Christ and Culture

A Brief Recap of Three Points

December 29, 2020

I’m a little late on this but a few weeks ago, our church hosted the inaugural discussion in what I hope will be an ongoing series entitled, “Christ and Culture.” This first discussion was about the relationship between Christ and Culture. Pastor Weldon McWilliams IV of Paterson, NJ, and Pastor Baron Wilson of Roanoke, VA, were gracious interlocutors. You can catch it all here.

There’s a lot to unpack, and I’m not going to do it here. I do want to respond to three things that came up during our 2 hours together.

First, in order to properly assess any aspect of human culture (artifacts, movements, philosophies, songs, art forms, movies, etc.), Christians may not start and stay in the realm of human culture. To offer a moral evaluation of culture is to necessarily step outside of it. That’s impossible to do because every criteria we can adopt to judge culture is, well, human. The only transcendent word is the Word of God. Scripture is the all-seeing microscope under which all must be viewed. It alone judges all. It is judged by none. To believe this doesn’t make me a seething Van Tillian. It makes me a Christian.

The point was made in our discussion that hip-hop’s genesis is found in the fires of human oppression. Hip-hop gave voice to those who were voiceless. It empowered those who were marginalized. It was the cry of hope from the desperate and hopeless in America’s inner-city. Thus, it is good.

That kind of statement may be historically true but it does not actually offer an evaluation of hip-hop’s music and culture. There are a ton of things that may provide therapeutic hope to the hopeless, like kidnapping, rioting, drug-use, and the like. These sins may have some therapeutic value, but they remain sins that should be universally denounced.

In other words, suffering is not an unqualified good. It does not automatically make good whatever action or art is produced by those who are oppressed. Suffering does not baptize anything with virtue. You can suffer unjustly in sinful ways: the husband who beats up his wife because he was unjustly fired from his job, the mother who kills her unborn baby because she was raped, the teenager who watches pornography because all the girls at school shun him. Being oppressed is not inherently good. The concept of “intersectionality” in our day is problematic not only because its advocates misconstrue true suffering, but also because they assign increasing moral virtue to compound groups of sufferers without regard to a divine and transcendent standard of goodness and truth. Let’s all listen to a Puertorican man since he’s experienced “oppression” in his life, but let’s really be all ears to the black, muslim, trans-woman because no one can top her “oppression.” Say what?

To start in the realm of human oppression and suffering is one thing. All people suffer. Each culture has hurts and suffers the effects of sin. No one is without reams of stories to tell. Dig deep enough, and we could trade stories for hours.

But to stay in the realm of human suffering is another thing. Such an inquiry refuses any kind of meaningful resolution regarding culture because it is content with human impressions, speculative thought, and human wisdom. Christian inquiry regarding culture must never give creedance to an immanence that divinizes human suffering, whether fake or actual. It must move on to the everlasting God and His everlasting Word as a true foundation of inquiry and evaluation. All men are liars. Only God is true.

A second observation from our discussion: there’s a lot of— and excuse the Marxist term— false consciousness regarding oppression. There are a lot of people who think they’re oppressed but really aren’t.

Oppression is not the possibility that someone, somewhere will call you a name, make fun of you, hate you, or even want to do evil against you. If that’s oppression, then every person who has ever lived is oppressed to some degree, which the Bible asserts. We hate one other. That’s life in a fallen world.

But this is not what progressives mean when they talk about oppression— theirs is a race-based, systemic, and pervasive oppression, such that blacks, browns, and other minorities are a hair-breadth away from becoming chattel. For some, to deny you’re a racist is to be a racist. To admit your racism, on the other hand, is to make strides towards the final solution, no pun intended. This is the sort of decadence to which our enlightened society has succumbed.

I have a hard time thinking so many who talk about oppression are actually oppressed in any meaningful way. Is LeBron James more oppressed than a resident of Appalachia who has “white privilege”? If your pieces are routinely published by the New York Times and other legacy media; if your music videos make it to Billboard charts; if you’ve milked your gangster background and hard-knocks lyrics into a lucrative lifestyle; if your movement can have the backing of most Fortune 500 companies— I dunno, this is just a thought— maybe you’re not so oppressed. You are not what you think you are.

Tangentially, this is the problem with the concept of “minority rights.” For starters, it is problematic to think of people as minorities or majorities. It slices and divides society into groups that are more conceptual than real. What’s a “white” person? What’s a “hispanic”? A second problem is that “minority rights” often means preferential treatment given to some and not others. It’s reverse discrimination.

But a third and probably longer-lasting problem with “minority rights” is that once you make it to the “majority” (whatever that means), you still think they’re after you. Everything gets interpreted through the filter of “oppression” and “minority rights.” But violence against Jews as Jews, horrible as it is, does not mean that America is back in 1939 Germany and the start of the Holocaust. Violence against Blacks as Blacks, horrible as it is, does not plunge us back to the era of Jim Crow. The LGBTQHOLDTHEMAYOPLEASE—less than 2% of the population yet controlling 100% of culture in terms academia, news, social media, entertainment— think that fighting for marriage (life-long and exclusive commitment between one man and one woman, with the fruit of their love— children) means they’ll be forcibly removed to concentration camps. What delusional nonsense.

There’s a lot of false consciousness out there.

A third observation from our Christ and Culture discussion: when you come to Christ, everything must come under the judgment of King Jesus.

My knowledge of hip-hop may not be proficient to produce a doctoral dissertation at the CUNY Graduate Center, but it’s sufficient enough to know that it’s not the highest musical art form. If you were to consider the lyrics and culture and messaging of 21st-century hip-hop (take the 100 best-selling singles), you will see that mainstream hip-hop is atrocious.

The same holds true of government education. I was glad to hear in our discussion a warning against propaganda and anti-truth messaging in our day. Amen and amen. But what is government education but precisely that? It is the educational wing of the Ministry of Propaganda. It is an efficient factory for the packaging and dissemination of every manner of lie, no matter its size. It is one of the biggest scams pulled in our lifetime because of its pre-commitment to the first and most foundational lie in human history— “has God really said?”

Why is there a reticence among many of my fellow Christians to acknowledge the moral and educational failure that is government schooling? The Church must follow Christ. We must be willing to hold forth all things to Jesus Christ. We must be willing to sacrifice any part of our ethnic, earthly culture in order to gain Christ. We should be willing to say that some things are good, or better, or best, and others are bad, worse, or worst. We need not be afraid of distinctions. Not all cultures nor cultural expressions have the same merit. Some are better and some are worst because they more or less approximate God’s design for mankind set out in His Word. Christians cannot be cultural relativists.

As I alluded to in my closing remarks of our discussion, Jesus Christ makes the Church equal opportunity offenders of human culture. Not only is the Church a culture-producing culture, but we call out sin where we see it and we embrace God’s design where we find it. As Bavinck put it, Jesus Christ came to destroy the works of the devil, not the works of His Father. Jesus does not destroy mankind but redeems it, and makes it a new mankind through His body and blood. Because of the need for redemption, the Church does not call everything “good.” The IS is not the OUGHT. Yet, for the Church, cultural engagement and production is a hopeful task because she is guided by the Word of God, the only ultimate and final standard for offering moral evaluations of culture.

Photo by Marco Bianchetti on Unsplash