 glorious God and it is a great day to serve Him, a great day to be in Him and to know Him. I'm Tom Hollis, I'm here with Anna Fry. We have got a great program for you on Hope Today. You're gonna really enjoy it. It's all about living for Christ in this present day, in this time and in this culture, Anna. It is so good to be back with you and get this week started off with you. So here's the question to start. How do we structure our lives and households to become pressure resistant to the moral and social decline of our culture? As we watch God become more marginalized, we see chaos becoming more centralized. Putting Christ back in the center starts with us and our guest today, Erin Wren is here to talk with us about how we can confront the challenges of living in an anti-Christian culture and be a light in this dark world. Tom, it is an awesome privilege that we have to be the light of Jesus. It is, and I'm so interested to talk to Erin and get his take on some of the things we're experiencing, some of the kind of anti-Christian things that are going on, and yet still, can we be salt and light in that situation? Because that's what we're called to be. So it's gonna be a great conversation. Right, yeah. Well, it's a Monday, so I'm sure you know that. You had to get up and you had to go back to work, but... The sun is shining. The sun is shining, it's a beautiful day. We love Mondays and we love meaningful Mondays. Well, this past weekend, episodes one to three of the chosen season four debuted in theaters and finished second in the box office. How about that? The new season looks incredible and here's a sneak peek of what you can expect to see. Our hearts are so tender. All our emotions right at the surface. Laughter, closer than ever. Should we avoid dark places out of fear? Or should we be light to them? Night is coming and I have limited time. And as long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world. Let's not argue the sins of the past. We've got light to give. This teacher from Nazareth is a sinner. All of you, this man is dangerous. Oh, I am just getting started. We will concentrate our efforts on preserving God's law. You really need to do something. Don't become infamous for overseeing the town where a revolution started. Neglecting what is actually important of the law, justice, mercy, faithfulness, whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light. Oh, this man must be from God. I was blind but now I see I have a tough time going on after seeing that because that is so impactful. And who would have ever imagined a few years ago that a crowd funded TV show about the life of Jesus spread out over seven seasons will become this global phenomenon. The show which began as a low budget project in 2017 has already been streamed by 600 million people. Media observers expect the shows to grow by just more than 300 million when all episodes of season four are shown on the big screen during the month of February. After that, the season will be aired on the Chosen app and on various streaming services, including Netflix, Amazon and Peacock. Hey, it's out there, everybody. The most exciting development is that the Chosen is beginning to gain big audiences overseas. The BBC ran a feature on the show's popularity just before the London premiere of season four. And the word on the street is that sizable British, there's a sizable British fan base developing. Meanwhile, in Brazil, the Chosen is now the fourth most watched TV show on Netflix. And we just wanted to thank Charisma for this story. And I just love this. It's, I'm actually behind. I'm only halfway through season two. So it's something that I want to catch up on, but it's done very well, amazingly well. It has had such an incredible response. Yesterday, I was sitting at my mom's house. We were celebrating her birthday. And I got a text from one of my friends who just came out of the movie theater. She and her husband had just watched and in all capital letters and like multiple exclamation points, she's just like, wow. It's interesting because Jean happened to find something on YouTube, an interview that, when Jonathan Rumi, who plays Jesus, was on the view. Okay. Not necessarily known for their Christian views there, but it was really powerful. It just goes to show the influence that it's having and how media entertainment is being light in that dark world, which is what we're gonna be talking about. Our guest today, Erin Wren, researches and writes extensively about culture and the future of the evangelical church and his new book, Life in the Negative World. He shares how Christians can confront the challenges we face in our anti-Christian culture. Erin, welcome to Hope Today. Thanks for having me on. Start by telling us a little bit about your background and how you became a leading voice to talk about culture, to talk about the future of the church. Sure, this is essentially my third career, but in essence, the culmination of work that began in my first two, I started out doing management consulting in helping Fortune 500 companies to adopt to a changing world. I was a partner at a major firm called Accenture. Then I moved into public policy. I was a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute in New York for several years and really started doing a lot of cultural and political diagnostics on the country at that time. And then just out of that, I got very interested in how it meant to this was affecting the evangelical church. And so I sort of moved into sort of trying to diagnose the culture and understand what's going on in the culture and in the evangelical church. So I always like to say, I am not a pastor or authoritative Bible teacher and I never claimed to be, but I'm someone who talks about the cultural context in which Christians and pastors have to live today. And you open up your book talking about the structure of three different worlds, the positive world, neutral world and now negative world. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Absolutely. If you go back to say the 1950s America, we didn't have a state church, but we did have a sort of softly institutionalized sort of generic Protestantism or Christianity. It's our de facto national religion. About half of all people attended church on Sundays. We had prayer and Bible reading in schools. We were putting in God we trust on our money. We were adding under God to the pledge of allegiance. Then in the 1960s, that started to unravel and be called into question. Church attendance declined, belief in Christianity declined, Christian moral order began to be called into question. And you can divide this period of decline of Christianity from 1964 to the present into three eras or worlds that I call the positive, neutral and negative world. So the positive world is from 1964 to 1994. And I wanna be clear, this is a time of decline for Christianity. All is not going well for Christianity in that period. We had sexual revolution, et cetera. At the same time, society basically views Christianity positively to be known as a good church going man. You know, makes you seem like an outstanding member of society and Christian moral norms are still the basic moral norms of society. Around 1994, we had a tipping point and what I call the neutral world lasted from 1994 to 2014 in which Christianity is no longer seen positively but it's not really viewed negatively yet either. It's just one more lifestyle choice among many in a pluralistic public square and Christian morality has a sort of residual effect. And then in 2014, we had a second tipping point and enter what I call the negative where for the first time in the 400 year history of America, sort of official elite culture now views Christianity negatively or at least skeptically to be known as a Bible-believing Christian does not help you get a job at an elite Fortune 500 company, white the opposite in fact and Christian morality is now expressly repudiated and in some ways evangelicals are now viewed as the main threat to the new public moral order. So this is a really unprecedented and uncomfortable situation in which we find ourselves and it happened this entry into the negative world in a pretty abrupt transition about a decade ago. So now we find ourselves in brand new territory and in your book you reference it's kind of like the Israelites having to explore this brand new land that God wanted to give them and you said that exploration is needed and it needs to happen first. What do you mean by that? I don't pretend to have all the answers to how we're supposed to live in this crazy world. And in fact, things are changing all the time. Just in the last years or so we see Donald Trump elected president which very few people saw coming. We saw a pandemic. We see the invasion of Ukraine. Stuff's happening all the time. We're not going to be able to create some kind of a master strategy that we can then apply to understand what we're gonna do. Instead, it's a little more like a startup operation. We have to have this what I call the posture of exploration. We have to be more comfortable walking by faith than by sight in a world where we're gonna have to feel ourselves along. We're gonna have to make adjustments. We're gonna have to learn from each other. We're gonna see what works and what doesn't work. And again, yes, I use that example which I think others have used as well to be fair which is the Israelites crossing the Jordan River into the Promised Land. This was a generation that spent their entire life in the desert and it wasn't necessarily great in that desert but hey, there was manna every morning. It was comfortable. It's what they knew. When you cross that Jordan River though, you're going into this unknown territory. And I love that line from Joshua that says, follow the ark because you have not been this way before. And that's what it is for us. We've not been this way before. And so I think this is an opportunity for us again to spend much more time following Jesus, walking by faith and feeling willing to just explore where we're at. Being comfortable not having all the answers. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I like that. I like that last line. But let me ask you, Aaron, you use this term of this time period of 60 years of decline. It's interesting being in my 60s to have that be the thing that happened in my lifetime as well. But what are some of the ways that Christians have tried and failed to stem the decline and why have they failed? Well, in a sense evangelicalism is a product of this era of decline. And I don't know that it's necessarily all been a failure. Evangelicalism did a lot of things that were very successful. So one of the things I talk about in the book is the three different strategies that were developed in these eras. That the culture war strategy, the secret sensitivity strategy, and the cultural engagement strategy. So for example, in the 1970s, just to talk about one of those secret sensitivity, people like Bill Hybles at Willow Creek Church in suburban Chicago or Rick Warren at Saddleback Church, they in a sense saw that people weren't going to church, that there was this decline in church attendance. And they said, well, why is that? Again, Bill Hybles did door-to-door surveys trying to figure out why people didn't go to church. Designed a church they would go to, a new form of maybe more consumer-friendly Christianity. And they became, of course, the progenitor of what we know as the non-denominational mega-church today. And a lot of people like to criticize mega-churches, but the reality is lots of people, millions of people were successfully reached for Christ through the mega-church movement. And so it was a great success in some ways at keeping Christianity alive. It just didn't reverse the overall cultural trend, which to be fair, I don't know that anything easily could have. And what I love too that you talk about is that there are things within our control that we can start doing to bring God back into the center. You specifically note a resilience saying we should be looking to structure our households to be pressure-resistant or even to grow stronger from hostility. How do we practically start doing that? Sure, I agree. We fundamentally, unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain, ultimately God does all the works. And yet the Bible's full of commands for us to take action. And so he's obviously looking for us to do things and step out in faith. And so one of the things I try to do is give people a set of starter ideas that they can use to start thinking about them, not telling people exactly what to do. Because again, we're in the unknown world. But think about how can I start living differently in light of these new different cultural conditions. And resilience was a concept that I took from a writer named Nasim Taleb, who famously predicted the financial crash in 2007, wrote a famous book called The Black Swan. But basically it's the idea of when we are at greater risk of, for example, being canceled in today's culture, we have to be thinking more intentionally about how we structure our life to be able to resist the pressure that's going to be bearing down on us. We should be thinking about where do we live? Is it a place that's gonna be more friendly or less friendly? What kinds of career should we be going into? Maybe we shouldn't be living out there on the financial edge. We should be limiting the amount of debt we take on, have more savings, things of that nature that make it possible and much easier for us to be, for example, obey our conscience when we're faced with having to make choice that might involve pain in our life if we make it. And so those sorts of things, I'm not saying there's one size fits all, but we have to be much more intentional about decisions that we should sort of just make without really considering the cultural context in the past. Aaron, when a culture begins to walk away from Christianity, other times it's happened, there seems to be a rush towards it's the end times. Jesus is coming back any minute and it's just everything's gonna slide away. Is that where you find yourself or do you have reason for optimism as we move forward? Yes, well, when it comes to the return of Christ, you know, I always say I don't wanna be betting any money that that's gonna bail me out. You know, we have to be prepared for that at any time, but I don't think we want to just make that be our strategy for the world. I think it can be very easy to see trends standing out in the future and things might look very bleak. I don't think we should do that. The reality is I told you some of those crazy things that happen, things are gonna keep changing in the world. We don't know what's gonna happen. History doesn't move in a straight line. There's always been a little bit of a pendulum shift. In America, we've had multiple great awakenings in the past. We've had times that were sort of more moralistic and times that were more libertionistic. I'm not optimistic that we're gonna see a great re-Christianization of America in my lifetime. If you, I'm 54, okay, and the summer of love was before I was born. So some of the outworking of these ideas that were present in the 60s or even earlier took over five decades to reach sort of a flowering or fruition. And so I don't think that we're gonna see some, you know, short-term turnaround. But I am optimistic that the church can indeed survive and flourish in America for a very long time to come. And if things do get set in motion that lead towards positive trends, maybe it won't be in my lifetime, but it'll be in my son's lifetime or my grandson's lifetime. Yeah, you just mentioned your son who is still very young. And for those of us who are parents and we're raising up this next generation who were born for such a time as this, how do we as parents prepare them to be resilient, to be obedient, to be excellent, to live as that light? Yeah, now when I was a kid, a lot of the focus was on insulation. So the idea was if you're a Christian family, you don't wanna expose your kids to rock music. You wanna sort of insulate them from the worst aspects of the culture. And that won't contaminate them. Well, I think it's a lot harder to follow that strategy today simply because things that are essentially not compatible with Christianity are now so pervasive, insulation is not completely possible. Of course, we wanna try to insulate our kids from bad influences. At the same time, we have to be much more self-consciously equipping and training them to be able to navigate this world as adults, understanding that in a way that we didn't before. Maybe the example, it's not a religious example, but you can think about smartphones. It's easy to say, well, I just won't give my kid a smartphone and that will protect them. But then they're gonna be an adult someday and they're probably gonna get a smartphone as an adult. And so I think about that from my son, like how do I train him at some point, at the right point to be able to live with a smartphone? So I think that that's just an example of how we have to think about not just insulating but equipping, which means not only teaching people the basics of the gospel and the faith and the Bible and all that, but it also means we also have to explain to people, like, okay, this is what's out there in the world. This is the mainstream culture. Here's why we don't believe that. Here's why we don't do that. Of course, one easy example to think about is how Jewish families, for example, at some point have to tell their kids what Christmas is and why they don't celebrate it. And so we're gonna have to do a lot more like that and say, hey, that's what they do. That's what the world is like. That's not us. Here's what we do. Here's how we live. That's so good. It's just very practical advice to be having those intentional conversations with our children just as adults, we are making intentional choices for ourselves. So, and just the last little bit that we have, can you give some final encouragement for those who are out there in their careers and building a household and building their lives to be light in the negative world? Well, as we've seen sort of all the guardrails of society decay, we have things like, record high drug overdose deaths, with gambling on your phone now, we have so many people with problem gambling. There are so many people who have such big problems today, mental illness among young people. There is so much opportunity to minister to people and let the light of the gospel shine into the darkness of so many people who are suffering. I think there are gonna be a lot of great opportunities for mission and evangelism in the negative world. As many of the bad messages of our society, unfortunately do a lot of damage to people's lives. Erin, we just appreciate all of your research and thoughtfulness that went into your writing. Again, your book is Life in the Negative World, Confronting Challenges in Antichristian Culture. We thank you so much for spending the time and just unpacking this important conversation. Thanks for having me. All right, while we have more of hope today coming up, so grab a snack during this break and we'll be right back. Jesus' two greatest commandments are love God and love others. Learning how to love better is a lifelong journey. This month with your best gift of cornerstone television, we'd like to send you Love Like That, five relationship secrets from Jesus by Dr. Les Parrot. Discover how to truly love those in your life with this revolutionary guide. Blending the latest research in psychology and sociology with biblical insights, Parrot shares five practices, being mindful, approachable, gracious, vulnerable and empathetic to help you forge meaningful, fulfilling connections with others. Love Like That will revolutionize every relationship in your life. Ask for your copy of Love Like That, five relationship secrets from Jesus by Dr. Les Parrot when you give this month to support Christian television through Cornerstone Network. Give online at ctvn.org slash donate or call us at 888-665-4483. Hope happens here. Hope happens here. Something that we like to say and something that we believe that there is hope in Jesus Christ and that that's what we are sharing with you. And it's interesting that in the conversation we had with Aaron and in the Meaningful Monday segment, Anna, we kind of juxtaposed each other in one instance. It's really true. We are seeing us sliding away from biblical principles and foundations in our nation, in our culture, in our civilization. And is that gonna continue? Or as has happened in the past, is there gonna be some sort of reformation, some sort of revival that kind of draws us back to where we should be. But then we see something like the chosen and see the gospel getting in a new way to people. And people, and again, they're not, sometimes they get criticized saying, are they rewriting the Bible? No, they're using a creative activity to demonstrate the Bible. And that's a good thing. And so to see that and to see, we're going to need, you and I as Christians, I'm speaking to my fellow Christians out there, we are going to need all of our abilities and the Holy Spirit to find our way of sharing the gospel. You can just shout the gospel out and maybe it'll affect somebody. But you know what? I wanna get past that into the heart of someone and we can do that if we follow what the Holy Spirit is telling us. Yeah, it is very fascinating, just the connection of looking again at the gospel stories that play out and the chosen and how Jesus came to, he caused a revolution on this earth and he didn't use the most important, the smartest, the most educated, the richest people to do it. He went to people just like you and me who are very common and ordinary. But what he did was after he left earth, he gave us his Holy Spirit to make us extraordinary, to have extraordinary influence on this earth and it's important that, oftentimes I'll go throughout my day and like Lord, how do you want to use me in this dark world to be light? And oftentimes it comes back to doing the assignments that he has ahead of you, whether it's loving your spouse well, loving your children well, getting involved in the community, being out there to be that light and to learn how to love others well. Because Tom, I've found that the more opportunities we have to do life with people and be loving and be intentional and be good listeners, it opens up those opportunities to be light. It really does. You know, one of my favorite quotes is from David Livingstone, the great missionary who said that he had, basically said he had no great endowments of intellect. He wasn't the smartest guy in the room but he said, but I have determined this day that I am going to be an extraordinary Christian. I think that's what we can all be, right? We can be a Christian and it doesn't sound very humble but what it is is he said, I'm going after it. I'm going after Jesus. I'm going after to where I can really know him and make him known to the people around me. That's what we want to do. So wherever you find yourself today, wherever you find yourself, there is someone you can affect for the gospel, someone you can love, someone you can pray for, someone you can do kindness to, someone you can share the word with, someone that you can visit and give a cup of water to, there is somebody out there that you can touch. You don't have to be this extraordinary person. All you have to have is an extraordinary God and a relationship with him and you do have that. So do that today. Be that great Christian, the one that goes out and just loves somebody. When you do that, you're going to bring hope today to them. Are you tired of just getting bills in your mailbox? Find inspiration instead by subscribing to the Cornerstone Television's Hope Today newsletter. Each month we'll deliver good news about what God is doing in our region and world through CTVN's ministry. We'll keep you in the know about our latest special programming and our full program guide will keep you connected to all your favorites. You'll also find a new dashing dish recipe every month. As you read our Hope Today newsletter, stay encouraged knowing your generosity and giving to CTVN is making a difference and building God's kingdom. We can't do it without you. Sign up today to receive your inspirational free Hope Today newsletter every month in your mailbox. Go to our website at ctvn.org slash news or call us at 888-665-4483. Thank you for being a part of our Cornerstone Television family. Hope happens here. Cornerstone Television wishes to thank all our faithful viewers whose consistent prayers and financial support have made this program possible.