-called elites are, disclaiming that people are elites, etc. This week I look at the question of who the evangelical elite are, and whether or not they are doing a good job. I start by reprising the elite theory of E. Digby Baltzell, and also the views of others elite theorists like James Burnham, Robert Michels, C. Wright Mills, and Robert D...
There's a low grade moral panic about the state of Generation Z, fueled by bizarre Tik Tok videos, stories of teen girls suffering depression from not getting enough likes on Instagram, etc. But moral panics over the degeneracy of the youth are recurring features of our society. The hippies, the goths, etc. surely inspired similar reactions. This is not to say that all is well with Generation Z. They have had too much unfiltered, unrestricted access to social media technology, but if the past is...
Women initiate the vast majority of divorces. It used to be that women felt the need to give a justification for divorcing their husbands. For example, they might say that he was emotionally abusive or neglectful. But today they increasingly no longer feel compelled to do that. Recent articles in the New York Times from Lara Bazelon and Vogue about the British singer Adele feature women proudly stating that they divorced husbands who did nothing wrong for purely selfish reasons. These powerful c...
In my previous podcast series on American conservatism, I observed that they have a pattern of jumping into the breach to try to defend their opponents from the consequences of those opponents' own ideology. For example, they defended the school administrators against the student radicals of the 60s when the administrators themselves were liberals implacable hostile to conservatism. In fact, some of those university leaders had previously trashed William F. Buckley over God and Man at Yale . We ...
The upper class and the intellectuals have always particularly loathed the middle class. The novels of Sinclair Lewis or the essays of H. L. Mencken exhibit this mindset. Conservatives, whose social base and principal character is middle class, have pushed back against this, celebrating middle class values. It's worth considering, however, whether there is something to the critique of the middle class. Middle class values too often revolve around small pleasures and respectability that fatally c...
American conservatives rarely read or engage with leftist thought outside of the mass media. This is a weakness because if they did do so, they'd find that serious thinkers on the left are often very smart and have important insights about our world. This includes people often stigmatized as bogeymen (by people who have never read them) like the postmodernists or the Frankfurt School. This podcast talks briefly about a couple of insights from Herbert Marcuse's book One Dimensional Man . Although...
If you made a list of what a right wing fantasy utopia would look like for someone with localist leanings, you'll discover that the only people who have successfully produced those environments are on the left. In this podcast I examine the cultural contradictions of conservative values, showing how in practice the values of conservatives themselves have produced some - not all, but some - of the dysfunction in which they live. Subscribe to my newsletter: https://www.aaronrenn.com/...
Americans are relocating, for economic, political, religious, or lifestyle reasons. But what should we think about when we think about moving? This podcast examines a number of factors to consider: whether you having a historic connection to or family in a place, economic prospects, costs and whether you can really afford to live there, whether you actually like it (not just think you'll like it), and whether you can find a church you like there. Subscribe to my newsletter: https://www.aaronrenn...
Mars Hill Church collapsed suddenly. The American backed Afghan regime collapsed almost instantly as America withdrew. The Berlin Wall fell unexpectedly in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed at a time when few expected it. Sudden collapse of organizations and countries does happen. Could it happen to the United States? In this episode I examine both sides of the question and how to think about the dynamics of collapse. Dietrich Dörner: The Logic of Failure - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/02...
This week I weigh in with some initial thoughts on the Christianity Today podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. Although there are some legitimate critiques of the way CT has positioned the materials, complementarians need to accept that Mark Driscoll legitimately does reflect poorly on the movement as a whole. Freddie deBoer: Who Tells Them Things They Don't Want to Hear? - https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/who-tells-them-what-they-dont-want Newsletter #7: Accountability for Failure - http...
What are people saying about you when you aren't in the room? Everybody has a rap sheet. The only question is whether we know what's on ours. Unless we know what people really think of us, we have no opportunity to improve on our weaknesses. In this podcast I share some of the personal, painful feedback I received. I also discuss ways you can look for good feedback for yourself. And philosophies about how to deal with our weaknesses. Subscribe to my newsletter: https://www.aaronrenn.com/...
In 2013 Bill Hybels foretold a looming succession crisis for churches. He ended up being more right than he knew. He observed that there had been an explosion of mega-churches, many still led by a founding pastor approaching retirement age. His prophecy has very much come true. Not only did his own succession not go well, we've seen several succession plans unravel recently. John Piper's successor at Bethlehem Baptist recently resigned. There are pastoral searches underway for two of the three m...
The media glamorizes people making the choice to defer marriage and children in order to focus on other priorities like career. While this is a free country and people absolutely have the right to live their lives how they want, the longer term consequences of this for many is not as well advertised. The proliferation of older singles in the pews is in part a downstream consequence of these decisions. The church should not simply become an underwriter of other people's choices to live life on th...
It's been 70 years since Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were found guilty of spying for the Soviets and sentenced to death. The left continues to discuss this case and argue that the Rosenbergs (or at least Ethel) were victims of injustice. We can learn patterns of left-wing behavior from observing this case, including that they are relentless and never give up, that they are loyal, and that they use ever shifting rhetoric that often "disguises their power levels." I discuss these patterns and then ...
Conservatives and Christians are very enamored of classical education. Studying the classics, the American founding, etc. are important things to do. But there are other important areas that people living in today's world. These items, including intersexual dynamics, the impact of industrialization, the revolution in scale, and the implications of mass media are often understudied. This leaves conservatives with key blind spots. This episode also includes further thoughts on playing for keeps an...
Darren Beattie once noted that "there is a profound psychological gulf between playing for scraps and playing for keeps." This podcast is a short discussion of how people on the left play for keeps while too often conservatives seem to be playing for scraps. Subscribe to my newsletter: https://www.aaronrenn.com/
People on the internet throw the term "red pilled" around a lot. It obviously derives from the film the Matrix. But how should we think about the term and what it means? I discuss in using the examples of the statistics I've highlighted about how women initiate around 70% of divorces, doomsday cults, the Matrix, and Plato's Republic. To be red pilled involves some sort of painful disconnecting from beliefs that have shaped our reality or identity. This is difficult to do, which is why we need to...
In this final podcast installment looking at the fall of the old WASP establishment, we'll compare sociologist E. Digby Baltzell's conservative defense of organic social hierarchy with today's movement conservative that rejects social distinctions. Subscribe to my newsletter: https://www.aaronrenn.com/
This episode looks at the implications of the fall of the WASP establishment by looking at the life and career of J. Irwin Miller, a WASP industrialist whose commitment to and investment in his town of Columbus, Indiana helped make it the Rust Belt city that never rusted. The town never went into decline and remains a top architectural destination in the United States due to Miller's leadership. Miller was also an important national figure. The first lay leader of the National Council of Churche...
Conservatives today bemoan the fact that men no longer behave as gentlemen. Yet their exhortations on the topic are without effect. E. Digby Baltzell's writings on the American upper class shed light on this decline of the gentleman. He notes that an upper class establishment, as American had until the 1960s, made the social, moral, and behavioral codes of the upper class normative, or at least aspirational for society at large. The end of the establishment meant that those standards also went o...
This episode in my series on the historic Protestant Establishment in the United States looks at the role the collapse of that establishment played in many of the dysfunctions of our age. These include the erosion of political norms, the decline of the gentleman, the fading away of the ethos of "fair play," the rise of charismatic politicians like Trump, and the decline of trust in institutions. Rediscovering E. Digby Baltzell's Sociology of Elites: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/02/red...
This episode discusses the evolution of the American upper class from a local and familial to a national and associational community. It describes the nationalization and industrialization of the US in the post-Civil War era. And it explains the challenges faced by the old WASP establishment leading up to its demise in the 1960s: managerialism, ethno-religious exclusion, and the failure to take up leadership positions in society. Rediscovering E. Digby Baltzell's Sociology of Elites: https://ame...
Social class has fallen off the radar in America, but remains key to understanding many of the problems we face today in society. This includes everything from the erosion of political norms to men no longer behaving as gentlemen. These problems are traceable in part to the fall of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) establishment. Sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, who popularized the term WASP, predicted many of these problems years ago. In a new podcast series starting today, we will examine ...
The decline of Mainline Protestantism, that is the historically prominent American Protestant denominations, had profound consequences for America and American Christianity. Mainline Protestantism was how Christianity was integrated with and represented in society as a whole. With the decline of the mainline denominations, America ceased to be a Protestant, and ultimately Christian nation. This podcasts describes what Mainline Protestantism is, the origins of the term "mainline", the nature of t...
Everybody likes to beat up on fundamentalists. I grew up in a rural, fundamentalist, pentecostal church. And while I am not a fundamentalist today and think they get a lot of things wrong, they also have some virtues we should appreciate. In this episode is discuss the power of a simple, naive faith, and the willingness to embrace and teach unpopular doctrines. Subscribe to my newsletter: https://www.aaronrenn.com/
The Gospel Coalition is the flagship organization of the New Calvinism movement. They hold their major conference every two years in Indianapolis. Since I'm now back in Indy and they were meeting in person here despite Covid-19, I decided to attend and check it out. This podcast was recorded in the middle of the conference to share a few observations about it, and the New Calvinism movement generally. The conference showcases two of the great strengths of the movement: its intellectual orientati...
In their book Metaphors We Live By , George Lakoff and Mark Johnson noted how our language, and very way of perceiving the world, is saturated with metaphor. We use the metaphor "Love is war," for example, when describing someone as a relational "conquest." Metaphors, analogies, etc. are a helpful and essential way of making sense of the world. But the metaphors we live by can, as with "love is war," import ways of thinking about issues that may not be entirely healthy. In this podcast we examin...
In our 24x7 media and social media saturated world, it's very easy for us to spend too much time engaging in the controversies of the day and not focusing on what's important to our own long term agenda. It's said that the media can't tell you what to think, but they can tell you what to think about. Merely focusing on something elevates its importance in our mind. We need to be careful where we are putting our focus so that we don't end up letting the media subtly rewire our agenda without us e...
