To Change the World

Metadata

Author: James Davison Hunter
Full Title: To Change the World
Category: #books

Highlights

The apparent problem, in brief, is twofold: First, Christians just aren’t Christian enough. Christians don’t think with an adequate enough Christian worldview, Christians are fuzzy-minded, Christians don’t pray hard enough, and Christians are generally lazy toward their duties as believers. By the same token, there are not enough people who do fully embrace God’s call on their lives, praying, understanding, and working to change the world.
In all, it communicates the message that if people just pay attention, learn better, be more consistent, they will understand better the challenges in our world today; if they have the right values, believe the right things, embrace the right worldview, they will be better equipped to engage those challenges; and if they have the courage to actually jump in the fray and there choose more wisely and act more decisively, they will rise to and overcome those challenges and change the world.
Indeed, often enough it takes little more than a celebrity blurb and a catchy cover to give an otherwise mediocre book manuscript the power to influence the perceptions and convictions of its readers.
What is significant in all of this, of course, is that Christians were willing to meet their opponents on the same ground. 16 “That Christianity became the object of criticism by the best philosophical minds of the day at the same time when Christians were forging an intellectual tradition of their own was a powerful factor in setting Christian thought on a sound course.” 17
the highly stratified hierarchies of social power as well as the imperial networks (connecting, through patronage, the emperor to local elites throughout the empire) were maintained. The skills of paideia were intricate and extremely difficult to master. For this reason, social mobility was severely limited; and yet neither the social hierarchy nor social networks was impenetrable.
There was very little room for maneuver in this structure. The ability of educated elites to speak their mind was highly constrained. In general, only those who felt that they could count on the protections of the more powerful exercised such freedoms.19 The exceptions were certain philosophers who, of course, were members of the nobility and shared in their paideia, but transcended the need for patronage and friendship. They had access to the imperial court and, in principle, could speak to the powerful without fear of reprisal.
the bishops who emerged were local notables who were well-born, in possession of paideia, and increasingly entrusted with the political autonomy of the philosopher.21 In some cases, the bishops had been philosophers before their conversion. Either way, the Christian bishop became a vir venerabilis, a person deemed “worthy of reverence” by the powerful. As a consequence, bishops began pronouncing on public affairs and more and more Christians began to hold office and exercise influence in the cities of the empire. Secular leaders even began to turn to bishops to control crowds and defend law and order. 22 All the while, the church grew more and more interconnected through frequent councils, travel to Rome, and so on.
Over a period of centuries, in a process that was rife with tension, conflict, and setback, a subtle shift occurred by which the distinction between Christian faith and non-Christian paideia faded.
By late antiquity, as Brown has shown, the Christian church absorbed the Roman paideia into Christian catechesis. In this way, paideia became a preparatory school of Christian character.
the new power of Christian bishops amounted more to a “reshuffling” than to a true cultural change.
The bishops rejected a central tenet of paideia, namely its understanding of and relationship to the social order.
Even though it was still a demographic minority, a church that was seen to reach out to the margins of the social order established its “right to stand for the community as a whole.”29 The “care of the poor became a dramatic component of the Christian representation of the bishop’s authority in the community.”
Because Christian charities were beneficial to all, including pagans, imperial authority in society was weakened.
See their love-feasts, and their tables spread for the indigent.
a populism made explicit in affirmation and in judgment, exhortations to shun the false idolatries of status, wealth, and power, to disdain the very idea of thinking of oneself as better than others, and so on.
Without these, Christianity is a brutalizing ideology. This is why elitism—a disposition and relationality of superiority, condescension, and entitlement by social elites—is so abhorrent for the Christian. Its foundation is exclusion on the implicit (and sometimes explicit) view that people are not equal in love and dignity before God. Thus, by its very nature, elitism is exploitative. So far as I can tell, elitism for believers is despicable and utterly anathema to the gospel they cherish.
When populism becomes a cultural egalitarianism, there is no incentive and no encouragement to excellence. This too is to be bemoaned.
there is an unavoidable tension between pursuing excellence and the social consequences of its achievement; between leadership and an elitism that all too often comes with it.
how will Christians think about power? What kind of power will Christians exercise? How will Christians, individually and institutionally, relate to the range of powers that operate in the world?
contemporary Christian understandings of power and politics are a very large part of what has made contemporary Christianity in America appalling, irrelevant, and ineffective—part and parcel of the worst elements of our late-modern culture today, rather than a healthy alternative to it.
the antidote to “seizing power” in a new way is a better understanding of faithful presence.
The failure to encourage excellence in vocation in our time has fostered a culture of mediocrity in so many areas of vocation.
theology moves in the opposite direction of social theory, but neither oblivious nor without reference to its insights.
The new creation he speaks of is a reference to the kingdom of God working in us and in the world; a different people and an alternative culture that is, nevertheless, integrated within the present culture. Whatever its larger influence in the world may be, a culture that is genuinely alternative cannot emerge without faithful presence in all areas of life.
as Christians seek to fulfill the creation mandate, perhaps the central factor determining the effectiveness and the outcome of their engagement with the world is the dynamic of power.
Christians have failed to understand the nature of the world they want to change and failed even more to understand how it actually changes. Even if they did, Christians in America are not anywhere close to being in a position to do anything about it.
the amount of law that exists in any society is always inversely related to the coherence and stability of its common culture: law increases as cultural consensus decreases.
For politics to be about more than power, it depends on a realm that is independent of the political sphere. It depends on moral criteria, institutionalized and practiced in the social order, that are autonomous from the realm of politics.
no group in American society has done more to politicize values over the last half century, and therefore undermine their renewal, than Christians—both on the Right (since the early 1980s) and on the Left (during the 1960s and 1970s). Both sides are implicated and remain implicated today.
the consequence of the whole-hearted and uncritical embrace of politics by Christians has been, in effect, to reduce Christian faith to a political ideology and various Christian denominations and para-church organizations to special interest groups.
politics can also be a way of saying, in effect, that the problems should be solved by others besides myself and by institutions other than the church.
key leaders and factions within American Christianity have cultivated collective identities that are constituted in distinct ways by a sense of injury to the faith and to America itself.
an identity rooted in resentment and hostility is an inherently weak identity precisely because it is established negatively, by accentuating the boundaries between insiders and outsiders and the wrongs done by those outsiders.
rather than being defined by its cultural achievements, its intellectual and artistic vitality, its service to the needs of others, Christianity is defined to the outside world by its rhetoric of resentment and the ambitions of a will in opposition to others.
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it creates a dense fog through which it is difficult to recognize each other as fellow human beings and impossible to recognize the good that still is in the world.
in the name of resisting the internal deterioration of faith and the corruption of the world around them, many Christians—and Christian conservatives most significantly—unwittingly embrace some of the most corrosive aspects of the cultural disintegration they decry.
even voluntary organizations protect their organizational interests against the interests and needs of the very members they are supposed to serve.7
Even the weak possess the power to challenge, subvert, destabilize, and oppose. It may not be easy and it may even be costly, but the power to act is always present within the relations of power itself.
the moral life and everyday social practices of the church are also far too entwined with the prevailing normative assumptions of American culture. Courtship and marriage, the formation and education of children, the mutual relationships and obligations between the individual and community, vocation, leadership, consumption, leisure, “retirement” and the use of time in the final chapters of life—on these and other matters, Christianity has uncritically assimilated to the dominant ways of life in a manner dubious at the least. Even more, these assimilations arguably compromise the fundamental integrity of its witness to the world.
it would be salutary for the church and its leadership to remain silent for a season until it learns how to engage politics and even talk politics in ways that are non-Nietzschean.
To decouple the public from the political will open up other options for engaging the world and addressing its problems in ways that do not require the state, the law, or a political party.
pluralism creates social conditions in which God is no longer an inevitability. 4 While it is possible to believe in God, one has to work much harder at it because the framework of belief is no longer present to sustain it. The presumption of God and of his active presence in the world cannot be easily sustained because the most important symbols of social, economic, political, and aesthetic life no longer point to him. God is simply less obvious than he once was, and for most no longer obvious at all—quite the opposite.
the grammar of Christian faith has become more strange and arcane, less natural and more foreign, spoken awkwardly if at all. To be sure, “God-talk” is certainly possible within the framework of the church, but outside religious community it has little or no resonance at all.
Even for ordinary people, belief requires a conscious awareness and a deliberateness that is unfamiliar to past generations. As the structures of belief have weakened, so has the self-assurance of belief. There is little if anything one can take for granted about the faith any longer.
we have no capacity to determine whether the interpretations we produce or the stories we tell or the decisions we make are right or good. Nor do we have any way to determine whether any choice we make will make any difference. Thus, in the contemporary world we have the capacity to question everything but little ability to affirm anything beyond our own personal whims and possessive interests.
IF SINCERITY WERE THE same thing as faithfulness, then all would be well, for Christians, as a rule, are nothing if not sincere—not least in their desire to be “faithful in their own generation.”
By misreading the nature of the times and by focusing so much energy and resources on politics, those who have claimed the mantle of leadership have fixed attention on secondary and tertiary problems and false solutions. By admonishing Christian lay people for not, in effect, being Christian enough, they shift responsibility for their own failures onto those that they lead.
St. Paul describes the mature Christian in his letter to the new believers in Colossae as those who would be “filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God” (Col. 1:9–10).
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1Healthy formation is impossible without a healthy culture embedded within the warp and woof of community.
Community is no longer “natural” under the conditions of late modernity, and so it will require an intentionality that is unfamiliar and perhaps uncomfortable to most Christians and most churches.
the vision of shalom. It is a vision of order and harmony, fruitfulness and abundance, wholeness, beauty, joy, and well-being. For the Christian, this was God’s intention in creation and it is his promise for the new heaven and the new earth.
qualities nonbelievers possess as well as the accomplishments they achieve may not be righteous in an eschatological sense, but they should be celebrated all the same because they are gifts of God’s grace.
In the classical Christian view, the goodness of creation is fundamentally and ubiquitously marred by sin but it is not negated by sin. It may be fractured, incomplete, and corrupted, but his goodness remains in it. The gifts of God’s grace are spread abundantly among the just and unjust in ways that support and enhance the lives of all.
If there are benevolent consequences of our engagement with the world, in other words, it is precisely because it is not rooted in a desire to change the world for the better but rather because it is an expression of a desire to honor the creator of all goodness, beauty, and truth, a manifestation of our loving obedience to God, and a fulfillment of God’s command to love our neighbor.
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1. As Peter Brown put it, it was through paideia that power was “rendered dignified” and “naturalized”; in a word, legitimated. Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 39–40.