Rethinking Christ and Culture

Liberal Protestantism has accommodated itself to culture at the point of the sexual revolution. The fruites of the sexual revolution are easy divorce, shallow interpersonal relationships and promiscuity, sexually transmitted disease and sterility, homosexual activity, routine abortion, contraceptvies and antibiotics as substitutes for sexual responsibility, increased poverty among women and children, and children growing up without secure relationships with both parents. All this is tragic--yet liberal Protestantism does little to stand against it.

On the other hand, conservative Protestantism has accommodated itself to culture by blessing the commercialization of all of life and the exploitation of the poor through global capitalism. The fruits of the worship of the market are the commercialization of nearly all public space, the constant preaching of materialism through advertising, the destruction of the environment, the mad scramble for money, and the trampling of the poor by faceless corporations that view people as nothing but units of labor and consumers. All this is tragic too--yet conserviative Protestantism does little to stand against it.

Ironically, having set out to transform culture, both liberal and conservative forms of Christianity in North America today find themselves greatly transformed by late-capitalist, liberal-individualist culture during the last century. It is little more that empty rhetoric, then, for liberals and conservatives to claim to be transforming culture and to accuse those who reject the Christ transformting culture model (of Niebuhr's Christ and Culture) as irresponsible and irrelevant. What could be more irrelevant than Christian leaders who beg the government to pass laws to coerce their own church members into caring for the poor or refusing the abortion temptation, when those Christian leaders cannot convince their own flocks to do these things on the basis of the Bible? There is a glaring parallel between liberal Christians lobbying the government to tax the capitalists in their own flocks and redistribute the money to the poor, on the one hand, and conservative Christians lobbying the government to outlaw abortion, so members of their own flock will not have it as an option. No wonder politicians often have so little respect for religious lobbyists.

--Craig Carter, Rethinking Christ and Culture (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006) 20-21.