It’ll make me sad if you didn’t notice I’ve been absent without leave. (And an extra lump of shame on me since I’m not even through my first year back.) But I’ve been busy. Specifically, I’ve been traveling, first to California for a conference and then to Leipzig, Germany, where I’m teaching a class for Abilene Christian University. Leading up to the conference was spent writing a few papers and prepping for this class I was commandeered at the last minute to teach, and the time since being here has been spent actually prepping for this class I’m supposed to be teaching, traveling around Europe (before the end of the summer, I’ll have visited Berlin, Munich, Wittenberg, Nuremberg, Dresden, Saxon Switzerland, Prague, Salzburg, Vienna, and the great city of Budapest), and learning how to say in clunky German, “Please, no sauerkraut.”
While I plan to excuse myself for the remainder of the summer, I did want to drop in and share a little from the class I’ve been teaching. It’s titled “Christianity and Culture” and was requested, among other things, to give special attention to German culture as it relates to the Christian faith. This means, with subjects as broad as Christianity and culture, I shoehorn a few references to Martin Luther and Johann Sebastian Bach, and then I get to talk about whatever I think is interesting. For the June section of the class, we talked about art, literature, music, movies, the internet, social media, dating, sex, parenthood, postmodernism, the theory of relativity, healthcare, abortion, the imago Dei, technology, economics, enchantment, capitalism, Marxism, vocation, and the future.
The July class just began their term, which we started with a discussion of H. Richard Niebuhr’s 1951 classic, Christ and Culture. For those who haven’t gotten around to reading it, the book offers a typology for understanding different Christian postures toward culture: Christ against Culture, Christ of Culture, Christ above Culture, Christ in paradox with Culture, and Christ the Transformer of Culture. While theologians are inclined to be charitable to H. Richard Niebuhr, who they generally like better than his more famous brother, Reinhold Niebuhr, they have, to put it mildly, been unimpressed with H. Richard’s proposal.
While the book deserves a fuller summary and analysis than I can offer here, I want to gesture at something of a retrieval or defense of Christ and Culture—much of which came out in the discussion with my students who intuited many of the criticisms that theologians have levied over the decades. Famously, Niebuhr associates the two extreme categories “Christ against Culture” and “Christ of Culture” with Mennonites and with mainline Protestants, respectively. The connection is fairly obvious: some Mennonites (particularly the Old Order Mennonites, who are much like the Amish) eschew many modern conveniences embraced by contemporary society; conversely, mainline Protestants (like Episcopalians or Methodists) are often the first to adopt trends in the broader culture. But, the critique goes, this is far too simplistic! No group falls squarely into any of the five categories—not even the Mennonites or Mainline Churches. Mennonites, for example, are very much indebted to a certain culture, namely a Swiss-German agrarian culture of the 18th century; moreover, they do adopt some modern technologies and, even more so, must rely on the dominant American culture that surrounds them. Separating out an unadulterated “Christ” or Christianity and a culture and matching them to one of Niebuhr’s descriptions is simply an impossible task.
Is this Niebuhr’s goal, though? I think not—or, at least, that’s what I argued to my students. To my mind, Christ and Culture wants us to see two things: (1) the variety of postures we can take up in relating our faith to the world, and (2) these postures can dominate our lives. In the first case, it is clearly true that a Christian denomination or a Christian individual can manifest different ways of being in the world, in one situation embracing cultural norms and in another recognizing a real “paradox” for faithful living. In the second case, certain postures or combinations of postures can come to define our life in the world and even—and this is what I take to be Niebuhr’s primary insight—overwhelm the other appropriate postures. The problem is not that Mennonites are “against culture” or that Aquinas viewed the Church as “above Culture,” as such, but that they postured themselves in these ways in circumstances when another posture was called for.
It also came out in class discussion with my June class that Gen-Z doesn’t watch good movies. Obviously, given this tragic news, I pivoted my syllabus to include as many classic films as I reasonably could. (The July class has asked that I do the same for them, despite my warning that these movies take longer to watch than the readings they would be replacing.) For the class, we frame these movies as intersecting with Christianity in a variety of ways, for which I offer my own typology: movies about the Bible or the Church, movies with explicit religious themes, movies with implicit religious themes, and movies that are beautiful for the sake of beauty. And in our discussion of that second category—movies with explicit religious themes—I began to see the connection to Niebuhr’s thought.
A notable subgroup of those movies are made by and for evangelicals. And while I myself am an evangelical, I imagine if Niebuhr were to publish a second edition of his book today, Evangelicals would take centerstage for the “Christ against Culture” chapter. Of course, in many ways, they reflect a “Christ of Culture” mentality if the culture we’re talking about is Republicans or the American South, but even more, their religion is defined by an ever-growing self-alienation from the wider culture. Restaurants, bookstores, TV shows, movies, novels, music, comedians, social media apps, states—all self-contained, directed inward, for just this group. And in many cases, I’d think that’s fine. One of the nice things about having a group is doing stuff with and for that group. (It would be weird if America tried to market their 4th of July celebrations to a Singapore audience.) But, again, the problem occurs when that “Christ against Culture” posture comes up too much and in situations where it is not fitting. That is, there is a problem when evangelicals try to make art that fails to incorporate the aesthetic insights of the culture—or, put even more straightforward: when they make bad movies.
Christians, called as we are to be in the world but not of the world, are accordingly called to see what is good in the world—the wildflowers of God’s creation that have grown up outside of the Church—and to seize it and to baptize it. They are called to hold up what is lovely. Only in that way can they, in Christ, be transformers of culture.