Stowage of the British slave ship Brookes under the regulated slave trade act of 1788, December 1788. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections. Wikimedia Commons
Christianity Is Not Countercultural
SUMMARY
The conventional wisdom among some Christian subcultures that Christianity is countercultural exhibits an ignorance regarding terms. More, it fails to say anything clarifying or constructive. Withdrawal from culture, further, is not simply a bad strategy; it is a logical fallacy. Similarly, charges of sectarianism often confuse more than they clarify and require careful analysis. Instead of a stance that is countercultural, a practice of percipient cultural discernment proves more constructive and clarifying.
EXPOSITION
To summarize to this point: Christianity claims that history has a direction, a meaning, an endgame in which all things will be set to rights. More, Christianity claims that the end of history has already begun, has been inaugurated in the birth, ministry, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of the Christ. As the blind will receive their sight, the nations will learn war no more, and the dead will be raised, so down payments of the resurrecting power of God have broken into the midst of human history even now. Those who call on the name of Christ are to be the ongoing incarnation, the body of Christ, embodying this alternative politic in the world. They are to live a proleptic politic.
To envision the nation-state—any nation-state—as the primary bearer of the salvific work of God in the world is to bastardize the Christian hope. But American Christians—because they have too often fallen prey to the spiritualizing or marginalizing of Christian faith—have too often placed such hope in America. Thereby, the church has served as a sort of patronizing chaplain, a sort of court prophet dispensing spirituality while America goes on its way doing what it does without regard to the claims of the authority of Christ. Or the church has prostituted itself, dispensing its favors in exchange for a bit of influence in intimate chambers of power.
For Christians to extricate themselves from this theological captivity—often of Christians’ own making—it must be stated clearly: the United States is not the hope of the world. The United States is not a Christian nation and never has been. The United States cannot be either of these because it is not within the province of a nation to be either the hope of the world or Christian. It would be like asserting that “this water is dry” or “the sunshine is dark.”
Consequently, to place any ultimate hope in the nation-state is foolish. The historical records clearly demonstrate that all empires have fallen. On historical grounds, and certainly on biblical grounds, we may safely presume that all empires will. Because such a bastardized hope in any empire or nation-state is foolish, the deep partisan hostilities that pervade contemporary Christianity are a further perversion of Christian faith. The ideologically committed Christian Republican who can see no good in the Democrat or Green Party has denied the faith. The ideologically committed Christian Democrat who can see no good in the Republican or Tea Party has denied the faith.
To move beyond such an ideologically narrow vision requires forsaking simplistic or selective readings of the Bible. We must stop redacting Scripture. So-called Christian values corrupt Christianity. Instead, a rightfully informed Christian politic must be adept with a thick accounting of the Christian tradition. Such a reading of the biblical text and the great tradition of the church will provide a host of riches with which to address contemporary concerns.
This being committed most seriously to the Christian tradition does not mean that the principalities and powers are irrelevant, insignificant, or to be ignored. The New Testament assumes a certain fallenness of the powers that be. Yet it also assumes a created goodness to such powers, located in their purpose to serve humankind. Consequently, Christianity rightfully has a great deal of interest in the relative political goods that the powers may engender or inhibit.
But in relating to the powers that be, Christianity must first understand itself well. Christianity must insist that it is not a religion, a sort of privatized set of convictions regarding the afterlife. Instead, Christianity is an alternative politic. It is precisely the content of this alternative politic that makes it impossible for any nation-state to be Christian. And it is precisely the content of this alternative politic that makes it impossible for Christianity to run the world. Liberal political puissance will not restore the witness of Christianity in America but only further deepen its failure. Instead, the alternative politic—of witnessing, sharing, forgiving, reconciling, extending hospitality—entails exhibiting to the world what the world was intended to be.
This summarizes the argument to this point.
Such a depiction of Christian faith has been wrongly summarized as a stance of withdrawal. Others have dubbed such a stance as sectarian. These two false assessments must be addressed and then an alternate construal proposed.
Withdrawal from Culture Is Simply Not an Option
Withdrawal is a literal impossibility. Anyone who suggests that we should withdraw from culture exhibits a fundamental ignorance about terms. Culture is not something from which one can simply withdraw. Culture comprises language, music, art, and numerous other forms of social communication, engagement, and character development. One cannot withdraw from such and still be human in any meaningful sense.
To make such a claim makes as much sense as telling a fish to withdraw from water or humans to withdraw from air. Culture is the air we breathe, in which human communities subsist, exist, coexist. We simply cannot withdraw from culture, because culture is what makes us human, at least humans who are in any sense rightly understood as social beings.1
Similarly, Christians must banish the ignorant but generally well-intentioned talk of being countercultural. Such claims confuse more than they clarify. In being countercultural, are we to be opposed to speaking English? To Americana music? To banjos or electric guitars or iPads? To William Faulkner or Max Lucado or Johnny Cash? This pious call to be countercultural, unless carefully qualified, may foster condescension or an unnecessary disdainful hostility. Or in some cases this call to be countercultural correlates with a pious anti-intellectualism.
All of these tendencies stand at odds with our desired political witness.
On the Charge of Sectarianism
The word sectarian is commonly employed to mean excessively devoted to a partisan view or narrow set of commitments. Often the term connotes an unwillingness to give credence to truth claims or authorities beyond those of the sect itself. In popular usage sectarian may further connote the tendency of a group to discount or demean or at worst seek to destroy the dignity or humanity of those outside the sect.
Three subpoints are in order:
1. If by the charge of sectarianism one simply means that a Christian is first and foremost devoted to the authority of Christ, then let us hope such an accusation will stand. There is a certain legitimate sectarianism of Christianity that we would do well to pursue, that is, to have a clear sense of the manner in which the politic of Christianity provides a constructive alternative to, and stands at odds with, some significant elements of American capitalism or Russian socialism or North Korean militarism or Hollywood sentimentalism or Fifth Avenue commodificationism.
(It is possible that many who use the term countercultural are wanting in fact to say something like this, in which case they would be quite correct. But to use the term countercultural misconstrues the situation and creates unnecessary hostility, judgment, or antipathy.)
Again, if the charge of sectarianism is simply that we Christians are upholding the teachings and authority of Christ above all other authorities, then we need not fear. But this is not typically the problem with Christianity in America.
2. The charge of sectarianism may mean something much less admirable. It may entail the sort of critique leveled at either ISIS radicals or Christian theocrats calling for a return to a supposed Christian America. This is a sort of sectarianism unworthy, for reasons we have already seen, of those who would be Christians.
The charge of sectarianism, similarly, could entail a sort of standoffishness, a sort of judgmental piety that refuses to engage its neighbors, refuses to seek the good of the city, or refuses to partner with those who do not share a claim to the lordship of Christ; or worse, refuses to partner with those who do not share all the jots and tittles of particular denominational commitments. The biblical vision, in contrast, offers a lavish vision of human possibility grounded in its generous vision, promiscuous even, of the love of God. Moreover, the biblical insistence that the principalities and powers have been overcome in the truth telling and suffering love of Christ and that the Spirit and resurrecting power of God have been unleashed in new ways in human history—these realities open up space for unimaginable possibilities to arise in the midst of our communities.
All these basic biblical commitments, and many more, should make it clear that Christianity, rightly understood, overwhelms this sort of sectarianism. If “captivity has been taken captive,” then our basic posture, in which we are different only for the sake of the glory of God and for sake of the good of the nations, can only be one fundamentally at odds with sectarianism itself. In other words, our so-called sectarianism requires us to celebrate whatever common graces and common pursuits and common goodwill we may find and wherever we may find them. Our divergent morality is one that requires us not to withdraw but always be in a missional mode, engaging, celebrating, challenging, seeking the good of the city. The Old Testament vision of Israel and the New Testament vision of the church both depict distinctive communities always in service to the nations and never in opposition to them for the sake of opposition. Israel and the church, in the biblical tradition, are different not for the sake of being different, not for the sake of condemnation, but for the sake of service and witness to the true goods of human history.
3. While we are right to critique these sorts of sectarian tendencies in Christianity, let us not overlook the sectarianism of the nation-state. Let us not fail to note that when French Christians were arrayed against German Christians in World War I, they were not fighting for competing visions of sectarian Christianity but for the sectarian nation-state in which they had been born. When the United States napalms Vietnamese villagers, when Japan rapes China, when Stalin slaughters millions of his own, or when Germany gasses millions of Jews, it is clear that the great sectarianism of the late-modern world is not the religious debates between the Baptists and the Methodists or even the narrow-minded Christians all aflutter about posting the Ten Commandments in the state house. No, at least when it comes to matters of life and death, the great sectarianism of our day is that of the industrialized killing done in allegiance to and in the self-interest of the nation-state.
Percipient Cultural Discernment and Cultural Production
Our task, then, is no ill-conceived insistence that we Christians should be countercultural. (Such a posture would be akin to someone sharply opposed to profanity insisting we must be opposed to language, that we must be counterlanguage.) Instead, we are called to a percipient cultural discernment: a deep capacity to rightly understand cultural phenomena in many facets and multiple implications and, with such understanding, discern a path forward that bears witness to the good news of the kingdom of God in our midst.
Our task, in other words, is not to see ourselves as H. Richard Niebuhr would have it, as a people with an abstract faith that must somehow be set in relation to a monistic culture, choosing an overall strategy to withdraw, accommodate, or transform that culture. No, quite to the contrary. We rightfully understand ourselves as people of faith swimming in the water of whatever culture in which we find ourselves. There in the cultural water will be a great variety of particular realities floating about. Some of these we will celebrate, some we will reject, some we will want to see transformed into a redemptive human practice. But there will be no celebrating, withdrawing from, or transforming the water of culture as a whole.
From some cultural practices we maintain an insistent withdrawal. For instance, the objectification of women and children in prostitution, the salacious use of sex to arouse consumerist desires, or the systematic manner in which we are taught to hate and then systematically kill our enemies while feeling patriotically noble about it.
Some exemplary Christian achievements in this area have included the civil rights movement, arising out of the black church in America, in which an explicit commitment to Christian nonviolence was conjoined with an explicit commitment to withdraw from particular structures and systems of oppression. Because of a refusal to participate any longer in unjust business practices, the self-interest of the local economic powers that be led to reform. The abolitionist movement provides another example, in the likes of the devoted Christian William Wilberforce, who committed his life to the withdrawal of English legal protections of and participation in slavery.
In some cultural practices we wholeheartedly engage: voluntary sharing of wealth and resources and seeking best practices for the holistic flourishing of communities, practices of forgiveness and reconciliation, the practices of music and art and poetry, which facilitate the liberation of the human spirit and the joy of living. Victim-offender reconciliation programs, symphonies, and art galleries; Marilynne Robinson and Andrew Peterson and Chris Wiman and Wendell Berry and Tracy K. Smith; Habitat for Humanity and rightly configured bankruptcy laws; low-interest mortgages for the poor and community development that attends not just to the wealthy but to those potentially marginalized by gentrification or other forms of wealth accumulation.
In yet other cultural practices we will seek a redemptive transformation, engaging with care, celebrating some particulars and critiquing yet others: celebrating a free press, for example, as an institution that at its best seeks to preserve the possibility of public truth-telling as a means of inhibiting oppression, and yet critiquing the manner in which capitalist concerns may undercut and subvert the truth-telling goals of that very institution. Or celebrating a free-and-fair exchange of goods as a mechanism for facilitating the economic well-being of a community and yet critiquing the manner in which the lust for power is often at play in the disciplines of marketing and the rise of the transnational corporation.
Stowage of the British slave ship Brookes under the regulated slave trade act of 1788, December 1788. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections. Wikimedia Commons
Beyond practices of discernment regarding existing cultural artifacts, we will do our own culture making: let us not forget that grand institutional and cultural contributions like the hospital and the university were propagated and facilitated by the Christian tradition, nor can we overlook the contributions made in many fields due to and arising out of Christian practice in Newtonian physics, architecture, Mendelian genetics, and much more besides.
Of course, these examples are painted in broad strokes but are nonetheless illustrative of a constructive way forward. And these examples set the stage for the final commitment of our political manifesto: that Christian social engagement must always be ad hoc.
1. H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture did a great disservice to the last century of American theological reflection. By envisioning culture as a homogenous, autonomous entity, Niebuhr posits it as an authority over against Christ that one must accept, reject, or synthesize. Niebuhr then types those who uncompromisingly adhere to the authority of Christ as radicals who withdraw from social or political involvement. But as I argue here, culture is more accurately portrayed as the field of human activity that the Christian community selectively engages, seeking to transform human history and societies through adherence to the lordship of Christ.