Christianity as a Cultural Phenomenon
Dr. Brian Walsh, the Christian Reformed Campus Chaplain at the University of Toronto , gave the inaugural lecture for the Rabanus Project, the Christianity and Culture Program student society dedicated to exploring two thousand years of Christianity as a culture phenomenon. He offered the following comments at the outset of his lecture on U2.
Thank you so much for inviting me to speak at this inaugural meeting of the Rabanus Project. I have been impressed and excited about the "Christianity and Culture Program" at St. Michael's College for a number of years now, and if such a program had been available when I was an undergraduate at U of T in the 70s, I think that I would likely have chosen this as my major, or at least I would have significantly supplemented my program in philosophy and religious studies with courses in Christianity and Culture.
Two thousand years of Christianity as a cultural phenomenon! This group will have a lot to talk about. And when we think of Christianity as a cultural phenomenon, we can, of course
think of the cultural expressions of the church in architecture, art, music, poetry, literature, sermon and liturgy. And we can also think about the very ecclesiastical structures of the church as cultural expressions of how the church has engaged the political structures of its day and how - for good or ill- the church has attempted to embody in its corporate life and canonical conventions the faith in Jesus Christ that is at its heart.
So before I launch into a discussion of U2, let me take a minute to say three introductory things about the broad topic of Christianity and culture.
First, Christianity is a cultural phenomenon because it is a human phenomenon. Now this seems pretty self-evident, doesn't it? Humans are culture-formers and therefore Christians are culture-formers. And we can fruitfully add that Christians (together with Jews) have a clear biblical basis for their understanding of culture-forming. You see, in the most foundational story of the Christian and Jewish scriptures we meet a Creator God who forms a creature in the very divine image precisely so that this creature can take leadership in the shaping of a creational garden (already a cultural reality --or at least an agricultural reality) in such a way that cultural fruition results.
Second, because culture-forming is a response to the call to humans to bear the divine image in their stewardship of creation, culture is always inherently and foundationally religious in character. Here I commend to you the tradition of cultural anthropology identified with people like Mary Douglas and Clifford Geertz. Or consider this provocative definition of culture from Jesuit theology John Francis Kavanaugh, “A culture is a cult. It is a revelational system. It is the entire range of corporate ritual, of symbolic forms, human expressions, and productive systems. It quietly converts, elicits commitments, transforms, provides heroics, suggests human fulfilments. The culture, then, is a gospel – a book of revelation – mediating beliefs, revealing ourselves to ourselves.”
In this perspective we begin to see that the Enlightenment dualism between faith and society, or church and culture, or religion and the public square is a myopic vision of life that fails to see the integrality of “faith” or “spirituality” or “ultimate concern” or “religion” to all of life. Culture-forming is invariably religious in character--that is to say, that human beings shape culture in ways that are reflective of and in service of worldviews, myths, and foundational symbols that are ultimate or religious in character. This is the case, I believe, whether we are talking about an Islamic culture, Buddhist culture, Marxist society or the cultural phenomenon known as the global consumerist society. All of these cultural expressions are rooted in narratively shaped worldviews that are, at least anthropologically defined, religious in character.
So, reflecting on Christianity as a cultural phenomenon is nothing that unique. Capitalism is also a cultural phenomenon. And both are equally religious. Now if it is true that humans shape culture in ways that are animated by something akin to a religious imagination, then my third introductory point is to note that Scripture provides Christians with their richest and most foundational, and indeed authoritative, fund of images and that a Christian imagination is shaped and engendered by the overall narrative--or metanarrative--that one engages in the biblical text. And at the heart of this narrative is Jesus. We could say then, that a Christian imagination is an imagination that is transformed in the image of Jesus and that Christian culture-forming is always done in relation to the radical early Christian confession that Jesus--not Caesar or any other hegemonic cultural expression--is Lord.
To borrow an image from C. S. Lewis, all of this suggests that there is nothing “safe” about the enterprise of studying and engaging Christianity and culture. Culture is now and always has been a site of conflict. We don’t need to appeal to the so-called ‘culture wars’ of recent year to understand that culture – in its mythological foundations, symbolic expressions, politico-economic structures and social patterns – is always a contested realm. Which symbols, whose myths, what structures and cultural patterns will shape any culture at any given time? From a biblical perspective we could say that cultural life is a site of contested sovereignties.
We meet the Irish rock band U2 in the midst of this contesting of sovereignties, this conflict of imaginations. And there is nothing surprising about this either. That’s where all creative and authentic Christian cultural expression will be found.
A significant portion of Walsh’s lecture was published as “Walk on: biblical hope and U2” in Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalog. edited by Raewynne J. Whitely and Beth Maynard ( Cambridge , Mass. : Cowley, 2003).
John Francis Kavanaugh, Following Christ in a Consumer Society: The Spirituality of Cultural Resistance (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1981), p. 56.
For a creative interpretation of U2 see Robert Vagacs, Religious Nuts, Political Fanatics: U2 in Theological Perspective ( Portland , Oregon : Cascade Books, 2005).