How to change culture
“To Change the World” is a composition of three of James Hunter’s essays, so this review is a composite of three interrelated but separate essays.
Essay 1: Christianity and World-Changing
Hunter begins this essay by claiming all American Christian institutions have a mission to change culture, but they have not met their goal. He blames their lack of success on a misunderstanding of the means for cultural change. He highlights two prevalent, and mistaken, models:
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Culture changes “one mind and heart at a time.” (he later calls this ‘populism’). Primacy goes to the transformation of individual intellect in this model.
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Culture changes by manufacturing more culture. Culture here is compared to an object, like an iPhone (though he allows for non-tangible cultural artifacts).
He softens his critique of each by stating that these models have produced good fruit, even if they have not changed America’s culture.
Having established the failure of our existing models, that the prevailing models of cultural change are ubiquitous and mistaken, he sets forth eleven propositions:
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Culture is, first and foremost, a normative order by which we comprehend others, the larger world, and ourselves and through which we individually and collectively order our experience (pg 32).
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Culture is a system of truth claims and moral obligations.
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Culture is a product of history
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Culture is intrinsically dialectical(1).
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Culture is a resource and, as such, a form of power.
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Cultural production and symbolic capital are stratified in a fairly rigid structure of “center” and “periphery”
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Culture is generated within networks(2).
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Culture is neither automonous nor fully coherent. — Here Hunter pivots from axioms about culture to how culture changes
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Cultures change from the top down, rarely if ever from the bottom up.
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Change is typically initiated by elites who are outside of the centermost positions of prestige.
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World-changing is most concentrated when the networks of elites and the institutions they lead overlap.
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Cultures change, but rarely if ever without a fight.
Hunter follows these propositions with a sweeping summary of the history of Christendom in three movements - the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire, the spread of Latin Christian culture through monasticism, and the revolution of Christian power and thought in the Reformation. In each movement he highlights where his propositions illuminate how these cultural revolutions took place and how the prevailing notions fail to explain these movements.
Having established his case, he renders a scathing critique of the Evangelical movement’s cultural influence. He highlights several causes to the decline of Evangelical power in cultural centers - from anti-intellectualism to populism - and proposes that, in its current state, the Christian community is incapable of leading a cultural revolution. He finally eases up with a recognition that the ‘answer’ is not to abandon the populace in favor of elitism; I appreciate his boldness.
The shift he might propose is less radical than his final chapters. If the Evangelical community were to set aside it’s foolish dalliance anti-intellectualism and again value the frontiers of discovery and entrepreneurship, it might one day reclaim a position of cultural power and relevance. To achieve this; however, does not therefore require the Church to abandon the “call to die” (as Bonhoffer put Jesus' invitation), but for the Church to again sponsor and promote the best among us to enter the world at every place of cultural convergence - the premier university, the seats of government, the halls of law, the research laboratories - and to be there a “faithful presence.” I might add that, not only might young Christians rise to these elite positions, but also there could be an effort to influence those existing in these positions to embrace the Church (not Jesus here, as I might say, but more in the culture of the Church as in his exploration of the conversion of Gaulic kings by strategic monks).
I have given many years of my life to embracing the world and being a Christian - to integrate faith with practice. I have a subconscious distrust of clergy, and a love/hate relationship to intellectualism. Also, I’m an enneagram type 5.
Addendum
- [1]From the context, Hunter's point seems to be that culture is not an ephemeral thing, a mist that surrounds us, but that culture also comprises the concrete institutions and processes that manufacture the 'mist.'
- [2]Hunter lambasts the concept that it was the 'great men' who created culture in history. It was the networks these men led and participated in.