Entries Tagged 'Culture' ↓

Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, president of Chicago Theological Seminary, in her discussion of the new findings about how Americans are always changing their religious affiliations, offers some provocative insights that we have posted over the last few days. She is, of course, utterly liberal in her own theology. She considers people changing churches not as a matter of belief or spirituality but as mainly finding “a better cultural fit”:

The shift in religious affiliation, or away from religious affiliation, has the most correlation, in my view, with that range of religious cultural assumptions than with any specific doctrine. And when people move from one affiliation to another, they are choosing a better cultural fit.

I would say that cultural Christianity is, indeed, what the liberal mainline Protestants are pursuing, as are, unfortunately, many culturally-conforming evangelical ones. A person should, however, look for a church that teaches what is TRUE and where CHRIST can be found.

And yet, “cultural fit” is surely a factor, with people raised back in the woods in a little country church becoming Episcopalians when they go to the big city and become rich. Should this be? Is there a legitimate search for “cultural fit” in a church?

Young people today know hardly anything about history, literature, or Western culture. We knew that, but study proves it. Among the findings,

Among 1,200 students surveyed:

•43% knew the Civil War was fought between 1850 and 1900.

•52% could identify the theme of 1984.

•51% knew that the controversy surrounding Sen. Joseph McCarthy focused on communism.

I’m positive my students here at Patrick Henry College know all this stuff. What amuses me is the way they often draw a blank at pop cultural references. Ask them about Britney Spears, High School Musical, and similar staples of the adolescent universe, and you often just get a blank stare. They WILL, however, tell you all about Homer, Dostoevsky, and deToqueville.

This article on changes in the Religious Right is interesting in itself, saying how the old hard-core conservative leaders have either died or are no longer listened to, and how evangelical Christians are now going beyond sex and abortion issues to work also for “compassionate” issues, such as improving the environment and battling AIDS in Africa. The article also raises another issue, though, that Christians are finding that non-Christians’ identifying Christianity with right-wing conservatism, which they hate and fear, has become a major obstacle to evangelism. An excerpt from the article:

Bush’s fall from grace has also highlighted a spiritual reality as evangelicals have begun to sense just how damaging the fusion of Bush and Jesus has been to the perception of our Christian faith.

Beliefnet’s poll revealed that a third of all evangelicals now believe that Christian political activism is “damaging to Christianity.” This isn’t an isolated poll. As Christian pollster David Kinnaman writes, “The number of young people in our culture who now embrace unflattering perspectives about Christians and politics is astounding. Three-quarters of young [non-Christians] and half of young churchgoers describe present-day Christianity as ‘too involved in politics.’ ” Twenty percent of all evangelicals believe that adopting a conservative Christian political agenda has helped destroy the image of Jesus Christ.

For a community of believers such as evangelicals, for whom sharing Jesus’s life-giving message is an essential part of life, this is a shock. It’s evidence of misplaced priorities, of focusing far more on the city of man than on the City of God.

Good point? Or are non-Christians going to hate Christianity no matter what? Should Christians try to be more popular in the name of evangelism? Or is that just more trust in our human efforts at persuasion rather than the power of the Holy Spirit to bring people to faith? One prominent Christian writer has said that Christians should drop anti-abortion activism, since this has become an obstacle to evangelism. How can Christians sort out their spiritual and their earthly missions?

(Hint: Try applying the doctrine of the two kingdoms. How would this work in practice?)

Susan Jacoby wrote an op-ed piece, based on a book she is releasing, entitled The Dumbing Of America.  She decries the anti-intellectualism of America today, citing the rank ignorance about history and geography that is rampant today, as well as statistics such as 40% of Americans have never read a book in the last year.  She also discusses how our culture tends to denigrate intellectuals as “elitists,” as opposed to the down-home democratic ideal of average “folks.” What she neglects to address, though, is that when it comes to anti-intellectualism, our elites are the worst offenders!  It is precisely our intellectual elites–university professors, cutting-edge artists, culturally-in-tune authors–who are denying the efficacy of reason, insisting that truth is relative, and holding onto exploded ideas (such as Marxism and neo-Marxism) against all evidence.  Who is training the teachers and writing the curriculum that have gutted our young peoples’ education and deprived us of our knowledge base?  Who is denying that there is such thing as truth or goodness?  Who is denying the existence of beauty and purposefully making art that defies the canons of classical aesthetics?  Most common “folks” have better sense.  So I agree with the author in lamenting the dumbing down of our culture.  But until not just the “common people” but the intellectual elites who need to change their thinking.

 I want to wish each and every one of you a merry Presidents Day.  I hope you have all of your decorating done and will have a wonderful Presidents’ Day dinner and enjoy all of your President’s Day customs like. . . . 

Notice:  The Church knows how to throw good holidays, but the government has not got a clue.  This day began as a commemoration of George Washington, that great man and father of our country.  He deserves a holiday, and customs started to grow up around the day, such as having cherry pie and stores throwing sales.  

But then the sentiment grew to throw in Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday was also in February.  And then, what the heck, let’s just celebrate ALL presidents, as if they were all of the stature of these two great Americans.So the holiday became generalized into impossible-to-visualize vagueness.  In doing so, the very reason for the holiday became lost.  (Why should we celebrate presidents and not have days devoted to the other branches of government?  Legislator Day?  Supreme Court Day?)  

And then the real reason to have holidays in our secularized state emerged:  Let’s change the day, marking a specific historic event, into a moveable feast so that it will always produce a three-day weekend!  That way government workers and others will have their day off work as part of a long weekend!

(I just wish someone would authoritatively rule on the place of the apostrophe in the holiday’s name.)  

Here is why this all matters:  This is another example, along with what we are seeing in education and theology, of the shift away from the OBJECT  (content,Christ,  honoring someone) to the SUBJECT (me, me, me).

On this day in 270 A.D., a priest named  Valentine refused to renounce his faith, despite strenuous efforts to dissuade him and many benefits promised to him if he would only deny Christ.  Valentine refused, so he was first beaten with clubs and then beheaded. 

I wonder if this is another holiday co-opted by the secularists that Christians could reclaim.  (Yes, there are connections to love and marriage in the saint’s tales, though they seem to apply to another martyr named Valentine who married Christian couples despite the Emperor forbidding that practice.  He was also honored on this day, simply because he shared the name of the other guy, though he had no connection as such with February 14, unlike the man who died on that day.)But how could we breathe Christian meaning into this observance?  Celebrate the refusal to back down, whether in faith or in keeping one’s marriage vows despite all pressure?  Celebrate the institution of marriage even though the prevailing culture, like the old Emperor, works against it?  Who are some other martyrs for love?  What would be some good customs that we should start? Anyway, to brighten your day, here is a picture of his relics in Rome, including what is said to be his actual skull that was removed from his body. (We don’t venerate these relics, but they make a wonderfully grisly reminder of what this day is really about.) 

I predict it will be  polyamory. That means committed sexual and quasi-familial relationships between three or more people. Think polygamy, only sometimes with more men than women, and throw in bisexuality. You can do the math.

Back to the controversy over the Archbishop of Canterbury saying that England should accept at least a limited jurisdiction of Islamic law (sharia). . . . Some of you said that the Archbishop’s statement was misinterpreted and taken out of context, that it was more nuanced than the reports indicated and that it was not so bad.  We should read what he actually said.  Well,  Anne Applebaum did, and here is her conclusion:

Arguing that his remarks were misunderstood, misinterpreted and taken out of context, his office even took the trouble to publish them, in lecture form and the radio interview version, on his official Web site. I highly recommend a closer look. Reading them, it instantly becomes clear that every syllable of the harshest tabloid criticism is more than well deserved. The archbishop’s language is mild-mannered, legalistic, jargon-riddled; the sentiments behind them are profoundly dangerous.   

What one British writer called the ” jurisprudential kernel” of his thoughts is as follows: In the modern world, we must avoid the “inflexible or over-restrictive applications of traditional law” and must be wary of our “universalist Enlightenment system,” which risks “ghettoizing” a minority. Instead, we must embrace the notion of “plural jurisdiction.” This, in other words, was no pleasant fluff about tolerance for foreigners: This was a call for the evisceration of the British legal system as we know it.

I understand, of course, that sharia courts vary from country to country, that not every Muslim country stones adulterers and that some British Muslims volunteer to let unofficial sharia courts monitor their domestic disputes, which is not much different from choosing to work things out with the help of a marriage counselor. But the archbishop’s speech actually touched on something far more fundamental: the question of whether all aspects of the British legal system necessarily apply to all the inhabitants of Britain.

This is no merely theoretical issue, since conflicts between sharia law and British law arise ever more frequently. . . .Police in Wales are dealing with an epidemic of forced marriages, honor killings remain a perennial problem, and British law has already been altered to accommodate “sharia” mortgages. The archbishop is absolutely right in his belief that a universalist Enlightenment system — one in which the legitimacy of the law derives from democratic procedures, not divine edicts, and in which the same rules apply to everyone living in the same society — cannot easily accommodate all of these different practices.

I enjoy seeing liberal folk get hoisted on their own petard (virtual contest:  explain that figure of speech), so I especially appreciated Applebaum’s accusing the politically-correct archbishop of racial intolerance: 

His beliefs are merely an elaborate, intellectualized version of a commonly held, and deeply offensive, Western prejudice: Alone among all of the world’s many religious groups, Muslims living in Western countries cannot be expected to conform to Western law — or perhaps do not deserve to be treated as legal equals of their non-Muslim neighbors.  

Every time police shrug their shoulders when a Muslim woman complains that she has been forced to marry against her will, every time a Western doctor tries not to notice the female circumcisions being carried out in his hospital, they are acting in the spirit of the archbishop of Canterbury. So is the social worker who dismisses the plight of an illiterate, house-bound woman, removed from her village and sent across the world to marry a man she has never met, on the grounds that her religion prohibits interference. That’s why — if there is to be war between the British tabloids [calling for his resignation] and the archbishop — I’m on the side of the Sun.

“The Weekly Standard” has a remarkable article by Walter Berns entitled Religion and the Death Penalty, arguing that the two are intimately connected. A sample:

The best case for the death penalty–or, at least, the best explanation of it–was made, paradoxically, by one of the most famous of its opponents, Albert Camus, the French novelist. Others complained of the alleged unusual cruelty of the death penalty, or insisted that it was not, as claimed, a better deterrent of murder than, say, life imprisonment, and Americans especially complained of the manner in which it was imposed by judge or jury (discriminatorily or capriciously, for example), and sometimes on the innocent.Camus said all this and more, and what he said in addition is instructive. The death penalty, he said, “can be legitimized only by a truth or a principle that is superior to man,” or, as he then made clearer, it may rightly be imposed only by a religious society or community; specifically, one that believes in “eternal life.” Only in such a place can it be said that the death sentence provides the guilty person with the opportunity (and reminds him of the reason) to make amends, thus to prepare himself for the final judgment which will be made in the world to come. For this reason, he said, the Catholic church “has always accepted the necessity of the death penalty.” This may no longer be the case. And it may no longer be the case that death is, as Camus said it has always been, a religious penalty. But it can be said that the death penalty is more likely to be imposed by a religious people.. . . . . . . .  European politicians and journalists recognize or acknowledge the connection, if only inadvertently, when they simultaneously despise us Americans for supporting the death penalty and ridicule us for going to church. We might draw a conclusion from the fact that they do neither. Consider the facts on the ground (so to speak): In this country, 60 convicted murderers were executed in 2005 (and 53 in 2006), almost all of them in southern or southwestern and church-going states–Virginia and Georgia, for example, Texas and Oklahoma–states whose residents are among the most seriously religious Americans. Whereas in Europe, or “old Europe,” no one was executed and, according to one survey, almost no one–and certainly no soi-disant intellectual–goes to church. In Germany, for example, leaving aside the Muslims and few remaining Jews, only 4 percent of the people regularly attend church services, in Britain and Denmark 3 percent, and in Sweden not much more than 1; in France there are more practicing Muslims than there are baptized Catholics, and a third of the Dutch do not know the “why” of Christmas. Hence, the empty or abandoned churches, or in Shakespeare’s words, the “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.”   

What do you think the connection is between religion and the death penalty? The article, with its very unusual and pro-death penalty take on the matter (using all these existentialists to make its point) does neglect those whose religion motivates them to oppose the death penalty (such as that little sect called the Roman Catholic Church!).But beyond that, the article is interesting in addressing the consequences of the decline of Christianity in Europe, as reflected in this quote’s shocking statistics.

Bolivia’s new draft constitution would allow its tribes to enact communal justice; that is, punishments ruled by tribal elders or, more commonly, by the people themselves. The penalties could not be appealed through the court system. Indeed, any appeal would be too late, since communal punishment tends to be instantaneous. They include beating, hanging, burning, and burying alive.What this means, in effect, that the nation state, with its rule of law, is allowing itself to be trumped by tribalism, and a reversion to bloody revenge codes (as is already happening in Africa) is sure to follow. The rule of law–with its legal system, police forces, and fair trials–is a huge advance over tribal justice. To devolve back into that is multiculturalism gone insane.(P.S.: Read Romans 12 and Romans 13 together, to see how the Bible has influenced the rise of lawful governments over against personal and communal revenge.)

An updated version of the Three Little Pigs was turned down for a government prize in England because “the use of pigs raises cultural issues.” The Brits felt the story might be offensive to Muslims, who consider pigs to be unclean. But no Muslims even complained!

Note the progression from stifling oneself because of external fears to stifling oneself voluntarily for no good reason. Notice too how an earnest multiculturalism is destroying actual culture.

Canada has “human rights” commissions that seem bent on shutting down human rights. At least the right of free speech. The board is currently prosecuting an editor for publishing the infamous cartoons of Muhammed. Other targets include a Catholic publication for upholding the church’s teaching about homosexuality and Canada’s main newsmagazine, Macleans, for printing a column by conservative pundit Mark Steyn who was critical of Islam. Read this and be appalled.

There are other meandering cases in the works, or that were in the works, often against Internet website owners or the contributors to their online forums. It is almost impossible to get clear information about these. In the notification process, the recipient of a human rights complaint need not be told who the complainant is, or what he is alleging. The recipient is just left to guess for a while, as the bureaucratic machinery of quasi-legal “justice” proceeds at its glacial pace.

By forbidding speech criticizing homosexuality and Islam, Canadian law is also throwing out freedom of religion. Are any of my Canadian friends and readers out there who could comment on this? If the United States government agitates for human rights in Russia, China, and the Middle East, shouldn’t it do the same for our friends to the north?

HT: Nathaniel Peters at First Things