New Profile of Me in the New York Times

"A kind of Malcolm Gladwell of conservative Christianity"

When Ruth Graham, a religion reporter for the New York Times, reached out to me asking if I’d be interested in being profiled for the paper, she said, “Your name seems to come up in my interviews more than just about any other contemporary Christian writer or thinker.”

I was blown away by this. I knew some of my ideas had spread pretty far and were having an influence, but I didn’t realize it was to this scale. Naturally I said Yes.

Her profile of me for the Times was published online this morning. That link should hopefully bypass their paywall.

It's always a bit awkward to be written about in the newspaper. It's kind of like hearing yourself on tape. Obviously, reporters are never going to write exactly what I would have written. If they did that, they wouldn’t be doing their job well. I get to write exactly what I want here. But I thought this turned out very well and fair. Graham is a great reporter.

Here’s the picture they used of me for the piece:

Here are a few excerpts:

• “Negative world” has turned Mr. Renn into a kind of Malcolm Gladwell of conservative Christianity, a skilled taxonomist known for distilling and naming a phenomenon that many were feeling but none had articulated. “You know you’ve got a winner when people adopt the vocabulary without attribution,” said R.R. Reno.

• “People ask, what are my politics?” Mr. Renn said as we walked along a rail trail that winds through downtown [Carmel, Indiana]. The city has installed more than 150 roundabouts and has almost completely eliminated traffic lights, making Carmel, as Mr. Renn has written, “one of the few growing American cities where traffic is better than it was 20 years ago.” He gestured to the playgrounds, charging stations and a bocce court that stud the trail, and the pedestrians who were enjoying the trail even on a chilly day. “These are my politics,” he said.

• Mr. Renn has an unusual profile for someone who has captured the attention of American evangelicalism. He is not a pastor, an academic or a politician. He has no institutional affiliations with high-profile evangelical organizations. He is a mild-mannered former consultant with a wide-ranging Substack whose topics include urban policy, self-improvement and masculinity.

• Once over dinner in the early 2000s, Mr. Renn unspooled a grand indictment of Chicago’s city government that left Mr. Modruson feeling unnerved about the city’s future. He said that a few years later, as the city’s woes were becoming conventional wisdom, he read a similar article in a magazine, and recalled thinking, “Aaron could have written this two years ago.” Mr. Renn, he said, is someone who is often thinking about things that other people catch up with later.

• In Chicago, he [me] began reading and listening to sermons by a Presbyterian pastor in Manhattan, the Rev. Tim Keller, who was popular among urban creative-class evangelicals. Mr. Keller held that Christianity was politically neither right nor left, and that the church could minister and appeal to urbanites without compromising its core beliefs.

• “These guys [online men’s influencers] have cracked the code on reaching young men, and they’re actually giving a lot of practical advice,” Mr. Renn said. “And by the way, some of the things that the church is telling these guys is just wrong.”

• Haroon Moghul, a Muslim commentator, found Mr. Renn’s work during the 2016 presidential campaign, when he sensed that many of his fellow Democrats were not taking Donald J. Trump’s appeal seriously. (Disillusioned since then by the Biden administration’s support for Israel in the war in Gaza, Mr. Moghul said he no longer considers himself a Democrat.) He has traveled to see Mr. Renn speak, and the two men have met a few times over the years. He said he saw Mr. Renn as a “measured voice” on pressing questions around what it means to be a person of faith in a pluralistic society. As a rubric, the “negative world” framework is helpful in a descriptive way, in Mr. Moghul’s view. But as a member of a religious minority for whom the United States has never been “positive world,” he said he did not see neutral- or negative-world occupancy as catastrophic.

• He [me] would prefer to return to a culture of shared social norms: against racism, but also against the cruel, the tasteless, and the boorish. But he’s not counting on it. The broad erosion of the old moral order is probably permanent, in his view. The pushback in the 1980s against the liberal excesses of the ’60s and ’70s did not undo the sexual revolution. The task for Christians of adapting to “negative world” remains urgent.

Click over to read the whole thing. I’m going to have to work on overcoming being mild mannered!

Since many of you are new, here are some articles that will give more depth on some of the things I talked about in the profile.

• Carmeltopia - An article I wrote about Carmel and it’s Republican governance model based around common sense center politics.

• Donald Trump Is the President for Post-Christian America - How Donald Trump is only possible in a post-Christian or Negative World

• Is the Negative World Coming to an End? - My thoughts on the “vibe shift.” Scroll past the first item.

• The Vibe Shift and the Decline of Double Standards - My thoughts on the DOGE staffer who was fired and then re-hired.

This profile is a great milestone for my work. I want to give a huge Thank You to all of you who have followed, championed, and supported my work.

When Graham wrote that I have “no institutional affiliations with high-profile evangelical organizations,” that is absolutely true. I have basically no support from major mainstream religious or movement conservatism organizations beyond the occasional freelance article or speaking engagement.

So I am overwhelmingly dependent on support from readers like you to make my work possible. If you are not already a paid Subscriber or Member, please consider becoming one today. Just click this button, because I need your help.

If you are a church or other institutional leader, please consider supporting me at the institutional level. There’s information about how you can do that on my Support page, or you can email me to discuss.

As this profile shows, the impact your contributions make possible in the world is real and high.