Transforming culture: processes and implications

Transforming Culture

Sherwood Lingenfelter, the anthropolist and author of Transforming Culture, begins with his perspective on culture. He sees culture as "of the world," and therefore basically sinful. His view is in contrast to other scholars who see culture as a neutral tool for spreading God's word. Culture, according to Lingenfelter, is a prison which keeps people from seeing and understanding diversity and blinds them to other ways of thinking and doing things. Culture, in his view, tends to limit the richness of experience. Because we are blinded by the "rightness" of our own cultures, we tend to impose our cultural ideas, attitudes, and customs on other cultures when we bring the gospel to them. Furthermore, we are often unconscious of our cultural assumptions. The author points out that Christ is the only way out of this prison. My own reaction to this is that Christ in consciousness renews and invigorates ideas, values, and attitudes by causing us to question our cultural assumptions.

This reminds me, for example, of an incident that happened to me a few years ago when I moved to an area where there was considerable racism being expressed in the culture. I felt very superior because I was "tolerant" of other races and treated people as individuals, not as stereotypes. One evening there came an unexpected knock at my door. When I opened, it was a black woman with her toddler who was obviously choking on something and unable to breathe. I turned the baby upside down and struck her back sharply and a penny flew out of her mouth! The baby gasped and then cried. But what surprised me was the reaction of the mother. She had been so frightened, that she cried with relief when the baby breathed. When I probed myself as to why I felt surprised by this, I realized that I had been believing (without ever thinking about it consciously) that black people did not love their children as much as white people did. I probably got this idea from my own mother who didn't believe in big families and was quite judgmental about people who had "too many children." Black mothers had bigger families, I thought, and somehow that translated itself into an assumption that they couldn't love them as much because they had so many more.

I was quite humbled by this awakening experience which wrought a small transformation in myself. I saw that I was not immune to racism, for one thing, and I made an effort to stop being so judgmental.

Lingenfelter says God has penned us up in self-created prison cells of culture. I agree that we are in cultural cells whose "windows on reality" keep us from seeing the broader picture, but I don't see the logic that God has imprisoned us in something basically sinful that we have created ourselves. God liberates us from all self-imposed limitations. Other people -- the people around us, the community, and the media create the prison cells through discourse. We don't do it alone. We talk about events, we interpret history among ourselves, share meaning with each other, and pretty soon we believe what we heard and said. Once cultural ideas and myths become embedded in consciousness, they are difficult, if not impossible, to dislodge except through the wholesome influence of Christ. Once this has happened in the individual consciousness, and the individual has been released from some imprisoning idea, then the individual becomes an agent for change in the culture. Agitation for change and reform is usually met with hostility, yes, but the individual awakened by Christ is not able to stop telling the truth. The sin in culture becomes more and more obnoxious.

For example, in popular culture today we have violent video games which are targeted at boys. Video game culture presents a model of manhood that is based on an ugly, hard-edged masculinity where manhood is associated with aggression, violence, and killing. Themes are far more aggressive than on TV. The boys who play these games want desperately to find out what it is to be a man and to feel like "real men." The companies that make the games are peddling (for profit) a distorted message about what it means to be a man. The game itself keeps the players from thinking critically about anything, as they participate in action designed to be visceral and to provide pleasure and fun in violence. Magazines about video games make this clear. Take this ad, for example, describing the graphics in the new edition of Cosmic Carnage: "The effect is similar to watching a movie where the camera zooms in for a close-up catching an R-rated view of that head being ripped from its shoulders." This deliberate corruption of youth is a striking example of what the author describes as "culture inextricably infected by sin" (p. 19).

One way to understand a culture is to look at how it is organized. Social institutions organize themselves in one of four structures (the author refers to them as prototype social games), either individual/individualist, authoritarian/bureaucratic, hierarchical/corporate, or collective/egalitarian. A fifth structure is an intersecting Christian life in which the "pilgrim" participates in one or more of these basic social structures (home, school, work, and church may each be structured differently) but the pilgrim is not controlled by it. As people work and interact within these organizational structures, they develop a cultural bias; that is, they internalize the assumptions and values of that particular structure and develop preferences. One's own culture becomes the only one that does things "right." Christians must guard against this kind of thinking in order to maintain their stance as pilgrims and servants.

A few years back a Congregational church I know lost their minister. A survey was circulated in the congregation asking members to tell what they would like in a new minister. One of the things that came out was that the small congregation, mostly older people, wanted their church to grow. The Board eventually found a minister who promised he could bring in new people. He made good on his promise. In the first eighteen months of his ministry, he increased the church membership from 56 to over 500! But the original members were not happy at all. Their new minister found the new members on the streets and in gangs. The young people he brought into the church brought their street culture with them, at least to some extent, in their manners, dress, and ways of communicating. The 500 new members were much more egalitarian, too, whereas the older members were organized along hierarchical lines. Eventually, the church split. The old members left and formed another church along the old structural lines. Their cultural bias prevented them from adapting to the youth who had been evangelized. And to be fair, the cultural bias of the new younger members, if they were even aware of the conflict, prevented them from making concessions to age.

I know of a Methodist church where growth happened suddenly -- also as a result of getting a new minister. The congregation swelled so much they had to erect a new building, but in that church it worked. The minister established two services, an early service for older members and a later service for younger. There is some cross-over, but not much. At both services the minister gives the same sermon. But at the early service, the congregation sings traditional hymns accompanied by organ music. They dress up in their good clothes. The service itself is conducted in a formal and predictable format (the way it always has been since the church's inception). The minister talks. The congregation listens. The minister gives instructions to stand up, sit down, bow heads, etc. And the congregation obeys. Afterwards, individual members shake hands with the minister and speak a word or two as they go out the door. At the later service, people wear casual clothing. Children are often present, and it's noisier. The congregation sings contemporary worship music accompanied by instruments such as guitar and electric piano. Rock style singers with microphones render contemporary praise songs. Members of the congregation sometimes raise their arms and sway with the music. The minister gives his sermon, perhaps slightly adapted for the younger crowd, and the congregation listens, but members of the congregation also get up and talk as the Spirit moves them. Prayers are frequently led by members of the congregation who also make comments and share spiritual insights of their own. Afterwards, small groups of people gather around the minister to talk. Perhaps the reason this church has survived, while the other one didn't, is because people are not being asked to give up their cultural biases. In neither church, however, was the issue of cultural bias addressed from a Christian pilgrim standpoint which would help the members see what cultural constraints are controlling them and, thus, help them to grow spiritually.

Lingenfelter points out that Christians are supposed to live as pilgrims in this alien world. "Be not conformed to this world" means that while we have to live in it, we do not have to believe in it or be led by it. We cannot free ourselves completely from the influence of culture (we live within it, after all), but we can achieve a high degree of insight about it. We can learn to let our lives be guided by God and thus be free-er than those people whose lives are guided by cultural assumptions, norms, practices, opinions, attitudes, and moral standards. Those people who are influenced and guided by the often conflicting forces of culture, without the mitigating guidance of Christianity, are the most enslaved. Jesus described them as "like sheep not having a shepherd." An extreme example of cultural enslavement is middle-eastern youths who grow up to become suicide bombers. They absorb from their culture the idea that they can be heroes by dying for a just and noble cause. In contrast, pilgrim life, although it takes place in a cultural context, is not culture-driven; it is gospel driven or God-directed.

Lingenfelter shows with a number of examples how the underlying values and assumptions of the social game we are coming from may pose obstacles to evangelizing. Particularly, our assumptions about the value of property which spring directly from our Western culture may hinder us in our relationships with the people we hope to evangelize. He councils us to depend on God for supply, as Jesus directed, and give up cultural pressures to own property, save money, and maintain the social status which goes with them. If we find it terribly difficult to live by the scriptural command to "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you," it is because we have been brainwashed by our culture that it is dangerous to give too much or depend on God for sustenance. Giving does not impoverish us; neither does withholding enrich.

To know this and depend on it can be tremendously freeing, whether practiced at home or abroad in the missionary field. "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning" (James 1:17) is a reassurance that God will, indeed, supply us at all times and in all places with all we need. It is important to remember that supply is not always money. When we place our reliance on God as the source of all good, we are freed from the fear of losing everything, being taken advantage of, being sued, being poverty stricken, etc. And we don't have to spend a lot of time maintaining property, preserving its value, and keeping things running if we don't have it in the first place. Adopt a simple lifestyle! Then, we are free to do the work God calls us to do.

Work and how it is conducted is another area that varies from culture to culture and reflects social structure. The author cites examples in the Bible of each of the four social games. For example, Nehemiah takes on the job of rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem in a culture of work that is organized along hierarchical lines. He plays the "hierarchist game" to get the job done. Jacob and Laban who compete with each other as sheep herders reflects an individualist game. Jacob's youngest son Joseph, on the other hand, works within an authoritarian / bureaucratic structure for Pharoah. In the New Testament we find the disciples organizing themselves after Jesus is gone around egalitarian principles in which unity and collective interests are paramount.

Thus, it follows that Christian missionaries should seek to find out the social game of a new culture and work within it, rather than try to make the culture conform to a social game that the missionary prefers. The Bible does not state one particular social game or world view is better than another. Christians are supposed to be pilgrims and work within the structure that they find. It follows that pilgrims at home, too, (such as teachers and counselors, for example) with missions to accomplish need to recognize and understand the characteristics of whatever social game is being played by the people they hope to help. We aren't supposed to change the social structure. We are supposed to bring Christ Jesus into the mix and let his holy influence accomplish whatever changing needs to be done.

Examples of all four prototype social games are again found in the Bible as underlying structures of family life, marriage, and child-parent relationships. Jesus' family, for example, can be seen as hierarchist/corporate in which the father has authority, family activities are regulated by Jewish law, and the eldest son inherits the estate. Jacob and Esau, another example, show individualist family structures where the two brothers were competitors, as were Jacob and his father-in-law Laban also. There is no single Biblical model for family relationships and no particular family structure is endorsed by God.