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Hunter’s To Change the World: What’s Wrong with the Common View of Culture

I’m doing a chapter-by-chapter summary of  James Davison Hunter’s new book, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Today we’re on chapter 3, “The Failure of the Common View.” (The “common view of culture” holds that cultures change when individuals change their ideas and values.)

Hunter clarifies that the three tactics—evangelism, political engagement, and social action—are themselves good things, and that much good can come from them. His criticism is with the “working theory that both undergirds these strategies and approves them as a primary if not only means for changing the world” (p. 18). The working theory itself is “fundamentally flawed.”

So according to the common view of cultural change, why aren’t Christians having more of an influence to shape culture? In effect, Hunter says, they think that “Christians are just not trying hard enough, acting decisively enough, or believing thoroughly or Christianly enough” (p. 22).

But the problem with this working theory of culture and cultural change and its strategies is its dependence upon idealism—the notion that ideas move history. As Colson puts it, “history is little more than the recording of the rise and fall of the great ideas—the worldview—that form our values and move us to act.” Hunter says that this “unqualified idealism” is “the convention among most American Christians” (p. 25).

Two other elements give this idealism a uniquely American and Protestant flavor:

  1. individualism (“the autonomous and rational individual is the key actor in social change”); and
  2. Christian pietism (“the most important goal in life is having one’s being right before God”).

Here’s the message that’s being communicated:

If people just pay better attention, learn better, be more consistent, they will understand better the challenges in our world today;

if they have the right values, believe the right things, embrace the right worldview, they will be better equipped to engage those challenges;

and if they have the courage to actually jump in the fray and there choose more wisely and act more decisively, they will rise to and overcome those challenges and change the world. (p. 27)

One of the ironies of idealism is that it is actually a manifestation of  dualism (the bifurcation of the secular and sacred, public and private, objective and subjective)—which the Christian culture-changers are seeking to challenge. He writes, “Idealism reinforces that dualism by ignoring the institutional nature of culture and disregarding the way culture is embedded in structures of power” (p. 27, my emphasis).

Hunter minces no words: “Every strategy and tactic for changing the world that is based on this working theory of culture and cultural change will fail—not most of these strategies, but all” (p. 27).

He’s not saying that renewing individual hearts and minds is a bad thing, or that worldview education won’t have good effects, or that Christians can be involved in social reform or the political process. Rather, “these things are just not decisively important if the goal is to change the world” (p. 27).

If we’re serious about changing the world, the first thing to do is to “discard the prevailing view of culture and cultural change and start from scratch” (p. 27).

At this point Hunter offers a four-page “coda” on Andy Crouch’s book Culture Making and his perspective of “culture as artifact.” Crouch argues that ideas, symbols, worldviews, etc. are mediated through things, and it is through the cultural artifacts that we encounter and make sense of the world. To change the culture, we have to create more of it. Christians should invest in creative cultural production.

I won’t reproduce all of Hunter’s analysis of Crouch’s approach—certain aspects of which he finds laudable. But he ultimately believes that “this view still suffers from fundamental flaws that render it inadequate for understanding the complexity of the world and Christianity’s relationship to it” (p. 29). Despite its merits, it is still individualistic, with cultural change being willed into being (by investing in and creating cultural goods) and is democratic (a bottom-up approach to change).

Hunter also notes that the market populism underlying Crouch’s approach “is reinforced by the absence of the church itself from the discussion” (p. 30).

Tomorrow we’ll look at chapter 4, a summary of Hunter’s alternative approach on how to view culture and cultural change.

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