Not Your Grandma's Negative World
How caving institutions and new media took us from Babylon to barbarism
When
first introduced his Negative World framework, it seemed pretty true. Yes, the “positive world” meant largely white evangelicals in the West; yes, there were exceptions; but evangelicalism had enough cultural cachet, especially in the United States, that Three Worlds was a useful heuristic.1 For a time, evangelical Christianity was a “positive good” that got at least lip service from the highest cultural institutions (up to the mid-90s); then, our population and cultural norms shifted enough to make it “neutral” in the sense of it having a mixed or indifferent reputation in elite culture (mid-90s to mid-2010s); then, a sharp cultural turn led to evangelicalism being viewed as a “negative” value in personal and social capital.In the mid-2010s up until the pandemic, it seemed like Negative World was coming. LGBT ideology rewrote social, corporate, and legal norms overnight; wokeism captured government, media, and corporate institutions; we seemed to have a new flag and a new civic religion. Donald Trump’s first election felt like the “reforms” of Julian the Apostate: the last spasms of a dying conservative power base. Writers like
and chronicled what seemed to be a cultural “Blue Wave” that was sweeping conservatism, including conservative Christianity, out from neutrality to the outer darkness of deplorabilism. Conservative Christians seemed headed for exile.And then the 2020s happened.
Aaron Renn himself has noted how much weirder the world of 2024 is than the trends of 2018 implied, but some of the most recent examples include:
The re-election of Trump, with definite margins of gain in wide swathes of society
Companies cutting or scaling back DEI departments, which are bureaucratic arms for codifying wokeism into corporate policy
Religious liberties winning some key legal battles against attempts to coerce LGBT norms
Universities walking back the inclusion of transgender males in female sports and spaces
A wave of public figures, even those without actual faith, expressing interest in or commitment to cultural Christianity
Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the world, hosting an evangelical apologist on his show and seeming genuinely interested in Christianity
Something has changed. If culture is Harry and Lloyd in a dog van, we were headed for Aspen but ended up in Nebraska.
The hidden assumption of the three-worlds framework
I’m grateful to Stiven Peter’s “In the Era of the Judges,” because this helped me see a hidden assumption in the three-worlds framework: a variable whose change shifted our trajectory from the projected Negative World (which was an absolutely valid projection that I thought would come true back then) to where we are today. I want to share Peter’s key point, then develop it further:
Negative world is not just the inverse of positive world. While Renn understates this, it is an essential point to draw out. The caveat has to do with the type of culture negative world creates. The holders of cultural capital have not simply substituted Christian values with an alternative set but promote the very loss of order itself. The only values are no values. That is, our culture promotes libertinism, everyone doing what is right in their own eyes. Sociologically, Hunter calls this the process of dissolution: “By dissolution, I refer to the deconstruction of the most basic assumptions about reality.” Our culture doesn’t enforce any guide to who or what we are, nor what we should do. Instead, what is promoted is turning inside ourselves and determining our own values. This process results in the fracturing of society alongside tribes/enclaves of people with similar values. In other words, positive world is a more integrated culture because it possesses a narrative that can unite a people together. Negative world, in contrast, is fragmented, which means mass disintegration.
…
We are not in Babylon. We are in the era of the Judges.
What Peter gets right is that we didn’t go from Neutral World to Babylon – which is shorthand for a culturally strong anti-Christian order, like Renn’s Negative World.
But it’s worth emphasizing that we could have. We could have ended up in Babylon.
Here’s a rough chart that illustrates what I mean. The main gray line is Renn’s hypothesis: the transition from positive world (he uses 1964 as a marker), to neutral world (~1994), to negative world (~2014), and presumably on.
This could have happened. We could have had a culture as unified in opposition to some historic Christian teachings and Christian affiliation as Soviet Russia. In Peter’s words, Babylon.
But that only could have happened if our cultural institutions had stayed 1) unified and 2) strong. That would have created the Negative World that seemed to be coming in the late 2010s.
But instead, as Peter notes, it feels like we’re in the era of the Judges instead: “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). Or what Mark Sayers calls a “Gray Zone,” a weird transition between eras. While there are centers of power and cultural trends, it doesn’t feel like there’s a unified, powerful control center like it did ten years ago. We’re not in Babylon. The trend looks more like this:
What happened? If we could have ended up in Negative World, why didn’t we?
Note: I’m writing this not to score partisan points – I haven’t voted either Republican or Democrat since 2012. I’m a pastor who tries to share the gospel with and shepherd people from various political and cultural backgrounds, which includes helping them pursue the common good of our nation and world in appropriate ways. The following is my best effort to understand what’s happened in the last few years; I’m not saying that these are good or bad, just that they’ve happened. A followup piece will have some recommendations for how everyday men and women, particularly Christians, might live in light of these things.
There are a number of events we could point to: the geopolitical upheavals of 2020 and government responses; Elon Musk purchasing Twitter; some key Supreme Court decisions that prevented wokeism from being codified in law. Those all matter. But I think two matter more than any others:
Factor 1: Institutional Deconstruction
The geopolitical shocks of the 2020s exposed serious weaknesses and flaws in our society’s institutions, in an era where institutional trust was already plummeting. From basic matters of governance to supply chain issues to essential mechanisms of law and order to big-S “Science,” a large number of institutions showed themselves to be incompetent, partisan, or corrupt. (It happened under the Trump administration too; his actions around January 6 and the lawfare he seems be preparing against political opponents are inexcusable) A lot of people just lost faith that universities, scientists, and local, state, and national governments were 1) seeking truth and wisdom, 2) trying to act justly, and 3) competent at pursuing their stated goals.
Mark Sayers noted in a recent Rebuilders podcast how most incumbent regimes around the world have low favorability ratings, so this isn’t limited to the US or to the left; but there’s this collective sense that old powers and principles aren’t working, at best, or are corruptly self-serving, at worst. And people are “deconstructing” their faith in response.
For some recent examples:
The sudden backpedaling on Biden’s cognitive health as soon as it became obvious that it … wasn’t what it had been claimed to be
ark Zuckerberg flipping to free-speech advocacy from Facebook’s previous willingness to police content in cooperation with the Democratic consensus
The distaste many people expressed over how the Democratic party swapped Harris for Biden as the 2024 candidate with no primary or procedure
The stats that show people are at least as likely to get their news via a personalized social media intake as they are from legacy media
There are plenty of examples that people are unplugging from healthy or life-giving institutions, too, like marriage, parenting (which creates an institution of a family), and organized religion; again, there’s a lot of bad news here. But there seem to be very few centers of organized trust.
noted this in “Ark Head.” Using Noah’s Ark as a metaphor, he described the phenomenon of people withdrawing from institutional life into a survival mode focused on a much smaller circle of concern:Ark-head is an interesting collective diagnosis. It’s not depression, anxiety PTSD, or collective brain fog, though all those currently common comorbidities tighten the grip of ark-head on the psyche. It’s an unconsciously adopted survivalist mindset that draws boundaries around itself as tightly as necessary to maintain the ability to function. It’s a pragmatic abandonment of universalist conceits to save your sanity.
He's not saying it’s good either; he just says ark-head thinking seems like a sane bet when the world feels a certain level of crazy.
If the Left (or anyone) had been able to hold institutional power and influence together over the last decade, we would have slid down from Neutral World to Negative World; but so many institutions collapsing at once created a situation more like the fall of the Western Roman Empire in Europe. Instead of Babylon, we get barbarians.
Factor 2: The Digital Multiverse
The other consequential change, which is connected to the first but also its own phenomenon, is one
has pointed to for a long time: the rise of “digital” media (the Internet and social media) and the displacement of “electric” media (namely cable TV). Or: Internet and new media displacing cable and old media.Building off the work of Marshall McLuhan, who coined the idea of “electric media,” Poulos has been saying for a while that digital media are going to change the world the way that the printing press enabled the Protestant Reformation. David Bowie, of all people, predicted this in an interview about the Internet in 1999:
Bowie: The potential for what the Internet is going to do for society, both good and bad, is unimaginable.
Paxman: It’s just a tool, though, isn’t it?
Bowie: No, it isn’t; it’s an alien life form.
Paxman: It’s simply a different delivery system. You’re arguing about something more profound.
Bowie: Oh yeah, I’m talking about the actual context and the state of content is going to be so different to anything we can envisage at this moment. … It’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.
In 1999! Bowie had read his McLuhan.
Electric media, in McLuhan and Poulos’ reading, enables centralized control of information, which is transmitted as a “shared dream” that everyone experiences at the same time. If you remember the cable TV days, if you were keeping up with a show like Seinfeld, then you had to be in front of your TV when the new episode aired, watching it at the same time as the millions of other viewers following it. And the news was delivered the same way: you caught a relatively small range of programming broadcast out from a relatively small number of stations, at the same speed as everyone else. So everyone following electric media inhabits the same basic mental universe: and if someone can influence that universe, they have serious power to influence what people think about, care about, and want.
Digital media blew that up. Now information comes not from a few central sources, but from everyone (think centralized fact checkers vs community notes). It’s imbibed not in scheduled waves, but at the user’s schedule and choice. And instead of dreams being projected and then forgotten, information is “remembered,” or stored in ways that are very, very hard to erase. Even when someone tries to rewrite the dictionary in real time, there are archives that remember what they changed.
The digital revolution, which came into power around the same time Neutral World forces were moving toward Negative World, split our mental universe into a mental multiverse. The Internet, social media, and podcasts enabled people to transmit ideas from all over the mental map; you probably couldn’t censor the genie back into the bottle, but an increasing number of platforms quit trying.
You can see a realization of this in some of the TV anchors’ responses to Kamala Harris’ loss in 2024. Many people whose world was shaped by electric media simply thought she had it in the bag, and missed all the signs that her campaign was in trouble. (Remember: I have never voted for Trump and never will. I’m analyzing, not crowing) Meanwhile, people tuned into podcasts like Joe Rogan at least gave Trump fighting odds in the election, whether they wanted to or not. They saw the new world coming. (And going on Rogan might have nudged the election in Trump’s favor)
Again, the Digital Multiverse is less like Babylon than barbarism. Whatever changes in 2025 and beyond, I don’t think it will be as simple as a right-coded version of 2014. Like the Protestant Reformation didn’t take over Catholic Christendom but created a new, more fragmented Christendom, the digital revolution is going to create smaller mental universes that we’ll have to navigate in new ways. Some will feel like Negative World; some will be right-coded “cultural Christianity;” some will be shaped by various forms of Christianity. We’ll feel strong affiliations with people who listen to the same podcasts and follow the same influencers; people in different universes may feel like foreigners at best and enemies at worst.
I don’t know what the legal, economic, or political ramifications of this will be, and I don’t feel competent to guess; but in the next post, I’ll share some thoughts on how we can navigate personal relationships and particularly Christian life and ministry in barbarism instead of Babylon.