Cultural suffocation

The application of religion's ultimate insights to specific situations is, of course, a tremendously difficult task. There are no blueprints, no simple rules to go by. Christianity does not present...a tool kit of easy-to-use rules and precepts by which problems can be solved. The doctrines are not bound up in a simple list of "do's" and "don'ts" somewhat in the style of a book of etiquette...But it does offer a frame of reference, a universe view, which instead of giving peace of mind easy and success...often breaches the barricade of self-assurance, focuses on difficulties, and erases naive hopes of...progress ever onward, ever upward. Harold L. Johnson, Harvard Business Review, 1957.

How do we avoid cultural suffocation?

Am I making too much of this? Am I correct in suggesting that there are areas of our life in the Canadian culture that need a significant overhaul, if Christian teaching is to be taken seriously, but we just can’t see them?

i. When I was lecturing at the Univ. of British Columbia, I had to be careful how I talked about the management topics with which I was dealing, as overt reference to religion is not acceptable in our public universities, whereas at privately-governed Trinity Western I had the academic freedom to say what the motivations were for my personal values and principles.

Therefore, when I talked about my personal views, the most I would say is something like this: “I draw my management values from my Judeo-Christian heritage, which emphasizes the right of every person to be treated with equal dignity and respect.”

In my student evaluations for the course, one student wrote, “I wish all the Christian professors at UBC had the courage of Prof. Sutherland.”

My reaction was, “Courage? That scant reference took courage? Are my Christian UBC colleagues seen as that timid or uncreative as they ply their trade on public campuses?”

ii. On another occasion, I was doing research on a Christian view of labour relations. I wrote to approximately fifty Canadian denominations and church-related bodies asking for anything they had by way of policies, sermons, or rules of thumb that they could send me. I received less than ten responses, most of them to apologize for the lack of study that they had given to this important area. The Canadian Council of Churches admitted that much work needed to be done on the topic and wished me Godspeed in doing so.

iii. When BC teachers struck in Abbotsford, a troubled teacher went to her pastor and asked if he would be willing to conduct a class on the subject of labour relations because the strike was becoming divisive in the church. He responded, “There is no Christian view on the topic.”

iv. I was Dean of Business & Economics at Trinity Western Univ. The bulk of my research and publishing focused on the importance of integrating our faith with economic life. And yet, when one of the university’s student recruiters was at a Christian high school and was asked, “What difference does being a Christian really make to the study of the various majors?” her response was, “Well, for some majors—Business, for instance—obviously nothing.”

In fact, I faced open opposition from some of my new TWU colleagues when I first arrived on the campus in 1978 as the second full-time Business professor. More than one said that management studies simply did not belong at that august, faith-based, liberal arts institution because one could not be a faithful Christian and be successful in business. And is it any wonder, when one of our board members, a highly successful and very rich businessperson who donated extensively to missionary work as well as the university, said to me, “It’s nice to have a Christian liberal arts university, but in business we have secular minds.”

v. I was part of a panel of Christian municipal politicians who were asked what difference being a Christian made to the way they did politics in a pluralistic system. The other Christian school trustee on the panel, who later became mayor of her community, offered this: “One of our employees was ill and I visited her in the hospital.”

vi. In the last dispute between the provincial government and the teachers, trustees were asked to vote in favour of a lockout of our employees as a way of bringing home to them how serious the government was in its bargaining stance. I voted against the lockout. I explained that my faith taught me that using innocent third parties—in this case students, their families, and non-teaching employees—as pawns in a power struggle was, by definition, unjust. Therefore, whatever merits the teachers’ demands or the government’s position had (and each side did have legitimate concerns), I could not resort to injustice to achieve them.

I urged my colleagues to offer a non-exploitative alternate means to address the impasse. I personally favour what’s called final offer arbitration. But my fellow trustees, including the three professing Christian ones, were unmoved by these arguments.

[By the way, the separation of church and state, and the extent to which we should look to government to address moral issues, are topics in which I have considerable interest, and have blogged extensively on them if you’re interested.]

Now understand that the people to whom I am referring in these illustrations are all fine fellow Christians, stalwart in their faith, pillars in their local churches. If asked, they would doubtless all say that they want to make a difference in their respective spheres of influence.

But sisters and brothers, are certain areas of our culture impervious to new, faith-driven perspectives? Do we lack confidence to apply our beliefs in places that others have not thought to do so? Is moral courage the problem? Or are we sufficiently complacent that we don’t even recognize the need?

If your answer to the above questions is No, that still leaves us with the challenge of finding a way to address cultural suffocation. Let’s go back to that quote I gave you in my last post from sociologist Margaret Anderson:

[M]embers of a given society seldom question the culture of which they are a part, unless for some reason they become outsiders or establish some critical distance from the usual cultural expectations.

“Some reason for becoming outsiders.” What did St. Paul say to us about just that subject in Romans 2: Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Another translation puts the verse this way: Don't let the world around you squeeze you into its mold.

The world’s mold is culture. And we are to avoid letting culture tell us when faith is relevant and when it isn’t.

But even if we agree on the WHY, there is still the issue of the HOW.

Margaret Anderson gives us a good clue here as well when she talks about establishing some critical distance from the usual cultural expectations. How does one do that when we are so immersed in our culture?

Well that’s where the teaching of Scripture and the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit come in. God takes a bird’s-eye view of culture, whereas we are stuck with the worm’s-eye perspective. To get out of this cultural ocean in which we swim, we have to climb onto the life raft of biblical principles, values, and norms. British writer Harry Blamires called this, “developing a Christian mind.”

But this is very hard to do. Biblical principles with which we can evaluate life seldom come in nice, neat packages. This is particularly true of the Old Testament, which is where most of the ethical teaching in Scripture is found.

Because I have a seminary degree in Old Testament and I have spent a good deal of my time in those scriptures looking at the principles and ethics of our faith. I want to turn for a moment to the opening five books of the Less Recent Testament, often called the Pentateuch or the Law of Moses.

The Israelites of the period depicted in these books were not a people with a unique culture. A collection of small families related by blood (Jacob and his twelve sons) when they departed Canaan for Egypt in Gen. 46 and following, they fled Egypt under Moses, returning to the Promised Land one or a few centuries later (depending on whose dating you accept) a much larger group, in most ways culturally indistinguishable from the surrounding ancient near eastern peoples. It is not likely that all (or even most) of them were monotheistic (believers in one God), and few would have had much idea of how being followers of Yahweh (or Jehovah) would make them in any way unique.

What we see in the latter four books of the Pentateuch is God carving out of the prevailing culture a people for himself. Having taken the Israelites out of Egypt, he now proceeded to take Egypt out of the Israelites.

God accomplished this through the towering presence of Moses, along with brother Aaron and sister Miriam; the promulgation of the Ten Commandments as that which would distinguish their worldview from that of other peoples; the establishment of a system of worship and the rituals that would be associated with its practice; and a series of laws and institutions to regulate everyday life. In most cases, these laws focused on the external--appearance, appropriate relationships, even allowable foods and textiles.

While in many cases mystifying to us now, beneath these seemingly strange and even arbitrary directions and restrictions one can discern a principled foundation, even though its moral logic was not spelled out in so many words. In no particular order, such principles included:

• The sanctity of the family unit as the building block of society.
• A culture characterized by justice (distributive, restorative, and retributive) and the rule of law.
• Letting punishment fit the crime (which is what eye for an eye really means).
• Life balance.
• Personal integrity.
• A mutually dependent, one could say organic, relationship among God’s people (vine and branches).
• Wholesome relationships; i.e. a fellow Israelite was never to be exploited in any fashion as a means of achieving self-gratification--whether sexually, economically, or politically.
• Loving others as one would love oneself.
• Worship that was sincere, not ritualistic or perfunctory.

But what the Israelites were taught, by and large, were not the principles but only the applications of those principles, often quite limited in the extent of their application, and typically contrasting with surrounding peoples and their practices that were hostile to the new culture that God wanted to establish and then develop. God was blasting, in a pretty hard-hitting way, through the enculturation that characterized his people.

Some later biblical teachers (including the prophets Isaiah and Hosea, Jesus, and the apostle Paul) affirmed that it was these underlying principles, and a commitment to them, that endure over time rather than merely legalistic adherence to ritualistic practice.

There’s the challenge. Scholars must work hard to discern the principled foundations of Scripture, along with their accompanying values, ethics, and objectives—all of which transcend time and culture and underlie what are mostly presented in Scripture as applications to cultures far away and long ago.

Teachers and preachers must take these findings and work them routinely into their sermons and lectures. Students of the Word of God, which includes all of us here, must creatively apply these principles to cultural situations in which we find ourselves, even if that means that some things we think are desirable, accept as inevitable, or practice routinely must change. This is when we really find out that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts J.

It won’t be easy. I was talking to my wife’s cousin who is part of the large, now quite modernized Swiss Mennonite population of Waterloo County, ON. I told him that the also large and modern Russian Mennonite population of Abbotsford tends to vote for conservative, free market political parties. Sharon’s cousin was gobsmacked. He said that the Mennonites there mostly support the NDP because of their commitment to social justice.

In other words, equally fair-minded Christians using the same scriptures and sharing the same heritage of faith may come to very different conclusions. We do, as St. Paul said, see through a glass darkly. But we must put in the effort and leave the enlightenment to the Holy Spirit. We have our job to do, and He has His.

Of worms, birds, and the Bible

Always remember, a bird’s eye view is way different from a worm’s eye view, when in fact, they’re looking at the exact same thing.- Paula Peralejo

Worms have a tough life. They are the furthest thing from strong, long-lived, or attractive. Their niche is a crap pile, a robin's beak, a fishing hook, or in the case of Mark 9:44, Hell, where the worm never dies. Worms are a metaphor for low-life humans. And their perspective--the worm's eye view-- is decried as too minuscule to be of much use (that's assuming that worms even have eyes). 

Yet from the point of development of a faith-infused worldview, we all start off as worms. We are products of a particular upbringing, set of friends, sub-culture, and culture that to the largest extent makes us what we are. We learn enduring norms, values, and perspectives at a very young age, and typically make adjustments only to the extent that we want to stay in, or move to, another societal niche. It's probably fair to say that we are immersed in our culture. And normally, we like it like that.

Hence my reference to humans as worms-- not to all those negative aspects of worms mentioned above, but strictly to their perspective. If we are immersed in culture, we have a hard time taking an arm's-length look at it--a bird's eye view as it were--and assessing its goals, values, and norms from an objective perspective.

I preached on this issue shortly before departing our home of 35 years--Abbotsford BC--for Ontari-ari-ario in 2015. Here are some excerpts and how I arrive at the issue of worldview.

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I’m convinced that we Christians are so deeply immersed in our culture that a large part of the potential impact of biblical teaching for living is lost on us, not because we don’t take the teaching seriously, but because we tend to filter the teaching through our culture, rather than filtering our culture through the Scriptures. This can distort, at times, the meaning of the teaching, and more often its applicability to cultural issues that confront us.

There are two important questions here that I want to explore with you:

1    What do I mean about being deeply immersed in our culture?

2    If my premise is correct, what resources are available to Christians to address the challenge of cultural suffocation?

A. What is culture and why is it important?

American writer Walter Lipmann usefully defines culture this way:

Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.

Sociologist Margaret Anderson goes on to show how important culture is:

Because culture is learned, members of a given society seldom question the culture of which they are a part, unless for some reason they become outsiders or establish some critical distance from the usual cultural expectations. People engage unthinkingly in hundreds of specifically cultural practices every day; culture makes these practices seem "normal." If you suddenly stopped participating in your culture and questioned each belief and every behavior, you would soon find yourself feeling detached and perhaps a little disoriented.

While all of this is true, it is not necessarily something we are conscious of. We are born into a culture and are immersed in it for all or much of our lives. Most of our priorities, values, and habits are to the largest degree dictated by our culture without our even thinking about it. This applies to the culture of the city, province or country we grow up in, our faith or ethnic tradition, organizations for which we might work, and of course, our family upbringing.

Can I give any examples of how culture shapes our judgment? Here’s a cute one from the writings of Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, the man who discovered mainland America and described the inhabitants he found there:

The manner of their living is very barbarous, because they do not eat at fixed times, but as often as they please.

But to bring things much more into the present--the economic trauma going on right now in Greece--consider this ingrained Greek cultural perspective, which they defend against a Canadian alternative point of view:

The Greek island of Zakynthos in the Ionian Sea is famous for its sublime beaches and sparkling turquoise waters. It is also where one of the most brazen scams to plunder Greece’s beleaguered treasury took place.

In a notorious scheme that may provide guidance to eurocrats trying to figure out whether this country deserves another big bailout, as many as 700 people of the island’s 35,000 residents falsely claimed that they were blind. They were rewarded with more than 350 euros a month in compensation.

The scheme, which operated for years, was finally shut down in 2011 after one of the “blind” was said to have been caught driving his Porsche. Among the cheats receiving the monthly stipend, which cost the government several million euros a year, were a taxi driver and a hairdresser.

One of the local residents rationalized the practice this way:

“I know from a good friend of mine who grew up in Canada before returning to Greece that your country was built on the rules of Her Majesty. Every country has its own mentality and it has never been the same as that here. What we have is the mentality that rules are made to be broken.”

The Greek gentleman I quoted simply accepts that culture rules, and that another point of view is fine for you but not for me. This is easy to see and criticize in the Greeks. But what of ourselves?

I’m the furthest thing from a sociologist, but from what I’ve seen from literature on the topic, cultural priorities, perspectives and values—what we often refer to as a worldview—are remarkably persistent. Transforming culture takes tremendous effort, whether it’s the micro-culture of a business organization or a church, or the macro-culture of a country or ethnic group.

Some very different kinds of people feel exactly the same way about the impact of culture and why it is necessary to recognize the stranglehold it can put on priorities and values, not to mention potential change.

Feminist and human rights activist Charlotte Bunch says:

Sexual, racial, gender violence and other forms of discrimination and violence in a culture cannot be eliminated without changing culture.

The estimable Pope Francis, in recent comments concerning the environment, observed as follows:

We should not think that political efforts or the force of law will be sufficient to prevent actions which affect the environment because, when the culture itself is corrupt and objective truth and universally valid principles are no longer upheld, then laws can only be seen as arbitrary impositions or obstacles to be avoided (sounds just like Greece).

Canadian political commentator Mark Steyn also recognizes the impact of culture:

You can't have a conservative government in a liberal culture. Schools in the U.S. are liberal and churches are liberal. The hip, groovy elite is liberal. Makers of movies and pop songs are liberal. Liberalism fills the air; it is the climate….Liberals expend tremendous effort changing the culture. Conservatives expend tremendous effort changing elected officials every other November--and then are surprised that it doesn't make much difference.

And, finally, my old cartoon favourite--Pogo the Possum, wading through a grossly polluted swamp--who observed that humanity is its own worst enemy with his famous quote, “We have met the enemy, and he is us”—‘he’ and ‘us’ referring to our very own culture.

That’s not to say that there are not many good things about our Canadian culture. Canada has once again been recognized as the most admired nation on earth for a reason. It’s a genuine privilege to live in this great land despite politicians, particularly those in the Opposition, constantly trying to convince us that we’re going to Hell in a hand basket, and that the only way to make life palatable again is to vote for them. Of course, our present government said exactly the same thing when it was in opposition. 

But what does a good living situation breed in its residents? —Complacency. If we conclude that things are great and that very little needs to be changed, then very little will change, and our worldview will carry on in an untroubled fashion. St. Paul's admonition (Romans 12:2) that we don't conform to the pattern of the world we experience will lose any punch; in fact, we probably won't really understand at all what he could possibly mean.

But there is a way to prevent that from happening. I'll discuss this next.

The times they are a'changin'...and a'changin'...and a'changin'

 What's so scary about free speech on campus?

"Back in the 1960s, a free-speech movement swept North American campuses and launched a

new era of social and political ferment. It was a heady, liberating time – time for dissent, challenge and dangerous ideas. It was perhaps the counterculture's finest hour. Today, university campuses are where free speech goes to die. Undesirable speakers are cancelled or shut down and unpopular opinions are suppressed. The inheritors of the counterculture believe that free expression is like kryptonite – so deadly that it will cause lethal damage unless it is contained or neutralized." – Margaret Wente, Globe & Mail, November 14, 2017

I was a university student from 1965-70. At that time, the desire for freely expressing

opinions,and promoting them in new ways, was part and parcel of the university ethos, even at relatively peaceful Queen's U. The times, the folk singers warbled, were a'changing (https://www.youtube.com/watchv=e7qQ6_RV4VQ).

Thus we saw an outpouring of student vilification re the war in Vietnam and racism, strong promotion of the new feminism, and an awakening concern with the environment. Throw in the sexual revolution, consumer rights, and a strong sense of egalitarianism and its concomitant suspicion of all authority, and you've pretty much captured how my culture attempted to shape me as an impressionable young person. To a large extent it was successful, particularly the belief that all ideas should be on the table and freely debated.

It is particularly in this latter case that I find today's Canadian universities virtually unrecognizable. There was a time when academic freedom was the be-all and end-all in the pursuit of knowledge, and looking for a good debate was akin to a sporting event. Now campuses are characterized by a secular fundamentalism about what is and is not allowable to even discuss, and "safe spaces" for select groups (but definitely not others) is paramount. 

The intellectual ferment that led to the liberation of many previously unacknowledged or suppressed societal segments (e.g., feminists, gays, pacifists, environmentalists) is now squelched in order to protect the psyches of just such people, and the newly suppressed are kept firmly in hand. In some ways we've gone back to the 1950s. But of course I would be vilified in the social media, and possibly expelled from the universities, for saying so.

How culture has changed since my youth is not my main point, however, but a segue to this: Culture is at best a shaky foundation upon which to build a worldview, if one is attempting to live Christianly. As I illustrated above, in many ways university culture has done a one-eighty since my days as a student. Many bedrock beliefs have been discarded. We were absolutely sure of certain truths regarding free speech and fulsome debate then that are no longer accepted. Was the culture right then? Or is it right now? How to decide?

The trouble with living in a post-religious faith culture is that we are bereft of enduring principles and values with which to think through issues of right and wrong. Faith has an absolutism about it that does not fit well in our "that's fine for you but not for me" age. Are we wrong to look to faith for principles, values, and goals that run counter to the prevailing culture?

That's next.