But the fact is that there have been plenty of philosophies and worldviews which have little or no concern for truth. In North Korea, truth is less important than what the Dear Leader says, even when the latter obviously contradicts the former. That should give us pause, because if such worldviews exist, then there is no reason that we and our descendants might not find ourselves slipping into such a worldview. The idea that truth should be valued by everyone instead of just philosophers – despite costs and consequences – is an exceptional one. This mindset pushed Western countries to develop modern science and integrate high philosophy into our religious traditions. With such a rich heritage stemming from our cultural devotion to truth, it’s worth asking what kind of societies develop such a worldview.

The individual attitude to truth begins in the family. Parents teach their children to tell the truth. But that doesn’t mean they always do, and how lies are responded to determines a child’s attitude to telling the truth in the future. First, imagine what happens when discipline is poor. Children get away with lying and the parents are unable or unwilling to curb this behaviour. The lesson the children learn – and learn very quickly – is that their self-interest can be better served by lying when it suits them. If they’re intelligent, they quickly learn how to lie convincingly and worm their way out when they get caught. For these kinds of children, truth is something to be taken up or discarded at will. It all depends on the payoff. How does that affect the atmosphere of the family? Instead of trust, parents must be suspicious of their children and children are in conflict with their parents. Conflict disincentivizes truth, and that further undermines trust. It’s a vicious cycle. What every parent desires is a child which will tell the truth. Punishment isn’t enough for that to happen; the child must actually want to be truthful. This requires trust. Good parents will give positive reinforcement, especially if the child remains honest even when they’ve done something wrong. With that kind of trust, the child comes to appreciate being honest with your parents as something a good person just does. They appreciate the truth because it is the truth. Trust reinforces truth in the family, and vice versa.

Let’s scale that up to a city. What sort of a city has high conflict? One with high diversity, close proximity, and great uncertainty. When a few neighbourhoods and skyscrapers house wealthy families while the masses starve, those wealthy families are going to value security. Armed guards will accompany them and walls will surround their houses. When cities undergo rapid ethnic shifts, conflicts break out between newcomers and natives. Cultural conflicts occur. Parts of the city become enclaves. This all becomes reflected in the politics of the city. Politicians must increasingly represent particular interest groups to rule effectively. This means that secrecy and intrigue will increase. Fighting corruption becomes an attack by one faction on another. It’s easier to ignore problems like crime by moving away than to face the uphill political battle of doing something about it. Truth, especially harsh truth, gives way to politics. On the other hand, people in high-trust cities feel safer investing in the community. If you’re certain that your tax dollars will go into better infrastructure and not councillor paycheques, you’re more willing to pay them. There are virtuous circles here too. Safe and prosperous cities attract families who invest in their children. Those children are less likely to commit crimes, and the city remains safe and prosperous. High-trust environments reinforce truth-telling and punish betraying social trust. The best ones reinforce the desire to maintain a high-trust environment. What attitude will the resident of such a city have toward truth? They must think about it in relation to business and politics. They are more likely to consider truth and honesty a social responsibility and not simply a private preference.

Finally, let’s consider an entire culture: an ingroup bound by common history, values, ways of life, and social institutions. As in our other examples, a low-trust culture will reinforce conflict. In low-trust cultures, one has to expend a lot of energy and resources on not getting stabbed in the back. Because the culture is low-trust, those who try to demonstrate faith in others become victims of their own good natures. But of course people need each other to survive, so cultural institutions are geared toward decreasing uncertainty. The difference is between cooperating voluntarily and cooperating because you have a gun to your head. Because low-trust cultures must mitigate a huge amount of uncertainty, norms and institutions micromanage interactions and punish eccentrics. In such a culture, social harmony is highly valued. In fact, innovators who violate social norms aren’t likely to last long – both socially and sometimes physically. How many great philosophers, daring scientists, or brilliant inventors will such a culture produce? Now consider a high-trust culture. The marker of such a culture is that social harmony doesn’t need to be enforced by harsh restriction. Because one can assume that others are acting in good faith, the culture allows for more spontaneity. A certain amount of heterodoxy can be tolerated without jeopardizing the culture as a whole. When people can be trusting and truthful in social interaction, those who bring innovation are believed to have the well-being of the group in mind. It seems safe to say that such a culture will be more willing to change in the face of new knowledge. It possesses a certain antifragility. This seems to be a culture where appreciation for truth can thrive.

Having considered these examples, where do our own societies seem to be headed? Millennials are quickly losing trust in both institutions and our fellow human beings, especially in America and Europe. Conflict resulting from mass immigration is rising. Ever tightening speech codes seem to indicate decreasing social trust – remember how our low-trust culture needed to compensate with heavy discipline? Nationalist parties in Europe respond to alienation and distrust. Economic inequality is once again rising. When you view yourself as part of a class in conflict with the rest of society, you won’t want to invest in your enemies – with wealth if you’re rich, or with trust if you’re poor. If a culture which declines in trust also declines in its appreciation for truth, then we are on a dark road indeed. You can’t solve problems when pointing them out and suggesting solutions is immediately interpreted as tribal conflict. Will such a culture maintain the idealism which characterized scientific endeavours? What of the vocational attitude which the most admired philosophers have to their life’s work? Given that many modern philosophers have already become mired in endless deconstruction in the service of Social Progress, the answer seems clear. No doubt there will be many individuals and groups with whom devotion to truth survives. But the minds of our brahmins may well not be among them. And where the brahmins go, the culture and the country follow.

The post The Flight From Truth appeared first on Social Matter.

The professor was an excitable and amiable middle-aged man, fairly chubby by North American standards. His swarthy complexion, gleaming bald head and bushy mustache betrayed his foreign ancestry — an Egyptian Coptic Christian from Cairo, long since emigrated to the New World, and long since employed at his hallowed American university, though he had never quite managed to master that standard, saccharine accent of the American Midwest. His Arab speech was deep and gravelly, yet still uniquely colorful. He could not utter a sentence so much as perform it, effortlessly gesturing and gesticulating, hopping and hawing with each sentiment he expressed. Simple questions were whispered, furtive inquiries, well-wishes were joyous spasms. Ordinary greetings, from this Middle-Eastern Santa Claus, looked to lifeless American onlookers like two long-lost brothers reuniting after a lifetime apart — except the one portly, bespectacled, mustachioed brother was obviously far happier than the other one, who invariably seemed confused or surprised. Professor Al-Santa ibn Claus’ verve was nonetheless infectious, and I would be shocked to learn he was anything but beloved by his students. Born and raised on the ancient Nile, this smiling pedagogue was a living reminder of a bygone era when the sad stereotype of the bitter Marxist academic still didn’t exist.

The young lady conversing with him — if memory serves correctly — was an undergraduate student at the university. She was an international student, a Turkish girl from Istanbul, Turkey’s largest and liveliest metropolis, geographically (and culturally) bridging two continents. Her social lineage, much like that of most Turkish immigrants to the United States (and deeply unlike that of the infamous Turkish immigrants to Germany — but I digress!), was borne from the European half of Istanbul. Turkey, though now making sensational headlines as a rising power sliding into Islamic fundamentalism, still has a significant, wealthy, secular upper-class; liberal cosmopolitans who wish Turkey could join the European Union, and who explain to non-Turks the repugnant provincialism of the reigning President Recep T. Erdoğan the same way pious American liberals used to explain the repugnant provincialism of the reigning President George W. Bush. These Turkish Europhiles and Occidentalists, concentrated in Istanbul, spawned this idealistic young woman who joyfully gushed about her future plans to work in non-profits aiding Palestinian refugees and Kurdish orphans. Like all true liberal, upper-class E.U.-peans — or, in her case, aspiring ones — her tender bleeding heart couldn’t countenance the horrors the Zionist apartheid state imposed on her downtrodden brothers and sisters in Palestine. Her English — likely carefully nurtured by her urbane parents, who likely put her in one of Istanbul’s many French, British or American international schools — was impeccable, with only the slightest veneer of Anatolian staccato modulating the same American accent the animated Egyptian could only shovel out in bursts of Cairene vim. This scioness of Turkey’s aspiring class of secular Eurocrats was the kind of girl who would soon spend nights hunched over her laptop screen in champagne-revolutionary fervor, impulsively tweeting #OccupyGeziPark.

(No such literary introduction will be given of yours truly, I am afraid. In this anecdote, I am but the anonymous catalyst for a revealing conversation.)

Rather poorly read on the contemporary Middle East, but curious to no small degree, I asked the professor about the level of social conservatism in Egypt. Do Muslims pray often? Is there a large black market for alcohol? Is there religious tension because of the Copts? In my pre-reactionary, progressive-by-default naiveté, I even asked “Are women in Egypt oppressed?” The professor answered my questions eagerly, with all the expected gesticulations and mini-dramatic-performances. The Turkish girl and I listened, rapt, as one is when witnessing such a masterful union of entertaining affectation and unornamented truth. Finally, he informed us of the state of women’s liberation in Egypt:

(I strive to convey his affable, slightly-broken English.)

“In Egypt, there is no girls living alone; single girls alone, this — it is not allowed socially! It is unapproved in Egyptian society. Egyptian girls must always live with the family if they are not married. The married girls live with the husbands, yes, but the single girls always live with the families.”

The female Istanbulite’s eyebrows leaped up in anticipation of news of an incoming women’s rights violation. “Trigger warnings” weren’t a thing back then, so far as I can remember, but even if they were, this bombastic professor would not have come with one. Asks the Turkess: “Women can’t live alone? Why? What if they’re students?”

The professor continued gracefully with his energetic explanation: “Aha, yes, sometimes if the girls are students they live in the dormitory. But this is rare, very rare. Not common, I think. Girls who are studying at the university also live with the family mostly. In Egypt it is not acceptable in society for the girl to live alone. If girls will live alone in an apartment, this will be shocking, it will be disgraceful. Even sometimes the janitor in the building, or the electrician, or the neighbor, he will knock on the door or he will find the girl, and he will say ‘Hey, you! What are you doing? Where is your husband? Where is your father? Why are you living alone here? Are you having men come in your apartment? Do you meet men there? Do they pay you to come there? What are you doing there alone?'”

The Turkish girl’s eyebrows at this point were practically detached from her head, so wide were her eyes with shock: “That’s… that’s horrible! Women have a right to live by themselves if they want to! Women have a right…” More high-pitched, futile cosmopolitan protests followed, but the conversation had essentially ended there, with an unperturbed professor shrugging his shoulders and rushing off to a meeting (with a dramatized wave, a hint of a bow and a gracious “Ma’a As-Salaama!” [“Good-bye!” in Arabic] — as always) and an amused me, softly smiling outwardly, and inwardly chuckling the kind of mischievous chuckle one can only enjoy after witnessing a truly monumental yet unintentional trolling. The disquieted young lady turned to me slack-jawed for reassurances for her offended liberal sensibilities, but I too had places to be, and quickly emulated the professor’s neutral exit. “Well, I guess that’s just how it is over there! See ya later!”

- – -

I love interacting with people from cultures that an effeminate Harvard sociologist would consider “hopelessly backwards.” These cultures, though often deeply alien in many ways to our own Western/European tradition and civilization, nevertheless share large similarities with the old Western world one reads about in history books. Though I doubt this fine site’s astute readers will need the point of the anecdote explicitly repeated, I will repeat it for the sake of the stray left-wingers who sometimes stumble into our territory: in Egypt, a girl living alone is immediately and automatically assumed to be a prostitute. And, hilariously, by the standards of Islamic Egyptian society, single girls living alone in the West are invariably precisely that: whores. And, distressingly, single girls living alone in the West are invariably whores by the standards of the Western society of 1950, of 1850, of 1750, 1650… and every century of Western society all the way down to 50 BC, and earlier. Women have four lifetime sexual partners on average, says The Telegraph. I will venture a guess that this figure is far below the actual amount — nobody wants to admit to being a slut or a whore, after all, even anonymously to a researcher. Despite abysmal modern sexual mores, even four is about three more than millennia of human civilization would have considered appropriate for a properly-reared young maiden. I can hear the protests already: “Not all women are like that! Some women who live alone aren’t whores!” Averages, baby, averages — I’m not here to talk about outliers, who always exist. The strong, independent, feminist woman high off women’s liberation sleeps around like a man, and this makes her a whore by any standard of civilization.

Whore of Babylon: Babylon the Great, the Mother of Prostitutes and Abominations of the Earth. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you. Just kidding; she’s been around since 1969, corrupting your daughters and fighting manspreading, mansplaining, manterrupting… no, no joke, Google any of one the three.

Average age at marriage for Western women only ever increases, and the divorce rate likewise only slowly climbs upwards and upwards. More fornication, more adultery, more divorce, more bastard children, more fatherless children, more broken families, more pornography — not to mention more public (and even state-backed) sexual perversion of all kinds of vile multicolored stripes. The only related metric that is decreasing is total fertility rate. To maintain a stable population, a nation’s fertility rate would have to hover around 2.1 children per women — enough children to replace the parents, and an extra 0.1 children to make up for all the people who die prematurely from accidents, war, disease, excessive masturbation, and what-have-you. A nation with a fertility rate below the magic number of 2.1 will steadily shrink in population until it disappears from the Earth. How is the West doing with fertility rates then? United States: 1.97. United Kingdom: 1.88. France: 1.98. Russia: 1.53. Spain: 1.50. Italy: 1.48. Germany: 1.42. Tiny Iceland is managing 2.08, but Portugal a dismal 1.32. Poor Bosnia is at 1.28, one of the lowest in the world. Austria, Croatia, Romania, Hungary, Serbia, Poland, Ukraine, Cyprus and Slovakia are all below 1.50. These countries are quite literally slowly disappearing from the map. For a sobering comparison, the smoldering crater known as Afghanistan is at 5.00, war-torn Iraq is at 4.06, and the dysfunctional Congo is at 5.98. Even North Korea is managing a 2.00 fertility rate — the same country where amassing a nuclear arsenal and luxurious liquor cabinet for the Supreme Leader is more important than preventing mass starvation and widespread famine. A North Korean family could probably survive for a year on one of their Supreme Leader’s many chins, and they’re still reproducing more than Americans ostensibly living in the vast land of plentiful bounty and limitless opportunity.

Seriously, just look at this guy.

This 21st century Bacchanalia is flashy and fun, bursting with a vibrant hedonism of clubs, bars, festivals, conventions, easy sex, easy drugs, easy booze, easy desserts, easy work, constant novelty and stimulation from the Internet, the television and from Hollywood, but it will end us all. If everyone is avoiding family life and child-rearing so that they can spend more time doing what our grandparents (and great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents, and great-great-great-grandp…) would have called “mortally sinning,” we’ll all be gone without a legacy before the end of the century. When one speaks of “mortal sin,” one must remember that the very English word “mortal” is derived from the ancient Latin word for death, mors. Our forefathers are looking down on us as we commit the most pathetic and protracted suicide in history. Rather grim, innit?

If you are a standard, milquetoast, liberal-by-default Westerner, this might all sound like racist, sexist and homophobic vomit. I would remind you then that, in our culture, we have multiple mainstream, high-tech systems for helping complete strangers prostitute each other. Take Seeking Arrangement, a popular service that helps young females, typically college students (the girls who, in any other era, would have been nobly raising society’s next generation), whore themselves out to unscrupulous and wealthy men for expensive gifts and money. Like Monty Python’s rude French sentry, I vomit in the general direction of this service. Prostitution is still largely illegal in the West, de jure. It seems we make some exceptions, however, when the pimps and prostitutes can satisfactorily rationalize their whoring to us — just enough to soothe our dwindling consciences and atrophied probity.

Alternatively, consider the extremely popular mobile phone application Tinder, “rumored to have upwards of 10 million daily users” making 15 million “matches” a day. What purpose does Tinder serve? Perhaps the “Tinderfessions” Twitter feed, with a mind-boggling 188,000 followers, can shed some light. Looks like Tinder is useful for supporting adultery (“Met my boyfriend on Tinder. Pro: so hot, great in bed. Con: has a wife…and 3 kids. – Emma”), taking the hassle out of fornication (“Swiped right on a girl that was ahead of me in line at Publix. Heard her phone go off when we matched. We banged 2 hours later – Chase”), helping modern-day troubadours build harems (“Been hooking up with a match for a month now. On my way to front stage seats cuz the lead singer of this band is in love with my pussy – Kas”), and most nobly of all, helping all-American sweethearts become home-wrecking, blackmailing whores: “Blackmailing a match I fucked who tried to hide the fact he was married. Can’t wait for my new Macbook Air to arrive. #ThanksTinder – Kim.” Thank you, Tinder, thank you indeed! “Mother of 3 slept over and fucked all night while their dad babysat them at home. She was Constantly cumming, and came in her pussy twice -F” Good Lord. When did the West run so low on self-restraint, virtue, shame, guilt, conscience, charity and kindness that 56 people felt a need to “favorite” the kind of morally reprehensible behavior that destroys the lives of three children? 15 million matches a day: when you hear someone say Cthulhu is digesting our civilization, this is what they mean.

Paraphrasing the admirable James A. Donald, the West of the 18th century considered women so lacking in continence that they would crawl through nine miles of broken glass to fornicate with their demon lover if not restrained by their husbands, fathers, brothers and pastors. In Egypt, a sexist, homophobic, hopelessly backwards Islamic society, girls living alone, beyond the reach of their family, are assumed to be whores. The Egyptians, I think, are not as backwards as we chauvinistically presume, since it seems their intuition about the behavior of unrestrained females has been more than comprehensively vindicated by the state of Western society today, where all girls can live alone (and do much more besides) — and where all girls are whores. Feminism failed. Modernity failed. We got women’s liberation and ubiquitous technology of unimaginable power and complexity, and the result was not a new Golden Age for civilization, but a new Golden Age for depravity.

“Modern,” “enlightened,” “liberal,” protestations aside, the situation in the West of 2015 is clear. Females can live alone, vote, run for office, commit infanticide, get away with murder, work men’s jobs, receive preferential treatment in universities and corporations, deny fathers their children, ruin innocent men with false accusations of rape & assault, and almost anything else they want to do — with the full support of the educational system, the media and the exponentially-expanding police-surveillance state. The dream of women’s liberation has been achieved, and then some. And then some. And then some more. And even some more after that! Females can live alone, unlike in Egypt. Females can live alone, and they do exactly what our 18th century forefathers, and 21st century Egyptian fellows a continent away intuited that they would do — they whore themselves. “Women’s liberation.” Women’s liberation is women’s prostitution. We should have known better.

If I miraculously became the Supreme God-Dictator of the West tonight, and upon finishing my gourmet breakfast of bacon, eggs and the finest Caspian caviar the next morning, I issued an edict that no woman may live alone, what would happen to the West’s marriage and divorce rates? The fertility rate? The bastardy rate? The amount of fornication, adultery, pornography and sexual perversion? The number of broken families? The number of kids shuffling between Mommy’s house and Daddy’s house on alternating weekends? (Or, more likely, just watching Mommy shuffle boyfriends while Daddy contemplates the taste of gun metal with a restraining order trembling in his hand.) What would happen to the rates of suicide, teen pregnancy, alcoholism, mass shootings, herbivore men, sexually transmitted diseases, eating disorders, self-radicalization, depression, gambling, drug abuse, obesity, cat-lady spinsters, gang violence, self-harm, ethno-religious tension (and violence), juvenile delinquency, social alienation and hollow shambling wrecks of human beings one missed medication away from walking off the edge of a thirty-story building?

A metaphor for Western society: not really working out as planned.

Quite simply, if we put every woman back in the home, back next to the hearth, and gave her one son and one daughter to educate, civilize, inform, teach, nourish, protect, cultivate, cuddle, cherish and love, what would happen to our society? What if we gave her a fit, cultured, intelligent and loving husband who could teach his son baseball and read Cinderella to his daughter? A husband who didn’t spend his boyhood drugged out on ADD medications, his teenage years drugged out on cannabis, and his young adulthood drunk out of his mind? A husband who was taught to appreciate Beethoven, recognize Van Gogh’s Starry Night, recite a little poetry in French, and recognize a Biblical quote in Ancient Greek? A husband who was taught to shoot a gun, punch a drunkard, row a canoe, and hike up a mountain without complaining? Who kept a library where the television might’ve been, and who knew who his father was, his grandfather, and their fathers and grandfathers before them? Who worshiped the same God as his most distant ancestors, and lived on the very same land they conquered long ago? Who maintained and honored the inheritance bequeathed to him by his forefathers, both material and spiritual, and left it in better condition than he received it, and passed it on to his own sons and daughters? Might we see a resurgence of the stable, loving family? Might we actually see — trigger warning – a better society?

Dramatized wave. Hint of a bow. Knowing wink. “Ma’a As-Salaama!“

The post Women’s Liberation is Women’s Prostitution appeared first on Social Matter.

After 300 youth waited in line to be led to Christ in a service in May 1974, Hybels and other leaders began dreaming of forming a new church. They surveyed the community to find out why people weren’t coming to church. Common answers included: “church is boring”, “they’re always asking for money”, or “I don’t like being preached down to.” These answers shaped the group’s approach to the new church.

If you want to sell more product, then giving your customers what they want is bound to be a successful strategy. And if you’re selling Jesus, why let accidental aspects of Christianity get in the way of his essence? Our small, introverted, and pietistic Bible Fellowship church was about to undergo a massive transformation in the direction of seeker sensitivity. Twenty-four years later, the results of this transformation live on in one of the most hip and relevant churches Lynchburg, Virginia has to offer. And in the evangelical Mecca of Lynchburg, home of Liberty University, becoming that is no small achievement.

A Brief History

The search for relevance did not begin in 1974 with Bill Hybels and his fellow “youth group” leaders. Evangelical Christianity has never not been a search for relevance—a way of taking the Gospel message of salvation by faith in Jesus Christ, uncluttered by cultural baggage, directly to the people—often anti-intellectual, embarrassing, and decidedly unprogressive cultural baggage. There is a reason that the 95-year-old Billy Graham, confidant of many Presidents, remains one of most admired, well-respected figures down to this day, whereas the name “Bob Jones” is an epithet: He never let political controversy get in the way of the message of Jesus. Graham was an anti-communist when it was popular to be one, and he was a social justice warrior when it was popular to be one.

Another way to put that would be: Billy Graham never let the message of Jesus get in the way of political controversy. And if getting folks to “accept Jesus into their heart as personal Lord and Savior” really is tantamount to the Great Commission—Jesus final command to his disciples to go and teach all nations—then there’s not a thing in the world wrong with it: Jesus… with no strings, no Church, no culture, no normative practice attached.

Religion has been historically a cultural anchor. Yet the Evangelical form of Christianity denies this. Not really so much denies it, as it deems cultural anchorage as unimportant relative to the weight of carrying out the Great Commission. In simplifying the Gospel Message down to a core of propositions to believe, in making the process of conversion as simple as responding to an altar call and praying the Sinner’s Prayer “Just give me Jesus” is a profoundly invigorating principle for church growth. It is immediately and almost infinitely adaptable. If “Christian Rap” is going to fill the pews, so you can give them Jesus, why should some old fuddy-duddies stand in the way? If pews are too old-school, why not “do church” in a comfy movie theater instead?

The formula works. America is among the most “church-going” first world nations, and it leads the first world in moral and cultural bankruptcy.

About that cultural anchor…

Evangelicals and Mindedness

As Mark Knoll noted almost 20 years ago, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” Knoll was wondering why Evangelicals contribute so little to intellectual scholarship and high culture and how his Evangelical brethren might turn that trend around.

I think the problem goes deeper than Mark Knoll wished to probe: There really isn’t much of a single, univocal Evangelical Mind. It isn’t that Evangelicals are stupid. It is that their system of religious thought doesn’t lead to many broader cultural implications. What clear implications does “leading people to accept Jesus into their heart and pray the sinners prayer” have upon the role of women in society? Upon traditional family structure? Upon free trade? College education? Suburban sprawl? Media Influence? Foreign Aid? Immigration? Support for Israel? Revolution in the Ukraine? The Role of Religion in Public Life?

“Just give me Jesus” is quite indifferent to all of those… “Just give me Jesus” doesn’t even very much care about what type of church you go to… so long as you go… to one that feels right… to you.

So the endless search for religious relevance in America has led to a prevailing religious expression described in 2005 by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism—a form of Christianity so devoid of normative content as to be indistinguishable from baptized narcissism.

Oprah Winfrey didn’t become a billionaire by building railroads or cornering the market on crude oil. And Bill Hybels and the host of mega-church pastors like him didn’t build their massive ministries by anchoring the Christian faith in traditional culture.

America is “deeply religious,” yet on-demand abortion and gay “marriage” are the (presumptively settled) Law of the Land. America fills her pews like no other nation on earth, yet the Overton Window glides ever leftward. And lest anyone think I’m picking only on Evangelicals, please understand that this tendency to strip the gospel message down to make it palatable for the broader culture has thoroughly infected the entire social order. Even non-religions like my local public radio station are getting in on the act. Making a message culturally relevant—whether that message be about Jesus or democracy or condom-use or toleration of sexual minorities—has become indistinguishable from plain old American cultural hegemony.

In spite of Evangelicalism’s low-brow status, we’re all Evangelicals now.

So how about that cultural anchor?

Let’s unwind this. That seeker-sensitive church growth ideas work is undeniable… for some values of “work”. But is that the work that Jesus intended the Church “Christian Community” to do when he gave the great commission? Or does “teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you” mean more than kneeling to pray the Sinners’ Prayer under the maudlin strains of Just As I Am? What is it exactly that we are to “teach all nations”: Be nice and feel good about ourselves?

How Things are Supposed to Work

The 800 pound (363 kg) gorilla in the room is that Christianity is supposed to affect the culture. Christianity admixes with genetics and environment and other memetic residues to produce certain kinds of culture. Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism produce different kinds. Everyone expects this. And what kind of culture is American Christianity producing today? One in which “Gay Marriage” can go from a funny joke to a self-evident sacred right in less than a generation. An entire generation of “Youth Pastors” is quite busy making Jesus look incredibly cool and could not be reached for comment.

Forgive me, but I don’t think that’s how Christianity is supposed to work for meaningful definitions of “work”. Well, why the hell not? The first reason is theological: Go ye therefore and teach all nations presumes a position of cultural superiority. Christianity is not just a propositional gloss that can be painted over an extant, formerly pagan culture, leaving it unchanged (except that now they’ll get to go to Heaven when they die). Certainly Christianity can add local customs to its own nature (cf. pagan winter solstice and spring equinox customs), but it cannot water down its universal call to repentance and holiness and kinship within the Church.

When it does, it ceases to be authentic Christianity. The relevance-minded Christians who imagine Jesus’ Great Commission as being about just getting people to pray certain prayers therefore sell the real gospel short. Conversion is a lifelong result of a lifelong commitment to a lifelong process. The signs of true spiritual conversion may be seen far more clearly in the reduction of various social pathologies than in the number of hands raised “with every head bowed and every eye closed”. Faith without works is dead.

The second reason I believe that Christianity drives culture is historical. Christianity came and changed the course of empires. Kings and princes and emperors once depended upon the Christian Church for their legitimacy. In return for the favor, secular rulers enforced Christian norms in their domains. For example, when the faith spread to England, cousin marriage soon died out and that nation experienced dramatic growth in well-being and collective power. Christianity played a crucial role in establishing science, the university system, modern economic and legal practices—virtually everything we associate with Christendom.

The End
Whenever Christians try to make their religion hip and relevant to the wider culture, it reveals instantly a wider culture that wears the pants in the relationship. Christianity adopts the role of the supplicating special pleader. It is not a masculine Christianity. It reduces religious practice to a source of entertainment or therapy–at most a curiosity to place alongside all the accouterments of a life otherwise untouched by its life-giving, culture-bestowing essence. You might get attendance figures or increased donations, but you’ll never get a transformed culture. You’ve already given that up as unnecessary cultural baggage.

So the question really never was how to make religion relevant to culture, but how to make culture relevant to religion. If people cannot make themselves relevant to religion, then the problem lies with them… and, by the way, they know it. Whosoever is the coolest doesn’t need to qualify himself to others. If you are tempted to attend a church growth conference that conflicts with your first wedding anniversary, just say “No”. Please stay home and cherish the company of your wife instead.

The post The Search for Religious Relevance (or How I Missed my First Anniversary) appeared first on Social Matter.