Culture Influenced Christianity part 1: Society going downhill

As a Christian and pastor, I strive to not only increase the depth of my relationship with God, but also in my knowledge of Christianity as a religion, the cultures in which it exists, and the cultures it creates within itself. Life has provided me opportunities to study outside my own denominational traditions, and recently I have gained a more acute awareness of how our cultural positions (Christian culture/doctrinal positions and our larger national culture) affect our day to day Christian practice in society. (By “doctrinal positions” I do not mean the core Christian beliefs, such as The Apostle’s Creed, which orthodox Christians affirm, but instead I mean the theological systems which we construct around our core beliefs.) Emerson’s & Smith’s (2000) Divided by Faith sparked some of these thoughts. For this first post I will consider premillennialism.

Pre-millennial Eschatology – Although this teaching has many facets, the feature of primary relevance to this discussion is the idea that even though there may be periods and places of revival, in general the world will go from bad to worse until the return of Jesus (2 Timothy 3:13). Premillennialism sometimes leads to Christians disengaging from culture instead of working to improve society at large, as the Church has the first priority to call people to salvation out from the world, not fix the world’s social systems. We should consider the possibility of doing both. Jesus’ ministry consisted not only of teaching people about the Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 13:24), but also healing people (Mark 2:2-11), feeding them (Matthew 14:21), and cleansing their temple for them (John 10:13-17).

When I was a youth pastor, and now as a parent, one way I saw the outworking of premillennialism influence was in educational choices. Many parents, including me, ask the question “Should I have my child live as a Christian at a public school, be reinforced in their faith in a private Christian school, or be home schooled?” The best answer probably depends on the individual child and the particular schools in question, but our decisions may be influenced, consciously or not, true or not, by an idea that secular schools, like the rest of society, are moving from bad to worse. The same thought process may be in play for engagement in politics, social justice, and public moral standards.

For me personally, my wife and I, having both attended public school and come out okay, plan on sending our children to public school, but that is easy to say when my daughter has not yet started school, we live in a high performing and socially conservative school district, and we cannot afford private school. The first time I hear of a school authority pushing an ungodly agenda on my daughter instead of teaching her math, science, English, history, and critical thinking, or I see a drop in academic achievement, I may want to change my mind.

I find it important to point out that just because I am bringing up these positions as issues does not necessarily mean that I do not affirm them. I bring them up to make us aware of ourselves. We all believe we are normal and right in our choices and actions when surrounded by people who are inculturated in the same way. People within a culture cannot always see their own cultural bias and behaviors until they are exposed to a different culture’s bias and behaviors, and the same is true for our distinctive denominational beliefs.

For the next post I will consider Individualism.

References:

Emerson, Michael O. & Smith, Christian. (2000). Divided by faith: Evangelical religion and the problem of race in America. Oxford University Press.

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