Christ As Culture: Conservatism in the American Church

When Christianity began to spread throughout the Roman Empire, the repeated complaint of the Romans was that the new faith subverted the worship of the gods that held the Roman state together. Though many less educated came to believe that the empire fell due to the displeasure of these gods at the Christian faith which disdained their worship, even those who believed otherwise defended the old religion on account of its usefulness.

As Christianity became dominant in Europe however, it came to occupy much the same place as had Roman paganism. The monasteries that were formed to break away from the wider culture came to be the foremost preservers of culture.¹ The empire united by an ecumenical paganism became a Christendom united by a catholic faith. Though the Reformation eventually jarred the Church’s enculturated sclerosis by restoring to it the centrality of Biblical orthodoxy, even Protestantism later became encultured in the places it became dominant. By the seventeenth century, there were political philosophers defending Christianity not on the merits of its truth, but on its usefulness as a civil religion.²

Thus we find the politically conservative wing of American evangelicalism. It is not a problem inherited from its European ancestors, but a problem inherent in religion gone mainstream: the type of people attracted to the mainstream religion are systematically different from those attracted to a fringe religion.³ Such people are conservatives by temperament. They seek stability and absolutes. Mainstream religion fills this need well. But to be able to absolutize the familiar aspects of one’s culture, as this temperament naturally desires – this requires a religion subjected to a culture.

The majority of people being conservative by temperament, it is inevitable that the orthodoxy of a religion gone mainstream will be subjected to the current culture. This was why the Greek and Roman philosophers felt the need to distinguish their natural theology, an earnest attempt at seeking truth, from the predominant civil theology, the exploits of whose gods and the extravagance of whose ceremonies the more learned found repugnant, but were unable to escape.⁴ Thus orthodox religion opposes itself to encultured religion, but cannot resist becoming encultured itself once the conservatives of a society stop resisting its influence.

Family Friendly Culture

One of the results of the enculturization of Christianity in America has been the promotion of “family friendly” culture. Alarmed at cultural changes, conservatives (especially in the Church) have fought back with a demand for family friendly media. As far as pop culture goes, “Christian” has become practically synonymous with “family friendly”.

From the standpoint of orthodoxy, this correlation makes almost no sense at all. The Bible does not at all conform to Christian standards of “family friendly”. Judges is sordid and gory. Job wrestles with the apparent injustice of God. Genesis has more than a few accounts of incest, even after Adam & Eve’s kids. A conception of Christianity molded into a family friendly model leaves the individual unprepared to deal not only with the reality of God as revealed in the scriptures, but with life in general as an ambassador of Christ.

The correlation then must be understood as arising from the conservative temperament of an encultured religion. It has nothing to do with the particulars of Christianity except so far as this Christianity has made itself attractive to the conservative temperament.

The takeover of the Church by cultural conservatives has left it with a dramatically faithless faith, exhibited as much in politics as in parenting. Rather than equipping the new generation to resist bad influences, rather than teaching them why such influences are bad, the family friendly mindset seeks to shelter them from all possible exposure lest the temptation prove overwhelming. The spirit of God has little to do in such an environment.

And so a niche market is created to meet this demand: duplicate and sanitize. More or less the same but without the sex (especially homo sex), drugs, and violence. Those who fill this demand – in any medium – don’t need much wiggle room: the product needs to seem similar enough to mainstream fads to be cool; just with a “positive message”.

Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why The Passion of the Christ was so controversial in Christian circles: it shined a violent and bloody yet sadly brief spotlight on the fact that Christian does not necessarily coincide with “family friendly”.

It’s easy to see then how the conservative mentality has stilted Christian creativity. This is why Christian pop and rock most often comes off as a mediocre clone of mainstream fads. This is why Christian fiction never breaks out of its niche market. This is why Christian film is seen from the outside as laughable. This is why Christian fashion (especially on t-shirts) is more often than not painfully kitschy. Conservative “family friendly” Christian culture offers nothing new because having been defeated in its “preserve the old” mandate, it resorts to “sanitize the new” as a second best. As James Horton wrote several years ago in Christianity Today,

In our day, this pattern [of being in the world, but not of it] is often reversed, creating a pseudo-Christian subculture that fails to take either calling seriously. Instead of being in the world but not of it, we easily become of the world but not in it.

When Christianity becomes an aspect of culture – when it becomes of the world but not in it – it does not absolutize the culture, as was its goal; it loses its own absoluteness. All the defense of the idea of “absolute truth” will fly by deaf ears if Christianity is simply cultural, because culture is never absolute. Certainly Christianity should inform the culture of the local church: the prevailing culture should be sanctified within its walls, but it must itself never become predominantly a cultural force. The culture wars are, ultimately, sealing the Church’s irrelevance.

This encultured faith, reduced in its external witness to a market demand for family friendly media, has turned American Christianity into a lifestyle without religion; action without belief; and like the Pharisees, an external semblance without internal reality. Dobson-style sheltering, whether by government or parental policy, is wasteful of strength and spiritually counterproductive if the goal of parenting is to keep the child in the faith. Christianity is a doctrine: it is not a culture, as if there were one canon expression of faith.

Patriotic Politics

Another typical aspect of the conservative temperament is to love the familiar. And what could be more familiar than the idea of one’s country? Thus in America and wherever Christianity dominates, it is not uncommon to find that nation’s flag flown prominently in the churches. In certain conservative circles especially in America, faith and patriotism have become virtually synonymous, to the point that hymnals often contain a patriotic section. The Church has, with minimal prompting from the state, given over its heart in devotion thereto.

Again from the standpoint of orthodoxy, such a correlation is entirely unnecessary. But it has significant repercussions in both the political and religious arenas. Those who are apprehensive about Obama because of his Muslim upbringing are the same who fault him for allegedly not saluting the flag. These are the same who see the War on Terror as a religious war against Islam (and that as a good thing), and the same who claim America as a Christian nation and thus perpetuate the association of Christianity with American exports in the eyes of the Muslims who also see it as a religious war. These are the same that feel a need to protect American culture from Mexican immigrants, or multiculturalism, or secular humanism.

It should be obvious that the parochial tendency of the conservative temperament seriously undermines the universality and transnationality of the Church. Paul “becomes all things to all people” (1 Cor. 9:22), resists the identification of Christianity with the export of Jewish culture (Galatians), and gives guidelines on how to coexist with the surrounding culture (1 Cor. 8:4-8). All these things the comfortable conservative finds irrelevant to his own situation. His cultural ties have become stronger than the ties of his faith – he is less able to fellowship with a Mexican or an Arab Christian than with an American atheist. This parochialism is easily exploited to bring about racial or cultural discrimination.

It is not surprising when the culture of a nation moves past the fixed cultural commitments of the current crop of conservatives over the course of decades. They will be blind to the sins of the culture in which they grew up, but will not hesitate to fight stridently against new aberrations.

But patriotism often fails to distinguish between a nation and its government. As dangerous to orthodoxy as identification with culture is, identification with a government is even more so. Jesus said “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other”, but many have placed their love for country on par with, or even above, their love for God by equating the two, enabled by the fiction that America is a “Christian nation”. “God and country”, as the saying goes. The ultimate aim of any state is self-preservation, while the aim of the Church is glorification of God. Much of the time these are not in conflict as the Christian is called to submit to the state so far as this does not run counter to the law of God, but this is not always the case. Besides the obvious instance where a government outlaws Christian practice (in which case it is unlikely that Christians would feel strongly patriotic), there are a number of more subtle conflicts. In wartime when a government floods the airwaves with nationalistic propaganda, how will you feel towards the people of the enemy state? Will you hate them as the state insists, or will you love them as God commands? When the government enters an economic slump and sends you a refund check to encourage you to spend more, will you run out and spend it as Congress desires, or be content in this and every situation (Phil. 4:10)?

Culture is mutable. Governments are mutable. Orthodoxy purports to be immutable. The mutable cannot be made immutable by being bound to the immutable; rather the immutable must be completely disregarded when it is bound to the mutable. It is dangerous self-deception on top of arrogant myopia to give culture or government the sanction of orthodoxy, for thereby the benefits of both are destroyed. Let the Church therefore stand strong in orthodoxy, while yet maintaining humility in culture, and caution with government.

1. Niebuhr, Richard. Christ and Culture, p. 67. “Monasticism eventually became one of the great conservers and transmitters of cultural tradition; it trained many great ecclesiastical and political leaders of society; it strengthened the institutions from which its founders had withdrawn.”
2. For example Hobbes, Thomas in Leviathan, where he argues that the sovereign must be able to dictate belief to his subjects for the sake of social peace. Individuals could hold to their own beliefs, but only in private.
3. Sowell, Thomas. Knowledge and Decisions, p. 153. “People who chose to be Christians under the persecution of the Roman Empire were not the same as people who chose to be Christians after Christianity had become the state religion.” Hence also the current mystique of atheism, which will no doubt fade once it too becomes mainstream.
4. Hence Varro’s distinction between natural and civil theology, the latter being a gross caricature of the former but nevertheless necessary for the unity of the nation. See Augustine, City of God book 6, especially 6.5 and 6.10.