About Mars Hill AudioKen Myers on Configuring Church and Culture
I. Keeping religion personal
The culture of modernity encourages the assumption that religion is an essentially private matter. Beginning around the time of the Enlightenment, the enemies of Christianity (with the help of some Christians) began to advance the idea that religion was interior and personal, not visible and public. Public life, including government, commerce, science, artistic pursuits, and much of education, could be organized according to principles of unaided reason. Religion was private and subjective. Over time, this viewpoint became the dominant view in the West.
The irony is that most Christians behave as if that Enlightenment view of religion were valid. Consider education. For decades, a secularizing view of education was taking hold of American public schools, and Christians rarely noticed. Ideas about the nature of knowledge and the nature of learning that were quite different from historic Christian thinking were influencing the way teaching was conducted in this country, and Christians (at least, Protestants, both mainline and evangelical) just kept sending their kids to public schools. Only in the 1960s, when school prayer was declared unconstitutional, did Christians suddenly care about public education. That is, only when an explicitly religious issue became obvious did Christians get upset.
The same is true in other areas of life. For centuries, the ideas that science has promoted about the nature of knowledge, the nature of nature, and the nature of human nature have been moving farther and farther away from Christian understanding. For example, science promoted a mechanical model of nature and of human nature that had some significantly dehumanizing consequences. But Christians generally ignored what science was doing, until evolution became a big issue in schools.
In the arts, Christians generally ignored trends for the past 200 years in the arts, and only got upset when Andre Serrano put a crucifix in a vat of urine with National Endowment for the Arts funding or when Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photographs (also NEA-supported) were celebrated. Only when the arts transgress a line toward the explicitly religious or obviously moral do Christians take notice.
Configuring Church and Culture
part II: Dualism in literature, business, and sports