Aaron Renn writes about the human, cultural, and institutional foundations of American flourishing during an era of transition.
His "three worlds" model describing the changing place of Christianity in American life has become "the dominant framework" many people use to understand the current moment, according to the New York Times. Christianity Today called it "among the most thought-provoking ideas pertaining to American evangelicalism this century."
The Project
America is in the midst of a major period of transition—technological, demographic, religious, cultural, and economic. Most serious thinking about this transition focuses on what might be called the Techno-Industrial Acceleration track: AI, energy, housing, state capacity, industrial policy, the infrastructure of a more dynamic future. Far less attention is paid to the Human-Social Formation track—the human, cultural, and institutional foundations that determine whether the transition produces genuine flourishing or something thinner and more fragile.
The premise of this newsletter is that the Formation track matters as much as the Acceleration track. Previous successful transitions in American history—notably the period from 1870 to 1930—required both working in parallel.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, America saw a vast transformation to a new, integrated national identity and economy during the Second Industrial Revolution. This was increasingly shaped by technological advances, large scale corporations of the type we are familiar with, linked together by sophisticated new forms of infrastructure like railroads and telegraph lines. This didn’t just emerge. It had to be created.
But this techno-industrial transformation had another side to it, which is figuring out how to help Americans adapt to this new world, and how to make sure that this new world actually benefitted the average citizen. So along with it, we also had the Progressive Movement, which, broadly understood, undertook the human-social side of this national transition.
This newsletter is a sustained attempt to do that thinking across the domains where the Formation question is most pressing in America today: religion, family, gender, leadership, immigration and human capital, urbanism and place, political economy — and technology's interactions with each of these.
About Aaron Renn?
Aaron M. Renn is a writer based in Indianapolis and the author of Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture (Zondervan, 2024). He is a Senior Fellow at American Reformer, a former Senior Fellow in urban policy at the Manhattan Institute, and a former Managing Director at Accenture.
His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Atlantic, First Things, American Affairs, and other publications. His work has been the subject of a 4,000-word profile in The New York Times and is regularly cited by journalists, scholars, and religious leaders working to make sense of American cultural change.
Who Reads This
Readers include journalists, scholars, pastors, founders, investors, and professionals across the political spectrum. They are looking for serious, fair, original analysis that transcends today’s tribal commentary and fights, and is focused on elevating people’s sights towards a productive approach to the questions facing American life.
