At Christianity Today, Christopher Benson—one of our bloggers at Evangel—interviews James Davison Hunter about his new book and why Christian strategies to transform culture are ineffective:
Benson: Why are the principal strategies for cultural change failing?
Hunter: Evangelism, political action, and social reform are worthy undertakings, but they aren’t decisively important if the goal is world changing. These strategies don’t attend to the institutional dynamics of culture formation and cultural change; in fact, they move in exactly the opposite direction of the ways in which cultures do change.
How is it that American public life is so profoundly secular when 85 percent of the population professes to be Christian? If a culture were simply the sum total of beliefs, values, and ideas that ordinary individuals hold, then the United States would be a far more religious society. Looking at our entertainment, politics, economics, media, and education, we are forced to conclude that the cultural influence of Christians is negligible. By contrast, Jews, who compose 3 percent of the population, exert significant cultural influence disproportionate to their numbers, notably in literature, art, science, medicine, and technology. Gays offer another example. Minorities would have no effect if culture were solely about ideas, but that’s clearly not the case.
[. . .]
You say that the “parallel institutions” of American Christianity are ineffectual as change agents in culture. Why?
Culture is organized according to a framework of center and periphery. The New York Times sells fewer copies than does USA Today, but The New York Times is at the center whereas USA Today is at the periphery. Some community colleges and state universities provide as good an education as the Ivy League colleges, but the Ivies are at the center, whereas community colleges and state universities are at the periphery.
By and large, American Christianity has produced a huge cultural economy, but it operates on the periphery of status rather than in the center. The importance of cultural capital is determined not by quantity but by quality. Quality is measured according to the kind of status it attracts, and status is almost always measured by exclusivity. As I note in my book, evangelicalism boasts a billion-dollar book publishing industry, yet the books produced are largely ignored by The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World, and other key arbiters of public intellectual argument.
May 26th, 2010 | 12:06 pm
Interesting… I do notice a seeming contradiction though.
On the one hand he says Jews and gays (That he ignores blacks seems odd.) exert more influence on the culture than Christians though they have much smaller numbers. (Don’t get me started on numbering Christians…most people apparently respond that they are Christians not because they ever go to church, read their Bible or pray but for other reasons.)
Yet, he goes on to assert that the Ivy Leagues are the doors to cultural influence. It’s not clear to me that the cultural influence of jews and gays and I would add blacks, has anything to do with an Ivy league education. If anything, the Ivy leagues have done their best to keep jews, and blacks anyway from having much of an influence on the culture.
Maybe there are two kinds of culture, fashionable, spicy, exciting and mundane, day to day, habitual.
May 26th, 2010 | 12:31 pm
glances at popular culture
On what grounds do you think blacks have disproportionate influence on public culture?
May 26th, 2010 | 3:14 pm
Mary:
I’m not sure I’d phrase it that way but… blacks are about 10% of the population but their influence in popular culture, music, movies, television, comedy, dance is much, much greater than that.
May 26th, 2010 | 7:23 pm
I understand the argument that Gays influence culture so that they can be included without discrimination, but that doesn’t explain the motive or purposed of Jewish influence. How do Jews in “science, medicine, and technology” steer the culture in a jewish versus a non-jewish direction?
May 26th, 2010 | 10:39 pm
I was also struck by the passage about Jewish cultural influence. Jews are certainly well-represented in positions of cultural influence but, for the most part, their contributions to culture are overwhelmingly secular. Then there is the ironic case of Jews writing and popularizing Christmas songs.
This aside, I am reminded of chapter 11 of George Orwell’s “The Road to Wigan Pier.” He talks of Irish Catholic dockworkers who go to mass every Sunday but have socialist literature in their homes. Most religious people see no conflict between participating in and consuming secular culture and still being a devout member of their religion.
As Orwell points out, it is the converts who have a real problem with this disconnect. He quotes an English convert to Catholicism who insists that drinking tea is an inherently Protestant habit and that real Catholics drink beer. Converts feel the need to have religion govern every aspect of their lives while most of the church-going Christians who were born and raised in the faith tend to live their lives in ways not that much different from how atheists or secular Jews live.
May 27th, 2010 | 6:57 am
You would never get your answer if comments are held for moderation.
Anyways a good place to start is to go to Dr Kevin Macdonald’s website.
take care
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