Aaron M. Renn focuses on ways to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse twenty-first century. He brings a similar eye toward thriving in his analysis of males, females, marriage, and frailly
The city analyst has been widely praised and featured numerous times in the media across America and the world. His innovative ideas on cities have been covered by outlets including the Guardian, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, and the Washington Post.
He is a Contributing Editor to City Journal, columnist for Governing magazine, producer of Heartland Intelligence and The Masculinist. Prior to his work in public policy, Renn had 15-year business career in management and technology consulting, where he was a partner at Accenture. He also founded the urban data analytics software platform Telestrian, which continues to underpin his work on cities. He wrote the e-book The Urban State of Mind: Meditations on the City.
Podcast on the history of social class and mainline Protestant conservatism.
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Transcript of A Journey through NYC religions Television show
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, churches, integrity, leaders, politics, woke, stand, issue, important, big, basecamp, disintegrating, missional, company, organization, aaron, results, competence, left, started
SPEAKERS
Tony Carnes, Aaron Renn
T Carnes 00:09
Hello, Journeyers! It’s a great day to go exploring religions in New York City. I’m Tony Carnes, your host for A Journey through NYC religions Television.
As we transition out of COVID, hopefully, religious organizations are returning to in-person worship. Also, many of the great generation of religious leaders after the 1980s are beginning to transition out of leadership and bring in new leaders. And we are in the midst of a intense mayoral campaign to succeed Mayor de Blasio. What is going to happen after our COVID moment? What kind of leaders do we need for the post pandemic city? What kind of leaders do we need in our religious organizations — our churches or synagogues or mosques? We need to be thinking about those questions. To help us answer these questions, we’ve asked Aaron Renn, a notable urban analyst, to come help us answer them. Welcome to the program Aaron!
Aaron Renn 01:18
Thanks for having me.
T Carnes 01:21
Aaron was one of the nation’s best urban analysts at the Manhattan Institute, and he is a contributing editor to their magazine, City Journal. He also has a newsletter called Heartland Intelligence, which gives shrewd perceptions and advice to Midwestern cities. And he sends out a very intriguing newsletter, titled The Masculinist, which is about men, family and society. It’s filled with good advice — and sometimes sobering observations. We will link to his works on our website.
T Carnes 02:06
Aaron, in the post-COVID period, we are undergoing a transition of leadership, both in the city itself, New York City, and also in our religious organizations. What kind of leader do we need? And what kind are we likely to get? We’re having all types of stresses going on in the after-COVID and after-the-Woke generation coming on? What kind of leader do we need? And what kind are we likely to get?
Aaron Renn 02:42
I would say we have not gotten the caliber of leader that we deserve in America. I think that’s a widely shared sentiment. There’s widespread dissatisfactions. Now, not all those people, you know, agree with each other. You know, the Trump voters certainly don’t agree with the people who are supporting the DSA or who are Bernie Sanders voters. I think there’s a lot of dissatisfaction. And frankly, at the macro level, you know, economic results in America haven’t been that great since about 2000.
You know we’ve had relatively low growth, tremendous inequality. And I think the key stat that we see is that actually life expectancy in the United States has started to decline. And that’s crazy to think that we have declining life expectancy, which is something we expect that to say, Eastern Europe in the post industrial era, opioids, etc. So, we haven’t had the leadership that we deserve.
When I think about leadership, of institutions, of governments, and of churches, I think there’s three real dimensions that I look at for managing for long term institutional credibility.
And so the three things, it’s about integrity, then it’s about competence, and then it’s about a kind of missional integrity.
The first dimension is called personal integrity. This is, are you honest. A lot of these churches have problems in this area. We see, for example, a lot of sexual abuse scandals. You know that’s just totally unacceptable. There’s a lot of people who’ve gotten very rich off of their kind of ministries, buying Gulfstream jets and the like.
I’m not suggesting that we can ever get to a corruption, free politics, for example. But having someone who’s just kind of baseline integrity of leaders is very important.
Second is competence. And this is where we’re really falling down on the job in America. If you look at this COVID pandemic response, frankly, we didn’t do all that great. Certainly, it was gonna be a challenge no matter what. But now we’re seeing things like this Vanity Fair reporting on the lab leak hypothesis. I don’t take any stand on what might have happened, but we see that people who had blatant conflicts events interest, were lying by issuing statements that they knew were not true at the time about it, in order to try to shut it down.
And our our results were much poorer than those of East Asian countries. China had an initial problem, but if you look at South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, these places did much better than the United States or Western Europe. So, a competence is important.
And then lastly, missional integrity, which is, what is this organization supposed to actually be doing? What results is it supposed to be delivering, and focusing on that, and not allowing them to be, you know, essentially redirected to political or other ends.
So I think if we could do all those things, that’s really the kinds of leaders we should be looking for. People have basic personal integrity, people who are competent, and know how to actually lead organizations and deliver results. And then, who are the people who are going to keep the organization on mission?
T Carnes 06:00
Well, let me ask you, that’s take a hypothetical. So let’s say you are on a pastoral search committee, and you want to operationalize those three concerns into questions that would really produce results. How would you do that?
Aaron Renn 06:25
Hopefully, you’re doing some basic vetting on the on these people. I think it’s a little challenging, because a lot of the abuse of authority things only come down the road, once you’ve acquired some authority.
If you look at the qualifications for elder slash Bishop in the Bible, they tend to be predominantly those of personal care, personal character like not overly loving money, husband of one wife, those sorts of things. So, presumably you’re doing some sort of baseline integrity check.
You have look at what are the results they’ve achieved, historically, and the roles that they’ve been able to do. You have to look at that relative to what was set out as the mission. So, then I think you have to look at the missional integrity. This is where people run into trouble, because so many people are essentially blown here and there by the winds. Whatever kind of secular zeitgeist in terms of where the directions are going, people tend to go to them. So, starting about five or seven years ago, I noticed this hard turn into race issues. And it was very different from say someone like John Perkins, who has been focused on that his whole life. All of a sudden the culture takes a Woke turn, and the church takes Woke turn right along with it. And so you see, in my view is like, that was not something that came out of a religious context, but it was essentially being driven by essentially market demand in society.
And you could just ask, Okay, great, if this is something that we’ve missed, if this is something that was this huge issue, and all the people who failed to be covering it, why are they still running the show?
Right, they should have been admitted that they botched it. So, I think this idea doesn’t have to be that you jumped on the Trump politics bandwagon. I think people are kind of driven by the trends, and have not shown that they’re willing to take stands that essentially put them at odds with society, or maybe even with our own flock. And this is where I see that a lot of a lot of people really have it like in the church world. Especially since the collapse of the original religious right back in the post Reagan era, we entered this sort of world where I think there’s been much more cultural engagement. Too, I think a lot of people tried to avoid conflict and avoid certain issues.
I don’t want to be pro-conflict but at some point, are you willing to take a stand against some of your own people? Or are you able to take a stand against some of the cultural trends?
I think that’s really this ability to have integrity in the sense of a structural integrity. It is like a ship on the sea where the wind and the waves are bearing down on you, are you going to be able to withstand that pressure or are you simply going to crumble under that pressure?
In a world where there is a lot of pressure coming in from all the sides on these leaders, they’re going to have to decide what they stand for, what’s their core, and be willing to stay true to that, even at a cost. They’re not going to please everybody, and maybe some people are going to leave their churches, maybe it’s going to be a little smaller church. And so I think when you look at competence in terms of numbers — are we growing? Is the money coming in?, you can’t divorce it from missional integrity.
The churches are getting essentially kind of ripped apart by masks or by talking about crazy stuff. This is where we stand but you might change it if you think you are legitimately wrong on something. But I think it’s really important to say this is where we stand and show that someone can actually take some heat. It’s very important.
T Carnes 11:02
Well, you might want to take heat, but then again, you might be creating heat. Or you don’t have debate among many of the churches. And in synagogues, the debate is on politics. Is there a center, so that left and right can some have a common ground to speak at? That is, is there a central platform, not necessarily a central politics, but a central platform that people can come together and disagree?
Aaron Renn 11:39
There have been some long term trends among churches, in particular, of theologians drifting toward extremes or toward left or right. And you see this in the younger pastors when they join one particular network they become Woke? Or they’ve joined another network, they become Trumpians, maybe.
T Carnes 12:21
if I went to the largest churches in Manhattan, you would get something like this. You would get the majority want the teaching of the Bible, or better depth in their doctrine. They want to live out of Jesus in their lives. So, that becomes an important characteristic of the pastor, not just integrity, but actually, you can see Jesus actually living out in his life. That is, he looks like a person that’s genuine to the biblical tradition.
And finally, you have a substantial significant group that want Woke politics in the church. And you have a significant group that absolutely doesn’t want Woke politics.
I’ve seen a number of these churches that you can see in their hiring. Some hire from networks that are Woke, and then they have staff that start driving the direction thru the type of readings you have, the type of programs, what’s seen as good. And some of these structures are saying, Wait a moment, do we want really that split?
I think one of the resignations at Redeemer was because the pastor himself did not feel he could bridge those tensions. He was more a little bit more Woke than the others, but he had a lot of integrity. He did not want to betray people’s trust. And so he felt like that, really, it was best for him to leave — in a big surprise move because nobody was pushing him at the time. He decided, ‘I just can’t do this with good integrity.’ But it’s still after all the people who brought on staff, all the literature about social justice and Woke and so forth. And now, your pastoral selection committee has to figure out how do we get somebody that bridge?
Aaron Renn 14:48
Maybe, you can’t, and, you know, I think that’s part of it. This idea that “Can’t we all just get along” idea is one that isn’t there and I know it’s interesting. I attended church here in Indianapolis, that they were basically very explicit. We don’t talk about controversial issues. Basically, it’s very moderate church.
T Carnes 15:12
Moderate means no controversial issues?
Aaron Renn 15:14
Yeah, basically. They say we’re not going to preach about these controversial issues. They explicitly say, we want to be a big tent, where people who believe these different things and these different issues are. Not to say that people might not discuss them, but we’re not gonna preach that from the pulpit. But so, you know, so Well, we’ll see about that.
This is the thing about Woke: if you truly believe that this Woke thing is absolutely true, then it is absolutely the thing that we need to be addressing in our church in our society.
I think this idea we are in this phase in which a lot of the old alignments and groupings are kind of disintegrated. We see it in politics. We saw it with the kind of Republican Party turn towards trumpism. And a lot of the traditional people like the George Wills and the Bill Kristols, a lot of these guys became the NeverTrump movement. They’re like, we’re out of here. A lot of them rejected their party affiliation. They went hard left. So, you start seeing these old alliances disintegrating.
Somebody tweeted something the other day that they seem to have now deleted, but they mentioned a whole bunch of Southern Baptist people like Al Mohler, Greg Thornbury, Russell Moore, Owen Strand, and on down the line. They said, Look, five years ago, these guys would have all been right next to each other, you know, very unified, and they’re thinking, and now they’re all over the map. This guy’s over here, this guy’s over here, this guy’s over here, this guy’s over here. And so we’re seeing what used to be these aligned groups of people. There’s this reconfiguration going on. And I think in some respects, that is you have to be aware of this. And I’m not saying we should always be divisive, thata we should be seeking division. I think we should be seeking unity. But I think there is this sense in which there are there are kind of things that divide. Jesus even talked about it, I think, in his in his message.
T Carnes 17:21
Do we want to divide over the resurrection? Or over the meaning of Galatians? What’s the meaning of neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free?
Aaron Renn 17:34
What’s a peripheral issue? What’s the central issue? But you’ll find for some that there’s some third way like a Bill Clinton or Tony Blair type. If we just take this third way, if we just find this path, we’re going to be able to reconcile all this stuff. And I think realistically, it’s not going to happen. I think there are just there are some fundamental divergences.
And by the way, I think that what you see is it’s never going to be about one issue, because what you see is all these issue-complexes are very linked together. And, you know, yes, it’s just like the Republicans and Democrats: they have all these issues that you wouldn’t necessarily think they all go together. But people tend to agree on all of them.
So yeah, I do think there’s a sense in which we’re kind of migrating towards more division in society, that somewhat is going to be mirrored in the church. We just have to accept that we’re in this kind of kind of disintegrating, reconfiguring, kind of age.
The leader has to read things, the leader has to figure out how to answer those questions. What is something that I’m willing to see people leave the church over? Where do I want to make the stand and having the wisdom to do that, and the integrity to do that. I think is important that at some point, you’re going to have to displease some people.
Here’s an example from Indianapolis. The head of one of the big local agencies, was just basically slandered by a bunch of activists. And I know that all of the leaders in this community know who this woman is, personally; they know that these things are untrue. And yet none of them will publicly defend her. None of them is gonna say a word. It’s like, you know, you see this stuff. It’s like, No, I’m not going to expose myself to mob attack by defending my own friend–who by the way, whose husband just died a cancer a couple months ago, and they’re just leaving her to twist in the wind. And it’s not like she’s gonna get fired or lose her job or anything like that. But this idea that you won’t even stand up for people. It’s those little things in which I see such moral cowardice.
I recognize that we only have so many chips, so we got to decide where we’re gonna play those chips. I think that’s part of it. Leaders have to decide: I got this many chips. Where am I going to place them? Where am I going to put them? Where’s it going to go? And I think that’s very important. Right now, a lot of people aren’t playing any chips.
T Carnes 20:31
Well, let me ask you, I know you’ve given some thought and talk about the Basecamp example. They are known as a pretty progressive or leftist organization. And the two founders, particularly one of them, decided that the political discussions were just tearing apart the workplace. So, he banned political discussions from the workplace. And evidently, there’s been a pretty significant number of employees, 20% or so, announced that they’re leaving. He offered them a buyout if they wanted to leave. Why is that going to work? Is he going to be able to have a non political work environment? Or is it just the captain at the ship that’s going down? Is it impossible?
Aaron Renn 21:45
I think that’s a great example. So Basecamp is a privately held company. They are really two main owners, and Jeff Bezos owns a small amount of the company, I think. And they are far-lefty guys. And they’re like, we’re running a software company here. Okay, so we actually have this what I mean by missional integrity, the mission of our company is to sell this project management software, this email software. We are in this kind of collaboration, software business. And if politics takes us away from that, we won’t have a business. And so you basically see that the same thing happened with Coinbase. And so yeah, a third of their employees quit, they offered a buyout, a third of them quit.
These are guys that took a stand, knowing that the hit jobs from the media, were going to start coming after them. They had seen what happens when Coinbase did the same thing. They had said, Look, we’re going to be focused on our mission, which is cryptocurrency. We are not going to become an organization that is all around politics. The New York Times just starts writing hit jobs on them as racist. Look, we’re gonna make this decision anyway, because this is the right thing for us to do for our business. And I think in both cases, it seems to have worked out, so far,
T Carnes 23:12
Obviously, they just started, we don’t know yet,
Aaron Renn 23:14
Right. Coinbase is still doing quite well. You take you take a decision that alienated a third of your workforce, and they quit. But those decisions are going to attract other people. Right? And I can tell you, there are a lot of people in corporate America who are not conservatives, these are people on the left, who think, Man, this craziness is going on in our companies is insane. They don’t like it. And the idea that they can work for a company that’s like Coinbase could be attractive to a lot of people. This especiolly true for a company like Basecamp, that isn’t that big. They don’t need a huge number of employees, they don’t need to find another 4000 employees, they need to hire and find, like, 15 employees. Are you telling me that there are 15 software developers in the country that wouldn’t kill to work in a place where they didn’t have to deal with politics all day? There’s a lot of them. So you know, and that’s sad, there are prices to be paid, but they were able to make a decision. And I think that’s, that’s an important thing: that they’re willing to make a decision.
T Carnes 24:33
Let me shift off from the leadership for a moment to the post COVID period. What’s going to be the impact of COVID on the churches? Are they going to end up in the future shrinking because people have got used to not going to church? Or will they be going virtual as well. Or will they have a new restart and a new freshness about what they’re doing?
Aaron Renn 24:58
It reminds me a little bit of the debate over remote work that everybody is prognosticating. But nobody really knows for sure what’s going to happen.
There is a lot of research. People suggesting a significant number of churches are going to go under. I don’t have hard data, you know, but what I’m told is that a lot of church plants, particularly in big cities, really took a hit, may have folded, because they just were getting started and didn’t have a lot of money and a lot of resources. So, a lot of the newer ones kind of took a hit.
I hear that people are moving around between churches, on account of a few factors. One is, are they meeting or not meeting? And so, churches that had been meeting there’s a lot of new people coming in the door, because they’re meeting. Will they stay? I don’t know.
Secondly, I think it’s kind of crazy to think about but masks has been a big dividing line for people. And then this woke politics is becoming a dividing line as well. And so you know, what? I think there is this sense that some people just pick the church online, and they’re gonna stay remote.
I don’t think there’s going to be as big a blowout among churches is many may have been expected. I’ve also heard giving for most churches has remained pretty strong. So I think we’ll have to see, I do think there’s gonna to be a reallocation of people among churches, over some of these issues. How exactly it’ll play out is not clear,
T Carnes 26:44
Are established churches, like let’s say, the Catholic Church, or the mainland church, or historical churches benefitingmore, because they show stability?
Aaron Renn 27:00
To some extent, if you had a building and could control your own destiny, that counted for something because you weren’t at the mercy of landlords telling you you couldn’t meet or couldn’t open and all that stuff. But the trend in main line churches has definitely been going the wrong direction. In terms of in terms of membership, it remains to be seen, I do think some of the younger churches that were not really fully self- sustaining are going to take a hit. We’ll just have to see how it plays out.
T Carnes 27:27
Well, we’re really glad that you could come in and share your wisdom and insight.
T Carnes 27:34
My name is Tony Carnes. I’m your host for A Journey through New York City religions Television, I’m here with Aaron Renn, please check out the website and also on all our Sunday programs. Good day, bye!
