It’s about someone named Aaron Renn.
Mr. Renn loves city life, and has lived in Manhattan, Chicago and Indianapolis. Carmel is different. Here, church bells chime full hymns over the town square. It’s a place where it’s easy to forget Mr. Renn’s best-known idea: his warning to Christians that America is in an era of distinct hostility to believers like them, and that they must gird themselves to adapt to, as the title of his recent book put it, “Life in the Negative World.”
I don’t think there is anything new here at all. Christians have a habit of periodically engaging in wildly enthusiastic embrace of some new “reinterpretation” that seems more engaged and relevant and intellectually credible. (Jesus Freaks, Christian Contemporary Music, Blue Like Jazz, and so on.) And then you investigate it more closely and you see that it’s the same old redneck fire and brimstone, pieties and hypocrisies, patriarchy, smugness, and materialism.
And, of course, extreme right-wing politics. No, you’re not smart now.
It’s not really Christian at all. It’s superstition combined with reactionary politics. It’s the politics of the rich and privileged, which isn’t all bad, but mostly is. It’s paranoia and conformity, banality and self-regard. The same old, same old, same old. The blah blah blah of middle America.
It’s a sweet, wonderful world, if you’re in the club, of consumer trinkets, antiseptic public life, and space for all those men to get off to Vegas for a glorious weekend once in a while, of gambling and prostitutes and Wayne Newton, because, after all, boys will boys.
The Palladium, a proud edifice built in Carmel to demonstrate that even conservative Republicans can have good taste, features acts like Mickey Dolenz, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Itzhack Perlman, Emmy-Lou Harris, The U.S. Army Field Band and Male Chorus, and an official release party for some country singer named Tege Holt who sounds pretty harmless.
Emmy-Lou Harris and Itzhack Perlman are esteemed but safe choices. The others speak for themselves. They remind me of the problem Trump is going to have bringing A-list acts to the Kennedy Centre now that he is it’s chief.