What is our culture?

Probably the most commonly given and broadly satiating response to this query is simply: ‘we are a melting pot.’ And that isn’t wrong. The United States of America is an eclectic mix of cultures unlike any the world has ever seen.

However, I would argue there is something inherently disturbing about an attempted definition of culture which seems to imply that all cultures might ‘melt’ into a single, monolithic one.

Our cultural leaders (media, entertainment, intellectual) certainly buy into the effort to dislocate us from our troublesome, particular cultures. They all too happily incorporate everything from every culture — except those pieces which might cause any offense to any person. The result is a sanitized, [egg] shell upon which we are all compelled to walk.

Moreover, the ‘melting pot’ line is far too bird’s eye to accurately depict anything like the myth of a cohesive, happy union it implies. It is critical to resist delusion. We are a people fundamentally — often violently — divided. While not exact, the division is often and historically along racial and cultural lines along with long-standing geographic ones. This fact should give pause to the idea that our culture is anything more than superficially ‘multicultural.’

So, if we can’t describe ourselves cohesively even as multicultural, what are we?

The great American farmer/poet Wendell Berry describes modern American ‘culture’ as one “born of a philosophy that endorses the expansion of human control — toward the subjection of all particularities to the logic of market dynamics; exploitation of local resources; and active hostility toward diverse local customs and traditions in the name of progress and rationalism.”

In other words, our ‘culture’ as a western liberal society can be identified as one fixated on the abstract concept of individual ‘freedom.’ We deify ultimate personal — and particularly sexual — liberty. We worship the efficient dividing powers of open markets. We rely heavily on our government and military to impose these ‘freedoms’ at home and abroad.

In his book, Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen discusses, in-depth, the deeply reinforcing nature of increasing individual liberty administered by an increasingly powerful government. He uses the apt term ‘anti-culture’ to describe the false promise of a multiculturalism which, in practice, amounts to little more than ‘the evisceration of culture as a set of generational customs, practices, and rituals that are grounded in local and particular settings.’

Our society (that is, modern, liberal society) fundamentally undermines culture and devalues the histories which once formed us, which gave us meaning.

In unison, we pursue the ‘rights’ of placeless, ‘liberated’ individuals at the direct expense of our nation’s rich tapestry of distinct, particular cultures and histories, and the planet we occupy together.

So, to answer the title question…we don’t have a culture. Maybe we used to. More likely, particular communities amongst us used to belong to thriving, particular cultural traditions. But, for good or bad, these are rapidly slipping away.

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The Christian Church in America is no exception to this insidious reality of modern life. The specific history of the Church, like that of all human institutions is deeply flawed and troublesome. Along with the good, significant errors, evils, and injustices were committed by individuals and institutions — intricately, prominently intertwined with Church history. Moreover, as members of the living Church, we commit errors, evils, and injustices daily as we repeat the patterns of our history; engage in false beliefs; and act hypocritically in opposition to what we say we believe.

Modern, liberal society shines a light on this hypocrisy, on these injustices — just as it does on all other institutions. And while this light might be helpful, it more often serves to further deconstruct and shame adherents of particular cultures into shedding their identities.

And shed we have.

Our society gives us the out to separate, to dislocate from our histories, to live imagined lives free and disconnected from pasts fraught with injustice and inconsistency.

It is important to note that this state of being did not come about without warning. During his travels through America in the early 1800s, French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville worried that in a democracy like ours, people would one day actively resist viewing their own lives and actions as part of a continuum of time. Confronted by the sheer injustice and complexity of our own history, Tocqueville prophesied that we would run from these histories, focusing increasingly on our present reality as disconnected individuals. That this state of affairs has now come to pass is troublesome for two reasons.

First, as story-telling, communal creatures, humans find meaning and identity in our past, in our specific, unique histories. When you take that away, we are cut adrift.

I believe a significant cause of current widespread lostness, alienation, and fear in our society is as a result of this uprooting and undermining of cultures and denial of our histories. We have collectively given up our authentic (flawed) stories for the illusion of a cohesive, universal one and we deeply lack identity as a result.

Second and relatedly, without history we lack deeper accountability for our actions.

Along with coercion and injustice, rich communities and their histories once offered a view beyond our lifespan, forcing us to consider the long-term implications of our choices. The Church, like other institutions, seeks to form individuals by a certain set of virtues — a certain, particular posture towards the world.

Without the history and customs and norms — flawed as they are — of the church, for example, I will be far less inclined to surrender my natural, immediate, base human desires, Tocqueville’s ‘propensity of human nature.’ Rather, I find myself urged by our society to ‘live in the moment’ to embrace my individuality and to choose without consequence.

Via this devaluation of our place in a larger story and the decimation of our institutions, we become slaves to our passions. Our ever-expanding personal liberty strips away remaining freedom to communally direct our lives towards a greater purpose than ourselves.

On both points, the Church can serve as an answer. However, for it to do so, it must first face its past rightly, living up to the critiques of its society.

Plain and simple, the church has caused and continues to cause pain and injustice in the lives of many it might otherwise reach. It has failed and is failing to properly demonstrate to a hurting world its particular narrative — one of incalculable grace and hope and love from an incalculably powerful God.

Faced with this reality and the glaring light shined upon it by modern society, the Church has three options.

First, we can delude ourselves. We can say to the world that the church has done infinitely more good than bad in our history. We can provide a flawed, somewhat defensible, but ultimately human, rational, utilitarian defense for our beliefs. We can make this choice. However, in doing so, we pridefully commit to making the same grievous errors, justified by our believed good — further alienating Christ’s hands and feet from a world which needs them.

Second, we can concur with the rationality of this world. We can admit, again, in utilitarian form that our story is fatally flawed, shameful and thus not worth our commitment. We can shy away from our rich doctrinal tradition, opting instead for ‘a slimmed down moralism parading as progressive Christianity.’ Or we can opt out altogether.

In doing so, we make a rational decision, dislocating, freeing ourselves from a broken past. However, in this rationality, we are driven further away from church, away from others, away from Christ.

Third, we can take a braver, more counter-cultural approach. We can courageously admit the flaws of our past, learning from them, and understanding better how these were out of alignment with our call, yet part of our history, our story nonetheless.

If we embrace our history, rejecting the rational, (post) modern, liberal call to abandon our place, our story, we might just find ourselves transformed into the living body and representation of Christ. For as much as we may desire, when we make mistakes in our own lives, when we do things that are not mistakes, but instead, directly cruel, selfish, evil — we cannot truly divorce ourselves from this history and its consequences.

We can applaud the direction of our society and our sins, intertwining with them more fully. We can lie to ourselves about the path we’ve been on, fooling only ourselves. Or, we can embrace our history, become humbler for that embrace, and perhaps learn slightly better how to live aligned with our authentic narrative.

For, the history of the church is also its greatest gift. This history grants us participation in something bigger. Through connection to the saints, we might better become the living body of Christ. Through collective consciousness of our failures, we might find ourselves more resilient to past failure. As Alaisdar MacIntyre states in After Virtue, “the present is intelligible only as a commentary upon and response to the past in which the past, if necessary and if possible, is corrected and transcended.”

Combatting societal momentum through such a humble embrace of and commitment to our past will pit us against our society — the massive ‘anti-culture’ that it is — and give us back something much smaller, but perhaps more valuable: community.

Humbly committing to our past, reclaiming our community means that we choose to face our traumas, for example. That we engage in concrete behavioral changes and changes to our language including openness to new ideas. That we respect our parents and our planet. That we take bullets instead of giving them.

And through this type of community, through such a humble commitment to our authentic history, through the mistakes, and sins, and horrors we are undeniably a part of, are defined by, are accountable for, we might just find ourselves stronger and better able to speak truth into a world of lies.

Christianity, with such a stance about its history, has much to offer a fearful, depraved, lonely world. Western society, in particular, is full of people who are wrestling with the failed promises, the illusions of security, liberty, and progress and searching desperately for an answer.

In terms of security: we are promised that if we hand over more and more of our lives to state regulation, surveillance, military excess abroad, etc. we might be freed from our fear of death. However, death will find us all and without confidence in what comes next, our fear of it only stands to grow.

In terms of liberty: we are promised increasing happiness as we are increasingly released to make decisions without regard for long-term consequences. Instead, we find ourselves spiraling downward in an endless hole of depravity and emptiness the next fix (drug, sex, material, experience, or otherwise induced) will never fill.

In terms of progress: we are force-fed the line that things are getting better, are better than ever. However, increasingly, the promise of progress rings more like a taunt to a deeply fractured society in which millions are left behind.

In such a time, people are searching for meaning and identity. We cannot return to a time where cohesive identity was easy and automatic. Moreover, nostalgia for that place in history is misguided as it carried its own burdens, its own injustices. However, a healthy church can offer a different kind of hope.

An authentically Christian hope is not based in an unrealistic view that things will work out. Rather it is grounded in a perseverance which extends beyond our finite lives in a broken world.

According to Marilyn McEntyre, the hope offered by church can help us to get over ourselves. It can help us acknowledge guilt and experience forgiveness in a society which rejects and cannot grasp these weighty concepts. Church offers us a glimpse of beauty, history, and majesty in a world blind to these concepts.

However, McEntyre also rightly points out how our church fails to offer this beauty, this hope to the world. All too often, our churches are ‘clubby and exclusionary.’ Church tends to gravitate either to the pole of simplistic and preachy or that of overly-progressive and baseless. And, church all too often finds itself attached to (and used by) the partisan politics which define our nation.

Tellingly, these features define not just the church, but the contemporary state of all our beleaguered institutions. These failings, weaknesses define the world and we have let them define the Church.

The world desperately needs the church to show it what it is not. It doesn’t need us to show it autocracy, moralism, absolutism, propensity to violence. These things the world knows well. Rather, the church must demonstrate the value of particularity — a culture grounded in the unique, specific story of Christ — in a world gone mad for the universal.

We need a church which can embrace its own past — beautiful and ugly — and show the world what it means to be justified, to be sanctified. In his Christian-ethical classic The Peaceable Kingdom, Stanley Hauerwas suggests that we must resist viewing these church tenets as abstractions or as descriptive of a status which somehow grants us superiority to the world. He emphasizes that when our identity, our history is separated from Jesus’ life and death, it distorts our ability to live authentically Christian lives and reduces the Church’s potential value to the world around us.

Instead, he suggests, “Sanctification is but a way of reminding us of the kind of journey we must undertake if we are to make the story of Jesus our story. Justification is but a reminder of the character of that story — namely, what God has done for us by providing us with a path to follow.”

If we can arrive at a renewed, honest focus on this story and excitement for this journey, our church just might be able to offer the world a path to the hope it so desperately needs. And through this story, this journey, this path, we might just discover a culture we can call our own.