Making Sense of Modernity

Christians often talk about engaging with culture, but we typically frame this as if we were coming from outside of culture to point out what it’s doing wrong and help make it look more like us. While it’s good that we’re sensitive to the ways that contemporary society may be tempting us to go astray, we often assume that our bases are covered if we’re warning kids of the allure of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

The reality is that modern culture entails so much more than that, and, as often subtly disquiets my students, we’re more in love with modernity than we think. Our lack of self-awareness in this area makes us especially vulnerable to the idols of our age.

My favorite succinct account of what the modern world is all about is Andrew Wilson’s Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West. This book traces several contemporary themes through their early development as captured in the snapshot year of 1776. This isn’t a book about the American Revolution (although that of course shows up); instead, this is an account of how we all came to live in a WEIRDER world. By that, I mean that Wilson is presenting a handy acronym that captures many salient features of modern culture. “WEIRDER” means we are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic. This doesn’t capture every nuance of contemporary society, but it captures enough of them in a nice, memorable package that I have found this book incredibly helpful for recognizing and addressing our lack of self-awareness as Christians engaging the world.

For those of you who aren’t clicking away to add the book to your shopping cart just yet, let me dive a little deeper and offer some application.

The WEIRDER World

What I love about this acronym is that it draws our attention to a number of observations about how we think and live in very modern ways. Let me offer a few examples.

Considering “Educated,” my students have typically not examined why they assumed that they’d go to college after high school. While there is more debate lately, we still generally assume that education is the way to get ahead in the world, even if it’s not through a university. At the same time, while my “Industrialized” students are often on guard for materialism or treating technology as an idol, they are typically ignorant of just how much technology has transformed our world. At the same time that they critique technology, they typically assume we can engineer a solution to our problems. Finally (and this is one of my favorites), Wilson notes that virtually every nation in the world claims to be a democracy. Authoritarian though it may be, it still seemed desirable for North Korea to call itself a “People’s Republic.” We don’t often stop to notice how strange it is that almost everyone sees the appeal in calling themselves some form of democracy, even if they don’t actually function as one, and this opens up rich discussions about how equality and free choice have captured our imaginations.

The purpose of noting all of this is to help my students come to imagine their posture for engaging culture as insiders, rather than outsiders. This has critical importance for both our negative and positive engagement with the world around us. As to the negative, Christians aren’t the only subculture that fancies themselves set apart from culture. However, the way the devil ensnares us is often by an approach from the direction we’re not looking. When we think of society in the negative sense that Scripture sometimes attributes to “the world,” we are prone to blind ourselves to just how much we are part of society.

I know plenty of Christians with a laudable sensitivity to the sanctity of life who also take consumer capitalism as an unquestioned good. There are many Christians who are commendably on fire for missions yet unaware that their way of interpreting emotion as the leading of the spirit is more deeply rooted in Romanticism than Scripture. This isn’t to say that capitalism is evil or that our emotions should be suppressed. The idea is more that an unexamined adoption of these things creates easy avenues for distortions to creep in and pull us astray.

As a simple example of this, let’s look at the part of the WEIRDER acronym that most of you are considering inapplicable to yourself: Ex-Christian. I think it’s fair to assume that most people reading In All Things consider themselves Christians of some stripe; however, we still share many “Ex-Christian” assumptions. The term reflects changing notions about things like whether religion is essential for morality. Many of my students find it antiquated, if not offensive, to question whether an atheist can be moral. “Ex-Christian” also reflects changing attitudes to institutions. Ostensibly, this was wrought by the legacy of leaders abusing their office. As a result, many of us are enthusiastic believers on one hand but hold the church at arm’s length on the other. This can lead us to sever our sense of ethics from our sense of religion or to be highly suspicious of institutions. Both of these impulses can make it harder to live out our faith in robust ways.

At the same time, I want students to take seriously why we are modern in these WEIRDER ways. The reality is that God has blessed us in many ways through the modern world. This is most obvious in the standard of living that we enjoy. While there are certainly plenty of things to worry about, it also does something to our perspective to realize just how recently clean water, plumbing, and electricity were not givens of our environment. Society is alluring because, in so many ways, it works. Our cultural engagement is wrong-headed when we try to create divisions that allow us to easily discard one aspect of culture while preserving others by a different name. We can’t treat technology as a clear good while treating culture as “the world,” they’re too intertwined for that.

Taking the Good with the Bad

Wilson puts the entire challenge of cultural engagement in brilliant terms with a question he asks in a few ways throughout the book: does running water justify Hiroshima? This question might seem like a non sequitur for you. What do either of these have to do with one another? However, technology repeatedly provides us with both good and bad. Many feats of engineering were achieved at tremendous cost of human suffering, and many advances in medicine came on the heels of unethical research. Do the ends justify the means? Our impulse is to say no, but we have a similar impulse to focus on either the good or the bad stuff to the exclusion of the other narrative. We don’t like the ambivalence of being both grateful for what God has given us and yet sorrowful over the human sin or suffering that came along the way. We are prone to distortion and idolatry when we embrace either of these one-sided narratives.

As we kick off a series that considers our modern idols, perhaps a good place to start is recognizing how many of these idols come from distorted views of our modern world. How many creep up on us because we’re looking the other way? How many of them represent a story about where we are that refuses to account for both the good and the bad that comes along the way? How many of them reflect us being just like the Israelites, thinking we’ve set ourselves apart at the foot of Mount Sinai, yet worshiping in exactly the way we learned in Egypt? Hopefully some of the questions that stem from better self-awareness spur us to wrestle more fruitfully with our place in this WEIRDER world. Oh, and check out the book, it’s helpful with this.