Tearing Down the Walls

There’s too much going on in the culture at large, both good and bad, for us to sit on our hands and pretend as if it doesn’t matter.

I originally meant to post this a few weeks ago, hence to the reference to the “recent” L’Abri conference. Apologies for any confusion.

This past weekend was the L’Abri conference in St. Louis. I had the pleasure of attending last year’s conference up in Minnesota, and it was quite refreshing and challenging to be around Christians who don’t feel threatened by popular culture, but rather, feel that a proactive interaction with it is intrinsic to the faith. (Which is quite the oppposite to what most people think is the Church’s response to the “secular” world.)

And, if this recent Christianity Today article is any indication, it’s a trend that’s even spreading through the hallowed, ivy-encrusted walls of Christian higher education.

This practice [creating programming around the insistence that Billboard charts, box office hits, and indie bands are full of meaning and ought to be taken seriously] stands in stark contrast to historic evangelical attitudes, which have attempted to solve the problem of evil with a fortress mentality. Retreat as a means of preserving holiness became the modus operandi of Christian colleges and universities in the wake of the 1925 Scopes trial, a single event that symbolized the defeat of traditional fundamentalism by a new wave of intellectual modernism. Following the Scopes verdict, which allowed public schools to include evolution in their curricula, North American higher education experienced a dramatic schism.

Some schools with origins in a Christian worldview, such as Harvard and Yale, continued embracing the direction in which science was moving and thus became “secular.” Other schools, lacking the resources to grapple with the challenge of modernism, clung desperately to their roots and built ideological walls to preserve them. In many cases, these institutions — what we know today as evangelical colleges — have remained in hiding, distinguishing themselves from their “secular” counterparts by emphasizing personal piety, evangelism, and a disdain for involvement in “the world.”

In his seminal essay, “The Mission of the Christian College at the End of the Twentieth Century,” Nicholas Wolterstorff (a former Calvin professor who now teaches at Yale) describes this phenomenon: “From the cultural heritage of the past and the cultural accomplishments of the present they carefully picked and chose, lifting out what was judged safe and placing the rest under lock and key. They sought to quarantine and inoculate their students against the cultural developments of the day.”

I’ve personally seen how much this approach has hindered Christianity and damaged people’s lives. These people have grown up in bubbles; secure little places where “the world” (whatever the heck that is) is held at arm’s length and interacted with with only the greatest of concern and disdain. Which is all fine and dandy until those people actually have to leave that bubble and enter real life, with all of its complications, ambiguities, and uncertainties, things that can’t always be answered or explained by the handy little codes and regulations with which they’ve grown up.

Unable to deal with that assault, their “pious” lives implode and they’re worse off than before. That, or they live careful, straightlaced lives that are characterized by repression and guilt. Another byproduct of this approach is the embrace of a Christian subculture that, in reality, is often nothing more than a poor, Christian-ized copy of whatever is currently cool in the secular realm.

As the article points out:

This approach, often called the entertainment model, frequently leads to the illusion that it is preferable for Christians to appropriate popular culture’s style while condemning its actual, intrinsic substance — producing believers who are “of the world, but not in it.” Craig Detweiler, a communications professor at Biola University in southern California and author of A Matrix of Meanings: Finding God in Pop Culture, witnesses the effect of this legacy in his students and calls it “a schizophrenic bind.”

“I think [they] have been trained with their mind to resist all things outside of faith and to be highly skeptical of culture,” Detweiler says. “Their brains say, don’t listen to it, don’t like it, don’t dignify it. But their feet, their ears, and their hearts betray them. What they’ve been taught and what they are experiencing are two different things. It’s their heart waging against their mind.”

Now, at Christian colleges and universities across North America, this model is imploding, and hearts and minds are being unified. Evangelicals are finding that it is difficult to separate oneself from “the world” in this era. But they are also learning a greater truth: the arguments behind the fortress mentality were flawed to begin with.

All I can say is that it’s about freakin’ time. There’s too much going on in the culture at large, both good and bad, for us to sit on our hands and pretend as if it doesn’t matter, it’s all a product of hell, it’s a stumbling block, etc.

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