Conservative Christians often hear the cautionary refrain that we need to avoid focusing on the “culture war.” Be it questions over biological men in women’s sports, religious liberty in the public square, or defending the right to life, focusing our energy on the issues that impact the world around us has apparently become incredibly controversial.
It’s likely that you’ve been or will be confronted by someone who tries to convince you that the “culture war”’ is a waste of time. For such occasions, we must have good answers.
When conservatives, especially Christians, discuss how to engage the culture, we must know the reasons why, or our presuppositions. We must believe that our job is, at some level, to change culture. Too often, people argue that focusing energy on changing laws and policies is some kind of distraction from the real work we’re called to do.
This is misguided, either-or thinking. For those of us with a robust anthropology – i.e. an informed view of what humans are and therefore what human dignity means – cultural change is the only logical path forward.
If human beings are created with inherent dignity, aborting them in the womb is a cultural issue on which we ought not sideline ourselves. If freedom of expression is an extension of human dignity, then advancing religious liberty is work done in service of that dignity, not a distraction from it. If human flourishing is a good thing, then supporting the practices, industries, and markets that improve people’s lives is the natural result of that belief.
We may disagree on the practical ramifications of those beliefs, but the underlying assumption is the same: Our beliefs demand cultural engagement and a presence in the public square and, in fact, do not champion complacency or quietism.
Further, we must note the importance of taking counsel from our allies, not our opponents. Our strategies for engaging the culture should come from people who actually believe that engagement is a good thing. As a Christian in an industry built on cultural engagement, I run into the ramifications of this issue all the time. We should remember that many people simply do not want Christianity to have a robust voice in the public square. That presupposition – their presupposition – guides the way they interact with us, and we’re foolish to pretend otherwise.
You might go to an atheist friend to discuss cultural issues, but you probably wouldn’t go to that same atheist friend to give you a faith-to-culture argument about why engaging the culture matters. When Christian culture errs, it does not err by failing to adhere to some vague idea of what’s sufficiently nice and inoffensive. It errs because it fails to imitate Christ sufficiently.
If you’re not religious, or prefer a political version of this argument, be honest about where this goes with conservative cultural engagement. The critiques conservatives will find most compelling come from the right, not the non-conservative center.
The conservative movement currently questions what to do about the radicals on the right, and how even to define what a radical is. We will not be best served by allowing people who do not share conservative principles, such as a transcendent moral order and fundamental human rights, to define the limits of our movement.
Right-wing coded radicalism like genuine praise for Hitler is bad because it discards genuine conservative ideals for clout-chasing, not because it offends the centrist view of the public square. We can all agree that ideals antithetical to those that built Western civilization should be challenged, whether it pops up on the right or the left.
There’s a bad way to focus on the culture war, to be sure. There’s a space you can get into where you focus more on getting clicks on social media than what you can actually fix. But just because there’s a bad way to do culture war doesn’t mean there’s not a good way to engage in the public square.
So here’s the heuristic. When we are accused of focusing too much on the culture war, we have to understand: Are we being asked to be less abrasive and more constructive? Or, are we being asked to be the sort of people that never make waves or say anything in opposition to in-group dogma?
One of those is a productive call to improve, the other is often a call to shut up. Let the culture-engager beware.
We will not change, build, or enhance our culture by mistaking social media outrage for the difficult, detail-heavy, often unglamorous work that actually bends civilization further towards goodness and truth.
If we want to fight the culture war the right way, we must know why we’re doing it, who we’re getting our counsel from, and how the culture actually changes. Our moment demands morally grounded, well-guided, tenacious participation in the public square — nothing less will suffice.
