Naming Culture

Having just finished a very stimulating series of Annual Moore College lectures from Dr Bill Salier on the κόσμος, I though I'd share some of what I've been reading in James Davison Hunter's To Change the World. Hunter offers eleven propositions on culture that prove useful in defining this slippery term. Firstly are seven propositions on culture:

1 Culture is a system of truth claims and moral obligations.  But these truth claims and moral obligations “are embedded within narratives that often have overlapping themes and within various myths that often reinforce common ideals.”

2 Culture is a product of history.  Any given culture “takes form as the slow accretions of meaning in society over long periods of time.”

3 Culture is intrinsically dialectical.  On the one hand, this dialectic is played out in between ideas and institutions.  “One must view culture, then, not only as a normative order reflected in well-established symbols, but also as the organization of human activity surrounding the production, distribution, manipulation, and administration of those symbols.” On the other hand, this dialectic is played out between individuals and institutions.   

4 Culture is a resource and, as such, a form of power.  This resource “is not neutral in relation to power but a form of power.”

5 Cultural production and symbolic capital are stratified in a fairly rigid structure of ‘center’ and ‘periphery’.  

6 Culture is generated within networks, not the ‘great persons’ view of history. The “key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks.”

7 Culture is neither autonomous nor fully coherent.  Culture “is mixed together in the most complex ways imaginable with all other institutions, not least of which in our own day are the market economy and the state.” Moreover, culture is composed of innumerable fields.

Hunter rounds this proposition off with four propositions on cultural change:

8 Cultures change from the top down, rarely if ever from the bottom up. "...the deepest and most enduring forms of cultural change nearly always occurs from the 'top down'. In other words, the work of world-making and world-changing are, by and large, the work of elites: gatekeepers who provide direction and management within spheres of social life. Even where the impetus for change draws from popular agitation, it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites."

9 Change is typically initiated by elites who are outside of the center-most positions of prestige. Following proposition five, "when change is initiated in the center, then it typically comes from outside the centers nucleus. Wherever innovation begins, it comes as a challenge to the dominant ideas and moral systems defined by the elites who posses the highest levels of symbolic capital."

10 World-changing is most concentrated when the networks of elites and the institutions they lead overlap. "The impetus, energy, and direction for world-making and world-changing are greatest where various froms of cultural, social and economic and often political resources overlap."

11 Cultures change, but rarely if ever without a fight. The work of institutions and elites is to legitimize and legitimize different understandings of the world. "Every field of culture and thus, culture itself represents terrain in which boundaries are contested and in which ideals, interests, and power struggle." 

What Heaven Wants

I've been reading an article for college by William H. Willimon (of Resident Aliens fame) on the power of the Spirit of the Risen Jesus to create unity amongst cultural diversity and plurality.

The gospel is deferential and accommodating to no particular culture; rather, it is indoctrination, inculcation into a new and oddly based culture, namely the church. Thus Peter remembers Joel's prophetic vision of the crossing of gender, age, and social barriers (2:17-18). The result of Pentecostal empowerment by the Sprit is baptism (2:38), adoption by and enculturation into a new people, a holy nation, a light to all other nations, cultures, clubs, and means of human gathering. Thus many interpreters have seen Luke's list of hearers as an echo of the list of nations in Genesis 10. Pentecost is a day in which the linguistic divisions of Babel (Gen. 11) are healed. The same God who scattered the nations in order to prevent a united nations against God, now gathers and unites the nations in a new nation convened by God. The church is a sign on earth (2:19) of what heaven wants.

Willimon concludes the article with these heavy hitting words:

Acts says we are right to see the multicultural composition of our congregations as a kind of test of the fidelity of our preaching. I think Acts would also tell us that, whenever by the grace of God our preaching overcomes some cultural boundary, we are right to rejoice that God continues to work wonders through the word. Whenever we hear "multicultural" we are supposed to think "church," that peculiar cross-cultural people gathered by nothing other than the descent of the Holy Spirit.

It makes we wonder if we in increasingly diverse Sydney would meet this standard. "...[T]he multicultural composition of our congregations as a kind of test of the fidelity of our preaching."

Speaking of Hipsters

For a while now I've wanted to do something that comments on the 'oh so cool' zeitgeist amongst the Christian circles I move in. You know what I mean: watching any TV show written by Aaron Sorkin, listening to the music you'll find on Triple J (i.e. Arcade Fire, Sufjan, Cloud Control, The National), reading books by Tim Keller, Marilynne Robinson and Tom Wright, iPhone loving, caffeine, beer, wine and cheese appreciating (sometimes pipe smoking) hipsters.Or what you might describe as my life.

Well, although I had dreamt of capturing this in a very classy sketch, I never got round to it. And then Christianity Today beat me to it. Back in September 2010 they published a list of stuff Hipster Christians like to accompany their article Hipster Faith. Seeking to be counter-cultural in a culture that would describe itself as Christian (i.e. the US), Hipster Christians:

"seek to break out of the Christian subculture. The clothes and customs they shed are nothing less than the evangelical establishment itself, formed through decades of attempts at cool Christianity. Today's Christian hipsters retain their faith, but they want it to be compatible with, not contrary to, secular hipster counterculture. Their mission is to rebrand Christianity to be, if not completely void of its own brand altogether, at least cobranded and allied with the things that it had previously set itself in opposition to: art, academics, liberal politics, fashion, and so on. As a result of its intentional melding of Christian and secular, hipster Christianity often feels a bit like a stealth operation. One cannot easily decipher the Christian elements of a Christian hipster, not because they aren't there, but because they aren't in the foreground as much as, say, the "can't miss it" sartorial expressions (lumberjack beards, vintage dresses, flask as accessory) that traditionally signify hip. You're telling me that indie folk singer is a Calvinist?...That guy with the Poseidon tattoo I saw at the hookah bar last night is a Presbyterian pastor? Who knew?"

Having read through the list of things hipster Christians like and noticing that quite a lot of things a like make the list, I guess that makes me a hipster Christian. Maybe. Because I'm not sure how much is lost in translation from America to Australia. So maybe while I listen to The Suburbs and watch Jed Barlett, I won't have too much to worry about after all. But I think that the warning from CT is one that I and the circles I move in need to hear and don't get to caught up in being hip and cool:

"Isn't Christianity supposed to be distinguishable and set apart from the world? Christian hipsters are rebelling against a mainstream Christianity that they see as too indistinguishable from secular mainstream culture (i.e., consumerist, numbers-driven, Fox News—watching, immigrant-hating, SUV-driving), but their corrective may not turn out much better. Some hipster Christianity is as indistinguishable from its secular hipster counterpart as yesterday's megachurch Christianity was indistinguishable from secular soccer-mom suburbia."

Is there much point in being hip when the one I serve humbled himself and became a slave?