Well, I think the reason it resonates with a lot of people is because evangelicals, if they don't have any other or just classical Protestant or for that matter, Christians in the world today, in the West in particular, recognize that we're in a fundamentally changed position. The tectonic plates of the society have changed. And it requires some understanding of a periodization, historical schematic, but also a narrative flow, just to kind of make sense of our world. Was this always the way things are? Is this the way things are always going to be? I think the radical ruptures of the last to say century are very much apparent, but labeling them and even coming up with a periodic schema is rather controversial and meant to be. So, you know, I'm going to argue with you a bit in the course of this conversation. But I want to start out first by just asking you some fundamental questions like, why do you start where you start? To lay out the system. And so talk about the three worlds you identify, and that'll get us a long way towards our conversation. Sure.

And, you know, this has been refined a little bit over the years as people engage with it. So it's helped me dial in my own thinking a little. But America never had a state church like they did in many European countries. But for most of our history, we had a sort of softly institutionalized generic Protestantism as our default national religion. So as recently as the 1950s, half of all adults attended church every Sunday. And you know, that was actually the high watermark of church attendance in America. So we had prayer and Bible reading in public schools in the 1950s. We were adding in God, we trust your money. We were putting under God on the pledge of allegiance, right? We were in some sense, not an official sense, but the fact those sense of Christian society. But starting in the 1960s, this started to become unraveled and the status of Christianity in America started to go into decline. And that's a decline that continues to the present day. And my three worlds model takes this period of decline of Christianity in America from roughly 1964 to the present and divides it into three eras or worlds that I call the positive world, the neutral world and the negative world. So the positive world lasts from 1994, excuse me, 1964 to 1994. And I want to be clear, things are not going well for Christianity. This is the initial phase of decline. You know, church attendance is down. The sexual revolution is happening. And yet Christianity is still basically viewed positively by society. To be known as a good church going man makes people think you're an upstanding member of society. They want to vote for you. Christian moral norms are still the basic moral norms of society. And if you violate them, you could get into big trouble. Around 1994, we hit a tipping point and we enter what I call the neutral, which lasted from 1994 to 2014. And in the neutral world, Christianity is no longer seen positively, but it's not really seen negatively either. It's just one more lifestyle choice among many in a sort of pluralistic public square. And Christian morality has a residual hold, we may say, on society. But then in 2014, we had a second tipping point and enter what I call the negative world, where for the first time in the 400 year history of America, official elite culture now views Christianity negatively or certainly at least skeptically. Maybe that's a better phrase. To be known as a Bible believing Christian does not help you get a job in the elite domains of society. Christian morality is expressly repudiated. And in some respects, you know, Christianity and its ideas are viewed as the new leading threat to the new public moral order. And this has been very dislocating for a lot of people. And evangelicals are still trying to figure out because it seems like the ground shifted rapidly under our feet about a decade ago and trying to figure it out. And I think one reason that this framework has resonated so much with people is it took all of the things that they were already observing in the culture and gave them gave them a way to process it and make sense of it and put it into something that they would understand. I didn't tell them anything they didn't already know. I just gave people a language to talk about what they themselves had already been seeing. You know, that is one

of the most important contributions a book can make. And you know, whether it's something like the very academic philosopher Charles Taylor in his book on the Christian age and just understanding that we are talking about radical change taking place in the society. So I think that's a great achievement. And frankly, very few authors, you know, hit that moment and you hit that moment both at first things. And I think with the book, just a very quick question. I was asked by a reader of one of my books just a few days ago. It's 10 years after that particular book had come out are the things you'd want to say differently. And I said, for Greg, I got loud. That was 10 minutes after I turned the manuscript in. In other words, things happen. And we also have additional thoughts. So I guess just at this point, I want to ask you, are you basically confident we are in the negative world pretty much as you described it because you, you know, at least a year ago, since you touched the manuscript.

Yeah, I would say that, you know, the three worlds model has held up pretty good. There are things that I've updated in response to certain critiques or understandings that people had of it. You know, for example, when I originally laid it on the first things, I just described the positive world as pre 1994. And I think that that really wasn't quite clear enough because what I really mean by the positive world is that first phase of decline. I think before Christianity goes into decline back in the 1950s, it was still positive in a sense, maybe positive going all the way back to Constantine. We can think maybe as the Chris and D'Amara, whatever we want to call that, we have to make sense of that in different ways. And that was not a monolithic period, but there was a sort of a break. And again, as it 1964, you know, I don't want to get too hung up on the dates, but I think that the idea that Christianity goes into decline and the positive world is really the first phase of that decline. And so I think I've dialed in a couple of other things. You know, one of the things that I didn't mention in the book, and if I had it to do over again, I would, is I talk about the neutral world and there's a model I call cultural engagement in there, which we could think of as urban Christianity. And again, I'm a writer on urban policy, you know, I was an urban policy guy to think tank in New York City. I would have probably included the emerging church movement in that culturally. So much of it, I've actually been reading a book about the emerging church. You know, I never was really part of it. It was not a relevant part of my life, sort of like purity culture really had nothing to do with me. And yet the way that they talk about having a conversation, like, who come together in a pub, people who think all kinds of different things, we're just going to have conversation. You know, so that's what that was a great example of like the neutral world cultural engagement model getting started in the 90s. And then I just read a very interesting book by a French intellectual called Immanuel Todd. Oh, yeah. And he talks about changes in America and in the West in terms of the decline of, of Christianity, especially Protestantism, and he actually divides things into three phases. He calls it the act, kind of active phase, the zombie phase and the zero phase, zero state. And he says, you know, we've reached the zero state and his dates line up pretty well with mine. So he says we arrive at a Protestant zero state in which sort of not just the Protestant religion, but sort of the habits and the values, the mores of course, Protestantism evaporated, the old Protestant worth of work ethic is gone, for example. And you know, I thought that model really aligned. So I would probably like refer to his because it it overlast my, but I haven't I haven't necessarily, I haven't necessarily changed any thinking in the world. But I also one thing I tried to avoid was making any highly specific predictions about what the future holds, because the truth is we just don't know. Yeah, no, I have a respect. I've years from now things could be very different. Yeah.

All right. So I think your, your schematic is brilliant and very helpful. And there's a sense in which everything like this, to use the categories of classical rhetoric, it's a it's in a sense of tautology. In other words, you're setting this out, you're not staking your life on the fact that there's a hard line of distinction between these three worlds. But you are helping to make sense of the whole thing. It's a it's a it's a hortited process. I think what you lay out is very, very helpful. Now, by the way, I've been president of one institution for more than 30 years. And I was elected to this role in 1993, very active in Christianity, public policy, apologetics, all the rest for a decade before that. So there's a sense in which almost the entire and I was born in the 1950s. So you know, just about everything you talk about is in my lifetime. And I can see where that's right. And I can see where you would talk about the positive world, the neutral world and the negative world in that light. As a theologian and historical theologian, I tend to think in a far larger timeframe. And so I basically operate on the pre Christian West, the Christian West and the post Christian West. And so I see alarm bells long before you start your argument. So in other words, I'm looking at crucial turning points in which I think, for instance, if you're writing in Britain, the negative world came a lot earlier. I mean, but you could look at the period around World War one and understand by that period, identifying as a Christian and anything other than a cultural sense made you an outcast in many intellectual circles. But nonetheless, state church helped to hide all that and all the rest. But I do think the threefold scheme is not just Aristotle. It just makes sense. It's because there was something before what came after and what came after was a very long project. I mean, we're talking about 1500 years or something like that. Dominant Christian influence that produced Western civilization. And you know, the interesting thing is, Aaron, that as recently as, Oh, you know, five or six years ago, and certainly 20 years ago, you had most of the mainstream secular historians making that point themselves. And so they're scrambling all over themselves now to say, no, there never was a Christian culture. And, you know, America was a secular experiment from the start, but that's not what they themselves were arguing 20 or 30 years ago. And they were seeking to overcome that Christian reality in the culture. And they've been frankly pretty successful.

Yeah, well, I, I agree this. There's different ways you can look at the world in different timeframes. You know, I did read Charles Taylor's book, A Secular Age. And he tells like a 500 year story of secularization. So you know, when you look at his narrative there, you know, I'm dialed in on about 60 years. And when he's looking at this hundreds of years, and again, you look at a manual Todd, he would say that the UK went into what he called a zombie Protestant state in which religion no longer was truly believed. Right. People didn't go to church. But again, the culture was still Christian.

You can still have a coronation. Yeah.

And so, yeah, so you go into sort of the zombie state and then you end up, but you know, it's transitioning out of that in the sixties. And so I think that these tools, there's many different ways to look at the world. And you're right that I'm not trying to make some distinction that I'm arguing that like, this is the difference between a solid liquid and a gas or something where like a scientist would when I

have much

more rigorous distinctions. I think these are sort of tools. I think a lot of frameworks are tools. And the question is, does the tool help you? If you're a pastor, does this framework help you understand the culture and lead your church? If the answer is yes, use it. If the answer is no, don't use it.

No, I think it

clearly is. That's what I say. Or, you know, so I think you also, and there's different tools for different jobs. So I, I never would want to tell people that like what I'm saying is like the one size fits all of you in the

world. Right. Yeah. No, I appreciate that. And look, I think it's extremely helpful. That's why I've been looking forward to this conversation. And frankly, you know, you force the good thing about this kind of argument is, and I think the true test of its effectiveness is that it kind of becomes a structure that people can continually refer to. And I think that's probably the most important aspect of your book is how many evangelicals are now talking kind of openly and honestly about life in the negative world. So I am definitely not arguing in any sense with your assessment of the negative world. But through me off when I read your article and first things was, you know, I'm sorry, I was alive at the time and it was not a positive world. You know, we were already facing the onslaught. You know, I was involved in court cases, you know, or, you know, long before that. I'm just telling you, it was not a positive world. But I do concede that since you're beginning in that period, you know, especially in some parts of the country like the Bible built, you could pretty much convince yourselves you were in a positive world.

Yeah, well, one of the things that I use is some ways to illustrate this in terms of public morality. And I actually use three different presidential sex scandals to sort of illustrate this. And the one that I come to from the positive world was 1987 when Colorado Senator Gary Hart had was the leading candidate to be the Democratic nominee in 1988. And the newspapers reported that he'd been having an affair with a young woman. That ended his campaign. He had to drop out of the race. So the idea that having an affair would be a career ender, you know, as a politician in that era. And so you didn't have to be a Christian, but like the Christian sort of moral schema was still very active in society. And then of course you fast forward to today. And you know, the thing that gets me is like, you know, the newspapers do reporting that says things about Christianity that just get material facts wrong about it. And it's like nobody even knows what it is. And of course, they reject it. So there is there is a sense in which I think people were things were going the wrong way. That was definitely the case, I'd say in the in the positive world. And it was, you know, in a sense, you know, I think it was there were certainly areas where I think even in that era, you know, if you were probably in suburban Dallas, probably going to church was very beneficial to your networks, your career. Absolutely.