The command to love our neighbor is also an invitation to engage the mind and heart in a transforming vision of life. In this article I want us to take a look at the Christian's responsibility to develop a Christian mind–not only for their benefit, but for the good of their neighbors.
Popular television dramas–in their ongoing attempts to hold and entertain audiences in a highly competitive business–often present life lived at the edge. Hostages are taken by a deranged person while their relatives wait in fear and tension mounts, emergency medical crews struggle to save a flickering life, and lives are shattered by marital infidelity and divorce. What often strikes me about these dramatizations of persons caught in those prime time tensions and tragedies is that they do so with never a reference to God or prayer.
But then sometimes television gives us slices of real life. And things are different. The CBS show, "48 Hours," once featured a series of vignettes from Dallas's Parkland Hospital. Suddenly faith in God was present on prime time TV. A family prayed to the "Great Physician" prior to a relative undergoing hazardous brain surgery, and the relatives of another patient–when given a bleak report on their loved one's condition–said with Christians down through the ages, "She is in the hands of God."
Why the difference? Why is God nowhere to be found on prime time TV dramas, but suddenly present when real people, facing real tragedies, are caught by cameras and microphones? Faith in God is in evidence when real life dramas unfold because Americans indeed are a deeply religious people. Polls continue to disgorge the figures which document the strong religious commitments of the American people. These commitments are not merely to a vague religiosity, but to many of the basic, historic teachings of Christianity. In terms of professed beliefs, 86% of the public believes the Bible to be either the actual, literal or the inspired word of God, 84% believe heaven exists, and 67% believe in the existence of hell. In terms of practice, almost 40% of all Americans attend religious services at least once a week and almost 70% report praying frequently. Religious commitment cuts across education, social class, and age groupings.
But this leaves the question of why God is excluded from TV dramas. Surely the answer lies in the fact that even though most Americans are profoundly religious–even significantly Christian in orientation, there is little Christian influence in American cultural life. As a result, not only TV programming, but also newspaper articles, popular music, movies, the visual arts, and popular literature are marked by a profound secularity in outlook and values. Business, medicine, science, and technology are pursued without reference to God. Similarly, when issues of public policy arise, they are weighed, debated, and decided for the most part without reference to biblical principles and the role of God in the life of nations.
When it comes to the cultural life of the United States–entertainment and politics, business and agriculture, science, education and technology–Christian faith is almost nowhere to be found. The United States is therefore thoroughly secular in the sense that Christianity is simply considered irrelevant to national and cultural life. God is not needed. He can be ignored and no one will miss him.
The end result is that one finds a thoroughly secularized culture in the midst of a predominantly Christian population. The anomaly couldn't be greater. How can this be? The answer is suggested by the title of a lecture I once heard the Christian sociologist, Os Guinness, give: "Fit Bodies, Fat Minds: Why American Christians Don't Think." That title captured an important, but tragic, truth which does much to explain the anomaly of millions of Christians in this nation having little cultural or social impact.
Guinness's title had it right: Many Christians, along with many non-Christians, are taking more seriously the need to eat properly and exercise regularly. There are even Christian books available on fitness and some churches have sponsored highly popular aerobic classes. But the minds of American Christians have grown fat. Today's Christians, for the most part, no longer have a Christian mind with which to understand, critique, and give guidance to Washington, Hollywood, and Wall Street–or Main Street, USA. They have lost the ability to think "Christian-ly." Harry Blamires has described the current state of affairs well:
There is no longer a Christian mind….As a thinking being, the modern Christian has succumbed to secularization. He accepts religion–its morality, its worship, its spiritual culture; but he rejects the religious view of life, the view which sets all earthly issues within the context of the eternal, the view which relates all human problems–social, political, cultural–to the doctrinal foundations of the Christian Faith, the view which sees all things here below in terms of God's supremacy and earth's transitoriness, in terms of Heaven and Hell.
Christians today can think in terms of their faith about spiritual matters as they relate to individuals and small, informal groups. There are terms and categories of thought which provide a framework within which they seek to understand and evaluate. But they stumble and fall, or are simply struck dumb, when called upon or have the opportunity to speak in Christian terms to the worlds of commerce, politics, art, and entertainment. They have lost a Christian mind on matters such as these in the sense that they do not have the terms and categories of thought with which to construct a framework for understanding, analyzing, commenting, evaluating, and recommending courses of action.
So Many Christians, So Little Influence
Why the difference? Why can Christians think as Christians about events dealing with personal, private relationships, but can only think in secular terms when it comes to questions dealing with public, societal relationships? Why is it that Christians have such convictions about how they are supposed to behave with their spouse, but do not relate their convictions in the public sphere to their Christian beliefs? I would suggest that this is due to Christians having adopted an unwarranted, unbiblical religious-secular division. Religion and the rest of culture are seen as distinct worlds that are to be kept in separate, sealed-off compartments of one's life. Religion speaks to the religious dimension of one's life, to the private, "soft" world of individual relationships, values, love, and compassion. It is tolerated and even treated with a certain measure of respect as long as it stays in its assigned sphere. But Christians are discouraged from contributing as Christians to the public, cultural life of American society. They are told to check their religious convictions in at the door through which they go to engage in the cultural, public life of the nation and its communities. They can pick it back up again as they exit.
The tragedy is that the Christian church has to a large degree acquiesced to this division. It has lost both the will and the ability–the concepts, categories, and frameworks–to speak to contemporary cultural issues. If popular culture is to be reformed by a leavening Christian influence, Christians themselves must first be reformed. They need to recapture the vision of a dynamic, culturally relevant faith, and then they must learn to think about culture and the world about them in Christian terms. In the rest of this article I first want to argue at greater length why Christians should seek to influence popular culture, and then I shall explain more fully the meaning of such cultural impact.
Why Is Cultural Impact Important?
Some may question whether it is even important for Christians to recapture a Christian mind and, by using it, to speak to questions and issues of the day. After all, Christianity, as we have already seen in the data, has flourished under such conditions. The gospel is being preached, sinners are being saved, and the healing power of Jesus is mending lives broken by the storms of this world. So what if Christians are ignored by the leaders of American culture? But I would argue that there are three basic reasons why it is unwise and simply wrong for Christians to ignore the process of critical thinking and the development of a Christian mind.
First, developing a Christian mind with which to act in this world is a matter of discipleship and obedience to God. Christ is Lord over all of life, including culture as well as religion. The Dutch statesman and theologian Abraham Kuyper once said that there is not one square inch in the entire creation–whether in politics, business, science, art, literature, about which Christ does not cry out, "This is mine! This too belongs to me!"
This inclusive nature of Christ's lordship is clearly spelled out by the apostle Paul in his letter to the church in Colossae: "He is before all things, and in him all things hold together…, so that in everything he might have supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross" (Col. 1:17-20)."All things" includes all of culture, all of life.
Yet many Christians today act as though Christ were lord only of a narrowly defined religious sphere, leaving the rest of life to be shaped by those who do not know him. Christ is lord when one engages in morning devotions, but the rest of the day is allowed to be directed by a secular mind–and this is not someone else's mind, the "secular humanist" imposing his or her outlook, but the secular mind of the "believer" himself. Jude's warning still applies: "Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt I had to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints" (Jude 3). The "faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints," for which Christians are called to contend, is the full, complete gospel which recognizes Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord over all. To reduce that gospel to something less is to fail in our responsibility to contend for the apostolic faith.
Jesus Christ described his followers as "the salt of the earth," "the light of the world," and as "a city set on a hill," which "cannot be hidden" (Matt. 5:13-16). Clearly, Christ expects his church to be an influence in this world, and not a refuge where people can escape from this world. He did not preach a gospel of withdrawal from a hurting world, nor did he present his kingdom as a quiet place separate and sealed off from the world of his day. Christ himself gave us a clear example of what he expects his followers to do and to be.
The apostle Paul set a clear example for today's Christians when he took the gospel to the leading commercial and cultural centers of his day: Corinth, Ephesus, Athens, and Rome. In Athens he reasoned with Stoic and Epicurean philosophers, quoting their own thinkers and poets. He witnessed before the Roman governors, Antonius Felix, Porcius Festus, and Herod Agrippa, and exercised his right as a Roman citizen to be tried in Rome before Caesar himself. Paul, out of obedience to Christ, struggled for the gospel in the mainstream of his culture.
A second, related reason why it is important that Christians bring a Christian mind to bear on the cultural arena is that it is impossible to live consistent lives of love without doing so. If Christians truly love their neighbors, they will seek both their spiritual and their physical well-being. But when Christians leave culture in the grip of secularized outlooks and values, they are showing a callous disregard, not a concerned love, toward their neighbors. There are young persons in secular colleges and universities today whose faith is being weakened or an already weakened faith is kept from growing, because they are being taught, either explicitly or implicitly, that Christianity is not intellectually respectable and that it cannot stand up to reason or is incompatible with science. There are many people whose faith is being kept from developing because in the novels they read and the movies they see the Christian faith is ignored or ridiculed. In today's popular novels and movies clergymen and other religious people always seem unreasonable, harsh, or bigoted; it is the irreligious characters who are psychologically healthy, reasonable, and understanding. And are Christians simply to ignore those who are being destroyed by the pornography industry and its commercial mixture of sex and violence? Do Christians truly show love to their neighbors when they witness to them in a Sunday afternoon door-to-door canvass, but are nowhere to be found on Monday morning when they face an uncaring governmental bureaucracy or unsafe working conditions at the local factory?
The parable of the Good Samaritan teaches Christians not to pass by the hurt and lonely people of this world, and yet, many of us pass by those who have been hurt by the effects of an increasingly secularized society.
The third reason why Christians need to develop a Christian mind is this: If they do not develop a Christian mind, they will, by default, develop a secular mind. Neutrality is not an option. It is impossible to escape religious presuppositions in education, science, the arts and entertainment: They will either be shaped by truth or the false imaginations of secularism. And we cannot simply criticize the immorality of a "godless culture" while we remain largely godless in our own way of thinking. Christians who attack pornographic materials and yet are unconcerned about helping the unwed mother down the street fail to confront secularism in a convincing, consistent manner.
If we do not begin to think about what we enjoy, believe, value, and experience, not only will we be ineffective in the culture; we will ourselves be secularists, except during those precious hours when we are engaging in "spiritual" activity. So, the titillating pornography which demeans women and makes a mockery of marriage will be enjoyed, supported, and laughed over by Christians and non-Christians alike; Christians as well as unbelievers will rush out to purchase bigger, newer, natural resources-depleting consumer products as soon as, or maybe even before, they can afford it, as a sign that they have achieved success. Christian business people will make decisions based purely on market considerations, without a thought to their impacts on the natural environment or the welfare of workers. This, after all, is what everyone (i.e., non-Christians) are doing; no one expects anything else.
Conclusion
What we need in the church today is not more hit-and-miss protests, while involvement in culture itself is avoided. We must not simply attack the world for being ungodly, when it is believers who are supposed to be "salt and light." Christians ought to shape culture by making movies, not just protesting them. But that means good movies! They have to be realistic, meaningful, and moving, not celluloid "tracts." Christians must not only tell their co-workers, employers, and employees what they are doing wrong; they must provide good examples of what can be done. The New England preacher, Jonathan Edwards, was not only the leader of the Great Awakening, but a leader in science, philosophy, and theology, and was the president of Princeton. The Christian convictions of the 19th century British statesman, William Wilberforce, made him the leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade.
But does one have to be a C. S. Lewis in order to influence the culture? I believe that reformation in our culture will only begin when millions of ordinary Christians become extraordinary Christians, living simply and faithfully before the Lord and their neighbors. One final note of warning ought to be added here. Our task is to be faithful, not to bring about incremental improvements in culture. Our offering to God, out of gratitude for a salvation already accomplished in Christ, is to present our bodies as living sacrifices. It is up to God in his sovereign will to decide what fruit our offering will bear. For only God can change culture, not us. Hebrews 11 speaks of heroes of faith who "conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised…, whose weakness was turned to strength." We can all rejoice when men and women, in faithful obedience, are used by God to achieve much. But Hebrews 11 immediately goes on to describe others who "were tortured and refused to be released," and faced "jeers and flogging while still others were chained and put in prison…." Two different pictures. Their faith was the same and their actions in obedience to God were the same, but God chose to make entirely different uses of their proffered service. It is always this way with faithful Christian living. It is the faithfulness that is important. The results are up to God.
