How Loss Aversion and Safetyism Are Crippling Evangelical Leadership

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Aaron Renn is an author and thinker I’ve been following since 2022, when he wrote an article entitled The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism on First Things. His analysis was insightful and precise. So I was thrilled when I found him on Substack. I encourage my readers to explore his articles.

Recently, Renn reposted a Substack article by Anthony Bradley. While I’m somewhat familiar with Bradley’s work, I believe he provides some valuable insights in his piece, Evangelicals Don’t Produce Leaders. They Produce ‘Cubicle Men.’ — Why a culture obsessed with safety, reputation, and moral control is quietly eliminating the kind of risk-taking required to build institutions.

Renn posted Bradley’s full article here for free. I’d recommend reading it first before diving into my thoughts below.

I think Renn and Bradley are pulling on an important thread that is worth reflecting on and developing further.

In my experience over the years, I’ve found that loss aversion is often misdiagnosed as risk aversion (generally speaking). Loss aversion is when the fear of loss drives decisions that lead to actual losses. I became acquainted with loss aversion during my time as a wealth manager advising clients. This translated into other areas of ministry and church work.

“In human decision-making, losses loom larger than gains.”
- Kahneman & Tversky (Prospect Theory)

Simply put, losses have the same psychological effect as pain and have twice the impact of gain (pleasure). Our brains are wired to avoid pain. This affects the decision-making process without our being conscious of it, and the ramifications can be devastating. It leads to risky behavior.

The loss-averse individual will unwittingly drive their car off a cliff to avoid a pothole in the road. This misdiagnosis is fatal because there is a healthy form of risk aversion from a biblical worldview perspective that takes into consideration the effects of the Fall and sin on individuals and systems — but this aversion is a mitigation through wisdom, discernment, discipline, and prudence.

Contemporary secular American culture values preference, comfort, and safetyism. Safetyism is a term coined by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and lawyer Greg Lukianoff, who developed the concept in their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind. It is an ideology where “safety” (particularly emotional and psychological safety) is prioritized above nearly all other values, including free speech, intellectual growth, resilience, and open inquiry. Preferences, comfort, and safety are protected by paper walls and guarded by emotional sentinels that provide psychological well-being and a false sense of security that could be fatal.

The 2008 financial bailouts were, in one way, an example. “Too Big to Fail” is not a sentiment of risk but of loss. As such, the cure was more deadly than the disease. The same goes for the COVID response, in which people’s emotional and psychological safety was manipulated. We shifted from weighing and wisely mitigating actual risk while taking appropriate risks to an “if/then” false proposition. It basically posits: “If we don’t take these actions, then people are going to die needlessly and you will lose your freedoms. After all, if you don’t want grandma to die and you want to be able to attend a football game again, then you must inject an experimental drug and reorient your life according to a new set of social rules.” Thus, the social order was reoriented around safety. Safety becomes an idol — a pursuit in life.

As finite and fallen creatures, we fail to see our limitations and grasp the fact that failure is baked into our system architectures. We vainly believe we can eliminate all failure or loss by applying technique and management methods. I’d argue that, untethered from God’s creational norms and fundamental metaphysical realities, we become increasingly loss-averse, incurring exponentially larger losses than the ones we’re attempting to avoid in the first instance. History bears witness that risk-taking is essential to the human experience because it drives potential!

Since we live in an overly psychologized culture where normal risk-taking behavior and outside-the-comfort-zone journeys are deemed foolish or dangerous, the social imagination is rendered into a buffered self that attempts to bracket out reality resulting in devastating consequences for individuals and institutions alike.

Here is another example of loss aversion. Think of a young woman who goes down the road of transition surgery only to find that she can never be a biological male. Her parents affirm her decision because her doctors threatened them by saying, “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?” The doctors are implicitly claiming that if the parents don’t allow their daughter to undergo surgery, she will end up committing suicide. The fear of losing their daughter to suicide drives their decision process, so they agree to affirm her choice to have life-altering surgery. She wakes up one day to the reality that she has permanently injured her body — something she will have to live with for the rest of her life. Someone once said, “Reality bats last, and he’s a slugger.” In other words, one can deny reality all one wants, but the hard, true facts will eventually be faced. Denying reality is dangerous.

The doctors present a false dilemma: “dead daughter or live son.” Loss aversion makes that choice appear unavoidable and urgent. Bradley’s cubicle men operate under the same logic: speak up and lose your reputation, or stay silent and keep your seat at the table. In both cases, fear of loss drives an emotional decision with irreversible costs — a permanently injured body on one hand, and dead churches and collapsed institutions on the other. The tragic reality is that what felt like the safe choice was, in fact, the most devastating one.

Human potential is buried beneath safetyism, driven and shaped by fear. What appears rational on the surface turns out to be irrational, leading to devastating consequences. Look no further than the Parable of the Talents as an example (Matthew 25:14-30). The servant who buried his master’s talent was loss-averse and suffered the consequences.

So, how do we respond from a biblical worldview perspective? The remedy is the retrieval of a biblical reality vision — one where godly, faithful risk-taking is venerated and failure is seen as a faithful schoolmaster rather than a verdict. This is precisely the kind of leader Renn and Bradley are calling for: men and women who are grounded in truth and can absorb loss without being governed by the fear of it. An operationalized worldview transfers that theoretical understanding into practical action. As Christians, we must speak hard truths, build lasting institutions, and take faithful risks even when the outcome is uncertain. The hidden cost of loss aversion is high. But when properly grounded in biblical wisdom and an operationalized worldview, human potential and human flourishing are unleashed.

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Articles / Sources Mentioned:

The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism by Aaron Renn (First Things, 2022)

Evangelicals Don’t Produce Leaders. They Produce “Cubicle Men.” by Anthony Bradley (Substack, 2026)

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt (Penguin Books, 2019)

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