The Religious Critique of Culture

Abstract

As long as there has been a concept of there has been a critique of culture. In the eighteenth century in Europe, when the term began to come into general use, there was an Enlightenment critique of culture fashioned by the philosophes and directed against the alleged extravagance and superficiality of aristocratic on the one hand, and the simplemindedness of folk or peasant on the other. In the Romantic era that followed, a different critique of culture emerged - this one aimed at the supposedly overly-rationalistic and utilitarian philistine culture of the middle or lower middle class. Later in the nineteenth century, Marx and his followers developed another type of Kulturkritik focused on what happens to culture itself within modern capitalistic societies, i.e., on how cultural objects and values, by getting caught up in the market, become commodified, reified, and alienated both from the people who create them and the people who consume them. In each of these instances - to go no further with examples - there was always a basis or from which to make judgments about and particularly to make judgments about whether any specific form of culture should be considered good or bad, beneficial or harmful. For Enlightenment critics, reason was that basis. If cultural expressions seemed reasonable or rational, they were deemed good, but if they appeared to be irrational, they were labeled bad and rejected out of hand. For the Romantics coming a few decades later, authenticity or genuineness was the main yardstick of evaluating the worth of cultural objects or values, while for orthodox Marxists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the ground of evaluation was class relations. If a given culture produced mostly false consciousness, and thereby drew individuals wittingly or unwittingly into a bourgeois status quo, it was declared sterile or retrograde; but if it produced true consciousness in the working class, and as a consequence helped advance the hopedfor proletarian revolution, it was said to be progressive and considered worthy of support. There has also existed alongside these other types of critique a critique of culture, even though it has generally been less noticed or commented upon. The religious critique of culture - which in the West has largely taken the form of a Christian critique1 - also makes judgments from certain presuppositions, but these presuppositions are, not surprisingly, quite unlike those that accompany the various secular critiques, thus making the religious critique unique from the very beginning. For example, undergirding the Christian critique of culture are a number of metaphysical and theological assumptions that are entirely foreign to the secular critiques just mentioned. Among these are the notion that there is an afterlife created by God for human beings; that men and women are placed here on earth for one principle reason, to gain salvation in this afterlife; and that, this being so, everything we might do or think here below pales in comparison to this single overriding end - an end that involves, after all, how one spends the whole of eternity. When assumptions such as these are present, even implicitly, in a cultural critique, then those cultural objects or practices that encourage spiritual development, nourish one's faith, or promote higher salvific ends would naturally be evaluated affirmatively, while those cultural activities or forms of expression that impede these same ends would be regarded negatively. Given the particular premises of the Christian-religious approach to it seems that one likely result would be a mode of analysis and evaluation that is not only different than that of the secular critiques, but which also produces conclusions that are different than those arrived at by non-religious cultural critics. This indeed appears to be the case. …