Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is John Herschauer, Associate

Editor of City Journal. Joining me on today's show is Aaron W podcast. This is John Herschauer, Associate Editor of City Journal.

Joining me on today's show is Aaron Wren. He is a writer and consultant based in Indianapolis

and a co-founder and senior fellow at American Reformer, a nonprofit that seeks to address

issues facing Christians in the United States and to reform decaying Christian institutions.

Before co-founding American Reformer, Aaron spent five years as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute where he focused on urban policy.

He writes a monthly newsletter, and his written work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, First Things, and, of course, City Journal.

Today we're going to discuss his new book, Life in the Negative World, Confronting

Challenges in an anti-Christian Culture, which was published earlier this year.

Aaron, thanks for joining the show.

Thanks for having me on.

So this book draws on themes that you first discussed in a much debated 2022 essay for first things

titled The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism. In that essay and now in your book, you sketch a three-pronged

account of the changing relationship between American culture and evangelical Christianity

across the 20th and 21st centuries, what you describe as the positive, neutral,

and negative worlds. When did each of those periods, you know, sort of begin and end? And how did

American elite's view of Christianity change across those decades? Unlike in Europe, we never had

a state church, but for most of our history, America had a sort of

softly institutionalized generic Protestantism as its default national religion. So as recently

as the 1950s, half of all Americans attended church every Sunday. There was prayer and Bible

reading in public schools at that time. We were adding, in God, we

trust to our money, under God to the Pledge of Allegiance. So there is, in a sense, a sort of Christian

...