Christian, Stop Blaming Culture.

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Conflating culture with theology is a Christian tradition. When I think of the enduringly dysfunctional relationship between the Church and culture my mind immediately conjures up photographs from the 1800’s of Christian converts in the Polynesian Islands and India, smartly dressed like the sophisticated European missionaries who had brought them truth from the West. While the Apostle Paul commended the Christian converts in Thessalonica for “turn[ing] to God from idols to serve a living and true God,” many missionaries of past generations led people to turn from their culture to serve the God of the Anglos. 

Never mind the fact that Christianity is not a Western, anglo faith; its geographic origin is the ancient Near East, more than half the Bible is written in a Semitic language; its central figure was a poor, brown-skinned, ethnically-oppressed minority, and the single most influential Christian theologian (Augustine) of the ancient church was a black African.

Christian Missionaries may not do this (or much of this) anymore, but many Christian communities still struggle with conflating culture and theology. Where discipleship and practice end and culture begins is too often simply an unthought. When I became a pastor in 2014 it became immediately clear that, for many, if it doesn’t have pews and an organ, and it doesn’t sing “Rock of Ages,” it’s not a church. For others, the same church would feel more like a cult than a church, because a “real” church has a large, ornate edifice, a grand altar, and a pipe organ. For other Christians, both of these outmoded options represent old, dead religion.   

Another, arguably much bigger, problem area between Christians and culture is knowing how to respond to broader, narratival changes in the culture that run against the grain of Christian teaching and belief. 

In the introduction to her 2021 book, The Secular Creed, Rebecca McLaughlin describes the two common reactions among Christians to the five cultural narrative ideals considered in her book:

• Black Lives Matter.
• Love is Love.
• The Gay Rights Movement is the New Civil Rights Movement.
• Women’s Rights are Human Rights.
• Transgender Women are Women.

One approach to these ideas by Christians is to agree completely, declaring and seeking to enforce these ideas. Another approach seeks to destroy the ideas as completely unbiblical. But a third approach seeks to interact wisely with the content of these cultural narratives. This third way recognizes these slogans as “creedal” statements grounded originally in distinctively Christian ideas—in a sense, the foundation of western society, such as the inherent dignity of the human person, equality of men and women, care for the poor and marginalized. This third way then seeks to distinguish the biblical from the unbiblical within the five above-listed narratives. For example, it is true that women’s rights are human rights because God made men and women equally in His image, but placing the right to abortion as central to women’s rights is not something the Christian should affirm.

Perhaps the strongest elemental claim of McLaughlin’s third-way approach is that “the tangling of ideas in the secular creed has been driven not only by sin in the world out there, but also by sin in the church in here.” (pg. 2) As she further explains, “The frequent failure of Christians to meet biblical ideals…has allowed this mixture of ideas to coalesce under the banner of diversity.” When Christians become counter-examples of baseline cultural values and assumptions, and the culture (historically grounded in some of those values) reacts negatively against it, the culture will shift in a counter-Church direction. 

McLaughlin is expressing a hard truth, that cultural developments in a society largely shaped by Christianity cannot be entirely attributed to secularism or secular people. Given the historical reality of Christianity’s substantial influence on the underlying values and assumptions of western society, we Christians don’t have the moral license to evade self-examination in the face of such a counter-Christian culture shift, to attribute the cultural shift entirely to God-hating, and to think this is what Jesus meant when he told his followers they would be hated by the world. The issue at hand is conduct, not content. Jesus was attractive because of his conduct, and hated for his message, so the Church gets no bragging rights for being hated for conduct unbecoming. Therefore, correctly evaluating these cultural narratives and claims, in our context, is an act of repentance, and a call for maturity, “For it is time for judgment to begin with the household of God.” (1 Peter 4:7a)

The longer I’ve reflected on this, the more I’ve come to realize that many Christians are gaslighting the secular communities around them. Consider the baseline assumptions and values that established western civilization–the inherent dignity of the human person, equality of men and women, the value of babies, care for the poor and marginalized, love across racial difference (which obviously came later; we’re still working this one out to a degree). We take these ideas for granted today as self-evident truths, but historically these values are very new to planet Earth, and they came from Christianity. Historian Tom Holland, a skeptic who became a Christian after studying ancient Greek and Roman civilization and making note of Christianity’s impact on the world, put it this way:

That every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely a self-evident truth. A Roman would have laughed at it. To campaign against discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexuality, however, was to depend on large numbers of people sharing in a common assumption: that everyone possessed an inherent worth. The origins of this principle . . . lay not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible.

Dominion, pg. 494.

How are many Christians gaslighting the secular communities around them? Christians’ professed moral values, listed above, at some point became the bedrock of western society. Because these values are assumed by the broader culture in which Christians live, when Christians get caught in conduct unbecoming, the community around them (rightly) takes issue. Over time, culture reacts and shifts away from the Church while maintaining the baseline assumptive values. When this happens, many Christians tend to point the accusatory finger at those in the cultural shift, blaming them entirely, chalking it all up to secular people hating God and the Church, and then they feel righteous because Jesus said the world would hate His followers. That’s gaslighting and scapegoating, not to mention completely misunderstanding Jesus. It’s no wonder non-Christian people have such a hard time being willing to listen to anything we have to say.

It is not a compromising cower to culture in the name of “just being nice” to seek to be culturally unoffensive in conduct. Compromise occurs when the message of the gospel is corrupted. It is not persecution when you elicit negative reactions for being offensive, belligerent, or judgmental. It is only persecution when you are mistreated for doing right. Consider the words of Peter:

“For what credit is there if, when you sin and are harshly treated, you endure it with patience? But if when you do what is right and suffer for it you patiently endure it, this finds favor with God.” 1 Peter 2:20

What does our current culture need to see from Christians? Here are a few ideas:

• Stop withdrawing into your own subculture.
• Don’t assign spiritual significance to differences that are purely cultural (there’s no Christian uniform).
• Don’t blame and revile those in a cultural shift who hold the same assumptive values as you who are merely reacting against the sins of the Church.
• If your sin is public, repent in public.
• Do not ever demand someone else’s forgiveness.
• Do everything in your power to ensure that the only thing offensive about your Christian communication is the message itself, and not your conduct.
• Be more fierce in your “fight for the truth” within the Church than you are at fighting a culture war “in the name of truth.”
• Grow up and out of black and white, either/or, all or nothing type thinking. Learn to appreciate nuance, and both/and perspectives.
• Be quicker to affirm what is good about a particular idea, event, or person, than you are to criticize it because you don’t agree 100%. Take time to affirm what God affirms and praise what is praiseworthy, even if there may be elements you disagree with within. Even Paul commended the pagan Greeks for their religiosity before pointing out their error and need for Christ.
• If you are not loving your neighbor as yourself, know that according to Jesus the world has no reason to listen to you. (adapted from Francis Schaeffer’s reflection on John 13:32-35 in The Mark of the Christian)

What’s missing from this list? What do you agree or disagree with? Leave your comments below.