It’s the culture, stupid
[Ed. Note: Yes, It is a culture war. We will see more pronounced details about this war between conservatives/modernist thinkers and post-modern thinkers as the Obama camp takes over the TV air waves next week. We vote based on what we believe. But, constant exposure erodes just as rain erodes a hillside. That's where Hollywood takes control. Good read for a Labor Day weekend. Cheryl M. Wetzel]
Blogs : John Stonestreet
Blogs : John Stonestreet
http://www.lifesitenews.com/blog/its-the-culture-stupid?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+
When Hillary Clinton claimed there was a “vast right-wing conspiracy” against her husband, many conservatives just laughed. “Work together?” many of us thought. “She apparently doesn’t know conservatives as well as she thinks she does.”
But Jonathan Chait, writing last week in the left-leaning New York magazine claims there’s actually a vast left-wing conspiracy, but this conspiracy isn’t located in Washington, D.C. This conspiracy, Chait argues, comes from Hollywood, which is “mainly transmitting an ethos in which greed is not only bad but the main wellspring of evil, authority figures of all kinds are often untrustworthy, sexual freedom is absolute, and social equality of all kinds is paramount.”
Chait goes on: “You don’t have to be an especially devoted consumer of film or television to detect a pervasive, if not total, liberalism.” He then points to “the modern family in Modern Family, not to mention the girls of Girls and the gays of Glee…” as evidence.
In the end, Chait concludes that “the uncomfortable reality is that the culture war is an ongoing liberal rout. Hollywood is as liberal as ever, and conservatives have simply despaired of changing it.”
This is something that all Christians concerned with the state of our culture must hear and learn. We have tended to see the culture wars as being primarily a battle of ideas, which almost exclusively takes place in the political sphere. But as we often say here on BreakPoint, politics is downstream from culture. Politics is most often a reflection of cultural values, not a source of them.
This is precisely why social liberals have been so successful in re-defining cultural values. They see the battle of ideas as a battle for the imagination that takes place in all cultural spheres, especially the arts. As Rod Dreher said in response to Chait’s observations, “The Right only knows how to make arguments; the Left knows how to make art.”
Now, these articles are primarily critiquing political and philosophical conservatives, but they just as easily could apply to Christians. We’ve almost exclusively limited our cultural engagement to the level of critique. We’ve locked in on ideas, while secularism has captured the imagination of our culture by retelling our stories.
Being able to identify the ideas at the root of culture is critical, but our failure to engage and produce cultural artifacts in the arts and sciences reveals a huge blind spot. Cultural change requires more than ideas, it requires the production of cultural goods.
Our Christian forebears understood this better than we do now. Christians created cultural goods embedded with a Christian understanding of God, man, and the world. This happened in cultural areas as diverse as music and healthcare, architecture and education, arts and the sciences, exploration and government.
The Christian fear and flight from culture in our day has led to a marginalization of faith in public life and an inability to capture the imaginations of people with the compelling vision for life that is offered in the Gospel.
That’s why I’ve dedicated a four-part series on the “Two-Minute Warning” to talk about culture. Last week I examined the proper posture Christians should have toward culture, and this week I define clearly what culture is (and what it is not). This would be a great series to watch and discuss in your small groups and church education classes. Come to BreakPoint.org, click on this commentary, and we’ll link you to this “Two-Minute Warning” series.
Let’s tackle this. Let’s figure out how we might begin reclaiming the cultural imagination through a re-engagement with various areas that shape our culture. We might find the political and legal battles much easier to handle if we do.
Reprinted from Breakpoint.
But Jonathan Chait, writing last week in the left-leaning New York magazine claims there’s actually a vast left-wing conspiracy, but this conspiracy isn’t located in Washington, D.C. This conspiracy, Chait argues, comes from Hollywood, which is “mainly transmitting an ethos in which greed is not only bad but the main wellspring of evil, authority figures of all kinds are often untrustworthy, sexual freedom is absolute, and social equality of all kinds is paramount.”
Chait goes on: “You don’t have to be an especially devoted consumer of film or television to detect a pervasive, if not total, liberalism.” He then points to “the modern family in Modern Family, not to mention the girls of Girls and the gays of Glee…” as evidence.
In the end, Chait concludes that “the uncomfortable reality is that the culture war is an ongoing liberal rout. Hollywood is as liberal as ever, and conservatives have simply despaired of changing it.”
This is something that all Christians concerned with the state of our culture must hear and learn. We have tended to see the culture wars as being primarily a battle of ideas, which almost exclusively takes place in the political sphere. But as we often say here on BreakPoint, politics is downstream from culture. Politics is most often a reflection of cultural values, not a source of them.
This is precisely why social liberals have been so successful in re-defining cultural values. They see the battle of ideas as a battle for the imagination that takes place in all cultural spheres, especially the arts. As Rod Dreher said in response to Chait’s observations, “The Right only knows how to make arguments; the Left knows how to make art.”
Now, these articles are primarily critiquing political and philosophical conservatives, but they just as easily could apply to Christians. We’ve almost exclusively limited our cultural engagement to the level of critique. We’ve locked in on ideas, while secularism has captured the imagination of our culture by retelling our stories.
Being able to identify the ideas at the root of culture is critical, but our failure to engage and produce cultural artifacts in the arts and sciences reveals a huge blind spot. Cultural change requires more than ideas, it requires the production of cultural goods.
Our Christian forebears understood this better than we do now. Christians created cultural goods embedded with a Christian understanding of God, man, and the world. This happened in cultural areas as diverse as music and healthcare, architecture and education, arts and the sciences, exploration and government.
The Christian fear and flight from culture in our day has led to a marginalization of faith in public life and an inability to capture the imaginations of people with the compelling vision for life that is offered in the Gospel.
That’s why I’ve dedicated a four-part series on the “Two-Minute Warning” to talk about culture. Last week I examined the proper posture Christians should have toward culture, and this week I define clearly what culture is (and what it is not). This would be a great series to watch and discuss in your small groups and church education classes. Come to BreakPoint.org, click on this commentary, and we’ll link you to this “Two-Minute Warning” series.
Let’s tackle this. Let’s figure out how we might begin reclaiming the cultural imagination through a re-engagement with various areas that shape our culture. We might find the political and legal battles much easier to handle if we do.
Reprinted from Breakpoint.
The Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson, Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire and I had the privilege of traveling to San Diego, CA last month to attend the Ruth Institute's It Takes a Family to Raise a Village Conference. The conference is targeted at college-aged students and provides them the opportunity to learn from and interact with very notable scholars who work in the field of marriage and family in their respective disciplines. Speakers included economists, attorneys, activists, a medical doctor, and theologians all presenting persuasive arguments in support of natural, man/woman marriage. I wish a similar program had been available when I was a college student and even more, I hope that if it had, I would have had the wisdom to avail myself of it.
Tuesday night, Ann Romney uttered four small words, buried deep within her 20-minute address at the Republican National Convention that gave the world an insight into her religious background.
On Sunday, August 19, 2012, The Most Rev. Dr. Nicholas Okoh, Primate of the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion), and The Most Rev. Robert Duncan, Primate of the Anglican Church in North America, accompanied by three other Nigerian archbishops, The Most Rev. Olu Akinyemi, The Most Rev. Ikechi Nwosu and The Most Rev. Ignatius Kattey and nine other bishops made history at the inauguration a new diocese in North America, The Missionary Diocese of the Trinity.
I recently read an article by Dr. Michael Poon in The Living Church (August 26, 2012), "Look Beyond England." Dr. Poon, director of the Centre for the Study of Christianity in Asia (Singapore), has been a frequent critic of "post-Western colonialism"-especially those quarrels and disputes "exported and internationalized" by British and American (read "Western") Anglicans upon "institutionally weak" Anglican churches particularly in the Global South.
The Global South of the Anglican Communion, comprising more than fifty-five million of the eighty million members of the Anglican Communion, deeply appreciate our historical relation with the See of Canterbury. We therefore commend the following to the Crown Nominations Commission for your serious consideration.
How do you turn the world upside down? In the span of just five decades, the moral and cultural world has been transformed by the sexual revolution. In terms of both public and private impact, no moral revolution can come close to the importance of the sexual revolution, and none has occurred so quickly. The moral world taken for granted in 1960 has virtually disappeared.