Christianity and Culture

In "Keeping Current With The Culture," Bill White says

How many of these terms can you identify? Metrosexual. Bennifer. Blogging. G-Unit. Is it hard to stay on top of the constant stream of culture swirling around you? (Metrosexual: a heterosexual who embraces much of homosexual culture; popularized by the wildly successful TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Bennifer: the movie star couple Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. Blogging: a Blog is a web log (an online journal); blogging is using your online journal for the purposes of criticism, which then has extensive influence because web search engines link to them. G-Unit: The band of top-selling rapper 50 Cent.)

If we are to be like the men of Issachar "who understood the times and knew what Israel should do" (1 Chronicles 12:32), we need to study the culture. Here are a few pointers on how to catch the culture in order to bridge the gap from the unchanging gospel to the contemporary world.

The idea seems to be that culture is bad or denigrating to the word of God and that all culture is popular culture. As the subtitle to Mr. White's piece allows, this is "How to study the contemporary world without being shaped by it." The suggestion is that Mr. White is not part of the contemporary world.

Mr White offers four strategies for studying contemporary culture but not being shaped by it.

Listen to Non-Christian Radio
Watch Commercials
Study Their Bible (e.g. Entertainment Weekly)
Find a Culture Coach (e.g. a 'non-Christian,' or what he calls 'Normal People')

I hate to break it to Mr. White, but culture is more than popular and it can't simply be reduced to something bad and impure. Mr. White, whether he knows it or not, participates in a subculture--not even a subculture in the US, a fairly dominant culture in fact. Understanding what it means to be an evangelical Christian is perhaps the first sign that one is operating within this cultural matrix.

To quote The Interpretation of Cultures, by the late Clifford Geertz, an anthropologists that made his living studying culture, "culture consists of socially established structures of meaning" that makes members' actions intelligible to those participating in that (sub)culture.

So, here is another way of seeing Mr. White's actions.

Mr. White participates in a subculture, or a structure of meaning, in which it is intelligible for fellow members (particularly those engaging in preacherly discourse) to understand their actions as outside culture.

I would argue that Mr. White is not literally getting outside culture. I mean, if he were outside culture, then no one could understand what he means. He would be unintelligible to fellow preachers and to me--his words would be akin to a strange language or dialect of clicks and grunts that make no sense. But since he makes sense to us and to evangelical preachers around the world, we can see that Mr. White is participating in a culture.

In drawing a clear boundary between Christians on the one hand and non-Christians (or 'Normal People') on the other hand, Mr. White is asserting a division between inside and outside. This set of actions helps define the cultural identity community in which Mr. White participates in relation to Others--namely popculture. In his discourse, then, we see that popculture is a figure of difference and Otherness against which Mr. White organizes himself and speaks for/with a community of evangelical preachers. Mr. White is not outside culture. Rather, he is performing a cultural script that makes a lot of sense to evangelical preachers.