Counter-Cultural?

"Christians who permit themselves to be shaped by secular culture are guilty, not only of betraying God, but of losing their own true selves." - W. Paul Jones

I am not 100% sold on this notion that Christians should not permit themselves to be influenced by secular culture.

Mostly, because whether we like it or not, we are surrounded by secular culture from the moment of our birth.  It is a lens that influences how we interpret the world around us and our role in that world.  It's how we begin to understand how things work, it's how we pick up on social cues, and it's how we learn to speak to one another.

In essence, our interaction with secular culture determines how we live.

It is impossible not to be shaped by secular culture.

Moreover, I'm not sure that I think we should try to avoid it.

If we aren't shaped by secular culture, then we lose the ability to truly proclaim the Gospel.

For example, we see in our very own pews and congregations people who do not understand words that people in seminary think are obvious - words like discernment, sanctification, or ecclesiology.  They just do not have a place in the vocabulary of most people.

By failing to be shaped by the secular culture - such as the language, the tools, the knowledge - that come up out of the larger culture, we make ourselves even less understandable to the very people who want/need to hear our revolutionary message.

I think social media is a great example of how we are shaped by secular culture, but it allows us to serve God and claim our Christianity.

In our 140 character tweets, we are able to focus our message down. By doing so, we force ourselves to really engage with the thought/idea and make it a part of ourselves.  We then are able to use a language that we have grown up in to then speak that idea to others.

We become translators of the Gospel.

I'm not suggesting we fall prey to the secular culture that worships sexuality, drugs, and violence, but we do need to be aware of their existence and their prevalence.

Christianity cannot work in isolation from the larger world.

It's only by engaging the larger world that we are able to see where our own flaws and failings reside.

For example, Darwin and his theories of evolution forced us as Christians to re-think how we read scripture.

Do we read the scriptures literally or metaphorically?

The result of that conversation has helped bring us to a new understanding of how we can read scripture today.

When we insulate ourselves from secular culture, we cut ourselves off from new opportunities to learn and grow.

The Secular and the Sacred

Keeping our daily prayers, my friend (and co-author of this blog) and I came across a particularly disconcerting quote which the prayer book we use asked us to contemplate. It went like this:

“Christians who permit themselves to be shaped by secular culture are guilty, not only of betraying God, but of losing their own true selves.” –W. Paul Jones

Now, obviously it’s not scripture so it’s not like we have no choice but to work with it—but since it’s in this prayer book, it must have some kind of weight in the Christian community and some value to a Christian shaping their life. But isn’t it a bit damning?

After all, how do we avoid being shaped by the very culture we are brought up in? Can we avoid letting bits of secular culture cling to ourselves?

Moreover, by making such an incendiary statement, Mr. Jones seems to be casting himself as the reactionary who, rather than learning from the past to shape the future, would prefer to retreat from all forward movement in the hopes of preserving the ephemeral dream of the past. From that understanding, it hardly seems like his quote should even be considered.

But the Church has found the strongest impetus to find its identity when it has to argue with wrong (or apparently wrong) statements to clarify its own message.

To begin with, claiming that allowing ourselves to be shaped by the inescapable culture that surrounds us is betraying God is reckless. After all, merely by typing these words on a computer instead of painstakingly writing them on a scroll is letting myself be shaped by secular culture. Scripture didn’t exactly give us the computer.

However, perhaps it is not something so superficial. After all, Mr. Jones probably didn’t withdraw entirely from the culture around him and become a hermit in the hopes of avoiding contamination from the secular culture.

I think what he is getting at is a more precise idea. If we are shaped exclusively by the secular culture, we certainly betray God and lose our true selves. After all, secular culture is hardly capable of honoring God or nourishing the identity of a being in communion with God.

Doesn’t secular culture distract us to want more things to make us happy?

Or seek exploiting others in the pursuit of our own worldly gain?
  

Or dehumanize those who disagree with us?

If we permit ourselves to be shaped by this culture, and not by our encounter with Scripture, the Church, and the Holy Spirit, then we are certainly betraying the god who loves us, and losing the image we were created to be. 

Certainly honoring God and trying to become the person God wants us to be doesn’t mean abstaining from interacting with the secular culture that inundates us. As long as that interaction doesn’t result in the abandonment of God’s aim for our lives, there hardly seems to be an issue.

But then, if Mr. Jones meant that we should all become reactionaries and withdraw from society in the hopes of becoming some idyllic Christian community, washed free of all assumptions of secular society, then we should all heartily ignore his suggestions.