Religion and culture: Challenges and prospects in the next generation

Every generation of Christians faces its own challenges and prospects in God's providence. The last generation of evangelicals, lead by such people as Carl F. H. Henry, Kenneth S. Kantzer, and Billy Graham, sponsored numerous initiatives intended to address the urgencies of their day. These included the founding of the National Association of Evangelicals (1942), the Evangelical Theological Society (1949), and the journal Christianity Today (1956), all of which accomplished positions of their founders' visions.

As we look forward to the next generation, what are the challenges and the prospects which stand before evangelical scholars? The purpose of this article is to assess those challenges which are most urgent for the integrity and effectiveness of evangelicalism in, and in relation to, American culture in the next generation.

While there are certainly many things evangelical scholars can and must do which are here assumed, my distinctive proposals can be summarized under three headings. We must address issues related to the common good, the common man, and a common voice.

I. THE COMMON GOOD

1. We must face the common issues raised by globalization. If we as evangelical scholars are going to speak to our world and to our culture in the future, rather than just to ourselves, we must concern ourselves with facing and giving Christian responses to common problems which affect the common good. One such set of problems is raised by globalization.

There are two broad ways in which we can and should address issues raised by globalization (or globality, as it is more and more commonly called). The first is by addressing the major challenges which globality poses for the world at large, offering Christian solutions for the common good and at the same time an apologetic for the value of Christian faith. The second way we must face globality is by understanding and addressing the challenges it poses for the integrity and effectiveness of the Christian faith. After defining globality, we will give an example of each sort of problem and response.

In 1995, sociologist Malcolm Waters made clear how recent is the development of consciousness of globality when he wrote, "Social change is now proceeding so rapidly that if a sociologist had proposed as recently as ten years ago to write a book about globalization they would have had to overcome a wall of stony and bemused incomprehension. But now, just as postmodern was the concept of the 1980s, globalization may be the concept of the 1990s. . . . "1 Waters's prediction has proven true. Globalization has become a major concern among social scientists, displacing the older paradigm of "modernity," and progressively displacing also discussions about "postmodernity"2 British sociologist Martin Albrow, in his The Global Age, declares that "postmodernity is only the latest radical form of modernity." Instead, he writes, "We have to listen to the language of the new age in a wider discourse. It resounds most in [the word] `global' and all its variations."3 The epochal change we are witnessing is not "the end of history" (in the sense of all of the ideological conflicts of human history coming to an end), but the dawning of "the global age."4 It has become widely recognized that the globe is "the most salient plausibility structure of our time."5 Therefore, we as evangelicals scholars must address preeminently the issues raised by globality.

A number of distinct approaches have emerged regarding how globality is best conceived.6 Based upon his recognition of a tripartite view of society (recognizing economic, political, and cultural spheres), ability to take religion fully into account, comprehensiveness, and flexibility we must agree with Waters that Roland Robertson is "the key figure in the formalization and specification of the concept of globalization."7 Robertson opens his major study of globality with a definition of the topic: "Globalization as a concept refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole."8 By "the compression of the world" Robertson means "global interdependence."9 Waters elaborates upon this definition when he defines globalization as "[a] social process in which the constraints of geography on social and cultural arrangements recede and in which people become increasingly aware that they are receding."10 Globality is a complex matrix of ideas and issues, but we will address some basic issues here as samples of the sort of interaction with it that is necessary in the future.

The first way we can address globaliztion is by addressing the major challenges which it poses for the world at large, offering Christian solutions for the common good and at the same time an apologetic for the value of Christian faith.

One such problem which globality poses for humanity at large is the problem of pluralization, that is, the problem of a plurality of options being present in a society (not an endorsement of the "value" of a multitude of options). The dawn of the global age signaled the end of the age of social isolation. There are many particular ways that pluralization impacts humanity, but one is that diverse cultures and religions progressively come into close proximity in a culture. Global compression means that inevitably communities which were previously isolated come into prolonged contact. One common result of such contact, cultural and religious, is violence, which will undoubtedly increase globally in the future. Robertson writes, "[S]ome now claim that cultural clashes between civilizations constitute the primary source of current worldwide political and military tension."11 As sociologist James Hunter points out with reference to religious tensions in America, "culture wars" often turn into shooting wars.12 In fact, the periodic murder of abortion doctors ought to demonstrate to us that the United States is not immune to religious violence, and that the Christian community is not above the practice of violence, particularly in an environment when the mood of the Christian community is alarmist, our rhetoric is inflammatory, and we have no clear philosophy of Christian social engagement to guide us and to set limits upon our efforts to achieve our goals. Thus, globalization leads to pluralization, and pluralization often leads to violence worldwide.