Aaron Renn
Writer and urban theorist in Indianapolis, author of "Life in the Negative World" and creator of the "Three Worlds of Evangelicalism" framework; Senior Fellow at American Reformer and former Manhattan Institute urban policy fellow.
4
APPEARANCES
3
PODCASTS
Sep 14, 2026
Joseph HolmesHOST
When you're observing as a culture critic these changes, this sort of growing anti-elite sentiment, what do you believe are some of the main drivers of it? And then also, why do you think that this matters so much?
Aaron RennGUEST
Seamus Kahn wrote a great short paper that may be available online where he reviews various theories of the elite movement.
Aaron RennGUEST
And one of the things that we should probably spend some time thinking about is when we say elite, who precisely are we talking about? Because there are a number of ideas about who is elite.
Aaron RennGUEST
We can think of someone who is elite as to performance, like an elite athlete, an elite sprinter.
Aaron RennGUEST
What are the handful of greatest performers in a particular domain? We sometimes use the word elite in that category.
Aaron RennGUEST
Some people use the term elite for essentially the professional managerial class.
18 MINS LATER
Imer SantiagoHOST
But how are we doing and where are we at in that process of adaptation? Will we survive into the future?
Aaron RennGUEST
You know, I think there's lots of reasons to think that Christianity can, you know, be can thrive into the future.
Aaron RennGUEST
The mainline churches that dominated America back in that 1950s I talked about, they couldn't adapt to changing times and they still haven't figured it out.
Aaron RennGUEST
Evangelicals have, you know, found ways to create models that work in different, you know, environments.
Aaron RennGUEST
other thing I will say that's related to this is there really is sort of still an American cultural hegemony in a lot of ways, you know, in the sense that, you know, we had Hollywood sort of exporting American culture.
Aaron RennGUEST
you know, exports American culture and American categories for thinking about things.
Aaron RennGUEST
And maybe, you know, some of the colonialism or post-colonialism, you know, discourse to the extent that affects other countries is actually a product of US social media dissemination.
Aaron RennGUEST
One thing is like in France, there's been some debate over oh, people in France are adopting these US woke categories of race that we don't believe, those are not French ideas, those are American ideas.
Aaron RennGUEST
It happened in the north of England and places like Manchester and all the industrial cities in the north of England.
58 MINS LATER