Strategies of Power (and cultural Influence)

I am sitting on my back patio, reading on into Essay Three (his book is divided into three parts) of James Davison Hunter’s book and getting a little excited as I see where he is headed. In true “external processor” fashion, I have reached a point where I need to stop and express my thoughts in print (even if no one reads this, it helps me organize my thoughts).

In his second essay (part 2 of the book) he devotes one chapter each to examination of three current political theologies of Christian evangelicals; the Christian Right, the Christian Left and what he calls the Neo-Anabaptist position. He describes them as cultural strategies of “Defense against,” “Relevance to,” and “Purity from” and shows that the first two (the Right and the Left) buy into the “Constantinian heresy” (from an Anabaptist perspective and here Hunter agrees with them) of Christian alliance with the coercive power of the State and the necessity of political domination to impose moral views on a pluralistic public that is lacking a clear moral consensus. One of his most telling quotes is about the extensive politicization of our society:

"The politicization of everything is an indirect measure of the loss of a common culture ... the competition among factions to dominate" (I cannot find the page number right now but he amplifies this view in pages 102 to 107 in his discussion of the Nietzchean Will to Power and the ugly function of Ressentiment)

 I have come to appreciate the biblical values reflected in many of the moral issues of the Christian Left (protections for the weak, justice for the poor), although Hunter does a good job of deconstructing the Christian Left’s Nietzschean “will to power” that also even more clearly characterizes the Christian Right’s approach to politics. My problem with the Right (as well as with the Left) has been the way they seek political domination through party politics and ultimately control of the State, which seems ideologically partisan and antithetical to the spirit of Christ. The Christian Right actually did achieve complete control of all three branches of government (executive, legislative and judicial) in the 2000s, roughly at the same time that they peaked in influence and began to decline. The Democrat Party learned from its errors, and made room to include people of faith on the Left in 2008. Hunter does an excellent job of documenting and exposing this process. In many ways, I find myself closest to what he calls the ‘neo-Anabaptist” position (which values the teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount about loving one’s enemies, and turning the cheek), but, as he points out, the problem with that position is not so much the issue of “domination” but their hostile attitude toward the World and tendency to disengagement from the public sphere. So many of his paragraphs about power, cultural power and political power; and both soft and hard power, fit into concepts I have become aware of in recent years, especially through Robert Farrar Capon’s ideas of Left-handed and Right-handed power (borrowed from Luther) and David Hawkins in Power versus Force (probably borrowed from Chinese Daoism). It is a good thing that I own my own hardcopy of Hunter’s book; the pages have turned yellow with highlighting.

For at least a decade (the same decade that Debbie was ill and I was in graduate school) I have floundered around in the dark, like the proverbial blind man in India, thoroughly frustrated as I groped and prodded the contours of the proverbial elephant, sensing the outlines of some truth intuitively but unable to coherently describe what I was sensing. By keeping one foot in the university and secular culture, and the other in evangelical subculture, I led myself to a place where I felt culturally schizophrenic...

 I felt strongly that the Christian Right took a seriously wrong turn somewhere in the late 1980s and 1990s and departed from Jesus’ style of exercising influence by attempting to dominate the State and legislate evangelical morality through the electoral process (in the absence of a clear cultural consensus) thus leading to the disastrous “Culture Wars” and the current massive exodus of Millennials from churches (just do a check of the hashtag #postchurch on Twitter).

Hunter has helped me save a great deal of reading and investigation with the Christian Left and the Neo-Anabaptists by analyzing their underlying strategies of influence (Note: I owe a deep debt of gratitude to thinkers such as Brian McLaren and Anabaptists such as Yoder and Hauerwas and I respect their basic theological message just not necessarily the accompanying strategies of cultural influence).   

I am anticipating where Hunter is going with his idea of cultivating “Faithful Presence” in the public realms of culture such as art, higher education, business, development, science and philanthropy (as opposed to the three predominant strategies of “Defense against, “Relevance to,” and “Purity from”) and I am genuinely excited about it. For several years I have been reflecting on the Babylonian captivity of the Jews as a paradigm of culture change and a reflection of God’s higher purposes with all of the implications of Jeremiah 29 (especially verses 5 to 9).

Faithful Presence accurately describes the attitude of Daniel and his three friends as they served in public administration under Nebuchadnezzar’s rule in the Babylonian Empire. They did not defensively resist the empire (although some Jews did, such as those who escaped to Egypt), they did not assimilate to Babylonian Culture (witness the three Hebrew children in the fiery furnace) and they did not withdraw from active participation in the life of the empire in order to maintain their purity (although some Jews did, think of the exiles who laid down their harps and refused to sing songs of Zion). Daniel and his friends provided a faithful (and non-political although quite public) witness and had the privilege of helping to interpret the Emperors’ dreams.  

I think Hunter’s proposed strategy will provide another big piece of the crazy jig-saw puzzle in my head about “what Israel should do,” and “how we should then live.”  I have to confess that it also stirs in me, not only hope, but the early flickering of desire to participate in a faith community. I have been a blind man without a vision for far too long.

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)