Hi, I'm Ruth Graham, and I write about religion, faith and values for the New York Times.
A big part of my job is to talk to conservative Christians,
and it's happened multiple times in the last few years that when I ask someone
about how they see themselves in American society,
they'll say, well, do you know this idea of the negative world?
It explains everything for me.
So as it turns out, I do know about the negative world,
because the person who came up with this idea has become really inescapable.
He's a new star intellectual within conservative Christian circles.
His name is Aaron Wren.
And within just a few years,
Wren's negative world theory has turned into the dominant framework for a lot of people in America.
I first learned about Wren's theory in February of 2022.
I was reading an essay he published in a Christian magazine.
The essay was titled the Three Worlds of Evangelicalism, and it went viral.
I go deep into what this whole theory is about in the article that I'll read to you in a moment.
But according to Wren,
conservative Christians have been living since around the year 2014 or so in a negative world,
an era in which conservative Christians are pressured to live according
to a new secular public order dominated by elites in politics,