Culture, Fluency, and Power

Andy Crouch's book Culture Making, animated an interesting idea.  Cultural fluency = Power.  He recounts his one and only trip to court (an experience I too can only relate to based on one encounter).  The baliff, judge, attorneys and other denizens of Courtlandia passed through its hallways and infrastructure with familiar ease.  But he (and I) found himself exhausted and powerless.  Cultural fluency makes some things possible and some things impossible just as language fluency empowers or frustrates.

As we seek to influence culture broadly speaking, our ability to speak and think with fluency into the details of culture will impact our power in that culture - our power to interpret and to contribute to the formation of that world.  I suspect that just like language, the development of fluency requires exertion and purpose.  We don't just wake up one morning speaking Tajik.  Nor do I wake up in the morning able to influence any of the myriad of arts that impact how my teenagers dress, what the listen to, and how they interpret the world.

So as I have been writing in these "pages" in the last few weeks, this idea of the Church engaging with culture is going to require us to choose with some wisdom what fluency to develop and then to concentrate our energies to develop the ability to exercise the power of that fluency toward an intentional change.  In other words, we are going to have to choose where and how to have power.  That is not typically a word used in Churchlandia.

We will not be able to make cultural impact from without.  We need to move in. We will need to find cultural guides to orient and train us.  But detached commentary - I hate what texting is doing to our teenagers' social skills - is as powerless as my untrained visit to the courtroom.  We must engage in the places where culture is is made.

Capitalism, Culture, Justice...

Michael Porter, the nearly iconic management guru, has written a new article on the future of capitalism.  He argues that we have demonized companies and that as a result we don't let them do what companies do best:  Optimize the use of scarce resources.  Then he argues that companies' actions in the area of social responsibility (e.g. Starbucks Fair Trade coffee bean sourcing policy) only redistributes the wealth from the sale of beans; it does not create more or newer or better use of the resources.  It is a call to a thing he calls "shared value creation."  The shared value is something that is optimized when companies and society engage.

One could look at Acts 2 for a concept of Shared Value. 

To my mind, this is an area that thoughtful Christians should engage.  What does shared value look like?  What is a biblical view of corporate engagement and corporate responsibility?  How can we move beyond token social sensitivity?  How can we use businesses to do what businesses do best in order to optimize the "talents" God has given us?  Should the church really treat business as something foreign, only speaking into the lives of individual workers. or does it have something to say about corporations?

Philip Griffin's March sermon on the relationship between employers and employees is also very helpful when thinking on this topic. In this talk, Philip's emphasis is on the sum of individual righteousness adding together one-soul-at-a-time to build better culture. It may be helpful to hold this in healthy tension with James Davidson Hunter's book, To Change the World.

In this book, Hunter argues that the Church must engage in the elite circles where culture is made if the Church as any hope of impacting culture.  He mentions the cities, universities, and the arts as the key places the Church has missed its calling.  Having just read the Porter article, I wonder if corporations should be added to the list.

I am now reading Tim Kellar's book, Generous Justice. The book is really about how to engage with the word's most challenging problems of the poor, widowed, vulnerable, and oppressed.  (If you are concerned about the issues of relativism and morality, you need to read the chapter on "Empty Concepts.")  About 2/3rds of the way through the book, Kellar writes these words:

Abraham Kuyper's "sphere of sovereignty" can be of some help.  Kuyper was both a Christian minister and the prime minister of the Netherlands at the turn of the twentieth century.  As both a theologian and a politician, he was able to reflect on the respective roles of church, state, and voluntary associations.  Kuyper concluded that the institutional church's mission is to evangelize and nurture believers in Christian community.  As it does this work, it produces people who engage in art, science, education, journalism, filmmaking, business, in distinctive ways as believers in Christ.  The church, in this view, produces individuals who change society, but the local congregation should not itself engage in these enterprises.  Kuyper distinguished between the institutional church -- the congregation meeting under its leaders -- and the "organic" church, which consists of all Christians, functioning in the world as individuals and through various agencies and voluntary organizations.

I continue to read and wrestle with these questions.  As I write these words, I am also reading Andy Crouch's Culture Making.  In the opening chapters he suggests that culture is the activity of making interpreting meaning from our world, but even as culture interprets it becomes part of the world itself.   Concepts worth pondering.

Back to work.