Culture And How To Change It

I notice in today’s paper that one of our Oklahoma state lawmakers has proclaimed herself "a cultural warrior for Judeo-Christian values."

While I have no doubt that she means well, I think her statement springs from a sentiment that has taken deep root among American Christians in recent years -- the idea that the best way to get our morally adrift culture back on the right course is through political action.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be concerned about laws and government and who our elected leaders are; we certainly should be. But if that becomes our central concern, we are focusing on a symptom and missing the real problem, which goes much deeper. Real change for good occurs on an intimate personal level, as individual hearts come to realize their alienation from God through sin and find reconciliation in Jesus Christ. That and only that is how individual souls, and by extension groups of people, will find their bearings.

As long as the individual hearts of our country are turned away from God, it is going to be reflected in their collective whole -- the culture at large, of which our laws and governing institutions are but an emanation. Laws are top-down solutions to problems that originate at the bottom of a society: the individual hearts of its members. Laws are necessary but they are ultimately ineffective at getting at the real source of corruption. Even if you could somehow magically transform all our laws overnight to reflect Judeo-Christian values, it wouldn’t change one single solitary heart and our society’s slow backwards drift into spiritual narcolepsy would continue unabated.

As for this particular lawmaker, whose intentions I’m sure are noble, if she is committed to the cause of Christ, she would serve it much better by spurring her fellow Christians to get out of their church buildings and take their message to the streets, getting involved in their communities through acts of service -- not acts as ends in themselves, but as avenues for reaching individual hearts with the Good News about Jesus.

That, brothers and sisters, is how you change a culture. Anything else is confusing effects for the real cause.