Do You Have Culture-​​Colored Faith?

How culture-​​colored is your faith? The ques­tion may seem unim­por­tant, but I assure you that it is vital. You see, cul­ture as we know it will be dras­ti­cally dif­fer­ent at some point, and it may be in the not-​​so-​​distant future that cul­ture as we know it — it doesn’t mat­ter if we’re talk­ing the cul­ture of the United States, Saudi Arabian cul­ture, or Argentinian cul­ture — would be unrec­og­niz­able in impor­tant ways.

We see this played out in fic­tional depic­tions of what the future of human­ity might look like. Take Star Trek as an exam­ple. In First Contact, Captain Picard explains to a 21^st cen­tury woman that in Picard’s time (just a few hun­dred years in the future), greed is no longer a dri­ving force for human­ity. He doesn’t get paid. No one does. Instead, human improve­ment is the focus — to build a big­ger, bet­ter Federation, to increase the qual­ity of life as much as pos­si­ble, and so on.

I’m thank­ful that cul­ture changes — were it not for com­put­ers, I wouldn’t be able to acquire a healthy com­puter mon­i­tor tan! But while the world shifts end­lessly around us, how are we as Christians respond?

Let me use as an exam­ple fam­ily size. Our own Scriptures declare that chil­dren are a her­itage from Yahweh and that the man who has many chil­dren is “blessed,” or happy (Psalm 127:3–5). That is what our Scriptures say, and con­se­quently it is an absolute truth for every age. But what says the cul­ture? Two kids are enough? Three are a bur­den? Four are too many? Five or more are unthinkable?

It’s curi­ous that our cul­ture is at such a point that hav­ing eight kids is enough rea­son to parade the fam­ily around “real­ity” tele­vi­sion shows like cir­cus freaks so that any­one inter­ested can see just how much work goes into hav­ing a large fam­ily — most of them are too lazy to ever want that much of a bur­den, but to be enter­tained by oth­ers? This is America, after all; about the only national value we have left is the right to be enter­tained at oth­ers’ expenses — the highly lucra­tive enter­tain­ment busi­ness depends on it, so that value is safe no mat­ter who runs the White House, I think.

Our faith has been col­ored. Dreams which pull women out of the house­hold and into the work­place sim­ply to make ends meet. Dreams which pull chil­dren out of the house­hold and into government-​​controlled schools or pricey pri­vate schools. Dreams which pull men away from being an active and present par­ent for their chil­dren, teach­ing them and rais­ing them in the way they should go.

United States cul­ture isn’t really con­ducive to large fam­i­lies — the blood of far too many unborn cry out in tes­ta­ment to that.

And fam­ily size is just one area our faith has been mud­died by culture.

Churches? Simple gath­er­ings of believ­ers are few and far between; in their place, elab­o­rate enter­tain­ment pro­duc­tions have appeared. Even in con­ser­v­a­tive, “tra­di­tional” churches, the church is no longer a band of believ­ers but is instead a busi­ness wherein the bulk of money joy­ously given by the attend­ing saints isn’t used to fur­ther God’s king­dom on Earth but is instead used to pay “church” bills, pay full time pas­tors, build bet­ter build­ings, or any of a vari­ety of other things.

Marriage? Somehow con­ser­v­a­tives have got­ten the idea that mar­riage is described by the equa­tion “1 man + 1 woman = mar­riage.” It has not always been so. Our own Scriptures tes­tify that a man may be mar­ried to mul­ti­ple women, pro­vided he has the resources and abil­ity to care for them all. We spend so much time and effort attempt­ing to get the United States gov­ern­ment to out­law homo­sex­ual mar­riages (and by exten­sion, polygamy and any other non-​​heterosexual-​​monogamy unions) with­out real­iz­ing that our views are in direct oppo­si­tion to the lives of men like Abraham, Caleb, David, and numer­ous oth­ers. God Himself never con­demned these men, why should we? Contrariwise, Yahweh declared His hate for divorce, yet we do lit­tle to pre­vent it these days.

Childhood? Would you believe that Josiah was an effec­tive king of Israel at only eight years of age? There was a point that chil­dren weren’t just chil­dren, they were chil­dren being raised. We aren’t prepar­ing chil­dren for adult­hood any­more, and this is quite evi­dent by spend­ing any amount of time in a pub­lic place — try your local depart­ment store’s toys area, where most of the messes aren’t made by chil­dren but but teens and adults who have no idea how to con­duct them­selves in a pub­lic place. It’s easy enough to blame schools for not teach­ing effec­tive cit­i­zen­ship, but because I dis­be­lieve that the schools should be teach­ing chil­dren any­thing, I instead must place the onus of respon­si­bil­ity back on par­ents whose faith has been col­ored by culture.

Appearance? Millions upon mil­lions of dol­lars are spent annu­ally just in the United States on beauty prod­ucts and designer clothes. We really have noth­ing bet­ter to spend the money on? Television instructs us on What Not to Wear while mag­a­zines fill us in on what’s hot or not. Rather than being taught by the older women how to love hus­bands, younger women are instructed on how to wear makeup, do their hair, or dress “just so” to attract guys. Guys aren’t immune to this either, nor do much if any­thing to dis­cour­age such imbal­anced pri­or­i­ties in our families.

If you’re won­der­ing why any of this mat­ters, I’ll tell you. Culture changes, and that’s absolutely fine; we see that in the Scriptures with no indi­ca­tion that Yahweh dis­ap­proves of cul­tural changes. What we do find in the Scriptures, though, is that we tend to grav­i­tate away from the ways of the Lord and toward aspects of the cul­ture which run con­trary to bib­li­cal principle.

An increas­ing num­ber of churches are embrac­ing any and all hip or “in” prac­tices in an attempt to be “seeker sen­si­tive” and “cul­tur­ally rel­e­vant,” but they ulti­mately do is make them­selves rel­e­vant only to a tiny por­tion of cul­ture and his­tory at the expense of remain­ing bib­li­cal.

God in His omni­science told us that large fam­i­lies are awe­some, that mod­esty is a virtue worth hav­ing, that divorce is more often than not sin­ful, and so on. His views won’t change, and if He wants us to con­form to His mind, then it is His cul­ture that we will be held account­able to in the End.

How culture-​​colored is your faith? It matters.