Christ & Culture, II
To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy,
and Possibility of Christianity in
the Late Modern World
by James Davison Hunter
Oxford University Press, 2010
(358 pages, $27.95, hardcover)
reviewed by J. Daryl Charles
Three essays form the backbone of this intriguing volume, in which the author, LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory at the University of Virginia, offers a highly provocative critique of Christian faith in contemporary American culture. Hunter’s argument can be summed up in three theses.
Thesis number one, under the rubric “Christianity and World-Changing,” is that while a passion to engage, shape, and change the world for the better seems to be an enduring mark of Christians everywhere, their actual legacy—at least in the American context—leaves much to be desired. Hunter contends that our prevailing ways of thinking about culture and cultural change are fundamentally flawed.
Thesis number two (“Rethinking Power”), decidedly more nuanced than the first, follows: Christians should not concern themselves with holding onto power—read: political power—in the world to enact change. Rather, they should conceptualize issues of public life in a manner that resists the temptation toward politicization and ideological conflict.
Thesis number three (“Toward a New City Commons”) represents Hunter’s “answer” to the dilemma of American Christianity: we should aspire to a theology and practice of “faithful presence” in the world. This strategy and “alternative way” is said to prepare the groundwork for what Hunter describes as “a new city commons.” In this new communal context, Christians will faithfully cultivate, preserve, and make their peace with the necessary tension that arises from both working through cultural institutions (affirmation) and resisting accommodation to the world (antithesis).
(It should be noted that apart from several passing references to John Paul II and one mention of Benedict XVI and Mother Teresa each, Catholic voices are conspicuously absent; Hunter’s analysis is confined to Protestant witness—and Evangelicalism in particular—as it finds expression in American culture.)
Top-Down Change
Parts One, Two, and Three of the volume, accordingly, unpack the three theses in six or seven chapters apiece. In support of his initial thesis, Hunter considers the work of diverse and broadly Evangelical spokespersons, including the late Bill Bright, James Dobson, Christian politician Tom DeLay, and social critics Os Guinness and Don Eberly. A more protracted critique is reserved for Charles Colson and Andy Crouch, given their visibility and the trajectory of their cultural critiques. Despite their varying strategies, these sundry voices, along with the organizations they represent, are thought by Hunter to be united in their basic assumptions about cultural transformation that, in Hunter’s view, are “wholly mistaken” and rooted in a false “idealism.” Even figures as diverse as Princeton professor Robert P. George, John Paul II, Billy Graham, and Mother Teresa are said to mirror elements of this mindset.
Hunter’s objections are anchored in the fundamental conviction that cultures “simply do not change in these [Evangelically conceived] ways.” Hunter challenges several cherished assumptions among Evangelical types—namely, that “real change must proceed individually, one by one”; that “cultural change can be willed into being”; that this change is “democratic,” occurring “from the bottom up among ordinary citizens”; and that, therefore, “you too can be a [William] Wilberforce.”
Hunter is at pains to instruct his readers that culture is complex and undergirded by unspoken assumptions; consequently, it is not subject to change in ways we might wish. Furthermore, institutions and conferred cultural authority exact greater influence in society than ideas alone. Correlatively, cultural life expresses itself in the stratification of “center” and “periphery,” which implies a status structure that simply cannot be willed away or ignored.
J. Daryl Charles is the Acton Institute Affiliated Scholar in Theology & Ethics. He is the author or editor of twenty books, including Retrieving the Natural Law (2008), Natural Law and Religious Freedom (2018), and, most recently, Just War and Christian Traditions (forthcoming). He is also co-editor of Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace: God's Gifts for a Fallen World, Volume 3 (2020). He is a contributing editor to Touchstone.
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more from the online archives
32.2—March/April 2019
Flight from the Absolute: Cynical Observations on the Postmodern West, Volume II by Paul Gosselin by Louis Markos
31.4—July/August 2018
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