Transforming Culture through Virtuous Citizenship

So he’s with us remotely, but is ready to discuss, really, part two of a document that the Kern Family Foundation produces called “Theology That Works,” and the goal of this document is to discuss the connection between, really, whole life discipleship and faith, and to connect the idea that a large portion of most people’s lives are spent in venues that we don’t talk enough about in the church.

So, Greg, welcome. We’re really pleased to have you again, and we’re glad that all the technology is working out very nicely.

Now that’s kind of an ominous beginning to a section. So can you elaborate on what you’re beginning to get at, and kind of orient us to kind of where we’re going in the second section of this document?

You know, actually, after I wrote that document I heard Dallas Willard say something that says basically the same point I’m making there, but much better put. He said: “The cause of our economic crisis is that we cannot say no to our desires,” and I think that is deeply true, and that’s really what I was driving at when I wrote the passage that you just read; that in our culture increasingly we understand the purpose of our lives. We understand what is good for human beings in terms of satisfying our desires, in terms of just going after the things that our hearts tell us will make us happy in a spontaneous way without having the wisdom of the long-standing tradition that’s informed by Christianity or many other sources of wisdom either that teach us that your heart will deceive you, that your natural desires are not actually a guide to what will make you well off or happy. It’s not the good for human beings to satisfy your natural desires.

And the church is the repository of something that God has placed in human culture in the church that we can then bear out to our neighbors through the way we live our lives and the way we participate in culture, and the witness that we bring, the wisdom that we are able to share with our neighbors in a thousand different ways, and that this is part of every Christian’s task to figure out how do I, in the places where God has put me, embody and live out and bear witness to the wisdom that the Lord has cultivated in the church.

That passage, the first person pronoun appears multiple times in a handful of verses; I think it’s like 11 times in three verses or something like this. So that the cliché that you hear, “It’s all about me,” is very much true about that text, and that’s what I see you beginning to address and warning in this section, and the way you’re trying to do it is to kind of reconnect us, not just to who we are as individuals, but what our social membership is, how we connect to the rest of society.

In fact, at one point you say: “Our relationships are never merely the product of individual choice, but are always constituted in part by social structures that transcend the individual, and again, having us have this sense of this corporate identity that we have.”

This paragraph in particular that I just read from made me think of the question: How did society make claims on us? And how should we respond to those claims? What is it that God does by placing us in the midst of a society?

And the problem is there’s no system that can save us if we’re not good people. There’s a lot to what it means to be a good person, but putting other people’s needs ahead of your own desires is step one. It’s 101. If you haven’t got that, the advance course is not going to matter if you haven’t got that beginner-level course.

So your question was how does society place claims on us, and what is God doing when he puts us into society? I think, unfortunately, the culture we live in as a tendency to think of the human person as I kind of disembodied spirit who lives in a body, and the few square inches inside your skull is the real you, and then your relationships with others are kind of subordinate to your own choices, your own desires, and that’s not a realistic picture of the human person.

If you just look around you at the way human beings actually live and thrive, what you discover is human beings are made for for a relationship. Human beings are formed by their relationships. You don’t think about everything that your parents contributed to who you are. Think about everything your schools contributed to who you are. Think about – you can just go down the list of the people around you, and think about how much they contributed to who you are.

Well, that means, basically, you do not get to make up the meaning of your own life. There’s a sentence in a Supreme Court decision from back in the ‘90s that said that, “The heart of liberty –” I’m not going to get the exact words right, but, “The heart of liberty is the right to understand the mystery of human life in your own way, not in the way someone else tells you, and I think we want to safeguard individual liberties. We don’t want to go back to a sort of the Dark Ages where the individual doesn’t matter, but we cannot just have people make up the meaning of their own lives for themselves and live in whatever way pleases them, because the results of that are what you see all around you.

And the other element, the other picture that comes to mind, as I hear you, is that when we see people only as things, as chess pieces to move on a board because they occupy a certain space, and we don’t think about who they are as people made in the image of God, what their souls are about, what the connection to them might be, those kinds of things. We really demean life.

And I think creating that balance between, on the one hand, seeing every human being as precious and made in God’s image, and on the other hand having a culture with integrity is the way I like to put it. Integrity is the word that I use because it fits together; literally, the word integrity means it fits together. So we need a culture that fits together.

C.S. Lewis uses the image of ships. He says: “Society is like a fleet of ships, and if they all sail wherever they want to regardless of the needs of the other ships they’ll crash into each other or else they’ll drift apart and the fleet will disappear because all the ships sailed in 10,000 directions.”

And what I hear throughout this entire section that we’re in of this theology that works piece is, really, the first lens that needs to go on the glasses that you use is not one of entitlement. It’s one of service. It’s one of engaging and moving towards another as opposed to asking what can they give me, and the difference in the direction of that arrow makes a lot of difference in how people live and how they make their choices.

These things matter, and like you said, the first lens we need to put on is how can we be of service? How can we be a blessing to those around us, because we are implicated in this web of relationships that we’re a part of?

And if one danger is to simply dismiss the culture because that’s the world and that’s under the dominion of the evil one, and the world has nothing to do with the church, that’s one error to think that we’re not implicated in the life of our culture.

The opposite error would be to say, “Well, it’s imperative for us to be beneficial to our culture, and we can’t force our faith on people,” which is true. “Therefore, the only thing we can do is to promote the ends that our society approves of that we also approve of.” That’s insufficient. As ambassadors of something that is higher and greater, we also have to bear witness to righteousness in those areas where our culture is going wrong ‘cause we are implicated in those areas, just as we are implicated in –

We’re here as exiles or as ambassadors, and are here to represent something that transcends the particular nation or the particular community that we’re a part of. That also gives us the ability to connect with other nations and other communities in the process because our concern is for humanity at large, not just the particular location that God has us in.

There are all kinds of ramifications for that. In fact, there’s probably a whole podcast that could be built around just those ideas that we’ve just gone through.

A coworker of mine here at the Kern Family Foundation until he retired recently, Tim Crewall, used to say: “Politicians want us to think of the Chinese as a billion people who are going to steal our jobs, and that’s how they want us to think of the Chinese.” We need to think of the Chinese as a billion customers that we could be serving, and if our economy was producing things that they wanted to buy because it was beneficial for them, they’d be better off and we’d be better off. They’d have more jobs and we’d have more jobs, too. We don’t have to be in competition with them in an ultimate sense. We can both benefit.

The opportunity for us as Christians to demonstrate within, not as a separate thing from our culture, but within our culture, the possibilities for harmony and flourishing and abundance that can be mutually reinforcing across these lines, I think it speaks very powerfully to the opportunity to bear witness for the work of the Lord.

And a second dimension of it that’s also important is when Jesus gets asked, “What’s the most important commandment,” he puts both of these things together because he has, “Love God with all your heart, mind and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself,” and the two very much go together and impact each other, and so that’s what you’re evidencing.

So there’s a sense in which we have bought in – I think a mistake that we’ve made is that we have bought into the sacred-secular dichotomy that our culture wants us to have to keep religion kind of off to the side at arm’s length, but, in fact, the biblical picture is that there’s an integrative, or what you all have called consistently a holistic dimension to this in which you don’t divide the secular and the sacred ‘cause it’s all interwoven within itself. There’s no way to split that atom without having a nuclear explosion, and in the process we need to get people to see that every act that they perform out of their religious life, and no matter where it is, no matter what building they’re in, it is a sacred act of one kind or another.

It says: “Virtuous citizenship means participating in social structures, such as the home, workplace and community in a way that puts the good of our neighbors first, rather than using these structures as tools to serve our individual desires.” So what we’ve been talking about here since the beginning of the podcast.

“Just as discipleship means more than doing religious works, but is a calling for all of life, virtuous citizenship means more than doing a special set of ‘citizenship works’.” You have that in quotes – “such as voting, but is a calling that reshapes all of our participation in social structure.”

So there’s this call to participate in and to be this virtuous citizen, if you will. And you say there are two dangers. Here they are: “Social collectivism that violates the dignity of the individuals on one end, and an isolation of the individual that tends to produce over-accommodation to the prevailing culture on the other.”

Now I think you’ve already alluded to this, but why don’t you develop those dangers in terms of what we’re talking about?

You know, I sat in on a panel discussion about five years ago where a group of theologians that were ecumenical – both Protestant and Catholic – were talking about all of the problems that are created by this sovereignty of the conscience idea, and how we’ve got to stop giving so much room for the sovereignty of the conscience, and we’ve got to let institutions tell us more the meaning of our beliefs.

And I was kind of impertinent. I raised my hand. I said, “You know, I was just trying to think what Martin Luther would say if he were here. What’s he supposed to say to the Lord? You know, Lord, I wish I could have borne witness for you at the Diet of Worms, but the human self is situated in this dense web of human relationships that is constitutive of its personhood, Lord,” and they squirmed a little bit in trying to answer that question. I think we never want to go back on Brother Martin. We never want to go back on the fact that, as Brother Martin puts it, every individual is responsible for his own faith. He said, “Every man is responsible for his own faith.” And I think we don’t want to reduce people to cogs in a machine. We’ve got to make sure that just as Brother Martin in the 95 Theses was standing up for the spirituality and the freedom of every person in the church over against the attempt to exploit them by powerful elites. We’ve got to keep that dignity of every human being front and center.

At the same time – this goes to the other danger – if the only piece we have is that dignity of the individual thing, then every individual will start to make up his own plan for what we’re going to do in the household, in the business, in the community, and people will begin to serve themselves instead of serving others, and that can be very insidious. It’s not always an explicit, “I’m going to be a selfish person and just lie, cheat and steal to serve myself.” It can be very insidious. It can be very self-deceptive.

What we do is we think that we’re serving other people, but we’re serving other people in a way that we define, and because the heart is deceitful, we define service to others in the way that actually delivers the payoff to us, whether it’s a payoff in material benefit or a payoff in some psychological benefit that we get out of using other people in various ways – emotional benefits, status, wanting to be in a certain position in the relationship or whatever it is, and that runs the gamut from the top to the bottom ‘cause the problem is not one party or the other, one class or the other. The problem is in the human heart, and we’ve all got that problem to deal with.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn made this famous comment after having been imprisoned and tortured by his enemies simply for standing up for the right to tell the truth and not just parrot what the Soviet authorities told him to say. You know, if anybody can say I’m good and my opponents are evil, it would be Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn sitting in the Gulag being tortured, but he had this famous line where he said, “The line between good and evil is not a line between one party or another. It runs through every human heart.”

And for him in that place to say that really, I think, is a sobering reminder of how insidious this tendency to serve ourselves can be. So we have to be very careful to be on the watch for that, and not only in our own hearts, but we need to think about how can we build a culture, how can we participate in a culture that leads people in that direction? Because it can’t just be me thinking about me and you thinking about you because then it just becomes narcissistic and selfish again.

On the other hand, there’s a participation that needs to be critical about how we do it, and what’s interesting is when you look at society you break it down into three pieces, and I found this fascinating: The family, which everyone talks about so that’s an obvious one; the workplace, where everyone functions, but we don’t talk about it very much; and then thirdly, civil community where I think for most Christians they would go family, workplace and church.

So there’s this whole dimension of our connection to the larger world that goes missing. I’m being critical, not of what you’ve written, but in thinking about these three areas.

In the family area I think we give a lot of energy and attention to how the family works and how it should work. I think for the most part we do okay there. We may not perform well there, but at least we’re talking about it and engaging it and trying to think through how it ought to work.

And then the third area also is a problem – the whole civil community idea – because we define our community so narrowly in terms of our own spiritual experience and our spiritual community that we forget a vast web of networks that we automatically live in and that aren’t a part of the community that we tend to identify with, not that church community identification isn’t important. It’s actually a part of that civil community idea, but the civil community is much bigger than that, and our view and our engagement has to be much bigger than that in order to be holistic. A fair summary of what we’re dealing with?

The more people were rooted in heaven, the more good they were to the communities in which they lived, and I think that’s true. I’m not remembering word for word the quote there, but it’s close to that.

Yeah. I think just seeing the civil community as a place into which we launch our mission from the church is a really important thing.

And then the second part of it that’s also important is what you call transformation, which implies that as we engage the culture there is a critique that is going on, and there is a counter modeling, and I’m saying both intentionally here because the critique deals with what we may say verbally about what goes on in our culture, how we address it, but the modeling is a way of picturing that critique, of giving it flesh and blood and breath and life. So that the critique isn’t just an academic exercise of words only, but you actually see it in practice.

And what I’m seeing you encourage people towards is a holistic life that does both; that is conscious about what verbally it says about what’s going on in the society, and that also is making effort to be a model in a counter kind of way. And I want to make a distinction here between not merely just shaking your finger at the world, and saying the way you live is wrong, but actually trying to produce a positive model for what right living looks like so that there’s something put in its place that people can see and grasp and get their hands around and hopefully move towards.

If you look at the early factories that emerged during the Industrial Revolution, these new towns were springing up in the middle of nowhere where nobody lived there before, and now suddenly tons and tons of people are tightly packed in around the factory. And they choose to be there because the wages are better than farm life, but there’s no boundaries because there’s no established culture. There’s no rules. Sort of the rhythm and cultural boundaries of agricultural life have all been disrupted so you had rampant alcoholism; you had absenteeism. And the factory owners really very often had a sort of aloof paternalistic and arrogant view of their works as, “Well, what do you expect? Of course they all get drunk and of course they’re showing up at noon because they were hung over. What better could you expect?”

Well, Josiah Wedgwood came in and said: “No, no, no. This is not the way human beings are made to live. We’re going to give you a proper community. We’re going to give you a clean environment.” Sanitation was a huge issue. “We’re going to give you a clean environment. We’re going to give you medical care. We’re going to have religious services. We’re going to have all of the services and things that a normal community has.”

“In exchange we expect you to show up for work every working day. You will show up on time. You will work very hard. You’ll work the entire day. You will have specific tasks that we will assign you to do ‘cause the old way was just you showed up and you did whatever task was lying around.” Right? “No. We will specialize you so that you learn to do this task with excellence, and I will set high standards for your work because I expect that of you.”

And this was just a tremendously better model for how to run a factory, and as I like to say, it was more productive because it was more humane, but it was also more humane because it was more productive. That is, you set high expectations for these workers and they deliver, because human beings are made to be workers, and it was the factory workers who did not expect hard work, who did not expect productivity. Those were the people who were really being demeaning to their people, but Wedgwood set very high standards and was strict about the quality of work and the amount of work that he expected from people, and it was better for them. The workers wanted to work in that factory where the standards were high because it was a better way.

And what he did, this is why I bring it up to you question, it demonstrated that this was a better way –

When we did this podcast with Andy Crouch, he talked about that transformation happening in a very localized level, but I as an individual may not be able to change the world; that may be an unrealistic vision, but I can impact my neighborhood. I can impact my local school, the places where I am regularly. I can impact my workplace by how I live.

And one of the things you talk about is a productive call, which is the idea of producing blessing. I think that’s a simple way to think about it; that if you ask what does service do? Service produces blessing. It serves and it serves well, and in the midst of serving and serving well, it produces blessing, and it produces blessing as a virtue for anyone who comes across it, and hopefully the person who experiences that blessing senses that and appreciates it, and is drawn towards it as a result.

I’m sensing that’s kind of – if I can say it – the goal of where you’re trying to take people. Fair?

And the other one was that we inwardly do it for God. I think you need both, and if you leave out the inwardly do it for God part, then you’re moving in the direction of reducing people to cogs in a machine because the only thing that matters is your effect on the world. Your inward motivation and identity are being left out in that case, and because individuals matter, we don’t want to lose that, but we have the danger of integrating faith and work or integrating faith and culture without that other call of are we objectively making the world a better place? Can we point to things and say, “The world is better, and here’s a way and here’s a way and here’s a way that the world is better because of what we do.”

Because if it’s only about doing it for God inwardly, and we’re not actually holding ourselves accountable to produce blessings for our neighbors, then it becomes narcissistic. Faith/work integration becomes just another way of navel gazing and thinking about how wonderful we are.

But if I understand that I’ve been faithful to a living God, whether that service has been entirely appreciated or not, I have another place for my identity to get its sense of value for what it is that I’ve done.

And he wanted to point them to the meaning and purpose of it, and the reason I bring this up from what you said is he knew that the fact that their work had a positive impact on the world was not enough; that they had to have this sense of inward identity and motivation that were rightly ordered; that that mattered just as much; that it’s insufficient to say we’ve got the factory workers at the machines doing their jobs and keeping the city running. He knew that it mattered whether those factory workers understood what they were doing and were doing it for the right reasons and had the right sense of their own identity and their own understanding of their place in the social system that their work participates in. So that’s why he wrote the book.

And then you go on to talk about that: “The goal here is not a seizing of power, but really a stewarding or a serving well; that if you ask what you should assess, it’s not how much do I control what’s happening here or how much did I seek to control more of it, but am I really serving in the way I ought to?”

It’s a major mistake to think that the goal is to start by going out and grabbing as much power as we can, and then once we’ve got that power, we can start using it to impose godliness on the areas where we’ve grabbed that power because that just doesn’t work for all kinds of reasons.

The number one reason being that our neighbors, who are not Christian, are also made for stewardship. That the image of God was defaced by the fall, but our neighbors are still made in the image of God and they’re precious in God’s sight, and we don’t want to take away their stewardship, and if seizing power becomes the dominant force or becomes the major way in which we’re engaging with our culture, then we become in competition with the stewardship of our non-Christian neighbors. We don’t want to be in competition with the stewardship of our non-Christian neighbors. We want to acknowledge the stewardship that God’s given them. We want to, again, seek that harmony in flourishing together.

So in a sense the transformation that’s worked in our lives by the Holy Spirit is manifested and has an influence in human culture not in a redemptive way, I mean that’s the social gospel we don’t want to down that route, but while we need to avoid a social gospel, we do need to say if we are living faithfully, we should see an infusion of that transformation impacting our culture; that our culture is different than it would be if we were not present.