Climbing the American Totem Pole

The old saying goes that politics is downstream from culture, but that begs the question: how do you get at the culture? That has certainly been the question of American Christians staring down the growth of disdain and hostility towards Christianity in American culture and the seemingly impossible task of reversing that trend through political means. The consensus answer of the past 20-odd years has been through "cultural engagement," a blanket term covering everything from witnessing to neighbors to appending hipster coffee shops to the church lobby to developing overtly evangelistic movies for broad distribution.

As Dean Abbott argues in a new essay, and I have touched on here and here, the returns on this charm offensive have been disappointing, even disastrous. Abbott breaks from the conventional wisdom that blames hypocrisy and political contamination of Christianity for its decline. It is not character deficiency but low social status that is handicapping Christian engagement efforts.

This observation rings true for me. I've long wondered why Christians are so willing to cede the moral and cultural high ground to their opponents. When you start to think of Christians as the low-status dorks of the American high school, that default position of surrender starts to make intuitive sense. When you're a teenager, no one needs to tell you that the hottie or the stud are on one tier, and that the metal-mouthed stickboy or pizza-faced shy girl are on another. You see it and sense it and adapt accordingly.

Humans are inherently hierarchical. We are constantly assessing our place in every social hierarchy. As a general rule, we even measure our happiness in terms of hierarchy. When you're working from the bottom of the sociocultural totem pole, then it doesn't matter how winsome is your messaging or how skinny is your pant leg - you are always going to be an interloper when you try to engage with anyone above you.

This concept isn't entirely new, but it has been deeply, perhaps willfully misunderstood by Christian self-critics. Russell Moore, for instance, talks a big game about embracing the low-status radical weirdness of the early church, but his bass-ackwards version of that principle is sucking up to high-status minority groups and media organs. (Meanwhile, the most effective modern Christian ministries are gathering recruits from people even lower on the totem pole, e.g. addicts in church-sponsored recovery groups)

Abbott rightly criticizes the attempt of churches to become hip, a tendency that goes far deeper than the clownish efforts of guys like Carl Lentz.

Nice glasses, Rev.

The guys with Hebrew tattoo sleeves talking systematic theology over craft beer and cigars are often just as ridiculous to the outside world as the shofar-blowing Pentecostals.

Abbott stops short of specific solutions, cautiously tipping his hat towards Rod Dreher's "Benedict Option" and insisting on a realistic appraisal of our actual standing and the culture's actual problems before committing to an engagement. Having read the Benedict Option, I can offer a brief summary of Dreher's thesis: we've lost the culture war, so it's time to build a new culture by creating our own fortified institutions. Eventually the secular culture will fall to its own demons, and when chaos breaks out, the semi-monastic institutions we created will then be attractive.

That idea is particularly attractive to Rod Dreher because, like many bookish types, he has a strong aesthetic preference for medieval Christianity and an associated antipathy for all of modernity. Letting American culture collapse under its own decadence is thus an appealing strategic prospect - not only do we get to cease direct engagement with a bunch of people who hate us, but we now have civilization-saving justification for Renaissance Fair-style LARPing.

I suspect Abbott's refined aesthetic tastes - I've followed him long enough on Twitter to get deluged with Delius, Roger Scruton and the poetry I tried to leave behind in English lit class - make him more sympathetic to this approach than a pop culture hound like me. It also may have given him a blindspot in regards to the moral weight of low culture.

As High Plains Parson pointed out in his response to Abbott's essay, the loss of elite culture isn't all that big a deal in America. As he says, "America’s cultural center is more Hollywood than Opera, more hamburgers and pizza than coq au vin." But contrary to the good Parson's optimistic spin on this truth, Christians have suffered their worst defeats in the pop cultural center, which is why Abbott's low-status diagnosis rings so true.

The elites have harbored growing disdain for sincere Christianity since the Enlightenment, but just 60 years ago, Christians completely dominated the middle-brow organs and institutions that in turn dominated American culture. Blockbuster movies, TV, popular music, radio shows, local schools, councils and country clubs - all were subject to Christian approval and catered to Christian standards. Now those organs and institutions are virtually immune to Christian disapproval and most seek subversion of Christian standards as a matter of course. Though they remain central demographically, Christians have been purged from America's cultural centers of gravity.

Dreher recognizes this, but in his distaste for modernity, he essentially gives up on pop culture and focuses on small-scale regional culture. He also seems loath to deal with existing institutions, preferring to build new schools and businesses.

I believe the best way forward does not involve surrendering the power of modern mass media or washing our hands of fully-converged institutions. Neither do I want a continuation of the smiley-faced groveling of the hipster wannabes or a return to the uphill charges of the Religious Right.

The best guide for our path back to cultural influence, though they might be unwilling sherpas, is the example of American Jews. When they arrived in America, they were assigned a place on the American totem pole approximate to Christians' position today. They were generally unwelcome in the highest-status positions of society. Though they did, as I believe Dreher references, establish many of their own institutions - primary schools, hospitals, charities - and patronized their own business, they refused strictly regional limits or a ghettoized subculture. Neither did they bunker down in monastic enterprises and wait for the collapse of WASP culture. Finally, they did not engage in frontal assaults on higher-status groups.

The Enemy Isn't Us, Part II

In Part I of my response to Phil Cooke's summary of "The Way Back: How Christians Blew Our Credibility and How We Get It Back" on Dean Abbott's podcast, I argued that Cooke's prescription for Christian cultural woes was not effective primarily because his diagnosis (that we blew our credibility) was wrong.

To pin the marginalization of Christianity in American culture on the behavior of Christians is to make two assumptions: that Christians had earned their earlier credibility through good behavior (at least in relative terms) and that Christians then lost that credibility because of bad behavior. In Part I, I question the second assumption, but the first is just as suspect.

Did Christians owe their prior dominion over American culture to good behavior? It strikes me as highly unlikely. The most straightforward, self-evident reason Christians have enjoyed so much power in America until recently is that America was founded by devout Christians and their fellow travelers. As the natives were virtually annihilated by disease, war and displacement, our founders had an essentially blank slate on which to a heavily Christian and specifically Protestant culture. Christian legitimacy in the culture was initially maintained not by good behavior but by Christians refusing to cede control of their cultural institutions to the rivals that had driven them from the Old World.

Though battered by the later waves of European secularism, first from Voltaire and the Enlightenment secularists and then from Darwin and Marx and the materialists, Christians remained the governing force in American culture. The peak of America's power in the immediate post-war period of the 1940s and 1950s coincided with a muscular reaffirmation of our Christian identity. In God We Trust was enshrined as the national motto. "Under God" was affixed to the Pledge of Allegiance. The most lucrative intellectual property of that era was not the Marvel universe or Star Wars but the Bible and its literary spin-offs. Samson and Delilah, Quo Vadis, The Robe, The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur - these were the biggest box office smashes of the era.

The gap between Christian behavior then and now isn't even close to explaining the catastrophic loss of Christian stature in American culture.  Christians could not blow so much credibility so quickly by their own hand. The culpable party was not huckster televangelists, but a third wave of European secularism that finally succeeded in taking from Christianity what it had refused to cede to Voltaire, Darwin and Marx: control of our cultural institutions. 

This third wave is comprised of so many causes and -isms that it has eluded consistent labeling, but has been most accurately described as cultural Marxism. While it lacks a common manifesto with explicitly spelled-out doctrines, the last 50 years have shown it to be a real, cohesive and implacably hostile rival to Christianity.

It is not an anonymous, impersonal movement. It was spearheaded by an alliance of post-Christian American coastal elites and European, predominantly Jewish or atheist, intellectuals and artists. They enjoyed their most important cultural victories in academia and mass media. Their most consequential win was in Hollywood, where men like Otto Preminger and Billy Wilder used their stature as creative giants to drive the previously invincible Christian censors out of the industry in the space of ten years. This unleashed a tidal wave of overt media attacks on Christianity and associated social mores from men like Mike Nichols and Stanley Kubrick. This media revolution coincided with the Sexual Revolution breaking out on college campuses and urban environments ignited by academics like Alfred Kinsey and writers like Helen Gurley Brown.

This movement was not created in response to Christian hypocrisy or bad behavior. It predated the rise of televangelism and the Moral Majority and it remained after their collapse. It won't be deterred by better Christian witnesses, at least not at the atomized, random act of kindness level that Cooke seems to favor. Indeed, it benefits from (and generally encourages) any approach that cedes any Christian claim to cultural authority.

The Religious Right drew so much fire from the cultural Marxists not because of their hypocrisy, but because they were reasserting Christian cultural authority. Their efforts weren't helped by the humiliating examples of Bakker and Swaggart, but theirs was a failure of tactics, not ethics. A televangelist-led direct assault on the media-fortified high ground was doomed to failure - another Charge of the Light Brigade.

Though the tactics need to change if Christians are to increase their influence on the culture, the high ground should remain the same. The mistake Cooke and the self-critics make is to accept the moral high ground as the cultural high ground. A community of loving Christians shining out like a city on a hill is and always been the fundamental objective of the church, but temporal cultural influence was not just a fleeting obsession of the Religious Right. It is a precious inheritance of Western civilization in general and the separatist American colonists in particular. The American City Upon a Hill sought to be a light to the world and to safeguard the cultural mechanisms that had been used to stifle and extinguish it. 

The American City Upon a Hill did not fall from grace, it was conquered by the same forces its founders sought to escape. Improving the percentages of church attendance, prayer, tithing and Bible reading are worthy efforts in and of themselves. If and when the culture war is lost for good, they may even be the only way forward. But if we are looking for a way back to a Christian culture, the road ahead of us is a long march back through the institutions that we lost.  

The Enemy Isn't Us

"We have met the enemy and he is us." This is one of those adages that is at least partially true in just about every scenario. And it gets bonus points for originating in my favorite comic strip.

But I'm starting to weary of it, at least in the culture war sphere. The latest Christian figurehead to employ it is Phil Cooke, a successful media producer and prolific cultural engagement writer who I encountered on Dean Abbott's podcast.

The context was his new book "The Way Back: How Christians Blew Our Credibility and How We Get It Back." As the title would suggest, and he made clear in the interview with Dean, he believes Christians weren't so much beaten in the culture war as they were disqualified by their own hypocrisy and false witness. Working from a basket of four metrics intended to measure Christian integrity - church attendance, prayer, Bible reading and tithing - he concludes that Christians aren't even coming close to practicing what they preach. The takeaway: how can we expect the secular world to listen to us when we aren't even listening to ourselves? He goes on to decry the politicization of Christianity and what he calls the anger-based approach typified by boycotts. He recommends a return to neighborly good deeds and cheerful Gospel-sharing.

This is a familiar refrain, echoing some of the arguments of Russell Moore and Rod Dreher. Each time I hear this line of reasoning, it's pitched as bold and fresh. Those pitching are always quick to define their winsome approach in contrast to the angry thundering of the Moral Majority and Religious Right, as if those philosophies of engagement are currently dominating American Christianity. They rarely seem to realize or acknowledge that the prominence of Falwell and Robertson and televangelist Right peaked 30 years ago and was basically kaput by the new millennium. For the last two decades, public leadership of American Christianity has been dominated by people who look, act and sound more like Mr. Rogers than Mr T.

Thus far the prescription hasn't worked. The retreat of the Bible-thumping televangelists from the main stage didn't put a stop to the string of culture war defeats. To the contrary, the cultural losses mounted, and eventually broke out into a political rout. In twenty years, the battleground shifted from a fight for control of the major cultural organs to a rearguard action for freedom from political persecution.

Cooke and his fellows could counter that the prescription hasn't yet been fully applied, that we're still suffering from the aftereffects of the previous regime. But no amount of time will make a prescription work if they are working from a faulty diagnosis. The prevailing assumption among self-deprecating Christians like Cooke is that the enemy is us. What if that's wrong?

What if it wasn't Christians that blew up their credibility? This is not to say that Christian error played no part in their many defeats, but that a strictly self-critical approach leaves a huge factor out of the equation. It's always a great goal to lose 10 lbs of fat through a vigorous nutrition and exercise regimen, but what's that gonna do about the malignant tumor that's taking over your body?

The enemy isn't always us. The defeats weren't purely self-inflicted. And, most relevant to Cooke's general argument, strengthening the local church isn't likely to get our credibility back if that's not how we lost it in the first place.

Who then is the enemy and what should we do about it? I'll tackle that next.