Living Off Christian Culture: Yes, Christianity Does Make a Difference for Pilots and Architects

When I hear scholars say there is little difference between a secular and a Christian approach to a particular area of the academy, I am often baffled. I recently had that happen this past month with someone at an academic event who mentioned architecture. This person claimed that they thought there would be little difference between a Christian and a secular approach to architecture.

Now, on the basic technical level, I agree. George Marsden wrote about how Christianity might influence a pilot. He noted that we want a pilot landing at O’Hare applying “methodological secularism”: “We hope that he will rely on the radar and not just the Holy Spirit when trying to get to O’Hare.”¹ Yet, Marsden noted, “The pilot who follows the radar and the instrument panel may even sense those tasks differently if she believes she is ultimately dependent on God and that she has spiritual responsibility to her passengers.”²

In this post, I want to point out how Marsden’s latter point applies to whole national cultures and not simply to an individual pilot, architect, or scholar. I contend we underestimate what general Christian cultural standards, and the internalization of those standards, contribute to our approach—even to technical disciplines and professions. I will use the two examples I just mentioned: architecture and aviation.

Atheistic, Communist Architecture

When I lived in Russia at various times in my life, I quickly noticed how a worldview and its associated culture influenced architecture. The Soviets built some of the ugliest, most dehumanizing, and low-quality buildings and cities for a supposedly advanced civilization. The only place they seemed to excel slightly was in beautifying subway stations and building monstrous and imposing government buildings (what are known as the seven sisters). They could undertake great national projects, put a man in space, and build nuclear weapons, but they could not build beautiful buildings for their citizens.

Instead, the most beautiful buildings tended to be associated with its Russian Orthodox and royal past (e.g., St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg, and the Grand Peterhof Palace). Communism thoroughly corrupted the practice of architecture by placing it in service to a narrow ideology. As anyone who has lived in Soviet-era Russian apartment flats can attest, they are dehumanizing in so many ways. One cannot even control one’s own room temperature or hot water.

Communist and post-communist Russians also could not build quality buildings. I remember looking at a new apartment building in Moscow. I could not believe how they could build a new building and make it look like it was already a decade old. The workmanship was horrific. One gets a sense of this contrast when comparing a Finnish and Russian school only nine kilometers apart. One is built to enhance human learning and flourishing, and the other is not.

Not surprisingly, when Russians want quality work, they bring in foreigners. While we lived the in 2001, right in back of our apartment, a school building was being built for the children of Gazprom employees (Gazprom is the largest oil company in Russia). They hired Turks (i.e., theists) to do it. In addition, they did not have regulations regarding working hours, which was a major pain during a hot summer, when we had to leave the windows open. Simply how they treated workers or the surrounding residents showed a lack of respect for human dignity.

Atheistic Communist and Post-Communist Aviation

A second helpful example is Soviet and post-Soviet aviation. During graduate school, I played basketball with a group of men during lunch, many of whom were engineers in the defense industry in Southern California. When I told them I had been doing dissertation research in Russia and Ukraine, they quickly asked me if I had flown Aeroflot. I confessed that I had. They said they would never fly Aeroflot, since it had the worst aviation record in the world. Things have not changed since the mid-90s. Here is what one recent article noted:

Aeroflot – Universally acclaimed as the worst large airline in the world, Aeroflot is the Russian state carrier and the planes are not exactly known as being modern and world-standard. Nobody trusts their official accident statistics either in a country where state media reports cannot be questioned and a flight with a Putin rival on it exploded in mid-air last year. In this worldwide list from AirlinesRatings.com, Aeroflot scored a zero out of 10. In fact, all 6 airlines scoring a zero are Russian ones.

Indeed, when I flew Aeroflot, everyone usually clapped when we landed after a safe flight.

Thus, we need to expand on Marsden’s illustration from a simple individual one to a communal and cultural illustration. It may not only matter whether one’s pilot is a Christian, but it certainly also matters whether one’s culture is formed by a certain kind of Christianity or corrupted by a malformed atheistic ideology. The specific culture influences whether the people who build the airline take safety seriously, whether mechanics take their job seriously, whether safety inspectors have been bribed, or whether expensive parts were substituted for low-quality parts, since the expensive parts could be sold on the black market.

Unless we visit deformed atheistic cultures, we have no idea the extent to which Christianity has influenced our culture in ways we cannot always easily identify. We do not realize how it plays a role in encouraging responsibility, accountability, respect for human life, and respect for the rule of law versus a culture where they skirt quality, lack accountability, and get around regulations and safety checks through bribery.

Most important of all, Russian society, as we see now with the war in Ukraine, places little value on individual human life. As Larry Sidentop demonstrated in his book, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, that kind of value of the person emerges out of Western Christian culture.

Granted, other elements of culture play a role in all of these things beyond Christianity, including economic, psychological, geographic, and other factors. Japan, a majority non-Christian culture, has performed fantastically in these areas for particular reasons unique to its culture.³ We should never claim more for Christianity’s influence than warranted. Joseph Heinrich’s book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, captures some of these other important elements. Still, we should also not forget that we are swimming in a particular culture and influenced by it. We take it for granted.

That includes the cultures we build in higher education as well. Indeed, a colleague recently shared with me how a visiting lecturer spoke highly of our culture at Baylor University, even though she taught at a prestigious R1 university and was not a Christian. She observed that the students demonstrated greater interest in the content, treated fellow questioners better, and overall demonstrated greater interest in the academic process of learning. Sometimes we take our own cultures for granted, and it takes an outsider to point out the differences.

The same is true for technically-oriented disciplines such as architecture and aviation. Too many people, swimming in a culture informed by Christian norms, think the practice of technical disciplines or higher education would not be that different when practiced in a secular culture in which the leaders tried to scrub its culture clean of Christianity. They are deluded.

1. George Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, 2^nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2024), 106.
2. Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship.
3. See also Jon Miller, Mike Wroblewski, and Jaime Villafuerte. Creating a Kaizen Culture (McGraw-Hill Publishing, 2013).