I recently moved from the Washington metropolitan area (aka the DMV) to Polo, a small community in rural northwestern Illinois. I’ve become the pastor of the Polo Church of the Brethren. It’s a big change in a lot of ways, and my wife and I are still making the adjustment.
One of the first differences appeared on the day we were moving into the parsonage. A couple of people from church were here and one of them said to the other, “We had about ⅔ of an inch of rain yesterday, but it all stopped by about noon.” The second replied, “Yeah. It would have been nice to get a little more.”
Most of my time in the Washington DC area was spent in northern Virginia. I don’t think anyone there ever commented on exactly how much rain we’d received the day before. People would say that we’d had a lot of rain, or a little rain, or a mist, or some other general descriptive word. I don’t recall anyone, though, talking about the exact amount of rain we’d gotten and when it had ended.
That makes sense, of course. In my part of northern Virginia, most folks worked in offices of some kind, in retail, or in foodservice. Very, very few had farms, and the few farms in our area weren’t particularly large. There were a very small number of people who needed to know how much rain we’d gotten, when it had begun or stopped, or when exactly it was expected again.
It’s very different in the Polo area. Farming is an important industry here in Ogle County. We’re among the top 15 Illinois counties in livestock and crop cash receipts combined. Lots of people around here need to know how much it rained, how much sun there was, when it’s likely to rain again, and how much it’s going to rain when it does.
This is one small example of one of the shifts my wife and I are working through – a shift in cultures.
In the church, we sometimes think of culture in an ethnic or racial sense. We talk about multiculturalism in a way similar to how folks a couple of generations ago talked about racial integration. I did a search for “multicultural” on the official Church of the Brethren website. I didn’t look over all of the results, but the first couple of pages seemed to use “multicultural” in this way.
There are other ways to think about culture, though. We’re all a part of a variety of cultures – ethnic, racial, religious, economic, political, and more. We sometimes talk about “culture wars” in US society, usually with reference to abortion rights or LGBTQIA+ issues. Some people describe themselves as culturally conservative or with some other modifier. Many people refer to popular culture. What is culture, and how do we define ourselves in relation to it?
According to Merriam-Webster.com, a primary definition of culture is “the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group.” We’re all parts of a variety of different cultures in different ways, all at the same time. We internalize the customs of these cultures, sometimes with some hesitation at first, but eventually, our practice of these norms becomes almost automatic. We even shift from one set of norms to another without conscious thought, depending on the situation.
Most of us are competent and comfortable in negotiating the cultures we regularly live in. Sometimes we’re called on to be in relation with other cultures, or people from other cultures, and that can be more challenging. The ability to comfortably interact with people from other cultures, whatever those cultures may be, is called cultural competence. This is an important skill for Christians to have, both as we interact with other people and as we study the Bible.
Not long ago at my church, we sang “Twas in the moon of wintertime”. If you have “Hymnal: A Worship Book” it’s hymn #190 and is also known as the Huron Carol. This is believed to be the first Christmas carol written in North America, in around 1642. The author, Fr. Jean de Brebeuf, was a Jesuit missionary to the Huron people in Canada. He wrote the lyrics in the Huron language, using imagery that would be familiar in that cultural context. Instead of a manger and swaddling clothes, the baby Jesus sleeps in a lodge of broken bark with rabbit fur. There are no shepherds, but there are hunters. Chiefs from far away arrive instead of magi or kings, and they bring pelts as gifts.
Brebeuf had spent 15 or so years among the Huron before he wrote this carol. He had learned their language and their culture, and so was able to share in ways that would be meaningful and natural to his intended audience. This is a simple example of cultural competency but demonstrates how long it can sometimes take to internalize the norms and mores of another culture.
Despite his best efforts, Brebeuf was not universally accepted by the Huron people. Many of them considered him a sorcerer of some kind. When the Hurons were conquered by the Iroquois around 1649, Brebeuf and others were tortured and killed. It provides some insight into the culture of the Jesuits that Brebeuf’s martyrdom was seen as a positive thing, as a sign that the mission efforts were blessed by God and would in the end be successful.1
Cultural awareness works both ways. While we are often aware of the ways in which we don’t understand someone else’s culture or its expectations, we’re often less aware of our own cultural assumptions and how they may exclude others. Many people have discussed the habit many of us Brethren have of finding common connections with one another, be it relatives or former pastors or college and seminary classmates. These connections are a lot easier to find in a small denomination like the Church of the Brethren than they are in much larger groups, and can help us build relationships with people we don’t know more quickly than we might. At the same time, this habit can seem exclusionary to people who are not long-time members of the denomination or have not been in places where they’ve had an opportunity to build those kinds of connections. In a Facebook post on July 13, 2020, Josh Brockway mused that this Brethren name game could be “…a means of maintaining control and exclusion. It is a part of the Anabaptist culture that recenters whiteness.”2 The discussion that followed was interesting and thought-provoking.
At the same time, efforts to be inclusive can unintentionally confuse or even exclude others who do not necessarily share our cultural assumptions. I was recently in a group of three people. The group leader was a good friend, and the third person was a Black woman of around 60 that we were meeting in person for the first time. The leader invited us to share our pronouns. This invitation was made in a spirit of inclusiveness. There are people who do not necessarily identify themselves with traditional he/him/his or she/her/hers pronouns, and there are people who use binary pronouns for whom it would not be obvious by their appearance which pronouns they use. The group leader’s intent was to make the person we didn’t know feel welcome. Our guest, though, didn’t understand the question at all and had no idea what was meant by “what are your pronouns.” This effort at inclusion had the unintended effect of leaving her feeling excluded, perhaps heightening the exclusion she may have already felt as the lone person of color in our gathering. At the very least she was temporarily uncomfortable in what the leader hoped would be a welcoming space for all.
One could respond to this little story by thinking that our guest’s discomfort was appropriate and that she should do the work needed to help make safe spaces for other marginalized folks. One could also respond by thinking that the assumptions that the group leader and I shared about pronouns could be shaped by experiences that might not have been as available to our guest on racial, generational, or any other grounds. There are lots of possible responses; it’s certainly not an either/or proposition, as is true of most things when we talk about culture.
Richard Niebuhr’s book Christ and Culture was first published in 1951. Since its publication, this book has provided an influential framework for analysis across the spectrum of Christian theological traditions.
Speaking of Jesus, Niebuhr wrote that “belief in him and loyalty to his cause involves (humanity) in the double movement from world to God and from God to the world.”3 This description of the double movement of believing in Christ emphasizes the concept of being in the world but not of the world, seen twice in John’s gospel. In John 17:14-15, we read, “I [Jesus] have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one.”4 Likewise, John 15:19 says, “If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world – therefore the world hates you.”
Niebuhr talks about three major ways in which Christians view Christ in relation to culture. The “Christ Against Culture” view argues that faithfulness to Christ requires rejection of society and culture. In the contemporary United States, the Amish are probably the best-known example of this view, and the Brethren certainly would have fit this description at one time in some ways.
For instance, members of the Church of the Brethren for many years wore what has sometimes been called “plain garb” as a sign of rejection of worldly values and an embrace of simple living. Many Brethren who no longer use plain garb but seek to live simply and in opposition to the world’s material values have been intentional about rejecting consumerism and reducing their carbon footprint. Many other groups that, like the Church of the Brethren, trace their origins to Schwarzenau have retained outward signs of separation from the dominant culture such as plain garb. The German Baptist Brethren, numerous in Southern Ohio where I grew up, still wear plain clothes. The women have long hair and keep it covered. The men wear dark pants and jackets, no neckties, suspenders instead of belts, and beards with no mustaches. This faith-based rejection of dominant cultural norms isn’t limited to clothing. My first car was previously owned by a German Baptist Brethren family. It was black, and all of the silver trim on the vehicle had been painted black so that it would not be as ostentatious.
“Christ of Culture” describes those who don’t see much tension between what Jesus wants and what the culture provides. Niebuhr believed that this relationship allowed the culture to co-opt Christ by identifying cultural values as Christian values. I once led a Bible study where the study guide talked about the wastefulness of a fur coat. One of the women in our study group had a fur coat, which she was proud of. She asked if Jesus didn’t want us to have nice things, or if Christianity meant that we shouldn’t move up the economic ladder as far as we could. These are good questions for all of us to consider, wherever we are on that ladder. The “Christ of Culture” position is fairly common among the elite groups of any culture, as success can be identified with Christian virtue.
It is tempting to reduce the “Christ of Culture” view to something like the prosperity gospel. Briefly, the prosperity gospel teaches that God desires material success and even wealth for believers. Preachers of the prosperity gospel such as Oral Roberts and Jim Bakker have encouraged their listeners to pray in a certain way or to give significant gifts to their ministries specifically in order to receive material (and other) blessings from God.
“Christ of Culture” is more than just the prosperity gospel, though. It is an identification of Christ with the dominant traits of a given culture. Exactly what these traits are will vary from culture to culture, and within a given culture will vary from subculture to subculture. People of all theological views are faced with the temptation of the “Christ of Culture” view, as it can be easy to allow the views of whatever culture or subculture we’re in at a particular time to co-opt the radical and difficult work of discipleship. Niebuhr wrote that with this approach Jesus is “the great enlightener, the great teacher, the one who directs all (people) in culture to the attainment of wisdom, moral perfection, and peace”5 If we assume that we are being enlightened and taught by Jesus, it’s easy to assume that whatever it is we’re learning is what Jesus wants us to learn and that whatever we’re achieving is what Jesus wants us to achieve. When we remember, though, that the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7 calls “blessed” those who the dominant cultures of the world call poor or oppressed, we can more easily recognize how the culture’s “christ” is different than the biblical Christ.
The third general description that Niebuhr offers is “Christ Above Culture.” As the name implies, this view places Christ at the head but allows more interrelationship between the Christian and the culture than the “Christ Against Culture” position. “Christ Above Culture” has been the dominant position through most of Christian history, as most Christians have not embraced the suspicion of culture embodied by the Amish but neither have they fully endorsed the identification of the values of Christ with the values of the culture.
There are sub-groupings in the “Christ Above Culture” category that I won’t try to describe here. As you can imagine, there are a variety of approaches to the relationship between Christ and the culture that allow for a wide assortment of opinions about how and when to engage with the culture, and where to draw lines between the embrace and rejection of different aspects of a dominant culture.
As we consider what it means to build relationships with people of other cultures, it’s important that we recognize the various cultures of which we are a part and how they form us. It’s also vital, and difficult, to recognize that for almost all of us there are times when our culture will be the dominant one in a given setting. How do we express our faith in Christ and place Christ’s lordship ahead of the values of our culture? How do we recognize the cultural assumptions that we and others from other cultures bring to intercultural discussions? Do those assumptions about ourselves and others change depending on which culture is dominant in a particular context? What can we do to keep ourselves open to the kind of change and growth that Jesus calls us to and to help others as they struggle with their own change and growth?
The answers to these and other questions will vary for each of us. What must not vary is our willingness to ask ourselves these questions, to be open when others ask them of us, and to always seek the answers in light of the discipleship to which Christ calls us.
Jeff Davidson is the pastor at the Polo IL Church of the Brethren and retired from the Fairfax County Virginia Department of Public Safety Communications in 2020 as a Communication Operations Supervisor.
- Pearson, Timothy G. (2008). Becoming Holy in Early Canada: Performance and the Making of Holy Persons in Society and Culture (PhD thesis). McGill University, p. 48.
- https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10157114505092687&id=512057686.
- Niebuhr, H. Richard. 1975. Christ and culture. New York: Harper & Row, p. 29.
- All scripture references from the New Revised Standard Version.
- Niebuhr, p. 92.