A Special Diet

It is rather rare that Christians speak of culture and when they do, one often wishes they would not. Many – if not most – Christians seem to know of only two forms of culture: the worldly culture of sex, drugs, violence, video games, and depressing movies and the Christian Culture which they have carefully culled of its worldly elements. Thus, Christian Culture is like culture proper, but much less, having removed miscreant elements such as expletives, narcotics, pornography, and abortion entirely while slashing the remaining artifacts down to their purely Christian components. Thus, Christians enjoy music, literature, dancing, movies, and talk shows, but only that which have been expurgated of their sinful extra-Christian facets. Christians may engage in sex and violence, but less of it and some Christians are allowed by their denomination to drink alcohol, but not to the point where one begins to enjoy it. Of course, very few Christians consistently adhere to these restrictions, but most would, I think, agree with the principle behind them. Much like the FDA, the Christian community inspects and certifies our cultural fare, and places the sinful parts under the ban. In order to be a good Christian (I suppose there are some), one must be willing to live within limits, enjoying only those elements of culture pre-approved for Christian consumption.

One may find this sort of restoration by negation practiced in the modern (and many a historical) Christian community to be aesthetically unpleasant, but what if the result is true virtue? After all, many a person has made a diet of far less palatable cuisine through gradual acclimation. Perhaps Christian Culture is like a strict vegan diet – a healthful lifestyle made possible by eliminating the tasty parts.

We must admit, as well, that the tasty parts of modern culture make up a rather evil stew, one it would seem sensible to give up entirely. If the vegan wishes to be no part of putrid feed lots and heartless mass slaughter houses, we can understand his objection even if in the bargain, he must give up the occasional Delmonico. Who could fault the Christian, then, for conscientiously abstaining from sampling the more innocuous end of the extra-Christian smorgasbord for fear that in the process she will become complicit in the whole mess. Better to be a teetotaler than a drunk, particularly given the clear scriptural injunctions to purity and holiness.

The rabbis of Jesus’ day followed this line of thinking. They had taken great pains over many years to build what they considered an impenetrable hedge around the Torah (the law). This hedge consisted of additional rules built around the edges of the law which held its adherents to a stricter standard than the law itself. Thus, the hedge functioned like the shoulder of a highway, or a security fence around a swimming pool, providing a safety margin between the individual and the danger of lawbreaking. They reasoned that if their hedge laws were placed far enough back from the sharp edge of the Torah, their offenses would be only misdemeanor.

Islam does something similar. It takes the hazy moral sentiments of Jesus and puts them into concrete action through the five Islamic pillars. Following Jesus seems a hopelessly ambiguous affair, but reciting the Shahadah, praying at five daily intervals, giving one fortieth of one’s possessions, observing Ramadan, and pilgrimaging to Mecca are duties in which one is clearly faithful or delinquent.

Broken Christian Culture

Many Christians seem perpetually engaged in this domestic dispute, skirmishing over bits of territory and points of order. Can Christians drink? What sex can or can’t a Christian have? Should Christians use birth control? Should Christian women wear pants? In short, what is inside the line of Christian propriety and what is outside? The frame of the entire argument is that of legalism and libertarianism – how much liberty is allowed the Christian before she begins to fall over the edge into lawbreaking? It is an intramural debate. The non-Christian world does not care, and why should it? Why waste time listening to a people whose spiritual and emotional energy is spent squabbling about limits only to have the majority of professing believers walk over those limits at the first opportunity? It is as though Christians gain an inner satisfaction from recording their position on an issue knowing all the while that it will be roundly ignored in practice.

Furthermore, even those cultural artifacts which have been certified as solidly within the lines of Christian permissibility bear a faint odor – the glue and formica smell of artificiality. Very few even within the Christian community would claim that Christian music is better as music or that Christian books are better as literature. They are not better or more beautiful, but rather safer. One might argue that a safer and cleaner environment offers the opportunity for even greater enjoyments since the fear of contamination is absent, but this line of reasoning only works to a point. The park is preferable to the dump for a Sunday afternoon, but if even the park (with it’s duck droppings, litter, and fungi) is found unsuitable, then one must move indoors and begin a progression of cleanliness and artificiality culminating in the sanitarium. As with the surfaces in a hospital, one must be willing to give up the aged patina of the genuine article to avoid its susceptibility to staining and bacterial infection.

Perhaps this explains the tendency of even those Christians who have remained faithfully quarantined from the broader culture to fall ill with it’s maladies. It is as if a lack of fresh air and sunshine have weakened the immune system to the point where common ailments such as marital squabbles and teenage rebellion metastasize into life-threatening conditions.

And so Christian Culture, prior to explicating the evils of the world, must first explain its own failures: how it is that a people who are supposedly set apart and holy can be so petty, shallow, quarrelsome, and obnoxious? This is not even to mention Christian Culture’s failure to live by its own higher standards in the areas that the rest of culture finds permissible.

Cultural Standards

All of this presents a perplexing dilemma. Today’s Christian Culture is formulated out of a belief in moral and spiritual absolutes – that it is possible to form judgements as to the goodness or badness of our actions and our creations. but somehow the pursuit of this absolute standard has caused a sort of evil to emerge – that of hypocrisy and artificiality. Why might this be? I believe that the answer lies in the fact that the Christian community has, like the rest of culture, failed to trace its standards all the way to their source.

Many would object, at this point, that it is meaningless to speak of cultural standards at all. Each culture has its own standards and one standard is no better than another. The problem with Christian Culture, as they see it, is this very dogmatism, causing Christians to adopt a “holier than thou” attitude toward others. If we could only accept people and cultures as they are without feeling like we have to pass judgement, we could build a diverse global community consisting of many cultures who appreciate and respect each other’s differences. When we see that ours is not the only way, they reason, we open our mind to knowledge and our hearts to others.

It is a beautiful sentiment. So beautiful that one feels impolite in pointing out that inclusiveness and cultural tolerance is a modern western ideal which we would have to impose upon most other world cultures. But assuming one could and assuming doing so would not undermine the very idea of a diverse global community, the self-proclaimed relativist may contend that each new cultural context requires a different moral response and therefore cultural morality is not a fixed point. In the jungles of Bolivia, marital fidelity may mean something different than it does in Brooklyn. What this person means is that the same underlying principles of conduct must be applied differently in different contexts, but this serves only to reinforce the notion that the principles themselves are fixed and inviolable. It would be relativistic to say that in some cultures hate rather than love forms the basis of familial relationships; to say that love demands different things in different contexts merely affirms love as an absolute moral imperative. The larger and more universal the moral truth, the more universally and therefore contextually it must be applied. Thus, “Thou shalt not kill” may be applied in fewer contexts than “Love your neighbor as yourself” inasmuch as the former is a subset of the latter. The fact that a principle can be referenced from a broad range of diverse circumstances proves its independence of these circumstances just as the referencability of a mathematical constant displays its superiority over the point from which it is referenced.

For the relativist to say that we simply cannot know (and therefore cannot judge) the rightness or wrongness of another culture falls into the same conundrum. She is simply placing the moral imperative to understand a situation thoroughly before passing judgement over and above other moral imperatives. She may be right or wrong in doing so, but she is not relativistic.

We have not made much progress. It is easy to show that each culture (even the tolerant one) holds its standards to be truth but much more difficult to decide between the truth claims. To do this, we must swim upstream, past the shallow cultural platitudes to the foundational elements which undergird all cultures. For the purposes of this discussion, we don’t have to decide on exactly what those elements are, but merely acknowledge the possibility (indeed the necessity) of their existence.

Nested Truth

In order to deduce the possibility of foundational truths, one need merely affirm two simple ideas, which are each as natural to us as breathing: In the first place, it takes no great flight of deductive reason to observe that something cannot be contradictory to itself even if logic is frequently employed (this is perhaps logic’s primary occupation) to show how something that appears contradictory is not. The second idea is perhaps even more primal although less self-explanatory. It is the idea that truth is nested, like Russian dolls, such that some truths are only a small part of other truths while these partial truths may themselves contain other truths within themselves. It is on this little idea, unpretentious, unassuming, and largely unexamined, that the whole of human knowledge depends. Even the radical reductionism of the Cogito Ergo Sum (“I think therefore I am”) assumes not only that thinking may be nested within being, but that the nesting tells us something – that it branches in both directions opening up both smaller and larger dolls as we unfold the mystery of existence. In other words, knowledge depends not only on organization (giving truths a category), but on hierarchy (relating the categories of truth to one another in ascending and descending progressions).

One sees this little idea at work constantly in the natural sciences. By the standards of science, one has not found a new plant or a new idea until one has defined it’s placement within the hierarchy. At this time, physicists are attempting to reconcile General Relativity with Quantum Theory in order to form a layer of knowledge further up the hierarchy than we have yet been able to reach. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the naturalist studies the flight pattern of a dragonfly or the muscular structure of an elephant, gathering sense data in order to inform our conceptual models. The nesting of knowledge does not necessarily progress from smaller to larger, but from less fundamental (and more phenomenological) to more. Thus, the study of natural phenomena help us formulate scientific laws which we then use to explicate other phenomena. Sometimes, as in theoretical physics, the phenomena demonstrating a law are quite sparse. Much of our knowledge of the universe is a projection of the human intellect using the apparatus of mathematics from the barest modicum of empirical phenomena.

Philosophers, anthropologists, theologians, psychologists – they too reach for the nesting doll “therefore” in constructing their theories, formulating their axioms, and explaining their findings. It is important to note that knowledge is always constructed either up or down, never sideways – at least not for long. Inference requires hierarchy. If we find two truths in parallel, our means of relating them to each other is either to place one truth beneath the other or to place both truths beneath another, larger truth. Truths cannot be side by side unless they have the same parent.

One may object that we are very far from reconciling all of our various schools of thought. After all, aren’t theology and physics studying vastly different subject matter – so different, in fact, as to be incompatible? This may be, but incompatibility proves only that one is true and the other is not or that we do not yet have sufficient knowledge to bridge the gap. The behavior of subatomic particles and the behavior of galaxies moving at the speed of light may appear to operate according to different physical laws, but that merely proves that our understanding of the laws is flawed and partial, not the impossibility of one day constructing a theoretical bridge. If a bridge really is impossible between two truths, then we are left with an irrational world, for reality cannot contradict itself.

All of our knowing, then, depends on the ordering of our discoveries along a hierarchy, and unless truth at its core is self-contradictory, following this hierarchy upwards must lead us to fundamental truths. As I said, it is not important at this stage to say what this truth might be. Perhaps it is love. Perhaps it is string theory. It does not matter to us now. It does not matter now, either, whether the fundamental truths are actually god, gods, or even The almighty, personal God of Judeo-Christianity. What is important to see is that each culture must trace it’s truths upward, opening up one Matryoshka doll after another, if it is to have truth at all.

Christian Relativists

If one grants that truths are nested and must culminate in something absolute, then it is only a small step to see that truths lower in the hierarchy are relative to truths higher up just as a child cannot come into existence without a parent. One could say that affirming a truth as absolute (or more absolute) necessarily relativizes truths below it. If Einstein is absolutely right, then Newton must be only relatively right. Our difficulty is that it is not always clear whether the chicken is absolute rather than the egg.

This difficulty causes us to place the locus of absolutism too far down the hierarchy of truths. We may promote the moral axiom of self-control to a place of absolute supremacy but this requires the demoting of other truths. Thus for a man to deem his own utter self-mastery an absolute virtue, he must give short shrift to such quaint truisms as “love that is not shown is worse than hate” and look with scorn on the weakness displayed when Jesus wept. If the biologist believes that the atom is fundamental, then the organ is relative. For a time, scientists believed that time was absolute, forming a substrate onto which the relativity of matter broke like waves. Now we are not so sure.

Christianity is based on the belief that a personal, creating God is the one absolute at the center of existence where all the chains of Russian dolls culminate. However, Christians in practice are just as prone as others to place the locus of absolutism further down the hierarchy, placing even God in the relative position. Thus, Christians in the south a hundred and fifty years ago mistook an economic system – their way of life – for an absolute and ran roughshod over the very image of God dressed in different skin – fomenting evil in their attempts to do good.

A Musical Culture

Our cultural standards are not arbitrary or relative, and they lead us by a progression of inferences toward some form of absolute. Our understanding of this absolute may require tightly-prescribed cultural parameters or it may indicate that the whole of human culture is irrelevant. The Christian position, which affirms this absolute as the personal God who is the creator of all things, is shockingly expansive in its approval of all elements of human culture even as is it is tightly prescriptive in the manner culture is practiced. Much of the damage caused by well-meaning Christians is done by being tightly prescriptive in the elements of culture while being expansive in the manner the remaining elements are implemented. Thus, a song is acceptable because of it’s explicitly Christian message even if it is implemented poorly.

If God is indeed the originator of all of existence and all we see is a dependent extrapolation of his independent being, then all of existence (all elements of culture) must be good – they must be worth preserving. This seems an outlandish claim, for one’s mind immediately jumps to all of the elements of culture which seem impossible to fit into a Christian framework. How are we to reconcile what we know about God with child molestation and racial genocide, with obscenities claiming to be art? Perhaps the Eastern religions can explain away these things as an optical illusion, but Christianity teaches that evil is real and must be dealt with. So real, in fact, that the only way it could be expunged from the lives and hearts of His followers was for God to die in the person of His Son. In the pages of Genesis, evil is even shown to take physical form in the person of the devil. In what sense, then, can we say that all of culture is affirmed by God?

The answer has to do with the character of good and evil – their substance, consistency, and relationship to one another. For one will find as often as one looks at the matter that you cannot find evil in isolation – it is always something good twisted. One cannot even imagine the evil of child molestation apart from the good of human sexuality and even racial genocide would be impossible without the goods of diversity, passion, and human industry. It requires creativity, imagination, and sometimes great technical skill to create an obscenity. In order to practice evil, a man must employ the instruments of good improperly; there are no instruments of pure evil. Even the devil is but a fallen angel. As C.S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity:

Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is goodness spoiled. And there must be something first before it can be spoiled. We call sadism a sexual perversion; but you must first have the idea of a normal sexuality before you can talk of its being perverted; and you can see which is the perversion, because you can explain the perverted from the normal, and cannot explain the normal from the perverted.

If this is so, then we cannot get to a perfect, un-fallen world by mere subtraction. We cannot simply remove all the bad things because bad is not a thing at all but something good which been taken out of context. Thus, things we think of as intrinsically good (like sexuality) can be taken out of proper context to form evil and even things we think of as intrinsically evil (like death) are shown to be the soil in which good grows. Good is stronger than evil. It is more substantial, more real, closer to God, who is reality itself.

Lewis writes earlier in the same book:

Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the ‘right’ notes and the ‘wrong’ ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.

Our culture may now be making a tremendous racket by playing the notes at the wrong times, in the wrong combinations, and in the wrong way. However, to make music again, we cannot simply memorize a set of notes or remove the notes that sound bad. We must learn to play. We must become musicians. Certainly, for a time, for the young or immature, we may prescribe the notes and guard young hands from venturing onto the black keys too soon, but that is with the intent that the whole instrument should be one day be played, in full and in harmony. For a time, we may tell our little children to stay away from fire, but there is a day also in which we must teach them to cook.

Put another way, the Christian’s stance toward culture is that of a farmer. There may be no animal, plant or substance which is altogether inappropriate, but its placement is crucial. Weeds in the meadow are healthy, but they shall not be allowed in the garden. Deer in the forest are beautiful, but they cannot eat from the stables. The trouble we are now in and the reason so-called Christian Culture suffers many of the same disfunction’s as it’s secular counterparts is that we have lost this farmers sensibility for appropriateness and place.

We have been conditioned to think this whole conversation is about legalism and libertarianism, and I’m afraid that by bringing up the Pharisees earlier on, I am implicit in the error. However, the frame is misleading. The danger of excluding a part of our culture that is good (although perverted) is not merely that it creates a law that leads us away from grace (although that is a grave danger). The real danger is that we will have removed a part of God’s image and with it truths that he would have us learn and share. In a fallen world, amputation is sometimes necessary to prevent gangrene from spreading – “It is better to enter life crippled or maimed…” – but even better to set the twisted limb in proper orientation to the body, the body in proper orientation to the spirit and the spirit in proper orientation to the one who made every last Matryoshka doll. In short, the Christian’s orientation towards culture must be that of restoration – of redemption rather than separation, of listening. Listening amid the wreckage and confusion of a culture gone mad for the haunting and sacred music that the madness still makes.