Renn’s book is so valuable because it brings to the surface the cause of this tension that Christians now feel in the Negative World. Further, by uncovering the nature of these temptations, he accordingly makes the choices ahead for faithful Christians more stark: which way, Christian man?
Why Aaron Renn’s Book is so Important
I predicted recently that Aaron Renn’s new book, Life in the Negative World, would be the most important book of the year. Here is why.
Renn argues persuasively that faithful Christians are now a tolerated minority rather than a tolerating majority for the first time in American history. I see this new state of affairs producing an effect very similar to the psychological phenomenon known as “cognitive dissonance.” Despite common misconceptions about this term, cognitive dissonance simply denotes a mental disturbance in an individual arising from a situation in which he is conscious that his beliefs and actions are in contradiction. A tension arises that is unpleasant and which can only be relieved by changing either the belief or the actions in order to bring them both into accord again.
During the Korean War, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army experimented with this phenomenon by forcing captured American soldiers to say on record negative things about the United States and capitalism that those soldiers did not believe. For some, the ensuing guilt they felt could only be relieved by refusing to continue doing the action (i.e., lie on record), but others chose instead to change their beliefs. The latter cases led to the phenomenon that came to be known as “brainwashing.”
For this analogy, I do not mean to imply that Christians in the Negative World are living as hypocrites in contradiction—professing belief in one thing and acting antithetically to that belief. I mean, rather, that on a collective level, Christians live in a culture the authoritative opinions of which are contrary to that of individual faithful Christians. We feel, for example, a kind of guilt that the laws we live under, in many cases, allow for things we find morally abhorrent (e.g., abortion). The action of our culture, in other words, is in contradiction to our beliefs.