Culture is one of those overused words that requires a clear definition to be helpful. Personally, I find one of the most useful definitions comes from H. Richard Niebuhr’s book, Christ and Culture. Every Christian should read Niebuhr’s famous work to help them develop Christian critical thinking about how Christ can and should animate one’s academic subculture. Yet, I also think Niebuhr’s typology is fatally flawed. In this essay, I explain the major reason why, but I also note how his typology can still be transformed to help us think Christianly about our academic subcultures today.
The Basic Flaw
Niebuhr’s definition of culture, derived from the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, is simply this: culture is the secondary environment that humans impose on the natural environment.1 Basically, it is anything that humans created or create (e.g., language, habits, clothing, architecture, governments, etc.). Based on this definition, Niebuhr then uses five categories to delineate the different responses of various Christian groups to culture. The five responses are 1) Christ against culture; 2) Christ of culture; 3) Christ synthesizing culture; 4) Christ and culture in paradox, and 5) Christ transforming culture.
The problem is that “culture” is never monolithic. For example, Niebuhr indicates that the Anabaptists represent the Christ against culture group. Yet, when it comes to a domain such as clothing, no one is against culture (i.e., the human creation of clothing) except those in nudist colonies. For example, the Amish are not against the human creation of clothing; they are against the contemporary fashion subculture but actually accept an older form of fashion subculture.
That is an important nuance that Niebuhr’s typology does not help us address. In reality, Niebuhr was focusing, as too many Christian ethicists tend to do, on politics. He saw the Anabaptists as being against contemporary involvement in politics (although, as John Howard Yoder demonstrated in The Christian Witness to the State, that characterization is not entirely accurate).
Since cultures are not monolithic, different subcultures compete. Think about various philosophical traditions of thought. Niebuhr identifies Thomas Aquinas as synthesizing culture, but the reality is Aquinas synthesized Christian thought only with a particular aspect of Western intellectual subculture (Aristotelian thought) and not Confucian, Hindu, Buddhist, or even Greek hedonistic thought.
A Better Way to Think about Christ and Culture
A better way to think about Christ and Culture is to recognize that we must think about particular human subcultures and not culture as a monolith. For instance, I undertook a qualitative case study during my PhD studies at the University of Southern California of a church called Sanctuary: The Rock and Roll Refuge. Here is a description of the origins of the church from the article I published from this research:
Sanctuary owed its existence to evangelical Christian rock bands, such as Stryper who had embraced heavy metal music and used it both as a medium of entertainment and a witnessing tool at clubs and other concert venues. The evangelistic success of these bands resulted in numerous converts within the heavy metal subculture. However, when attempting to enter traditional churches, the converts complained of being ostracized from local churches whose members criticized their appearance, musical tastes, and behavior. Thus, various band members approached Bob Beeman, an interim pastor at Palm View Assemblies of God Church in Whittier, California about helping the new converts grow in their new faith. Soon he began meeting with both the band members and their fans on Sunday afternoons and in early 1985, Sanctuary, “The Rock and Roll Refuge,” had its first formal meeting with the purpose of “reaching kids on the edge.” This goal involved, according to Sanctuary’s literature, “boldly going where no church has gone before.”
What Sanctuary sought to do was provide a church that would address the needs of people involved within a particular subculture—the heavy metal subculture (which is not monolithic in and of itself, but it does have clear identifiers and demarcations as demonstrated in Deena Weinstein’s Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology).2
It is important to note that the church leaders/members’ engagement with this particular culture was not merely one of Christ accommodating heavy metal culture. They made critical decisions about what they would reject, accept, synthesize, hold in paradox, and transform from this culture.
They rejected the hedonistic, chaotic, or hopeless strands of heavy metal lyrics, but they accepted the music, most forms of dress, and the rituals of the culture (concerts, mosh pits). For example, they accepted heavy metal dress, which included long hair for the men (I was the only male in the church with short hair when I attended), blue jeans, and a black heavy metal t-shirt. Other optional elements included black boots/shoes and jackets, pins or tags, caps with logos, earrings, necklaces, spiked collars and bracelets, rings, dyed hair, and tattoos. I noted:
One member claimed, “Gothics, people who wear black lipstick, black nails, hair, clothes, everything, if some of those walked into a regular church, people would freak out. ‘What is that? Aaah.’ But they are accepted. I think that’s what people want. People want acceptance not based on what they look like or what music they listen to.”
To justify this approach, Interviewees cited Scriptures that emphasized the importance of a person’s heart over his or her appearance. The ideal normative Christian practice, they argued, would be to accept everyone attending the church, no matter what their appearance.
They synthesized Christian messages and symbolism, such as blood and the cross, with heavy metal t-shirts, lyrics, and concert performances. Heavy metal logos had a thick, jagged typeface that signifies energy and power, the colors red and black, and iconography from gothic horror tales or heroic fantasies. The church synthesized this norm by making t-shirts, car window stickers, and dog tags with its logo printed on them. On the logo, the letters comprising “Sanctuary” were thick and jagged, and for the letter T, a Viking sword was used. Below the title, the phrase “The Rock and Roll Refuge” was painted in the same letter.
They held in paradox that one could engage in the mosh pit of a heavy metal concert with the right motives, but then the wrong motives could turn moshing into a problematic activity. Finally, they would transform heavy metal music into thoughtful Christian meditations on death, despair, and meaning. They would also transform it into worship. In addition, they transformed heavy metal concerts into evangelistic outreaches at famous Hollywood clubs. In this respect, Niebuhr’s categories are helpful when thinking about a Christian church interacting with another particular subculture or set of subcultures and not culture as a whole. When understood this way, we find that Sanctuary’s relationship to the heavy metal subculture, like any Christian group’s relationship to a subculture, was complex and involved employing all five of Niebuhr’s approaches.
Christian Professors and Academic Subcultures
I contend that the same is true for a Christian institution, professional society, or scholar and their interaction with the broader higher education, professional, or scholarly subcultures in their lives. Every university, professional society, or academic discipline creates subcultures that can and should be evaluated Christianly. Some elements should be welcomed as expressions of God’s good creation or synthesized with additional redemptive elements to bring forth a flourishing Christian vision. Other parts of these academic sub-cultures may need to be rejected or transformed when thinking in light of the ultimate human culture God wants us to create in light of His Kingdom. For instance, any academic attending an academic conference should try to resist the status-seeking occurring, synthesize the best of what they learn with a Christian approach, and transform a paper presentation into an engaging presentation of learning that hopefully advances human learning and flourishing, and not simply one’s career.
I also want to conclude with one provocative claim. If academics cannot apply all five of Niebuhr’s categories to their institution, their discipline, their discipline’s theories, their professional association, or the terminology used in their field, they likely have not learned how to think critically from a Christian perspective. My posts these past four days have attempted to provide some guidance about how to acquire these skills.
