Center for Faith & Culture

And The Survey Says

An NBC News poll reached my desk today that has the news media abuzz.  This poll had the highest number of responses that NBC has ever received with a research question.  The question: "Should we keep the words "in God we trust" on our money and "under God" in our Pledge of Allegiance?  The American people affirmed with a resounding 86% positive response that we should keep references to God in both our pledge and on our money.

The overwhelmingly positive response to this poll pleases me.  At the same time, however, I stop and pause at another question.  That is, why are we as a culture questioning societal references to God in the first place? 

I guess I grew up in another time and place.  I didn't live in Mayberry, but I wasn't far from such a place.  We stood and recited the Pledge of Allegiance with hand over heart every morning at school.  Then the elementary school principal offered a prayer for the day over the intercom system just before making mundane announcements like what we were having for lunch and how we needed to remember to play fair on the playground at recess - or else.  We never knew what the "or else" meant, but we didn't want to find out the hard way!  Just about everybody attended one of the half dozen churches in the area; those who didn't attend respected those of us who did.

Now that I think about it, the Judeo-Christian tradition of ethics and moral values served as an underpinning of our community life.  We welcomed God as a reference on our money and in our national pledge.  We proudly displayed the Ten Commandments in public buildings because we knew those directives offered not only good spiritual advice but also civil order for our community.  Most of us didn't practice stealing or murder and didn't approve of those we heard news reports from faraway places who did.

As I said, that was another time and place.  Things have changed in today's society.  I now take my truck keys with me when I go into the store, lock the doors, and turn on the alarm.  I also lock my house doors and turn on the alarm at night.  The Judeo-Christian tradition of ethics and moral values no longer serves as a solid underpinning of our community life.  We've taken down the Ten Commandments from our public buildings and wonder why we're celebrating the 10^th anniversary of the Columbine School shootings.  Columbine is not an isolated event.  Reports of public shootings of innocent people hit the news waves nearly every week these days.  One week last month we had two such events in the same week.

I wouldn't say that the results of the NBC News poll signal a sweeping return to God as the center of our cultural life.  I would say, however, that with so many social indicators pointing in the wrong direction people are aware of the need for some sort of return to God.  By indicators pointing in the wrong direction I'm thinking not only of the random shootings of innocent people but also increasing instances of child abuse, child abandonment, random street violence, drive-by shootings, gang violence, suicide, illegal drug usage, and divorce rates.

Most of us can look back over the changes that have happened to our culture in our brief lifetimes and see a radical transformation just over the past 30-40 years.  The changes happen so slowly on a day-to-day basis that we hardly notice what is happening.  Then we hear reports of a nativity scene being removed from public property or the end of the calendar year being referred to as the Holiday Season rather than Christmas.  It's then that we see reminders that our cultural worldview and value systems are changing.

What is culture anyway?  Culture is the soil in which we are all planted the day we begin life on this earth.  It is as much a part of our lives as the air we breathe.  Christopher Dawson, a noted intellectual historian, says, "A social culture is an organized way of life which is based on a common tradition and conditioned by a common environment. . . . It is clear that a common way of life involves a common view of life, common standards of behavior and common standards of value."¹  We receive cultural values from every sight, sound, and smell that comes to us from the earliest age.  These cultural values become the standards by which we place our price tags on everything in our world.  Kenneth Myers asks,

What sort of being is a culture?  It's not a person.  It's not even an institution, like the church or the state or the family.  It is instead a dynamic pattern, an ever-changing matrix of objects, artifacts, sounds, institutions, philosophies, fashions, enthusiasms, myths, prejudices, relationships, attitudes, tastes, rituals, habits, colors, and loves, all embodied in individual people, in groups and collectives and associations of people (many of whom do not know they are associated), in books, in buildings, in the use of time and space, in wars, in jokes, and in food.²

Neither Satan nor humanity designed culture.  God Himself designed culture for our good intentions.  He placed Adam and Eve together in a social bond and gave them the directive to re-create.  In the Garden of Eden culture and worship of God went hand in hand.  They were two sides of human expression.  All that humanity did was in loving obedience to God.³  Only after the fall did culture become separate from worship and a tool in the hands of Satan to keep humanity from true relationship with God.

Is culture, then, to blame for all the sin and problems of society today?  No.  Culture, in and of itself, is value-neutral.  It is the particular positions that a culture takes that create a problem. 

Who sets the standards for a particular culture?  That's a hard question to answer.  Nobody and everybody.  When we study culture in its total context, we are impressed that it is the result of billions of choices, separate choices by millions of people.  Rarely is the condition of a particular culture the product of deliberate decision, either by society itself or by individuals such as social engineers wearing white lab coats and thick glasses.  Cultural development flows naturally, not artificially.⁴ 

William Bennett, former United States secretary of education, comments, "Our common culture is not something manufactured by the upper stratum of society in the elegant salons of Washington, New York, or Cambridge.  Rather it embodies truths that most Americans can recognize and examine for themselves.  These truths are passed down from generation to generation, transmitted in the family, in the classroom, and in our churches and synagogues."⁵ 

I might add that popular culture today is taking fewer cues from tradition, family, and church, and more cues from media and peers.  So the answer to our question of who sets cultural standards is nobody in particular, but everybody in general by the decisions we make on a daily basis.

Information is always coming to us from different cultural influences.  We hear from the culture of our nationality, the popular culture of the media, the Christian culture of our church, and a host of others.  They all offer suggestions on what to eat, how to dress, how to fix our hair, how to speak, how to be entertained, and every other choice we make in life. 

But more important, they suggest how we should think.  As Kenneth Myers puts it, "Popular culture's greatest influence is in the way it shapes how we think and feel (more than what we think and feel) and how we think and feel about thinking and feeling."⁶  And it all happens so unconsciously.

Then, one day we wake up and realize we don't live in Mayberry anymore.  That's an important realization.  Many people realize that something is happening to us as a society.  They just don't know exactly how or why.

That's what I want you to think about this month.  Analyze your own culture - the one you live and work in everyday.  What does it value?  Who does it reward?  Why?  What is its worldview?  How are its values changing?  What examples can you give that its values are changing?  What does your culture teach you?  What does it not teach anymore?  How does it want you to think and feel?

Go through the next couple of days asking yourself these questions about your culture.  Then go to the Discussion Board and report your discoveries.  You might be surprised at what you learn.  And the survey says - you're living in a different world.

Endnotes

1  William J. Bennett, The De-Valuing Of America:  The Fight For Our Culture And Our Children (New York: Summit Books, 1992), 25.

2  Kenneth A. Myers, All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes.  (Wheaton,Ill.: Crossway Books, 1989), 34.

3  Ibid, 40-42.

4  Ibid, 31.

5  Bennett, 34.

6  Myers, xiii.