Season 04 EP09: The Lack of Evangelical Elites

Join Pastor Ryan and Pastor Matthew with Aaron Renn as they talk about The Lack of Evangelical Elites.

A quarter of America identifies as evangelical. But evangelicals are nearly absent from the institutions that shape American life — the Supreme Court, elite universities, major publications, and the high-leverage corners of business and media.

In EP09, Aaron Renn joins Ryan Fullerton and Matthew Delaughter to ask why. They talk about what evangelicals lost when mainline Protestantism collapsed as a cultural pipeline, why rising evangelicals so often convert to Catholicism, what "profitable but prosaic" industries can and can't accomplish, why Catholic institutions out-mentor and out-fund evangelical ones, and what pastors can actually do to cultivate the next generation of evangelical leaders.

Aaron Renn is the author of Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture (Zondervan, 2024). His essay "The Problem with the Evangelical Elite" appeared in First Things.

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