All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Chapter 2
Chapter 2: What Is Culture, That Thou Art Mindful of It? This is not a straight summary; this is a summary with my own inferences and thoughts weaved throughout.
What is culture?
Culture is the human effort to give structure to life. (p. 30) Culture is an abstraction. (p. 30) Culture is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake. (p. 32) Culture is a dynamic pattern. (p. 34) Culture is regarded by Scripture as an extension of creation. (p. 35)
Myers begins this chapter by asking why we should care about culture at all. He quotes C.S. Lewis at length to demonstrate that we must necessarily function in our culture, and so we should do so deliberately. To not consider our surroundings and our choices (that is our culture) is to choose the inferior, because that is humanity’s default.
Then Myers quotes T.S. Eliot at length to demonstrate that culture and religion are inexorably tied; culture is the outworking of religion. He states that culture cannot be preserved without religion (the culture of cathedrals and stained glass is gone because the religion that inspired such has been widely discarded or diluted) and conversely religion cannot be maintained without a culture (faith without works is dead).
Myers next discusses how cultural relativism affects our ability to see and understand culture. In fact, relativism and polytheism is generally the religious belief behind secular culture. It denies, and makes it difficult for even believers to realize that God is a transcendent standard; that God created hierarchies and established orders within creation, allowing us to make distinctions of quality; and that God’s own nature and character reveal truth, goodness, and beauty, meaning these things are not merely matters of individual taste.
Myers moves on to prove that popular culture taken en totality is not a grand conspiracy nor is there any one establishment contriving all cultural matters toward some specific goal; rather, culture is developed and is ever developing based upon billions of individual choices and actions performed by millions of people. We need only concern ourselves with our own actions and choices and matters within our own sphere of sovereignty; there is not a higher body engineering culture, but we all shape — and are shaped by — culture.
Finally, Myers concludes that Scripture tells us to consider our ways, to consider the world around us, and to walk and grow in wisdom. We are not to look for law in the Scripture with regard to the majority of cultural decisions we make, but we are to examine our choices and motivations and make wise choices with the time and circumstances we have been given.
“Popular culture is not a simple, homogeneous abstraction that allows for simple application of Biblical principles. Its challenges and temptations do not confront us like the proverbial harlot whose seductions are clearly to sin, straightforward and simple. It has many dimensions and contours and hidden agendas that require some historical and experiential perspective before we can evaluate it fairly and, having understood it, conduct ourselves in its presence with wisdom.”
“Many of the decisions we make about our involvement in popular culture are not really questions about good and evil. When I decide not to read a certain book [or watch a particular television show, or get onto the computer], I am not necessarily saying that to read it would be a sin. It is much more likely that I believe it to be imprudent to take the time to read that book at this time in my life.” He ends with this application: “We should ‘consider’ the jaded television producer and the screaming fans of Michael Jackson, even as we consider the ant and the lilies of the field.”
Myers is calling for deliberate actions, not habitual actions, and not pious action only. Lewis’ quote fits well here: “If you attempted to suspend your whole intellectual and aesthetic activity, you would only succeed in substituting a worse cultural life for a better.” And Myer’s observation: “This is precisely what many religious people do, which is one of the reasons we have such bad music and ugly architecture in Christian settings.”
