I am enjoying James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World. In addition, I have read Andy Crouch’s review of the book in Books & Culture, and have listened to Ken Myer’s interview of Hunter on the most recent Mars Hill publication. At the same time, enjoyment aside, I do think Hunter gets off on the wrong foot.
In chapter three, he offers his criticism of popular evangelical cultural engagement. One of his points, the fact that evangelicals do not have a robust enough understanding of the role of the church in all this, is well-taken, and needs to be made again and again. But there is another sense in which I don’t believe that Hunter can see what evangelicals are actually doing.
He represents the popular evangelical view of cultural change as being the idea that if you reach enough individuals with evangelism, and then follow-up discipleship in “Christian worldview thinking,” those individuals in the aggregate will then percolate through society, naturally transforming it. His critique of this is that evangelicals are thus “ignoring the institutional nature of culture and disregarding the way culture is embedded in structures of power” (p. 27, emphasis his).
Now I am, so to speak, a reformational and evangelical Gramscian. I believe that we should have our own “long march through the institutions.” I agree with Hunter completely that leaving institutions and elites out of a proposed reformational solution is futile and wrong-headed.
I also agree with Hunter that cultural change is not the result of a simple equation between the number of individuals who think or believe a certain way and their culture then reflecting those same values. Democracy cheats. He points out the disproportionate influence that homosexuals have had on our culture (p. 20), and this most certainly was not the result of them getting past a magical tipping point in the demographics. They succeeded, to use an old phrase of Gary North’s, by “capturing the gowns” — the mainline seminaries, the courts, the university. Theirs has been an institutional victory, and the gowns they captured were also fabulous.
Hunter also points to the stubborn facts behind Jewish cultural influence. Less than five percent of the population is Jewish, and their cultural contributions are “both brilliant and unrivaled” (p. 20). This, in the face of a significant prejudice against them. And it is a tenacious kind of prejudice, the kind that uses your very successes as evidence that “you must be cheating whenever you win.” For those interested, I would refer back to my recent sermon on Romans 11 — the apostle Paul’s strategy, one that he assigned to us, was to provoke the Jews to cultural envy, and to be provoked to envy by them instead is about the most unPauline thing we could think up to do. The achievements of Jews have been far more than political, and have included “science, literature, art, music, letters, film, and architecture” (p. 20). The apostle Paul argues that the salvation of the world depends on Christians figuring out the riposte to this.
Now in order to have disproportionate influence like this, a group has to be using levers or, at the very least, perhaps their heads.
In all this, Hunter is making some important points. But here is where he is missing something important, where I think he gets off on the wrong foot. There are many ways to approach this, so I will use just a couple of examples.
I have been a foot soldier in the culture wars for going on forty years now. In that time, I have seen enough exasperating examples from within the evangelical ranks to give Hunter more than a footnote or two. But one thing that Hunter gets entirely wrong is this central point of his about building institutions. For virtually that entire time, I have been in the good company of many thousands of Christians who have been planting institutions — schools, for one instance. Sometimes I think it is all we do. Private Christian education is a network of institutions, many hundreds of them, and virtually all of them under fifty years old. Within that is the classical Christian movement. There is now an Association of Classical Christian Schools (click here), and in early 1980, there weren’t any. Then in the realm of higher education, there is New St. Andrews, and Patrick Henry College, and you get the point. Something important to evangelicals is driving all this, and for some reason it is invisible to Hunter.
Even where Hunter’s point is most strong (on the question of church proper, and worship), some very heartening things have been happening — many churches have also been planted within the last generation, with the self-conscious understanding that it is worship that drives the world. Man is homo adorans — not homo sapiens in the first instance.
Here is my second example. Even at the broad parachurch level, where Hunter’s point seems to be most cogent, groups like Focus on the Family are fighting against homosexual marriage, for example, in favor of the biblical definition of marriage. Now when they are doing this, they have risen in defense of an institution. Marriage is not an assigned arrangement of roommates with sexual privileges. It is one of the fundamental institutions.
Our secularists are currently attempting something that Nero never dreamed of. Now this fight is a defensive one, granted, but it remains an institutional one. The guys in the Alamo might well lose the fight they are in, but it would be misguided to tap one of them on the shoulder and tell him that they weren’t paying enough attention to the importance of defending small mission buildings in San Antonio.
In short, the famous and vaunted individualism of the evangelical is being overstated here. Human beings are inescapably institution-builders, and evangelicals are above average in this respect. They have the spiritual energy to start institutions up. Liberals know how to capture and crash planes, but believers do know how to build them. But we need to get better at defending what we have built, I grant that.
Now a concluding point. An airplane in the construction hanger at Boeing does not fly nearly as well as an airplane in the sky, captured by the secularist jihadis, who are going to crash it into the skyscraper of civilization to the defiant cry of “Orgasm Akbar!”
Sometimes my illustrations just take on a life of their own. Nothing I can do.