The Aaron Renn Show

People tend to look at the compositions of bodies like legislatures or boards of directors based on attributes like party affiliation or race and gender.  But there are other characteristics like professional background, geographic origin, and educational experience that are often even more revealing of how people think about the world. This can give important insights into organizational dynamics...

Our perception of time and relation to it radically shifts over the course of our lives. Our perception of the flow of time accelerates as we age, for example. It's not until around age 35 that we get the ability to intellectually and emotionally relate to the future story arc of our lives.  That's when we start being able to realize that not only have we changed in the past, we will con...

Conservatives have long rushed to the defense of institutions and people who are threatened, even when those people and institutions were hostile to Christianity. This was true even when conservatives were a minority movement despised by all the major organs of society. They defended the university administrators during the campus unrest of the 1960s, for example, at a time when the universities w...

In this episode I wrap up my series on conservatism, summarizing the previous installments and encouraging conservative Evangelicals to rethink their deal with the Republican Party. Evangelicals have been the largest and most loyal voting block of the Republican Party, but have not received a return commensurate with what they've brought to the table. While the Democratic Party may not be a v...

Continuing with my series on conservatism, I note again that far from standing firm on timeless principles, conservatives have in fact changed their mind on many of the most basic elements of society. This includes civil rights and the nature of gender and the family. If they themselves say that they were wrong about such fundamental things, why would anyone believe they are right about anything e...

Are conservative pundits just shills for donors? We'll look a bit at the role of money in the conservative intellectual world. While money plays an important role in boundary setting, the cynical view that conservative intellectuals are just shills for donors is not true. This podcast will give multiple examples of where money did matter, where there are potential conflicts of interests, and...

For some critics of conservatism, the neoconservatives are a sort of bogeyman to which they often attribute conservatisms' flaws and failings. This portrait is often unfair, despite neoconservatism emerging as the dominant strain with conservatism.  This episode provides a basic overview of neoconservatism's origin and debunks certain myths about them. It explains that domestic policy, n...

Who financed the rise of conservatism? A large amount of funding came from independent oil producers who were keen to avoid government regulation of their industry. They were at war with the major oil companies that descended from the Rockefeller Standard Oil monopoly, and were rightly concerned that the government might de facto cartelize oil again at their expense. Christianity, both liberal and...

The American conservative movement was founded by people who were largely socially outside the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) establishment of America at the time. William F. Buckely's book God and Man and Yale and the reaction to it cannot be understood without looking at this social dimension. He was an Irish Catholic criticizing the citadel of the Protestant Establishment that had gra...

Many if not most conservatives in the United States have very little idea where the conservative movement originated and how it developed. This episode provides an extremely condensed summary of the founding of conservatism in the wake of World War II, as well as a bit about its history since then. Key points include: ·      American conservatism is a modern political movement with postwar origins...

Evangelical Protestants and socially conservative Catholics have been among the most loyal voting blocks for the Republican Party. The electoral base of the Republican Party is increasingly non-college educated, middle to working class whites.  Yet it does very little for either of these constituencies in terms of delivering on their policy preferences. Instead, the Republican Party, its donor cla...

Too many Christians today evince an attitude of hopelessness and despair. Such attitudes can drain your morale and make it likely that you will preemptively surrender or sell out your posterity without a fight. It's very important that the Christian avoid hopelessness and not give in to the counsels of despair. While we should be realistic in our diagnostics, we should also understand that ex...

Liberal groups have always treated non-incumbent conservative positions as illegitimate. Thus they do not substantively engage with them, debate or engage with their practitioners, provide platforms or space in their publications, etc.  Conservatives, by contrast, frequently give respectful hearings to liberal views, engage in substantive debates, etc. They fail to appreciate that even engaging wi...

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 leaders...

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...

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 t...

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 ma...

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 chu...

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...

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...

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 compl...

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...

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 churc...

American cities looked like they were headed for the scrap heap in the 1970s and 80s, but some of them, particularly the elite cities of the American coasts (and their peers in other countries) came roaring back. Thanks to globalization, deregulation, and other factors, places like New York and San Francisco now control the commanding heights of the economy. They also control the culture because t...

This episode begins a series called "Urban World, Urban Church" looking at the trends in global urbanization and the church's response to them. This first installment looks at the great shift underway from a planet that was almost entirely rural a century ago to one that will be overwhelming urban at the end of this century. As cities and megacities growth, this will require a compl...