More Thoughts on Culture

Two weeks ago Ken Myers was one of the speakers at the Reagan Symposium sponsored by the Roberson School of Government.  I’m a long-time subscriber to the Mars Hill Audio Journal that Myers produces and I suspect that he sometimes gets more out of the folks he interviews than they knew they had.  In any event, Myers’s remarks connect neatly the Renew 2010 Conference. 

Myers suggests the American flavor of Christianity is intensely personal and private; it is not a moral community that loves truth and sustains a way of life.  In other words, despite the hysterical rantings of some, there is little evidence of Christian culture in America today (understanding culture as a pattern of inherited meanings and sensibilities that form and motivate us).  American Christians either condemn the disorders of modern America from some lofty moralistic perch or buy into America’s consumer culture.  (After all, the customer is always right, right?)

We don’t have any record of the Christians of the first centuries of this era asking how they could have an impact on Roman culture.  Instead, they created their own culture, one which eventually reformed and ultimately replaced that of Rome.  Will American Christians break out of their cultural captivity?  Time will tell but the odds don’t look good.