The Challenge of Cultural Influence

John Seel

Coercion is just as harmful—and ineffective—in culture as in politics

Culture is a hot topic these days. Among a number of public intellectuals, religious leaders, and social activists, there is an urgent conversation about the importance of cultural renewal. A number of significant initiatives are being launched nationwide. This interest and effort is long overdue and is certainly welcome.

After twenty plus years of investment in political activism on the part of evangelical Christians, there is a new awareness that the dynamics of cultural renewal differ radically from political mobilization. Even political insiders recognize that years of political effort have generated little cultural benefit. American culture continues its precipitous decline into hedonistic consumer nihilism. Father Richard Neuhaus wrote in the April 2007 issue of First Things, “At the risk of generalization, I think it fair to say that Christianity in America is not challenging the ‘habits of the heart’ and ‘habits of mind’ that dominate American culture, meaning both the so-called high culture and the popular culture.”

Abandoning the wrong approach

Our past efforts at cultural renewal have not been effective in part because the faith perspective is underrepresented in many of the institutions of cultural leadership. Consider geography. There are four main centers of national cultural influence: Boston, New York, San Jose—representing the Silicon Valley—and Los Angeles. Evangelicals are concentrated instead in places like Wheaton, Colorado Springs, and Orlando. Institutional evangelicalism serves institutional evangelicalism, but rarely the wider culture.

Culture is shaped by a small number of gatekeepers. Majority perspectives have little bearing on culture formation. Instead, elites dominate. Neuhaus notes: “Even though [these elites] may be a minority of the population, they succeed in presenting themselves as ‘mainstream’ through their control of powerful institutions in the media, in entertainment, in the arbitrations of literary taste, in the great research universities and professional associations, and in the worlds of business and advertisement that seek the approval of those who control the commanding heights of culture.” Increasingly, grassroots political efforts to reverse the current cultural direction are proving futile. Politics reflects culture; it doesn’t direct it.

Moreover, by focusing on mobilizing majorities and legislative coercion, these faith communities have alienated their opponents while squandering their cultural and biblical capital. They have failed because the convictions that underlie culture cannot be coerced. They can be proposed, never imposed. Culture changes when a society’s assumptions and aspirations are captured by new ideas and images that are developed by thinkers and artists, expounded in both scholarly and popular forms, depicted in innumerable works of art, literature and entertainment, and then lived out attractively by communities of people who are committed to them. By narrowly focusing on Washington and state legislatures, faith communities have forgotten how to assert cultural influence. Today, most Christians in America are known for self-serving power politics rather than humble service for the good of others.

That many faith leaders are now viewing “the culture” as a new strategic goal is laudable, but such recognition also needs a deep theological perspective and appropriate cultural discernment to have any renewing effect.

Thinking it through

Some suggest that the time for talking is over. All that is needed is action—and any action is better than no action. Yet historical reflection would caution one against the unintended consequences of well-intentioned action.

Moreover, any discussion about cultural renewal must simultaneously include concerted prayer for reformation and revival. We need for God’s Spirit to move among us again with power. Cultural renewal, if it is to begin anywhere, begins in our churches and in our own hearts.

The cultural crisis is first and foremost a church crisis—a crisis of discipleship. It is a scandal that nonbelievers perceive Christians as just another special interest group or market niche rather than those who are drawing on the resources of the kingdom of heaven in order to demonstrate the power of truth lived with overwhelming love.

If Christians engage in cultural renewal in an ineffective manner, this may well create a greater negative reaction than our past failures in politics. One only has to think of the metaphor of polluting a river at its headwaters to grasp the implications.

Superficial answers can be dangerous. If one treats symptoms rather than causes, time is lost as the disease spreads. Even worse, sometimes the treatment simply makes the disease worse—like bloodletting with leeches when one is suffering from internal bleeding. Some efforts at cultural engagement merely provide a religiously sanctioned justification to culturally accepted idolatries. They don’t change or renew culture; they reinforce it. There is also the inevitable temptation of power. And culture is an arena filled with spiritual warfare.

So a faulty diagnosis, an inadequate treatment, overconfidence in one’s own abilities, or naiveté over the spiritual dangers all have serious ramifications for the church’s engagement with culture. It is not enough to get involved, to get jobs within the culture industries. We need more than mobilization and momentum; we need dependence and discernment. The problem we face today is not simply that we don’t have people where they should be, but that they are not who they should be right where they are.

Christians have too often resorted to cocooning, combating, or conforming. We need think before we act, prepare before we pursue, and listen before creating, lest we create a bigger mess than already exists. We need a solid foundation based on spiritual disciplines, theological reflection, and cultural discernment. Of primary importance is being clear about our mission.

The human mission

In his initial charge in Genesis, God outlines his intentions for mankind. History and our responsibility as disciples of Christ must be understood through this interpretive lens, and it is an obligation that is undeniable because it is based in who we are. We are hardwired to the task. Our mission is a concrete expression of being made in the image of God. “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness and let them rule.’” It means that we were not created to be angels, but human. It means that our task is to bridge heaven and earth—doing God’s will on earth as it is done in heaven. We have a choice of fulfilling this mandate or not, by serving God or ourselves, affirming life or embracing death.

Jesus’ subsequent commission does not abrogate God’s command at creation. It provides the specific directives for its fulfillment in a fallen world. It is a re-missioning of the cultural mandate in the light of the cross. Mark tells us Jesus said, “Go into all the world and preach good news to all creation.” By making men and women little replicas of Jesus, who are empowered by his life and love, we become culture-transforming agents of shalom—rightly ordered peace and wholeness. Jesus’ cross enables us to fulfill our creational purpose as those made in God’s image.

The creation mandate has three aspects summarized by three words: fruitful, fill, and subdue. “Be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea, and the birds of the air, and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” This mission statement answers the what, where, and how of the human enterprise. It describes what it means to be human.

The substance of the task is captured in the words “be fruitful.” Its “what” is the twin obligation of procreativity and cultural creativity. We have a responsibility to create life and to generate a life-affirming, life-sustaining culture in its widest variety—from making babies to making music, from family life to civic life.

The scope of the task is expressed in the words, “fill the earth.” Its “where” is all creation. Ours is a global responsibility—Jesus tells his disciples that they are to “be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” This witness encompasses an ecological responsibility: over every living creature in the sea, in the air, and on land. This witness is both extensive—geographically all nations—as well as intensive—sociologically all of culture. Our task is both wide and deep—every nation, all of culture.

Finally, our stewardship of creation is expressed in the words “subdue” and “rule.” Its “how” is one of authority and leadership. Neither abdication nor domination is an expression of faithfulness. The force of the imperative is not control over, but care for. We are responsible to cultivate, prune, and husband nature, thereby enabling its full potential to glorify its Creator. Our aim is not merely environmental “sustainability,” a hands-off policy of an unkempt wilderness, but rather creational “vitality,” a thoughtful active investment of ourselves in nature’s rich inherent potential—a weeded garden in full bloom, a landscaped city filled with music and art.

The only question is whether we will participate now in our individual callings as ambassadors of reconciliation and agents of shalom until Christ comes again to bring this reconciliation and shalom in its fullness. We are called to be co-creative creational caretakers. We are called to a selfless stewardship of all people, cultures, and creation in a manner that is creative, life-affirming, and God-honoring.

Only with such a vision and practice will we have something positive to share with the wider culture and our non-believing neighbors. Broadcaster Dick Staub writes,

“The early church out-thought, outlived, and out-died their pagan counterparts. This certainly cannot be said of pop Christianity . . . . Bach, Mendelssohn, Dante, Dostoevsky, Newton, Pascal, and Rembrandt are but a few who personified the rich tradition of faith, producing the highest and best work, motivated by a desire to glorify God and offered in service of others for the enrichment of our common environment: culture.”

It is our task to pick up this mantle in our generation once more.

The nature of change

Since the culture industry dominates our society, it is imperative that we understand the nature of cultural change and appreciate the depth of our cultural crisis. The writings of two sociologists, Randall Collins and Philip Rieff, are helpful in this regard.

Randall Collins is a conflict theorist and author of The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. He argues that the divisions and dynamics of society are based on inevitable conflicts over ideas, resources, and power. Society is less a unity than a composite of competing networks. Following the lead of Michael Mann’s The Sources of Social Power, Collins thinks of society as having four basic networks: military, political, economic, and cultural. When one of these networks gains ascendancy, as the cultural has today, it tends to dominate the other networks and dictate society’s direction. The cultural network, represented by education, art, media, and entertainment, is collectively the controlling source of contemporary social power. To change culture, one must address this network.

Collins’s research focuses particularly on intellectuals, exploring how ideas develop and come to dominate. He suggests that ideas don’t influence society because they are true; rather they influence society because they have supportive networks, which have accumulated economic, social, and symbolic capital, and have access to the reality-defining institutions of society.

The change in public acceptance of homosexuality in the past twenty years is an example of this process, as described in the book, After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90s. In the same way, the nineteenth century abolition of slavery was less the work of William Wilberforce than the work of the Clapham group and the powerful networks they represented. Collins writes, “It is the networks which write the plot of this story; and the structure of network competition over the attention space is focused so that the famous idea becomes formulated through the mouths and pens of few individuals.”

Collins’s theory has a number of important implications. First is his observation that at any given moment of history there are only a limited number of dominant ideas and corresponding networks. He calls this the “Law of Small Numbers.” There are usually between three and six at play at any given time. Financial resources and public attention limit the number. In surveying the history of world philosophy, he found that the total number of philosophers who are significant in world history is approximately 135 to 500 persons. They account for virtually all of the intellectual accomplishment in the “theoretical” fields of knowledge—excluding the fields of literature, music, and the fine arts, which have their own networks and leaders.

Second, he observes a generational timeframe for a given set of ideas and actors—approximately thirty-five years. This parallels the biblical idea of “generation”—approximately forty years. The Apostle Paul says of David, “For when David had served God’s purpose in his own generation, he fell asleep.” The most powerful ideas find ways of transmitting themselves beyond one generation.

Third, Collins observes that networks, whether based on peer correspondence or teacher-student apprenticeship, become more creative when they are under a greater degree of conflict with competing networks.

Fourth, ideas that are institutionalized have a greater potential to span two generations. These are the ideas that endure. He writes, “Schools of thought, grounded in intergenerational network linkages, are best able to reproduce themselves when they are based in organizations with material property and a hierarchy of offices.” Books and speeches alone do not change culture. Ideas must be embodied.

Finally, the key to intellectual networks is their ability to attract material support—that is, money. Collins observes, “The universities, publishers, churches, regal patrons, and other suppliers of material resources set the number of competitors in intellectual careers. Their organizational dynamics affect the underlying shape of the intellectual field.” Changes in financial support can change the viability of ideas to make a difference in culture.

Collins’s analysis helps explain why American evangelical Christians are largely left out of the wider cultural conversation. We have established our own subcultural networks that have not gained equal credibility within the reality-defining institutions of culture. Not only have we not been engaged in the cultural conversation, we often lack the economic, social, or symbolic capital to be taken seriously. Failing to understand the dynamics of culture is a serious liability. So too is our failure to comprehend the contours of the crisis.

The need for renewal

To advocate cultural renewal is to assume that there is a culture needing renewal. Most people are aware of the general coarsening and secularity of Western public culture. Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb observes that while avoiding the Class Revolution anticipated by Marx, America has succumbed to the Cultural Revolution anticipated by Nietzsche. One only needs to watch television for one night to come up with a list of its effects. Yet much of what we lament is beside the point, for these are only symptoms, not root causes. Symptoms can be addressed. Root causes are far more difficult to address, yet far more important.

Studying these root causes is the contribution of Philip Rieff. Sacred Order/Social Order: My Life Among the Deathworks is his work of “tragic sociology.” This book might best be compared with C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. Lewis says that it is impossible to deny absolute moral value and still do any valuing. “The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or a new primary color in the spectrum.”

Likewise Rieff, a non-practicing Jew, argues that identity, morality, and society itself are impossible to maintain unless they are premised on an existing sacred order. Cultural formation is a process of translating the sacred order into the social order. Until recently, all societies depended on a vertical relationship with the sacred. All social and individual life made this assumption. This is not true today.

Rieff identifies three historical epochs or worlds, captured in words: fate, faith, and fictions. The first world is the classically pagan, based on fate; the second world is theistic, based on faith; and the third world is postmodern, based on fictions. The third world differs radically from the former two. For the participants in this third world, which represents our culture, “transliterate no sacred order into social order but instead propose a world in which there is no truth and no sacred order, only fictions and various rhetorics of power and self-interest.” This is unprecedented. “Every world, until our third, has been a form of address to some ultimate authority,” Rieff warns.

Consequently, the culture war we face today is not like that of the past. Past conflicts were between competing sacred symbolic systems. They were in effect family feuds. Not so today. Sociologist James Davison Hunter, in his introduction to Rieff’s book, writes, “What makes the contemporary culture war distinctive is that it is a movement of negation against all sacred orders and directed, in its particulars, against the verticals in authority that mediate sacred order to social order.” The third world cultural elites are insistent on instructing society in this “higher illiteracy.” This world, anticipated by Nietzsche, Rieff calls a “deathwork.” “Deathworks are battles in the war against second culture and are themselves tests of highest authority.”

Rieff’s “deathwork” is Lewis’s “abolition of man.” The denial of an absolute morality and an actual transcendent sacred order has real human and social consequences. Rieff’s book is more than a sociological jeremiad, it is rather a sociological analysis of a society where it is increasingly impossible to say with any conviction, “Thou shalt not.” We live in a culture where there is no longer any “binding address,” no acknowledged obligations to other people or institutions or God. The locus of all authority is squarely fixed on the individual subjective self.

Blindness to the depth of the cultural crisis is itself a serious problem. Rieff warns,

“Deathworks are by no means concentrated or condensed in the works of art or science. Deathworks, as an institution of the third world kulturkampf, can be read or seen in everyday life, where they are far more fatal in their implications for not being correctly read. The unconscious art of everyday deathworks depends entirely upon the blindness of both the deathworker and those upon whom the work works.”

Consider how consumerism influences Christian attitudes toward church. Survey findings, as well as casual observation, tell us that young people believe that personal spirituality is cool, but organized religion is not. In response, church leaders seek to repackage church to fit the consumer preferences of a given target market. This is an inadvertent everyday deathwork. By adopting a consumer mindset, these leaders cede the authority of church to the consumer. A consumer-driven church no longer has any binding address on the worshipper.

Rieff writes, “What binding address now describes our successor culture? In what does the self now try to find salvation, if not in the breaking of corporate identities and in an acute suspicion of all normative institutions.” The threat of excommunication or withholding Mass is of little consequence to the worshipper when he or she can go down the street to sample from a different religious brand. In consumer religion, the consumer rules.

This is not about style; this is about authority in ever expanding concentric circles: first personal authority, then institutional authority, then cultural authority, and finally sacred authority. In Rieff’s perspective, consumer Christianity is a third world response to a second world faith. It is a deathwork, more dangerous for its religious dress, but just as culturally transgressive as Mapplethorpe’s Self Portrait or Serrano’s Piss Christ.

Correct address

It is imperative to address our cultural crisis correctly. We need a generation of apprentices of Jesus who are called, trained, and prepared to be cultural gatekeepers. Simply getting a job in a culture industry is not enough. Simply doing something can easily lead to doing more harm than good. Asserting power as a culture warrior is ineffective and counterproductive. Going solo rather than building institutions and connecting with other networks will not lead to change. And expecting immediate results will not foster faithfulness in our generation.

There is a great deal at stake in these matters. We are fast approaching a tipping point. We live in an Augustinian moment. Like St. Augustine at the end of the Roman Empire, we live in the twilight of the pax Americana. We are deep in uncharted waters, engaged in a culture war the likes of which has no historical precedent.

God is sufficient for the challenges of our times and the cultural renewal we desperately need. But we dare not take lightly the task before us, or the battle that even now looms in our midst. Heinrich Heine, a nineteenth-century German Jewish poet, wrote,

Should ever that taming talisman break—the Cross—then will come roaring back the wild madness of the ancient warriors, with all their insane, berserker rage, of whom our Nordic poets speak and sing. That talisman is now already crumbling, and the day is not far off when it shall break apart entirely. On that day, the old stone gods will rise from their long forgotten wreckage and rub from their eyes the dust of a thousand years’ sleep. At long last leaping to life, Thor with his giant hammer will crush the gothic cathedrals. . . . No, laugh not at the visionary who knows that in the realms of phenomena comes soon the revolution that has already taken place in the realm of spirit. For thought goes before deed as lightning before thunder.

A storm is brewing in America. We live in the brief interval between the lightning and the thunder. Our response to our cultural crisis will have lasting consequences. It is up to our generation to address it wisely.  

John Seel, M.Div., Ph.D. is a writer, educational reformer, and cultural analyst. He currently serves as a marketing consultant to Walden Media. He and his wife Kathryn live in Cohasset, Massachusetts. This address was first given at the Boston L’Abri and subsequently republished in Think, a publication of the Work Research Foundation, a Canadian think tank that seeks to foster a Christian view on work and public life.

5 Responses (comments are closed) • Features, Arts and Culture, Leadership, Public Square, Thu 15 Nov 2007