GroshLink

When the question was raised as to the role of InterVarsity staff on campus as those who transform the cultural elite I had the following thoughts (note: this was in response to a recent article highlighting a presentation by University of Virginia's Sociologist James Davidson Hunter, click 'more' for the text of the article),

I perceive the role of InterVarsity staff as being followers of Christ, which pans out practically as having a parabolic, prophetic, open door, and networking/communal life/ministry as we sow the seeds of the Gospel . . . some which take root, some which grow, and some which bring forth much fruit. This can get under the skin like salt, bring things to attention like a blinding light. As such, this may lead to opportunities for larger roles, if so, praise be to the Father! This may lead to lead to opportunities for lesser roles, if so, praise be to the Father! This may lead to times of conflict and change, if so, praise be to the Father! This may lead to times of peaceful co-existence where the various parties involve come to understand one-another more deeply, if so, praise be to the Father! As the People of God in shared ministry, we must beware of the professionalization, intellectualization, and numbers/influence calculations of our mission.

Together we are part of God's Story and God's Work not individual competitors (or various sectarian subcultures) to be compared w/the consumerism of the age. God sees the whole film, while we see but a frame (as part of the larger plot) to which we are called to be faithful in cultivating the earth and the advancing of His Kingdom through the lens of His teaching and not of this world . . . although I do not deny that considering such scenerios is the work of a sociologist such as Hunter. The question we are asking is whether he is proposing a wise and godly application of the knowledge he has gained through his research.

Solving the secular paradox: How can Christians influence world culture?
By Joe Woodard

Source: Calgary Herald
Section: Observer
Page: B7

Sunday, June 19, 2005

James Davison Hunter has been chewing on a sociological problem for the past 15 years. "While Americans are among the most religious people on earth" -- 56 percent worship at least monthly, 43 per cent weekly -- "how is it that our culture is thoroughly secular?"

The same paradox exists on a lesser scale in Canada, Hunter says: 78 per cent of Canadians call themselves Christian, 37 per cent worship at least monthly and 26 per cent weekly. Yet religion is banished from public life.

How can that be?

"Less than 14 per cent of Americans" and 16 per cent of Canadians "call themselves secular, yet our business, law, government, academic and entertainment institutions are all intensely secular," Hunter tells a select audience of 100 Christian church, advocacy, education and business leaders at the Epcor Centre.

"The general view of culture and cultural change is that Christians have failed to change the culture, because they just don't understand the biblical world view well enough, or don't try hard enough. But that comes out of a fundamentally insufficient understanding of culture."

Sociologist Hunter is the director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He was in Calgary last week as part of a four-city speaking tour, sponsored by the Work Research Foundation, an independent Hamilton-based think tank.

"Christians have a mandate to change the world," Hunter begins.

In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were commanded to "cultivate and preserve" the world, in words that mean work, nurture, sustain, protect.

"Human beings, by divine intent and our very nature, are world makers," Hunter says, spectacled and balding under the Epcor Centre spotlights.

"Art, music, literature, commerce, law, science and scholarship -- and all our relationships and institutions, our communities, families and churches.

"The passion to engage the world, shape and change it for the better is the mandate of creation. To be Christian is inseparable from an obligation to engage the world."

The issue is culture as the premier human creation. All that Christians do should be for the greater glory of God. And more urgently, healthy cultures nourish life, while decadent cultures destroy it.

At the turn of the last century, Christians began to realize that the culture of "the West" (once Christendom) was detaching itself from its Christian foundations, Hunter says. So almost by reflex, they began trying to influence the culture in three ways:

- Evangelism, as the primary means of change, one person at a time, on the assumption that individuals having the right "world view" results in right choices, resulting in a healthy culture;

- Politics, assuming that bad culture comes from bad laws, comes from bad judges and politicians, so putting good individuals there reverses the process;

- Voluntary social reform movements, like the old temperance movement or today's fatherhood or teen abstinence movements.

All these efforts are good, Hunter insists, especially the obligation to
one-on-one evangelism, which is central to the Christian mandate. They all achieve good things, saving souls, cleansing corruption, changing lives. But as proven by the past 50 years of Christian activism, the one thing these efforts cannot do is change the world.

Over the last two centuries, despite a majority Christian population and ever more fervent spiritual, political and social efforts, the culture has
become increasingly, militantly secular.

So what's gone wrong?

The standard Christian paradigm for understanding culture and cultural change is the "hearts and minds" model. People have values. Their values determine their choices, how they work, play, marry, raise their kids, build their communities, worship.

Hunter explains the old paradigm: When people have good values, they make good choices and build a healthy culture, reinforcing their good values. When they have bad values, they make harmful choices and a decadent culture, teaching destructive values.

The now-classic expression of this conventional, democratic understanding of culture is Prison Ministry evangelist Chuck Colson's "World View" hypothesis, argued in his book How Now Shall We Live?

Colson argues that "big ideas form minds, fire imaginations, move hearts and shape cultures." So "history is little more than the rise and fall of different World Views." At the heart of the post-modern World View is ethical relativism, promoted by big ideas like Charles Darwin's theory of random evolution, taught in a way that produces bad values and bad choices.

So the obvious need, Colson argues, is "to change the culture from the inside out," since cultures change when people change. Thus the three trategies, one-on-one evangelization and politic action and social reform movements to transform the grass roots. "Transformed people transform cultures," Hunter quotes Colson, the assumption being that, when enough people are finally thinking biblically, the culture will be transformed.

The problem is, it doesn't work.

In fact, Hunter says, the "hearts and minds" approach to cultural change suffers from "a fatal naivete" about culture, a kind of idealism that thinks of ideas as the decisive components of culture. And every strategy of cultural change based on this idealism will fail.

The missing component is seeing that culture is made up of institutions and elite interests. Institutions embody or incarnate ideas. Their elites don't count heads; they count status. Elite status is "cultural capital." Hollywood has known for years that G-rated movies make money; but the industry still churns out barely viable R-rated flicks. Why? Because for the Hollywood elite, there's status only in fringe violence and pornography.

The vast majority of Canadians and Americans do not want gay marriage; but they are on the periphery of the legal and political institutions. People of a different faith control the centre.

Christian novelists sell a thousand times more books, but post-modern writers are featured in the New York Review of Books or Globe and Mail. Conservative Evangelicals and Catholics are the most vital and active members of their own denominations, but liberals control the institutions.

"To change the world is to take power seriously," says the sociologist. "It's to take seriously raising leaders, building networks and taking over institutions" -- becoming an elite without succumbing to unbiblical elitism.

Hunter cites the example of the apostle Paul. When first founding his institution, Jesus recruited from the periphery of Jewish society. But for an Apostle to the Gentiles, he tapped someone highly educated, privileged, at the centre of the Jewish elite.

A more adequate understanding of culture and culture change requires appreciating five things, Hunter says.

- First, culture is a resource, a kind of capital or power. Credentials count. A stupid PhD has more cultural capital or public credibility than a brilliant mechanic. The ultimate credibility at the centre of culture is "the power to name things," to determine the public meanings of terms like"equality." This is particularly deadly in post-modern culture, because post-modernism deliberately empties words of meaning.

- Culture is produced, not mainly by individuals, but by institutions or networks and the elites who control them. Leadership is important, but the ideas of history-shakers like Nietzsche or Luther had an impact only because others built networks around them.

- Culture has a rigid structure of centre and periphery, the centre with the highest prestige. In economics, quantity counts, but in culture, only quality or status. USA Today sells 10 times the copies, but the New York Times has 10 times the prestige.

- Cultures change from top down, not from bottom up -- "the hardest thing for Christians to accept," Hunter says. The root of every culture is a tiny network of intellectuals. In his Sociology of Philosophies, Randall Collins estimates that just 500 thinkers have been at the centre of 3,000 years of world civilization; and their total network comprised just 2,700 people, shaping the public vocabulary. Grass roots movements bring only temporary change, because they don't build lasting networks, then institutions, to embody and preserve the culture.

- World change happens when networks of belief and institutions overlap, as when academics and businessmen overlap with film makers, or entertainers overlap with politicians.

"You can evangelize one-by-one, but to change the world, you must control the elite institutions," Hunter says in a later interview with the Herald. "That means both infiltrating existing institutions and forming counter-cultural networks" -- not ghetto subcultures, but a counterculture that "penetrates existing elite institutions."

A subculture is not an option, he adds, because that would abdicate the responsibility to reach out to non-Christians and "change the world."

Jubilee Christian Centre pastor Phil Nordin says he was fascinated by the sociologist's perspective.

"God's committed to working through people and our institutions; so he allows us to partner with Him in changing the world," Nordin says.

Nordin was less certain how much Hunter is suggesting Christians infiltrating the secular institutions, versus establishing new separate Christian institutions: "All those secular institutions used to be Christian," he says with a laugh.

Dan Reinhardt, director of the CREST Leadership Centre at Rocky Mountain College, said Hunter's analysis was "spot-on," explaining why Christians have so little cultural impact despite so much effort.

"The secular modernists were very strategic and very deliberate in taking control of the culture," Reinhardt says.

"They took 50 or 100 years" -- since the First World War at least -- "so we can expect to take as long getting it back."

jwoodard@theherald.canwest.com