In a previous thread Jane Dunsworth asked the question when it comes to all questions of “reading culture.” How do you tell the difference between some manifestation of lowlife culture and that same thing (apparently) adopted and carried out by someone whose respectability is beyond question? Hmmm? The problem is the same regardless of how much time has elapsed, or whether any has.
Let me cram a bunch of examples into one paragraph in order to prove to everyone that I at least appreciate the problem. When I was a wee bairn, use of the phrase that sucks was the kind of thing that would get you slapped by your grandmother, and then you would be grounded for three months. After that, they would turn you over to the federal authorities to be shipped off to Guantanamo. Now I hear Christians using the phrase with an almost blissful and childlike innocence. In the Victorian era, a modest skirt that ended just above the knee would have been an outrage on the public weal, and could well have had all the males of your Victorian acquaintance barking at the moon. When I was in the Navy in the seventies, I was stationed in Groton, CN and recall a conversation with a grand dame of the old school who had been a girl in the New England Edwardian period. She told me about the lace coverings that they used to have for piano and table legs so that those bare naked limbs would not stumble the brothers into lascivious thoughts. That’s just sick and twisted, but no doubt some conservative in that era (named Wilson perhaps?) thought that relaxation of such standards was the first step down the road to ruination. Sir Philip Sidney wore a collared ruff that would get an 8th grader (at a Christian school near you) sent to the office for impudence and disrespect. And so it goes.
Now after long experience with this “what are we coming to?” kind of thing, we think that anybody who complains about any kind of fashion shift (as in, my complaints about tattoos and metallic finery for the nose) is necessarily making the mistake of absolutizing the standards of the culture immediately antecedent to the proposed change, is guilty of various forms of imperialistic legalism, and has just enough brains to make a jay bird fly crooked.
First, the fact that we have a bunch of difficult judgment calls to make doesn’t let us off the hook. We, and the Christians who lived through all the various examples I cited (and multitudes of other examples), still have to make them. You are a parent in the fifties, and you either discipline your kids for saying that sucks or you don’t. You either let your daughter go to the dance dressed “like that” or you don’t. You either have bare nekkid piano legs or you don’t, or perhaps you forego buying a piano to avoid temptation altogether.
Moreover, if you are a Christian who is seeking to live biblically, you recognize that you have to make a bunch of decisions like this based on biblical requirements that positively require such judgment calls. Young men are required to be “sober-minded” (Tit. 2:6), and young women are called to “shamefacedness and sobriety” (1 Tim. 2:6). We want to be “grave” and “temperate” when we grow older (Tit. 2:2), which means aspiring to that when we are younger. Christians are not to be “worldly” (1 John 2:15). Now noplace in the Bible are you going to find a simple checklist for these things, or a 1-2-3 litmus test. You have to decide.
Now when you decide, part of that decision will be on the basis of your reading of the cultural behavior of hundreds of thousands of other people. And you find that it is just as easy for a teenager to argue with your determination that this or that is “worldly” as that it is “not ladylike.” But at the same time, not deciding is not an option — not to decide is to decide.
In going into this, I want to assume two things — first, a thorough acquaintance with Scripture and the symbolism of Scripture, and second, a basic cultural literacy — you know what the culture itself is saying about x, y, or z, and you know what that is before the evangelicals fire up their copy cat knock-off industry. With those two assumptions, there is one remaining principle that has to be mastered before you start getting yourself into real trouble. So what is it?
Basically it is this — generalizations are lawful. Whether we are talking about Pharisees, Republicans, or teenaged boys, generalizations are lawful and necessary. And those who respond to such generalizations by producing one counterexample (that got its feelings hurt by what you said) are demonstrating nothing so much as their own American individualism — the view that everything of this nature must be decided on a case-by-case basis. If you ever group people together and say something about the group generally that one member of that group in fact disavows, you are guilty of “discrimination.” For those just joining us, that’s supposed to be bad. But the person making this charge is only doing so because he is intellectually lazy, and he is lazy because he is a Cretan (Tit. 1:12). An island full of bums. If somebody, nobody in particular, contradicts the wholesome words of the gospel, Paul knows all about that guy (1 Tim. 6:4-5). He goes into astonishing detail about a person whose name he does not even have to know. And anybody who wants to refute Paul by finding one guy who doesn’t consent to wholesome words, but who at the same time does not dote on words of strife, or who does not think that gain is godliness — such an objector doesn’t know how human language works. Probably a slow belly too.
An insistence that no statement can be made about such things except on a case-by-case basis, and then only if you have weighed the motives of that person’s heart, is a tactic that has paralyzed and silenced many critics — and this is a shame, because we live in a time that could use a whole lot more critics. Not only do we need critics, we need an army of critics, all of whom paint with a broad brush. Shoot, give them rollers.
Suppose after a day at the beach I conclude that America is rapidly turning into Papua New Guinea — tribal tattoos everywhere. Just a matter of time before chewing betel nut is all the rage in our high schools, the better to achieve that fetching “red teeth” look. Suppose that just yesterday I heard young William arguing with his uptight mom, wanting to know where the Bible says you can’t put a bone through your nose. I would point to the inevitability of just such pagan cultural expressions because culture is religion externalized. In response to this, am I going to be even slowed down if you introduce me to the sweetest Christian woman ever, a faithful wife and mother of three, a godly church goer, and one who sports a dainty buttercup tattoo on her ankle? And she got it just last month, as a Christian? I am sure I would be very happy to meet her, and moreover I will grant everything you say about her. No doubt she is a better Christian than I. But how can I grant this without abandoning my earlier jeremiad, and my unfortunate tendency to launch jeremiads? And fulminations? Because I am not all P are Qing, and I am not all triangles are three-siding. Cultures travel in herds, and herds always have outliers. Triangles don’t have outliers.