Changing our culture? (or not)

2014.01.09

I was cleaning my office and re-organizing my books over the holidays and came across a book I ordered a couple of years ago but neglected to read, “To Change the World” by James Davison Hunter. If I remember correctly, I saw a review of the book on Scott McKnight’s Jesuscreed blog and thought that it would be interesting. Sadly, as with many books I buy, it ended up unread and sitting on my shelf, so, I picked the book up and started to read in the New Year. It was like finding hidden treasure in my office …

Besides being a Christian (I am tempted to say an evangelical Christian but that has so many contested meanings lately …) Hunter is a distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture and Social Theory at the University of Virginia. He is also the Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and has authored several other books, including one on the Culture Wars. All of this to say, when it comes to culture theory, he knows his stuff; he is not talking out of his ass.

Hunter begins by asking why, after sixty years of Evangelical effort in politics, and more importantly, in efforts to shape the minds and hearts of believers in a biblical, evangelical world view, is our culture more secular and less “Christian” than ever?

Hunter outlines two kinds of Christian attempts at shaping culture; one is the “worldview” approach advocated by such representatives as James Dobson and Charles Colson. This approach believes that to change culture, one must change ideas. The other is a “production of material culture” approach advocated by Andy Crouch. He examines and finds both of these approaches greatly lacking because they fail to take into account cultural elites, networks, cultural power and institutions that influence culture  

Hnuter shows that a majority of members of our culture believe in the existence of God and are opposed to abortion (p.19). Also, a majority of Americans believe that God had some part in the process of creation of humanity, with almost half of the population stating that Darwin’s theory is unsupported by evidence, and yet, public policy and secular culture clearly favors the minority opinions in all three areas (p.21).  Apparently, contra Colson and Dobson, shaping the worldviews of the hearts and minds of believers is not enough to change the dominant culture.  In contrast, the Jewish community and the LGBT community, although representing very small percentages of our population, have both had a significant influence on the shaping of our culture. Apparently, winning hearts and minds at the grassroots level is not all that is going on in the shaping of culture (note: I am not necessarily endorsing majority views here; although I believe in God and am pro-life, I am also a firm proponent of Intelligent Design and the emergence of Homo Sapiens from hominid evolution 250,000 years ago. These are examples of Hunter's thesis).

In Chapter 4, Hunter puts forward his own, alternative view of cultural change in eleven propositions, which I will cover in a subsequent post. Chapter 5 has been my favorite chapter so far (because I am a historian) in which he gives an overview of cultural change from the days of the early church, through the Irish (or Celtic) revival, the early monastic movement, the Carolingian renaissance of medieval Europe, and the Protestant Reformation. In each phase of the growth of Christianity, he documents the networks and institutions (primarily academies and universities) that propelled forward a Christian vision of society. In the conversion of barbarian Europe, for example, the missionary monks who went out to convert the heathen most often started from the top down, with the barbarian king and nobility, before attempting to reach the common people.  A common denominator of the Christian shaping of culture, besides education, include protection and financial support from nobility or state authorities (example, Frederick the Wise’s patronage of Martin Luther). Hunter ends Chapter 4 with discussion of various evangelical movements that were subsidiary (or subsequent) to the Protestant Reformation such as the Great Awakening and the Abolitionist movement in Great Britain to end slavery (William Wilberforce was part of large network of believers from the educated classes who opposed slavery).  In all of these movements over a 2,000 year period, there were not just great individuals, or godly ideas at work, but there were networks of highly educated men (and sometimes women) that formed an alternative Christian "elite" for society.  

So why have Evangelicals failed to “disciple” our nation? Hunter is critical of the influence of Georg Hegel and German Idealism combined with Evangelical Pietism that created an erroneous view that it is ideas in the hearts and minds of believers that create and change culture. This was the view propounded by Charles Colson and James Dobson. Hunter critiques this view as naïve idealism that fails to take into account networks, institutions, power and elites

What does Hunter propose to change culture? I have not finished the book but I can anticipate his suggestion that sincere believers should be seeking higher education and encouraging their young people to “go out into all the world” by supporting them in getting PhDs and MBAs or starting their own businesses and sending them into influential institutions that help shape public policy. Pretty much the opposite of what we have been doing for the last sixty years. This reminds me of another book that I have not read by a premier scholar at a major university, Mark A. Noll, called “The Scandalof the Evangelical Mind.”

To be continued …

(Note: to better understand what Davison means by elite institutions and networks, click here to read a selection on Cultural Capital from pages 84 to 90)