Meghan Larissa Good, Divine Gravity: Sparking a Movement to Recover a Better Christian Story (Harrisonburg, VA: Herald, 2023).
Aaron Renn, Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Reflective, 2024).
People’s ideas of geography are not founded on actual facts but on Mercator’s map.
—G. J. Morrison, British cartographer, 1902
Maps are ubiquitous in early-education classrooms. Young children learn to locate themselves on globes and maps by marking their position relative to continental boundaries and bodies of water. Maps may appear to be neutral devices, offering data just as if a child were observing a bird feeder through a window.
The world, though, is not a map. The correspondence between a bird and the image of a bird through a window is not the correspondence between the world and a map. This distinction is not simply that, as Alfred Korzybski put it, “the map is not the territory,” which I take to mean that the inhabited world contains qualities that a map cannot represent.[1] No, it is rather that maps themselves result from choices about what to depict and what to neglect. This is not as crass a selection as whose story a cartographer chooses to tell; it is more a question of how to make depictable what exists.
What exists is a glorious world full of diversity and cultures too vast and distinct to name. Our human endeavors to map such a world cannot help but flatten some of this difference. Nevertheless, maps serve their own significant purposes. In the world of the armchair Twitterati, we forget there once were explorers whose very lives depended on reliable maps. Whether they succeeded in their cross-continental or worldwide missions depended on whether the maps they held were true—whether they were reliable.
For the sailor or aviator, the easiest way to navigate by map is to draw an arcing line, called a rhumb line, between the origin and destination. Using a protractor, a sailor could read his bearing and set his course and, without even landmarks, find his way.
For the map to function in this way, it is “laid out . . . as a flattened version of a cylinder,” with latitude and longitude lines running at 90-degree angles. What the resulting Mercator map gains in navigational and directional accuracy, however, it loses in what is called equivalence. On such a map, two countries that are identical in size will appear different depending on their proximity to the equator, with countries appearing larger the farther they are from the equator. It depicts “a world centered vertically on a horizontal axis through Europe, [Russia], and the United States.”[2] The visual distortions privilege North America and Europe, making them the visual center of the world.
Cartographers speak of four criteria—shape, area, distance, and direction—that must be weighed in the making of any map.[3] For this map, the cartographer sacrificed shape and area in order to prioritize direction. A precise and successful navigational map thus yields an imprecise visual aid. That the Mercator projection is deficient in its visual depiction of equivalence (or relative area) results from its function as a navigational aid.
It would be a surprise to premodern sailors to learn that their map was racist or that a map could be racist. It wasn’t until the mid-twentieth century that accusations were made of maps as visual aids that might reveal “mapism”; analogous to racism, this term suggested a preference or bias that was revealed in the way the world was visually projected.[4]
Arno Peters, who helped develop the Gall-Peters map, was not a trained mapmaker but a journalist. His skills in writing copy and press releases likely contributed to the success of his map, which was not in fact unique to him but a revised version of an earlier map. The Gall-Peters map treats the globe as a rectangle but sacrifices distance and direction for equivalence. In order to portray the relative area of countries, “The Peters map . . . [enlarges] tropical areas with a north-south expansion that makes Africa and South American look tall and thin, as well as by reducing higher-latitude areas with a north-south compression that makes Canada and northern Asia look short and fat.” What results from this compression are countries south of the equator that look “like wet, ragged, long winter underwear hung out to dry on the Arctic Circle.”[5] Africa and South America especially benefit (or suffer) from this projection, as they appear to be significantly larger but also longer and more narrow than countries north of the equator.
It was not difficult for Peters, who it has been suggested was more a propogandist than a cartographer, to build the political case for his map. His map, Peters argued, would displace a “Europe-centred view of the world” and center the global south in its depiction.[6] Religious organizations, at the time concerned to promote the values and decolonizing energy of their era, helped the map gain attention. Christianity Today, reporting on the World Council of Church’s distribution of the map, published the following in 1984:
“In our epoch, relatively young nations of the world have cast off the colonial dependencies and now fight for equal rights,” [Arno Peters] says. “It seems important to me that the developed nations are no longer placed at the center of the world, but are plotted according to their true size.” His work is perhaps more of a contribution to world politics than it is to cartography, since its shape distortion renders it unsuitable for use in navigation.[7]
It would indeed seem a deficiency to have a map you can no longer navigate by—unless navigation was no longer the point.
The Peters projection was largely a projection of his own social and political concerns. This makes it not a bad map but one suited for only certain ends. The intent of such a depiction was to rewrite the world, and so indirectly change the way people live in it. But were sailors to have pulled out the Peter’s projection for navigational purposes, they would have run aground.
Aaron Renn’s Life in the Negative World and Meghan Larissa Good’s Divine Gravity are both maps. They share in common a desire to project a vision of the world and its relationship to the church. It is this relationship that they are trying to project, and their values are both apparent in each of their projections.
Renn frequently describes himself as a writer and a consultant. He is not a theologian or a pastor. Renn’s rise to relative prominence in theological circles the last few years resulted from his success as a blogger and online writer, and his particular prominence resulted from his three worlds model of evangelicalism, which he initially developed in 2014 and then published in First Things in 2022.[8] The three worlds model describes a relationship between Christianity and American culture that he says has moved from cozy, to neutral, to difficult, if not hostile.
Renn’s dating of these epochs is “impressionistic.” By his reading, the “neutral” world begins in 1994 and the negative world in 2014. The neutral world is marked by such changes as increasing evangelical influence in politics and an “urban resurgence” that moved successful upper middle-class professionals to the cities and made possible ministries like Tim Keller’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church.[9] Many have objected to the framing of this era as “neutral” toward Christianity, as friction still existed between the church and the secular world during this time, but Renn’s framing, as I understand it, intends to suggest that the cultural conditions of the time allowed for Christian institutions to exist alongside other nonreligious institutions. It is not the case that every artist in New York City would have viewed Christianity as a social good in the years between 1994 and 2013; it is simply the case that such a view would not have been universally objectionable.
Conversely, Renn’s view is that now, in the “negative” world, identifying Christianity as a social good or promoting, for instance, a conference on Christianity and the Arts, would subject individuals to negative social pressure almost universally. Renn uses 2014 as his rough beginning to this period, highlighting the greater awareness of social inequalities and personal identity that appeared to take shape during President Barack Obama’s second term. It might be easy to castigate such an observation as the reactionary politics of a white man who had much to lose by such realities, but even progressive commentators like Matthew Yglesias (who called this shift “the Great Awokening”) have noted this cultural trend.[10] The Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage, was in 2015 and is an important marker for Renn, as it demonstrates how his take on a Christian view of marriage and sexuality fell farther out of the mainstream of American culture. Of course, one of the deficiencies of Renn’s argument is that he never spells out how other shifting views during this period—for example, on race or the Me Too movement—clash with a Christian view of the world.
In Renn’s mind, the negative world has rendered Christianity impossible—impossible not only as a socially held good but, increasingly, as a privately held good. It is this insistence that both motivates Renn’s project and generates resistance to it. “For the first time in the four-hundred-year history of this country,” he writes, “society now disfavors Christianity.”[11] Keyboard warriors have gone apoplectic over this statement, and a more sophisticated thinker could easily massage it to make it more palatable. Perhaps this is not the first time—claims to uniqueness are almost never true. But Renn’s basic observation is that things have changed for American Christians. Only a fool would deny such an observable truth.
But fools, apparently, we are. Renn writes that among evangelicals there is “a lack of recognition that cultural conditions have fundamentally changed for Christianity. Evangelicals had not—and to a great extent still have not—recognized that we now live in the negative world.” Renn’s view is that Christians who live in the “upper middle class or urban elite” worlds are more susceptible to cultural pressure to give up Christian values. He sees many who synchronize “with secular elite culture—particularly on matters such as race, immigration, and the Me Too movement—aligning more closely with progressive cultural and political positions.” They also tend to soften the most unattractive Christian positions on issues such as abortion and sexuality. Renn diagnoses the fracturing of many Christian institutions on issues such as race, sexuality, and politics as related to the chief reality that “Christians are now a moral minority and secular society is actively negative toward the faith.”[12]
Remember, Renn is a consultant and strategist. He therefore gives himself the “assignment” of addressing the relationship between the church and the world, and he is set to offer a set of advice regarding how the church should function. His advice is practical and satisfyingly small scale. He divides his insights into three categories (Living Personally, Leading Institutionally, and Engaging Missionally) that each have three sets of practical guidance. The advice ranges from the pastoral (“become obedient” to the commands of Scripture) to the personal (“become excellent” so that there are Christians who can lead organizationally at a high level). Some of the strongest parts of Renn’s book are in the places where his experience in urban planning overlaps with his role as a consultant. He recommends Christians invest in local communities and “pursue ownership,” giving the examples of both small “third place” type businesses, like coffee shops, and larger successful businesses that can economically contribute to communities and provide employment for like-minded Christians in areas where Christian belief is scarce.[13] This advice is practical and actionable, and it benefits both Christians and non-Christians alike.
The virtues of Renn’s book lie with its modesty. It is short, practical, and reads more like a blog post than a book. For these reasons, however, it makes a sketchy map. Renn might have simply restated 1 Thessalonians 4:3–8:
It is God’s will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality;that each of you should learn to control your own body in a way that is holy and honorable,not in passionate lust like the pagans, who do not know God;and that in this matter no one should wrong or take advantage of a brother or sister. The Lord will punish all those who commit such sins, as we told you and warned you before. For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life. Therefore, anyone who rejects this instruction does not reject a human being but God, the very God who gives you his Holy Spirit. (NIV)
This passage is more succinct, not prone to overstatement, and as actionable as any advice out there, and it avoids the controversy of dating Christianity’s decline.
Meghan Good’s Divine Gravity is a different kind of map. Good’s practical solutions are nested in a different topography, what she names a “better Christian story.” She reimagines Christianity’s claims in relation to the twenty-first century’s “disruptions,” particularly the technological advances that have deemphasized the role of centralized authority and elevated the individual conscience far above even its Reformation heights.[14]
Where Renn’s book is ordered around the three stages model, Good’s takes the Reformation as its chief motif. The Reformation for Good was a “positive unsettling,” a “repentance movement, a regularly required period of communal reflection and reorientation.” The Reformation she imagines is a “convergence” of community held insight.[15] The disruptions evident in religious communities are signs for Good not of a lessening of Christian influence in the culture (as for Renn) but of genuine Christian insight that unhealthy institutions and the triangulation of religion and political power have obfuscated. Where Renn sees dechurching and the waning influence of Christianity as a sign of Christianity’s decline, Good sees it as a fruitful sign of God’s winnowing, of a fissure in society that is due to society’s sickness and not itself a decline.
Good identifies a series of “dilemmas” that bring with them positive restatements of Christian belief. Where the Bible might seem a challenge, with its claims about absolute truth and its sole legitimacy as truth’s arbiter, Good challenges her readers to understand Scripture as rooted in a rediscovery of the person of Jesus. Instead of shouting to match the cultural claim that “all ground is disputed,” Good chooses a gentler voice, urging us to see that “truth, love, and justice has a face.”[16] This strategy of meeting irreconcilable conflicts between the Christian church and the secular culture with a softer, gentler option is Good’s strategy throughout the book.
Jesus, she suggests, comes to reinterpret our sense of God as about “crime and punishment,” to replace the picture of God as “the one you call to bring the bat when someone keys your car.” Although the world may seem like it is going to hell in a handbasket, this Jesus-looking God is about his father’s business—making his kingdom on earth “a new world where God’s good will gets done,” a “borderless land where people live together in every effervescent shade of justice and pattern of peace.” “Operation Incarnation” isn’t intended to solve a knowledge problem or a personal morality problem. Christ came to oust “the Powers” who have created unjust systems that lead to human corruption, systemic violations, and even environmental degradation. In bringing “salvation,” Christ is addressing all this.[17]
Good here is critiquing the caricatured views of the atonement that are often heard by Western churchgoers, preached sometimes by dim-witted but well-meaning pastors who have transposed salvation into the key of personal moral transformation. She is right to attempt a reappraisal of such a theme, but her strategy here is consistently unsatisfying. Reading God “through the face of Jesus” is a deeply basic hermeneutical principle that really isn’t that helpful.[18] Jesus is at once the visible God and yet a deeply enigmatic vision. What is seen of God in Christ is love for the widow and oppressed, but it is also a strengthening of inconvenient commandments and a harsh judgment on those who consider themselves righteous. For every clear retort by Jesus, there is a mystery told as parable. Some of Christ’s words seem to obfuscate as much as they reveal—and this often seems to be the point. To take when we see God, we see Jesus as a hermeneutical principle overlooks the extent to which Jesus is, and remains, a veiled mystery.
It is not even quite fair to call what Good does a softening, because she really does attempt to hold to Christian particulars—the necessity of Christ’s death, resurrection, and personal transformation, among them. It would be unfair, too, to call it a gimmick—although her hermeneutic of seeing God through Jesus can often feel like one. It is more that Good’s attempt to narrate the particulars of being a “Jesus people” can feel short on particulars. What, after all, are the demands of being a borderless people?[19] How can this be enacted if borders are what make a people particular?
Good is clear that we are to be involved in inaugurating the salvation that God brings in Christ. She writes the following:
There is a role in this story for us to play in the rescue of others. Those exiting the prison can rally other captives. There’s no need to claim to have the answers or know more than we do. We don’t even have to pretend we know exactly where the exit lies. It’s enough to know that the doors are open. It’s enough to say, “I’ve met somebody who has been outside. He says he knows the way to get there. Let’s follow him together and see where we end up.”[20]
But that, in itself, is not much of a map.
Where Renn leads with nerve, Good seems at times to lack it. Although her depiction of what the gospel looks like is compelling, it lacks the gritty particulars. In her common attempts to move beyond the “dilemmas” of religion in the modern age, she acts as if they don’t exist. For this reason, it is hard to know exactly where such a map would be useful.
Renn and Good have both attempted maps of the church in the twenty-first century. Both maps correspond with their convictions regarding the state of the territory, regarding, foremost of all, what goods are at hand and which should be prominently displayed. It is less that values are promoted by maps than that they are revealed by them. What we see may not determine what we care about; rather, it may display it. But if you are trying to get around in the modern world, it is critical you are using the right map.
For my own purposes, I’d like a map that oriented me to reality and also showed me the most plausible routes. If there were a major mountain range along the way, I’d like to see it. I want there to be both correspondence and a hint of strategy. Purely decorative maps have no use for the explorer, and topographic ones look silly above a couch. Both Renn and Good have given us a type of map, but neither, I think, is all that useful. Neither goes very far in addressing the question I have most days, which is where on earth are we.
[1] Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (Lancaster, PA: International Non-Aristotelian Library, 1933), 58.
[2] National Geographic Society, “Gerardus Mercator,” October 19, 2023, https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/gerardus-mercator/; and Mark Monmonier, Drawing the Line: Tales of Maps and Cartocontroversy (New York, NY: Henry Holt, 1994), 18.
[3] Thanks to my brother, an actual cartographer, for this insight.
[4] Monmonier, Drawing the Line, 3.
[5] Monmonier, Drawing the Line, 13; and the cartographic educator Arthur Robinson quoted in Drawing the Line, 10. Also see Drawing the Line, 15–29.
[6] Monmonier, Drawing the Line, 27.
[7] “A New View of the World: A German Mapmaker Says the Third World Has Suffered Long Enough from a Distorted Map,” Christianity Today (February 17, 1984): 39.
[8] See Renn, Life in the Negative World, xvii.
[9] Renn, Life in the Negative World, 10, 12, and 10.
[10] Yglesias quoted in Renn, Life in the Negative World, 11.
[11] Renn, Life in the Negative World, 41.
[12] Renn, Life in the Negative World, 33, 36, and 39.
[13] Renn, Life in the Negative World, 66, 131, and 140.
[14] Good, Divine Gravity, 18.
[15] Good, Divine Gravity, 18 and 23.
[16] Good, Divine Gravity, 46–47.
[17] Good, Divine Gravity, 59, 69, 71, 69, and 68.
[18] Good, Divine Gravity, 47 and 53; also see 57–60.
[19] Good, Divine Gravity, 156; also see 66.
[20] Good, Divine Gravity, 75–76.