To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World

by James Davison Hunter

Having said this, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention two other elements that give idealism a distinctly American and Protestant flavor. For one, woven into idealism is the element of “individualism,” the view that the autonomous and rational individual is the key actor in social change.

But in the end, the larger source of the problem with the prevailing view of culture and cultural change is idealism.

There is an irony in this perspective. One of the great virtues of the “worldview” approach to culture is its rejection of “dualism”—the division between secular and sacred, public and private, objective and subjective; the idea that the truth of Christianity is really only religious truth, relevant to one’s personal life but mostly irrelevant to other spheres of life.

I said at the start of this chapter, this is not to say that the renewal of hearts and minds of individuals is not important; nor is it to say that worldview education is not a good thing and will not have beneficial effects; nor is it to say that social reform and political engagement are not worthy goals. It is simply to say that these things are just not decisively important if the goal is to change the world.

Thus, if one is serious about changing the world, the first step is to discard the prevailing view of culture and cultural change and start from scratch.

As its chief protagonist, Andy Crouch, has put it, culture is constituted by “actual, concrete stuff—material, corporeal, physical. It’s the very tangible product of human activity.”25 He echoes this point repeatedly: “If we want to understand culture, then, it’s always best to begin and end with specific cultural goods.”26 “Culture is the accumulation of very tangible things—the stuff people make of the world.”

Crouch is not merely a materialist, though. He clearly recognizes that culture also entails beliefs, values, and ideas—indeed, it requires them for it is only through them that material goods are understood and interpreted. But the priority is obvious, “We make sense of the world by making something of the world. The human quest for meaning is played out in human making:

In short, ideas, symbols, ideals, worldviews, and the like are not free-floating and autonomous from lived reality. They are, rather, mediated through things. It is the vast array of cultural artifacts—from omelets, chairs, and snow angels to highway systems, from the Pill to iPods—that finally shape the way we encounter and make sense of the world.

The priority he gives to the materiality of culture means that his focus is on the artifact as an artifact, and its power to shape the way that people imagine and experience the world.

Crouch puts it, “culture requires a public: a group of people who have been sufficiently affected by a cultural good that their horizon of possibility and impossibility have in fact been altered, and their own cultu...

how do cultures change? It stands to reason that “[c]ulture changes when new cultural goods, concrete, tangible artifacts, whether books or tools or buildings—are introduced to the world.”32 Put more succinctly, “The only way to change culture is to create more of it.”

We seek the transformation of every culture but how we do it is by actually making culture.

Importantly, the proper sphere of culture making is local and shared—it is never a solitary affair. “Every cultural good, whether a new world, law, recipe, song, or gadget, begins with a small group of people.”35 The same can be said of cultural change.

Crouch grounds this view on the assumption that societies are, in effect, constituted by the aggregate of individuals consuming a range of cultural goods, thereby influencing each other’s horizons of possibilities. It is for this reason that he argues that the best strategy for Christians is to invest in creative cultural production. “Investing is basically a way of placing bets on which cultural goods will grow in world-changing importance.

Crouch’s theology of gospel and culture is also a welcome relief to the focus on politics as a means of engaging the world. Yet, in the end, this view still suffers from fundamental flaws that render it inadequate for understanding the complexity of the world and Christianity’s relationship to it.

Yet the near exclusive focus on the explicit, visible, tangible, and conscious aspects of culture minimizes the more implicit, intangible, preconscious, inherited, and thus more encompassing nature of culture. He sees the tip of the iceberg, but not the mass of ice below the surface.

When all is said and done, though offered as a new approach to culture and cultural change, the “culture as artifact” perspective also falls far short of providing an adequate account of the complexity of culture and Christianity’s relationship to it.

Seven Propositions on Culture PROPOSITION ONE: CULTURE IS A SYSTEM OF TRUTH CLAIMS AND MORAL OBLIGATIONS Culture is, first and foremost, a normative order by which we comprehend others, the larger world, and ourselves and through which we individually and collectively order our experience.

But these norms are better understood as commanding truths, which define the “shoulds” and “should nots” of our experience and, accordingly, the good and the evil, the right and the wrong, the appropriate and the inappropriate, the honorable and the shameful.

our understanding of the world is so taken-for-granted that it seems utterly obvious.

the frameworks of knowledge and understanding (and thus culture, in this sense) are largely coterminous with language. Language, the most basic system of symbols, provides the primary medium through which people apprehend their conscious experience in the world. Through both its structure and its meaning—its syntax and semantics—it provides the categories through which people understand themselves, others, and the larger world.

This is why one cannot merely change worldviews or question one’s own very easily. Most of what really counts, in terms of what shapes us and directs us, we are not aware of; it operates far below what most of us are capable of consciously grasping.

PROPOSITION TWO: CULTURE IS A PRODUCT OF HISTORY If language provides one reason why culture is settled so deeply into consciousness and social practice, history is another reason. Culture takes form as the slow accretions of meaning in society over long periods of time. In this sense, cultur...

For these historical reasons, culture is highly resilient, durable over time.

It is just that they are not easily changed in these ways or changed in the direction we want them to change. The inertia built into culture by virtue of its relationship to its long history tends to make it lumbering and erratic at the same time.

culture is intrinsically dialectical. It is generated and exists at the interface between ideas and institutions; between the symbolic and the social and physical environment.

is better to think of culture as a thing, if you will, manufactured not by lone individuals but rather by institutions and the elites who lead them.

In short, individuals and institutions are inseparable. Institutions cannot exist without the individuals who make them work, but individuals cannot be understood outside of the institutions that form them and frame all of their activity.

should not be under the illusion that the dialectic is evenly balanced. While individuals are not powerless by any stretch of the imagination, institutions have much greater power.

PROPOSITION FOUR: CULTURE IS A RESOURCE AND, AS SUCH, A FORM OF POWER To think of culture institutionally and organizationally allows one to think of symbols as a resource. Symbols take the form of ideas, information, news, wisdom, indeed, knowledge of all kinds, and these in turn are expressed in pronou...

culture is not neutral in relation to power but a form of power. In other words, like money, accumulated symbolic capital translates into a kind of power and influence.

It starts as credibility, an authority one possesses which puts one in a position to be listened to and taken seriously. It ends as the power to define reality itself. As Bourdieu puts it, it is the power of “legitimate naming.”

PROPOSITION FIVE: CULTURAL PRODUCTION AND SYMBOLIC CAPITAL ARE STRATIFIED IN A FAIRLY RIGID STRUCTURE OF “CENTER” AND “PERIPHERY”

with economic capital, quantity is paramount. In the ways of the world, more is almost always better, and more influential, than less. With cultural capital, it isn’t quantity but quality that matters most.

PROPOSITION SIX: CULTURE IS GENERATED WITHIN NETWORKS

Most of us are inclined to what has been called the “great man” (or great person) view of history.

The only problem with this perspective is that it is mostly wrong. Against this great-man view of history and culture, I would argue (along with many others) that the key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks.

the more “dense” the network—that is, the more active and interactive the network—the more influential it could be. This is where the stuff of culture and cultural change is produced.

don’t want to underplay the role of individual charisma and genius. Within any network, there is usually one who provides a certain unprecedented leadership, who offers a greater degree of articulation or who puts more at risk financially, socially, and reputat...

My point is simply that charisma and genius and their cultural consequences do not exist outside of networks of similarly oriented people and similarly aligned institutions.

PROPOSITION SEVEN: CULTURE IS NEITHER AUTONOMOUS NOR FULLY COHERENT

The relationship of culture to the economy is especially complex in contemporary America because so much of what drives and sustains the economy and so much of what it sells is knowledge, information, images, symbols, entertainment, and the like. Long gone is the time when economy was mainly driven by the production and distribution of “things.”

the government is inextricable from the work of culture. In some ways, the expansion of the state in the last several decades is due to its growing role in the production of knowledge and information.

It is in the realm of education where these powers are most critically at work. Since school attendance is mandatory for all children up to the eighth grade, and since the government has a monopoly on public education, children are required to be educated under the auspices of the state.

Culture also is composed of innumerable fields—relatively distinct and often-overlapping regions of meaning, activity, networks, and relationships, as well as rules and interests. Religious traditions and ideological movements can be thought of as fields of culture as can publishing, entertainment, education, ministry, and the like.

the idea that changing a culture mainly by changing the hearts and minds of ordinary people is looking less and less plausible. Yet cultures do change. Yes, they are enduring but they are never permanent. What, then, can be said for how cultures change?

“Ideas have consequences.” The adage comes from a book by this title published in 1948 by the University of Chicago professor of English, Richard Weaver.

The ideas of economic and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.

not all ideas have consequences, and among those that do, some have greater consequences than others. How is this? What explains the difference? Weaver’s statement would be truer if it were reworded as: “Under specific conditions and circumstances ideas can have consequences.”