Community and Culture

In an article called Will Loss of Religious Liberty Doom Evangelicalism? George Yancy has some interesting comments.

Evangelicals have gotten used to being the most powerful religious group in our society. That is not going to be the case for the foreseeable future, if ever again...

So beyond politics, it is also important that we think about protecting ourselves by building up our community. If there are fewer of us, but those of us who are left are more committed, then we can make demands on each other that will strengthen our larger community. Groups that do not have majority group power do well to have a strong notion of community so that their subculture can thrive.

What are some of the implications of building up our vision of being a Christian community inside a larger secular society? We can develop a powerful in-group loyalty that allows us to help each other. We can develop supportive economic structures that serve our subculture. We can focus on socializing our children to be ready for the struggles of a post-Christian world. These are only some of the important ways having a community mindset can provide us with the social means to persist in a society that wants to remove us from the public square.

It can be as a community that we can renew a focus on reaching out to the marginalized. A powerful group tends to ignore those who struggle in our society. In a society where we no longer have majority group power, we can humbly use our in-group loyalty to work together so that we can better minister to those society left behind. Such efforts not only enlarge our community by bringing some of the marginalized into our community but also provides a powerful witness of love for the least of these.

Ultimately, it is going to be these acts of love and a true demonstration of the values we say we hold to help us deal with the threat to our religious liberty. Since the threat comes from a change of cultural values, we can begin to neutralize it by impacting the culture. And the best way to impact the culture is to have a Christian community where we are encouraged to live with integrity, transparency and to love those around us. Building the right type of Christian community is vital for what we need today.

Engaging the Culture

Christians have been uncertain about how they should engage with the culture of the world.

• One response has been to withdraw from culture to escape its evil influence, but this leaves society unleavened.

• The other common response is to engage with culture and attempt to control it from the top down by controlling the institutions that shape culture. Unfortunately, the world hates being controlled by Christians.

The best option is cultural engagement from the bottom up at the local level. Christians should be involved at every aspect of life, but on a voluntary basis. If we serve our community at street level and provide quality service with no demands, we will sometimes have influence. I explain how this works in Government of God.

Unity in Diversity

People like to be with people like themselves. So a strong society needs agreement on a core set of beliefs to remain united. A great deal of diversity can be tolerated, provided people accept these unifying beliefs. Not everyone has to accept the unifying beliefs, but if they are widely accepted, those who don’t like them will have to go along to function within the society. (Allowing people freedom to disagree with the dominant beliefs, provided they do not disrupt society was once called tolerance).

For many centuries, Christianity provided the unifying beliefs that held society together in the Western world. The principle of loving one another as Jesus loved us allows people of diverse cultures to live in unity. A tax collector and a zealot could work together, because they were committed to following Jesus.

At its best, the church tolerated a variety of cultures, provided people accepted some core beliefs. (At its worst, the church persecuted minority beliefs).

With the advance of secularism, belief in democracy has been the unifying belief that holds nations together. Now faith in democracy is on the wane, under pressure from identity politics.

In modern society, tolerance is becoming the dominant belief. Differences are to be celebrated. This has produced great freedom, but it cannot unify a society, because it builds diversity at the expense of unity. If this trend continues, society will be torn apart by class conflict and identity politics.

If there are no unifying beliefs, the only thing that can hold a society together is dictatorial state power, often justified by fear of external enemies.

Culture

Modern people have a shallow and naïve view of culture. They assume that diversity of culture is always a good thing. After all, a variety of cuisines at a food fair cannot be a bad thing.

Cultural diversity can enrich a society, especially if culture is confined to different foods, clothing, music, art, dance, worship and religious festivals. Unfortunately, culture often goes much deeper and produces different attitudes to political authority, military force, violence, which make diversity a problem.

If religion is limited to cultural activities, then diversity of religion can enrich society. The problem is that religion at its best should go deeper. If religion produces different attitudes to family relationships, government authority, violence, war and property, religious diversity creates problems for a society.

Culture of Lies

I am old enough to remember the Soviet Union when it was at the peak of its power. The memory that stands out most is the culture of lying leaders.

When President Khrushchev, or President Brezhnev said something, you could be certain that the opposite was true. If Khrushchev reported that the wheat crop had doubled, everyone understood that that the harvest had failed. If Brezhnev reported that Soviet troops had travelled to Hungary for rest and recreation, everyone understood that the tanks had rolled in to suppress the people.

This great edifice of lies eventually collapsed, and the Soviet Union is now gone.

Strangely, a similar political culture of lies seems to have emerged in the United States. I don’t know when it began, but I first noticed it during the Vietnam War. The Gulf of Tonkin incident used as a justification for escalation of war turned out to be a false flag. “We are not bombing Cambodia”, meant that it was bombed to crap. When a new president was imposed upon the poor South Vietnamese by the US, he would be described as a perfect man. Then he would turn out to be a thief and a murderer. The US was always announcing that another battle had been won, but the war was being lost.

This torturing of the truth continued through the death of JFK, through the shooting down of Iran Air flight 655, the sinking of USS Liberty, TWA flight 800 to 9/11. Now a culture of lies seems to control Washington. In foreign policy, if the Secretary of State says that something has happened, the opposite is probably true. Victory in Iraq means destruction of political order. “No boots on the ground” means 500 special forces in Syria. Training moderate forces means supplying weapons to Al Qaida. “Fighting against terrorism” means air support for ISIS in Syria. "Building democracy" in Libya means destroying the most prosperous nation in Africa.

This strange culture has now culminated in a presidential election where the people of the United States have to choose between two proven liars. And no one seems to care.

I am not expecting this to be exposed soon. The history of the Soviet Union shows that lies can keep a rotten system going for many decades. I suspect they can keep a powerful rotten system going for a long, long time.

Faith and Culture

Western culture was built on Christian culture, so it cannot exist without it, yet that is what we are trying to do. We are trying to eat the fruits of Christian culture while leaving Christian faith and values behind.

For many centuries, the church was the culture maker. Christianity was the dominant faith, and the normal worldview. Clergy giving their weekly sermon were the main cultural voice. They explained how the world and works, and how we should live. That situation changed a couple of centuries ago, and the Christian voice is just one small voice, lost in the hubbub of the world.

In modern culture, the main cultural voice is the arts and entertainment media. We learn how the world works from them. The media teach us what to believe, and what to do, but they do not mention God. They tell us how to live. Have a good time. The media now shape our culture.

The first step to restoration is proclaiming the gospel, but bringing people to faith will not be enough. God will need to raise up prophetic culture makers, who voice is so sharp and clear that it rises above the clamour of the media.

Christians and Culture (4) Hostile

Christians are now living in a Hostile Culture. A Christian response will have the following sequence.

1. Safe Environment
A culture is more like an environment than a worldview. The only way to counteract the impact of a hostile culture is to create an alternative environment to sustain the life of Jesus.

Attendance at a Sunday worship service and listening to a sermon will not be sufficient to counteract the influence of the prevailing culture. When worshippers are sent out into the world, they will be swamped by the culture in which they live. Their lives will be shaped by the culture that is propagated by the institutions of the world.

Our beliefs attitudes and behaviours are formed by the cultural environment in which we live. A person who has chosen to follow Jesus needs a Christian cultural environment to grow to maturity. The leaders of a Kingdom Community will attempt to create an alternative cultural environment in which strong Christian lives are natural and normal.

The citizens of the kingdom will not ignore the surrounding culture. They will listen to the music and watch the popular movies, but because these will not be the only voice they listen to, they will have less influence on their lives. Through their involvement in the community, they will be involved in many conversations that underlay what they have seen and heard with a Christian context. Discussions about the culture of the world will push them deeper into their Christian culture

2. Prophetic challenge
Prophetic Christians will have a role in challenging and exposing the lies that underlay modern culture. Not everyone will do this, but those who do it must do it well. They must understand the culture and be able to challenge its flaws incisively.

3. Create alternative culture
Some kingdom communities will start developing an alternative Christian culture making institutions. Modern technology reduced the cost and democratises the distribution.

The biggest cultural influence is the school. Christians schools operating within the Kingdom Community, will propagate a different culture.
Christians will write books that promote Christian world view on social media and publish them.

They will write music and songs to give to give away on social media.

4. Send apostles
Some Jesus Teams will send their best people to work (as apostles) in the more powerful culture shaping institutions. They will provide them with strong spiritual and emotional support, in the same way as other teams support more regular apostles. As more and more of the people in these organisations becomes Christian, they will shift their stance, and begin pushing society back toward God.

As the gospel spreads like yeast through the dough, the culture makers will be slowly transformed along with the rest of society.

5. Secular culture collapses
When people understand what it has done to them, they will turn against the culture makers and hate modern culture (in the same way that the church is currently hated because it was seen as controlling the culture). The modern culture shapers will collapse along with government power (Rev 18:21-24).

Christians and Culture (3) Response

The church in the western world has responded to the shifts that make culture an enemy of the gospel in four different ways, but each has been unsuccessful.

• Some Christian groups have attempted to use political power to control the culture and bring it back into line, eg The Moral Majority. These movements failed and are no longer taken seriously.
• Some churches have tried to recover their influence by creating alternative culture-making institutions, but these tend to get overwhelmed the surrounding culture. Christian schools and colleges risk getting is a reputation for inferior education if they refuse to adopt the curriculum and teaching methods of their secular counterparts to obtain accreditation and funding. The Christian music and movie industries have adopted the techniques and style, and corporate business model of their secular counterparts in order to succeed, but they have been absorbed by wider culture and got lost as a separate market sector within their industry.
• More liberal Christians have loved the world so much that they totally embraced modern culture. They have become so absorbed into worldly culture that they have lost an independent voice.
• Some Christians have rejected culture and attempted to escape from it, but this has isolated themselves from the world, which makes them irrelevant to modern life.

Christians and Culture (2) Culture Shapers

The culture reflects the heart of the people, and goes where they are going. If the culture leaders move too far away from that heart, they will be ignored.

• The Levites were the culture shapers in the Mosaic system. They led their society to God.
• The church was the main culture shapers for many centuries. The most important culture influence was the Sunday sermon. It pushed society towards God.
• Modern culture shapers move people further way from God, partly because that is the way that the people are moving.

The church has yet to adjust to a situation where they on the opposite side to the culture shapers and the heart of the people.

The culture shapers and the government provide strong support for each other.

• Politicians use the media to build support for their policies and capture the hearts of their followers.
• Television news programs create interest by showing what political leaders are doing.
• Even when criticising political leaders, the media perpetuates the view that the problems of society can be solved by politics.
• Entertainment programmes portray good government agents using skill and power to defeat evil.
• Reality television shows record police and customers beating up petty evil.

Nothing in this life is neutral. Music, art, television, movies are not neutral. They can be used for good or evil.

The news media are a powerful tool for the spiritual powers of evil. They use the emotions stirred up be these media to gain control of people’s lives.

Christians and Culture (1)

A culture is much more than a set of ideas and values, although it includes them. It includes a system of entertainment, artistic and educational institutions that support the prevailing worldview. Efforts to change ideas and beliefs has a very limited effect, if these institutions remain in place. The culture can be a friend or foe of the church depending on the institutions that shape it.

Through the Middle Ages and up into the 19th century, the culture was a friend of the gospel, because the church was the dominant institution shaping culture. The most influential message in society was the Sunday sermon. People sang the songs and listened to the music that they heard in church. The best artists were employed by the church to decorate its buildings. The institutional church had an immense impact on the culture.

That has all changed. The institutional church has lost its influence over the culture, so it has now becomes an enemy of the gospel. At the same time, new communication technologies have immensely increased the power of culture to influence society. The main influencers in western culture are television, popular music and social media. The music and songs we listen to come over the internet. The main messages that influence our thinking come through television and social media. These powerful technologies and institutions have combined to create a worldly culture that is hostile to Jesus and the gospel.

This had been going on for longer than we realise. Through most of the 20th century, people were coming to faith, so the situation looked fine, but the culture was going the other way. In the 1960s, the new culture burst out in full power.

Modern technology makes culture the most powerful influence on our lives. Despite this change, the church continued to operate as if could change the world by sharing the gospel, but this ignores the influence of the surrounding culture. Changing hearts and minds of people is not enough, because the behaviour of people is shaped by the surrounding culture, as much as by what they believe.

Modern culture is supported by a network of entertainment and educational institutions that support the prevailing worldview. These networks of institutions are often controlled by powerful elites and influential businesses. Changing ideas and beliefs has a very limited effect, if these institutions remain in place.

POG (4)

Last week I listened to Os Guiness giving a talk called The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times at the Acton Institute. Here are some more notes I took while listening to his message.

Modern World

Our modern world is not created by ideas, but by culture.

Peter Berger warned about a world without windows

In the pre-modern world, the unseen world is real.

Modern people say that the unseen world is not real.

we live in this so-called real world.

Many Christians are operational atheists, unawares.

Jesus said we can live by bread alone.

Modernism has brought us to a place where we can almost live by bread alone. science alone, technology alone, management alone.

A church can grow with the right technology and plan.

No need for God→secular societies.

Fragmented Faith

Modernism has moved us from an integrated faith to a fragmented faith.

In a village it easy to integrate faith with everything, because you can walk around it.

modern lives are strung out

Work, church, home are in different worlds.

Faith is privately engaging, but publicly irrelevant.

Cities have fragmented our lives without awareness.

Science is modern, but culture is post-modern.

Call to Community

The New Testament call to community is the very toughest part of the Christian ethic to live out in our modern, over-stressed, over-loaded, fragmented society.

It easy to retreat altogether.

We need a few doing that for prayer, worship, and to provide place for rest.

But most of us have to be in the world.

but we must be different.

POG (3)

Last week I listened to Os Guiness giving a talk called The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times at the Acton Institute. Here are some more notes I took while listening to his message.

What are the Keys to Kingdom Advance

Today there is a lot of analysis of how ideas change culture.

Secularism says that ideas spread through leaders
at the centre of culture, not the edges.

The Kingdom spreads differently.

1. Leadership of the Holy Spirit
2. Surprising reversals
3. Culture change is a by-product of seeking the kingdom.

Key lessons from Engagement with Culture

1. Times of success often breed worse failure, eg Christendom
   
   It was never perfect – we cant relax
   
   We always need critiques of our culture, even when successful

2. The greatest darkness is often just before the dawn.
   
   We she should not be discouraged at times of bleakness
   
   Look to God and see what he is doing.

3. The church moves forward best by going back first.
   
   The modern world is crazy about relevance and being up-to-date
   
   The reformation and renaissance were recovery moments.
   
   We must go back to the heart of the gospel, and live it.
   
   The future of humanity depends on us doing this.

Tools for discerning culture

1. History of ideas
   
   we need to understand the genealogy of ideas.
   
   This makes it easier to critique them.

2. Cultural Analysis
   
   Sociology of knowledge shows how life-context shapes thinking.
   
   eg clocks →fast past society
   
   Westerners have watches, Africans have time.
   
   cars, cellphones change society

3. Biblical World view
   
   shapes our wisdom.
   
   provides a framework of how thing fit
   
   supports critique of culture

POG (2)

Last week I listened to Os Guinness giving a talk called The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times at the Acton Institute. This video gives a great summary of many of the ideas that he covered in the book by the same name. It is a worth a listen. Here are some more notes I took while listening to his message.

What is the Explanation of the Power of the Gospel in Culture

CS Lewis says that the gospel is world affirming and denying at the same time.

Augustine, says we are living in the city of God in the midst of the city of man,
but not dependent on the city of man.

We are in the world, but not of it.

Not conformed, but transformed.

There have been two extremes in history

Worldly or isolated (retreat)

Three things are essential

• Engagement is essential

• Discernment
  

  American church is good at discerning ideas (can smell a heresy from a mile off)
  
  but not at discerning culture.
  
  However culture is more seductive than ideas.
  
  Evangelicals understand secularism and relativism, but not consumerism and fragmentation, which are far more dangerous.
  
  Evangelicals are attuned to bad ideas, but blind to cultural distortions.
  
  The American church is worldly. It is shaped far more by American culture than the gospel at many points, not in terms of ideas, but in terms of culture.

• Courage
  

  Christians consensus is gone.
  
  We need people to call the truth about evil, and say no.

We need to create a tension with culture that is culture changing.

Multicultural Society

Modern media, the internet and migration are causing peoples and ideas to spread rapidly. Cultures are becoming increasingly diverse. Multicultural society is the modern reality left to its natural course.

Unfortunately, a society needs a common culture to be strong and resilient. A multicultural society will eventually tear itself apart, as different cultural groups struggle for dominance of their culture. We can see the beginnings of these struggles in the battle over School Prayer in the US, wearing the burqua in France, and Bible in Schools in NZ.

A multicultural society can only survive, if a powerful group can impose order upon it, and the rest of society agrees to go along. For the Christendom period, the church took this role. It imposed uniformity of thought and culture throughout Western Europe. The secular state has now taken over this role of imposing uniformity on society. Whereas the church imposed a religious culture, the state applies a liberal secular culture.

The state will eventually fail in this role, as the pressure of multiculturalism is to strong. Society will break down into numerous small communities each different from the rest, but with a common culture. The trend in the world is away from a large amorphous uniform society towards diversity. The state cannot hold back this tide.

Tactics and Strategy (1)

We are in the middle of a cultural war,
but most people do not realise what is happening.
The Great Unwashed do not have a clue
about God or the meaning of life.
They just get on with it
working to “earn a buck”
and trying to have a good time.
They do not think
or care about the great issues of life.
They just follow wherever they are led by the cultural elite
that controls the media and shapes the nation.
The real struggle is between the cultural elite,
the clever people and the church.

At the moment the church is struggling.
It should be challenging the secular elite
and shaping the culture,
but instead its members are being sucked out
by the prevailing hostile culture.
The church is in danger of being engulfed
by the world around it.
The clever people are winning the cultural war.

Cultural Conflict - Occupied People

The people who already occupied the land when the people with a new culture arrive have fewer options.

1. Resistance
   The initial response to a large migration was usually resistance. The British Empire met resistance wherever it went, but the resistance failed in the face of superior force.

2. Capitulation
   Most peoples facing large scale migrations from colonising nations eventually capitulated. They had no choice, but to make the best of a bad situation.

3. Conversion
   Some peoples do acknowledge that the colonises cultures is superior and adopt for themselves. In India, many Ghurkhas attempted to become more English than their English masters.

4. Migrate
   When faced by a migration of a hostile culture, migrating out to another are is an option. When British settlement of Capetown increased significantly, the original Dutch settlers felt they were losing their culture. The joined the Great Trek into the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.

Cultural Conflict - Migrants

A nation needs a strong unified culture to be viable. When two opposing cultures are present, the nation will tend to fall a part. This is a serious issue for migrant to a new land.

When a people with a strong culture migrate into an area already occupied by people with a different culture, the migrating people have five options, if they want their culture to shape the society in their new homeland.

1. Dominance
   During the 19th Century, the most common approach was to dominate the people occupying the land using military force. The British uses this method in all their colonies. The military dominance of British Empire spread English culture throughout the world. The first American settlers used same method to deal with the Red Indians.

2. Reservations
   If the native people persist in rejecting the new culture, they can be pushed into reservations on the sidelines of society. Plentiful alcohol can be used to keep them quiet. American governments used reservations to shut down the culture of the natives who resisted the settler advance. This method was also used by the Afrikaners in South Africa. Until apartheid collapsed, most of the natives were pushed into reservations called Bantustans.

3. Ethnic Cleansing
   A more extreme solution is for the arriving culture to wipe out the people already in the land. This has been the norm through most of history. When the Roman Empire collapsed the people of Europe were defeated and destroyed again and again by peoples migrating from East.

4. Capitulation
   If the migrating people are few in number they will have no choice but to accept the culture of the people already occupying the land. For example, refugees arriving in a western country may try to persevere in their religion and culture, but because they arrive in a position of weakness, they are usually swamped by the host culture. If they do not give in, their children generally will.

5. Conversion
   The people migrating may persuade the occupiers that their culture is superior and the latter may agree to convert to the culture that has just arrived. This is what Christian apostles do. They move into a new village and stay there until some people in that village see the benefits of the gospel and freely convert to Christianity. The gospel can transform the culture of a nation. When English missionaries came to New Zealand the Maori were very receptive to a more peaceful culture. Many Maori converted, but when the land wars betrayed their trust, they rejected the warrior Christian religion.

6. Covenant
   New Zealand is the only colony where the British did not use military force to dominate the local culture. Here they made a covenant called the Treaty of Waitangi with Maori leaders agreeing that they could preserve their culture, provided they accepted the British presence. This approach worked for a while, but once the settlers became desperate for land, they switched to the dominance method. The urban migration of Maori in the 1950s and 1960s brought the covenant back to light and it is now being honoured more fully. We now have an interesting strange situation where the trappings of Maori culture function within a western culture.

Order (2)

The problem described in the previous post also affects the United States of America. For the first couple of hundred years, most migrants came from Europe, so they accepted Christian moral standards, even if they were not overtly Christian themselves. Regular revivals refreshed the wells of Christian faith and expanded the acceptance of Christian values. Migrants from Africa usually accepted Christianity soon after they arrived. This unity of values sustained an orderly society.

During the twentieth century, two things happened. The United States started accepting migrants from a diverse range of nations and cultures. At the same time, the church went to sleep on the job. The revivals which had swept a Christian perspective across recent newcomers came to an end. The United States is now a strange and diverse ethnic and religious mix without any unifying culture. This diversity would fling society apart, if it was not held together by force.

I read the other day that there will soon be 20,000 uniformed troops based in the United States to maintain homeland security. This is the inevitable consequence of the loss of a unifying culture. The homeland security troops will keep the lid on, but the tensions will always be there ready to emerge, when the right trigger comes along. They will establish an uneasy order, but it will not be the same as the order that comes from human responsibility and cooperation.

Unless the church in the United States forgets about waiting for Jesus to come and gets off its bum and spreads the gospel, the situation will get worse. Society will become more diverse and more divided. If there is no revival, the “United” will shrink and the “State” will expand to counteract the shrinking until it becomes “The State”.

I have real doubts as to whether the American church is capable of preventing this from happening. It is so blinded by end-times teaching and properity prophecies that it could not cope with a real revival. I think we have already moved onto Plan B in which God prepares a remnant to survive the ensuing chaos. Plan A where the church rises up to proclaim the gospel in the power of the Spirit to tranform the nation and unify the culture has already passed its use-by date. I hope I am wrong, but most of the evidence points the other way.

Order (1)

Last week I wrote these words.

Most of order in a society does not come from government,
but from people being responsible and cooperating with each other.

The statement is true, but it only applies in those societies where there is a culture that unifies people round a common set of moral standards that encourages respect for other people.

When unity of values or respect for people disappears, cooperation and responsibility no longer sustains an orderly society, so those with power eventually resort to political and military force to keep order. The problem is that force can only produce a semblance of order with the forces of disharmony smouldering just below the surface. The other problem is that soldiers and police can punish the people who attempt to destroy a society after the event, but they cannot prevent them from their harm. A society held together by force will be an unpleasant place.

Democracy cannot produce a unified culture, because it is a winner-takes-all system that decides which cultural group shall dominate all other cultural groups in society. The democratic process exacerbates cultural tensions.

Iraq and India are examples of this divisive diversity. They both contain an amazing range of ethnic and tribal groupings, laced with diverse religious beliefs. In absence of a unifying culture, such societies can only be held together by force. Saddam Hussein achieved this in Iraq. The United States military power has also managed go create an uneasy order, but Iraq will never have more than that without a unifying cultural force.

The British Empire created a semblance of order in India, but it never had the true order produced by cultural unity. Since the British left, many assumed that democracy could be a unifying objective. However, under democracy the winner takes all. The strongest cultural group gets to control the less powerful groups, so actually democracy is a divisive force. Democracy cannot provide the cultural unity needed to hold a diverse society together. Recent events in India are the natural consequence of intense cultural diversity breaking through the restraints of political and military force.

Cultural Struggle

Christians in America are getting really wound up about the contest for the presidency. This is very, very sad.

The sad thing is that, although the struggle between the cultural conservatives and the cultural liberals is intense and uncompromising, it is a side show compared with the real struggle between the world and the Kingdom of God.

The really sad thing is that both you and they are fighting on the wrong side in the real struggle between the world and the Kingdom of God. Both Christian democrats and the Christian republicans are undermining the Kingdom of God by their compromise with the world system (Mark 10:35-44).

Talking to each other is not the solution. Both groups need to cast down their idols, so their eyes can be opened to a vision of the Kingdom of God.