Lessons Learned Part I
"Culture is not only what we live by. It is also, in great measure, what we live for. Affection, relationship, memory, kinship, place, community, emotional fulfillment, intellectual enjoyment, a sense of ultimate meaning." -- Terry Eagleton
Mission accomplished...sort of. That's how I'm feeling as I wind down a three month Sabbatical. I had set out this three months wanting to learn more about how faith and culture come together in everyday life -- and to that end, this was a very fruitful summer. I read a lot, wrote some, observed different people in their everyday work, and had a lot of fun doing it. Yet I can't help but feeling that I've barely scratched the surface -- some thoughts and ideas have settled into my mind quite nicely, but there other topics under this umbrella where I feel I've barely scratched the surface (though I think that's the best possible place to be -- lots of room for new discovery and learning!). So what have I learned?
Culture is a Story: Sociologists undoubtedly have more technical (and probably more accurate) definitions of the word culture. The term -- like many ideas -- isn't as easy to define as you might expect, and so I began looking early on for a simple way to communicate just what it is when we talk about culture. In particular, I'm trying to capture a memorable and helpful way to describe to folks in my church, and in my everyday life what culture means. Presenting culture as our "story" is as good as any. As I read books on the subject, I pressed my idea a bit, poking and prodding it to see if it could hold up to critique. I think it does (though again, social scientists would rightly contend that it's probably not specific enough). Culture isn't music, or art, or science, or sports -- these are an expression of something deeper, and that something deeper is a shared understanding of what is true, and good, and beautiful. Culture is the story that a group of common people tell to express what matters (and what doesn't); what is right and what is wrong. Thus, the story of culture is told not just in the more obvious ways (the theatre, the sports arena, the art gallery, the concert hall, etc.) but in even the minute details: the way that a group of Indonesian children dress, the marriage norms of an Indian family, the way that an airport departure lounge is decorated, the kind of coffee (or tea) you drank for breakfast... and so on. How important it is, then, to survey the culture around us and ask what story it is that we are telling. As Christians, our first task in any culture is to become good listeners -- learning to see beyond the external expressions of a culture in order to discover the story beneath.
This also gives us an impetus to pay attention to our cultural products -- movies, literature, music, and the like. As Christians we are sometimes tempted to shun such cultural artifacts when they are at odds with our own worldview. To be sure, Christians must exercise careful discernment; there are some movies that Christians shouldn't watch. There is some music that is so distorted by sin that it would be wise not to listen to it -- and so on. But we sometimes take this too far. An R-rated movie can tell an excellent story, and can accurately reflect the ethos of our day, even though that ethos may not stem from a Christian worldview. Pop music may appear shallow to us -- and thus not worthy of our attention -- but on the other hand, it captures how many around us understand love and relationships. Good listening is required here too -- not uncritical consumption of culture, but neither closing our ears to the stories being told around us.
Culture is Fallen because People are Fallen: Since culture is a shared story, it reflects the values of those who share the story, and since all those who share the story are by nature fallen and sinful people, the culture itself will bear the marks of sin. Sometimes Christians are tempted to despair when seeing the way things are. Christians sometimes (erroneously, in my opinion) lament the state of the world today. We are discouraged by changes in the social, political, and spiritual climate, longing for "the way things were" - forgetting that "the way things were" has always been severely effected by sin, and often in ways that were not apparent at the time. To that end, Rod Dreher's approach is appealing (and, to an extent, it has some merit). Dreher advocates for broad withdrawal from culture by Christians, for the purpose of creating what he terms a "parallel polis". His approach mirrors what Richard Niebuhr suggested a half-century ago in his seminal work "Christ and Culture." Don Carson wrote an excellent critique of Niebuhr's work (I review Carson's book, Christ and Culture Revisited here). Both Dreher and Carson remind us that sin distorts culture because culture is ultimately an expression of what lies in the human heart. So, as Christians, we need to be sensitive and discerning to the way that sin is twisting and distorting the story of any culture. We also should be exceptionally cautious about our propensity to highlight "pet" sins -- sins that seem especially blatant to us -- while ignoring other sins (sins that that we struggle with, or sins that we whitewash because they are more widespread, or because it is advantageous to us to do so).
Tomorrow, I want to conclude this post by looking at how Christians ought to relate to the world -- we need to be wary of accepting carte-blanche the ideals of the world in which we live -- but we must also avoid the temptation of avoidance and hiding from the world. So what should our posture be? Tune in tomorrow.
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