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

by James Davison Hunter

ideas can inspire greatness, creativity, sacrifice, and human flourishing. But keep in mind, under the very same conditions, other ideas can lead to extraordinary folly or unspeakable destruction. The question is: What are those conditions and circumstances?

PROPOSITION EIGHT: CULTURES CHANGE FROM THE TOP DOWN, RARELY IF EVER FROM THE BOTTOM UP

Yet the deepest and most enduring forms of cultural change nearly always occurs from the “top down.” In other words, the work of world-making and world-changing are, by and large, the work of elites: gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. Even where the impetus for change draws from popular agitation, it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites.

The reason for this, as I have said, is that culture is about how societies define reality—what is good, bad, right, wrong, real, unreal, important, unimportant, and so on. This capacity is not evenly distributed in a society, but is concentrated in certain institutions and among certain leadership groups who have a lopsided access to the means of cultural production. These elites operate in well-developed networks and powerful institutions.

Deep-rooted cultural change tends to begin with those whose work is most conceptual and invisible and it moves through to those whose work is most concrete and visible. In a very crude formulation, the process begins with theorists who generate ideas and knowledge; moves to researchers who explore, revise, expand, and validate ideas; moves on to teachers and educators who pass those ideas o...

Cultural change is most enduring when it penetrates the structure of our imagination, frameworks of knowledge and discussion, the perception of everyday reality. This rarely if ever happens through grassroots political mobilization though grassroots mobilization can be a manifestation of deeper cultural transformation. Change of this nature can only come from the top down.

PROPOSITION NINE: CHANGE IS TYPICALLY INITIATED BY ELITES WHO ARE OUTSIDE OF THE CENTERMOST POSITIONS OF PRESTIGE

change is often initiated outside of the centermost positions. When change is initiated in the center, then it typically comes from outside of the center’s nucleus. Wherever innovation begins, it comes as a challenge to the dominant ideas and moral systems defined by the elites who possess the highest levels of symbolic capital.

Innovation, in other words, generally moves from elites and the institutions they lead to the general population but among elites who do not necessarily occupy the highest echelons of prestige.

The novelty they represent and offer calls into question the rightness and legitimacy of the established ideas and practices of the culture’s leading gatekeepers. The goal of any such innovation is to infiltrate the center and, in...

change occurs through a “circulation of elites.” His theory was fairly complex, though in its simple and sanitized form, he argued that elites were either foxes or lions. Foxes, as he put it, were those who innovated, experimented, and took risks. Lions, by contrast, were those who defended the status quo in the name of social stability. Foxes and lions were in tension over power.

Yet because it is difficult for foxes to maintain a stable social order, the lions would eventually replace them or—more interestingly—the foxes would become lions.

PROPOSITION TEN: WORLD-CHANGING IS MOST CONCENTRATED WHEN THE NETWORKS OF ELITES AND THE INSTITUTIONS THEY LEAD OVERLAP

Persistence over time is essential; little of significance happens in three to five years. But when cultural and symbolic capital overlap with social capital and economic capital and, in time, political capital, and these various resources are directed toward shared ends, the world, indeed, changes.

PROPOSITION ELEVEN: CULTURES CHANGE, BUT RARELY IF EVER WITHOUT A FIGHT

By its very nature, culture is a realm in which institutions and their agents seek to defend one understanding of the world against alternatives, which are always either present or latent. That work is the work of legitimation and delegitimation; of naming one normal and right and its competition, deviant, inferior, stupid, inadequate, ridiculous, un-American, politically incorrect, or just plain evil.

conflict is not the only dynamic of culture. Often enough, change will occur through movements of convergence, assimilation, and even concord.

an alternative vision of society—its discourse, moral demands, institutions, symbols, and rituals—must still resonate closely enough with the social environment that it is plausible to people. If it does not, the challenge will be seen as esoteric, eccentric, parochial, and thus either unrealistic or irrelevant.

On the other hand, if the challenge articulates too closely with the social environment that produces it, the alternative will likely be co-opted by that which it seeks to challenge and change.

Ideas do have consequences in history, yet not because those ideas are inherently truthful or obviously correct but rather because of the way they are embedded in very powerful institutions, networks, interests, and symbols.

it is not so much individual hearts and minds that move cultures but cultures that ultimately shape the hearts and minds and, thus, direct the lives of individuals. The movement between the individual and culture, in other words, goes in both directions and perhaps moves even more strongly in the latter direction.

The idea, suggested by James Dobson, that “in one generation, you change the whole culture”13 is nothing short of ludicrous. Change in political systems and economic conditions can occur relatively quickly but the most profound changes in culture typically take place over the course of multiple generations.

The most profound changes in culture can be seen first as they penetrate into the linguistic and mythic fabric of a social order. In doing so, it then penetrates the hierarchy of rewards and privileges and deprivations and punishments that organize social life. It also reorganizes the structures of consciousness and character, reordering the organization of impulse and inhibition.

Imagine, in this regard, a genuine “third great awakening” occurring in America, where half of the population is converted to a deep Christian faith. Unless this awakening extended to envelop the cultural gatekeepers, it would have little effect on the character of the symbols that are produced and prevail in public and private culture. And, without a fundamental restructuring of the institutions of culture formation and transmission in our society—the market, government-sponsored cultural institutions, education at all levels, advertising, entertainment, publishing, and the news media, not to mention church—revival would have a negligible long-term effect on the reconstitution of the culture.

Such is the story of one of the most powerful transatlantic social reform movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the temperance movement. This movement failed, of course, not least because it did not and could not address the culture of restraint on which the particular interest of temperance depended. In the end, the ideal of “temperance” finally expired in derision with the repeal of the Volstead Act in 1933, the word now having disappeared from our public vocabulary.

The passion and earnest resolve generated by all such movements may change people and may effect communities and they may, for a time, change laws, but they generally will not influence the course and direction of the culture as a whole unless they are tied to larger structural changes in the culture.

Culture, at root, provides the very terms by which life is ordered. In our own culture, the inherited categories derived largely from biblical and classical sources by which we understand the most basic aspects of human life have been and are being transformed by very powerful forces over which individuals and social groups have little control, forces such as consumerism, communications technology, and so on.

important qualification one must make in all of this is that even when successful, change does not always occur in the direction that people propose or with the effects for which people hope. There are almost always unintended consequences to human action, particularly at the macro-historical level and these are, often enough, tragic.

And the missionaries who brought aid to impoverished parts of the Third World would have never wished for the growing cycle of dependency they unwittingly helped foster. And so it goes. One can never quite predict where things will go.