Alan Jacobs has been interacting with Brad East on culture, how to define it, and how Christians should or should not define "culture" and in what ways they do or do not (or can or cannot, by implication) "engage" whatever culture(s) might be:
Jacobs recently came back to this set of topics, thus why I'm mentioning this, however tersely via links I mention this. Jacobs tries out a thought experiment that goes as follows:
So let’s try this. When some hunter-gatherers try to frighten off would-be predators, that’s not yet culture. But when they designate certain persons in the group to be their protectors, and find some means — clothing, decoration, modes of address, increased shares of food — to acknowledge the distinctive social role of the protectors, then they’re making culture. This is why James Davison Hunter speaks of “‘spheres of symbolic activity,’ that is, areas of human endeavor where symbols are created and adapted to human needs.”
I think I can go one better than that because my dad was a member of a Native American tribe that was nomadic hunter-gatherer for untold generations--when hunter-gatherers don't bother to cultivate agriculture because there's no point in cultivating plant-life when you know all the edible flora in the region that's not yet culture ... or is it? The knowledge of what plants you can safely eat that render moot wasting time on "cultivating agriculture" when you can put all your culture's cognitive bandwidth into hunting and fishing and making sure you get your necessary protein constitutes two different forms of culture.
Leland Donald has a whole book on the slavery practices of aboriginal tribes in the Pacific Northwest coast of the North American continent that opens early on with a dry observation that when Western European and Anglo-American scholars encountered the tribes in the Pacific Northwest these tribes' very existence and customs threw giant monkey wrenches into generations of established Eurocentric bromides. First of all nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes were supposed to be egalitarian and not have deeply entrenched slavery practices. Second of all they had strong class/caste systems but not necessarily what Westerners would think of as "political office". More surprising for local traders who had gotten accustomed to, let's put this in the bluntest way possible, screwing over the American Indians by trading beads and trinkets for animal skins and so on, was the local white traders discovered that the tribes around here were unusually shrewd and had what we'd have to call highly developed concepts of property, even intellectual property. A song was yours and not someone else's, often because the guardian spirit you got (if you got one) gave you that song. In other words, the Pacific Northwest tribes had plenty of culture but it was not necessarily always in the form Western meta-cultural theorists recognized as culture.
Now let's get to the point where Jacobs writes this:
But hang on — aren’t we approaching politics here? Isn’t the creation of a group or class of protectors-of-the-community a political act? Indeed it is. So we need to decide whether when we’re articulating a theology of culture we need to include political theology as a component of it. Do we want to do that? Maybe, maybe not. We could
- envision a theological anthropology that contains a theology of culture that in turn contains a political theology. Russian dolls. Or we could
- envision a theological anthropology that contains a theology of culture and a conceptually distinct political theology.
Jacobs prefers the former to the latter. Maybe it's because I'm slowly pecking away at John Neville Figgis and David Nicholls; because I (like Jacobs) have read Jacques Ellul but also a bit of Edmund Burke; and maybe it's also because my dad was Native American from a PNW tribe I lean toward 2. It makes more sense to me to have a theological anthropology that contains a theology of culture and a conceptually distinct political theology because, oh, let me just broad-stroke this and point out that we're one year away from Native Americans having been given the right of citizenship. All kinds of cultures have existed without formal political theologies, a point that I would hope both Alan Jacobs and Brad East can appreciate.
So where Alan Jacobs attempted to go was to highlight that "culture" and "politics" intersect but don't necessarily overlap at all points, he has a point. Alexandra Harmon has a book called Indians in the Making that sketches out a history of how fuzzy and in-process Pacific Northwestern tribal norms, customs and social definitions have been in the last few centuries I started but set aside due to mountains of other reading I've been doing.
Socially conservative white Christian guys are probably "not" going to explore what Alan Jacobs describes as "demons" in culture. Mainline Protestants? Oh, sure. Walter Wink seems to have synthesized ideas latent in Hendrik Berkhof and G. B. Caird or William Stringfellow across the last half century. Roger Scruton sniped that Marxists have one of the most developed demonologies of the 20th century (meant, of course, as a put-down because good English conservatives are supposed to be "loyally indifferent" about Christendom but ardent in their opposition to Marxism). By contrast, David Martyn Lloyd-Jones contended in the mid-20th century that too many British citizens surmised that they were default Christians because they were against communism without considering that Christian charity means you share Christ with the communist but that the capitalist is also absolutely a sinner in the eyes of God.
I have a more practical and mundane complaint, the kinds of white Christian scholars in the West who swim in meta-cultural speculation are just doing that, they aren't really producing a culture as producing material about culture. This probably most pronounced within evangelicalism, which keeps proving Mark Noll was unfortunately right in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. One of the reasons I am skeptical about "political theology" as a buzzword in Christian academic writing is not because I don't care about those things but because that's seemingly all evangelical scholarship cares about. Abstruse pontification about theories of sovereignty that will so obviously never get implemented in the real world and only manage to inspire stuff like writers at Current Affairs getting terrified of "natural law" is not the same thing as solving an actual cultural problem.
I can't help but notice that the cultural battle lines drawn up about pop and classical music in academic settings bracket out along lines of race, class, political theories, and economic theories and yet the entire Cold War came and went with neither side accomplishing much by way of music-making. What we got instead were things like Socialist Realism which found music useful to the extent that it affirmed the triumph of global socialism on paper but reduced to Russian nationalism in practice (and as soon as Stalin died Polish intellectuals were rushing to affirm jazz was a thing to be supported). What we got instead were American government bureaus deciding that to show we're not like the commies we'll bankroll black musicians to tour the world and show the superiority of the American and Western way of life. Conservatives embraced Germanophile, Francophile or Anglophile or Russophile art mysticisms and Christians, to the extent that they dealt with theological aesthetics conceded that they basically hadn't bothered.
Frank Burch Brown has noted in his books that the supreme irony of Christendom is that its greatest cultural achievements in the arts, architecture, music and poetry all came about with practically zero theorizing about visual art, architecture, music and poetry in a form that would have anything to do with what scholars from the 18th century onward would call "aesthetics". In other words, Christians who are historians of the arts and aesthetics have run into this irony that the greatest flourishing of Christian arts seemed to happen when Christian scholars weren't the least bit interested in aesthetics (because that whole concept had not been invented yet) or necessarily in what contemporary Christian academics consider "culture".
Christian scholars talking about culture can be sort of like the guy who talks about writing a trilogy of epic fantasy novels but who never actually writes them because he's busy talking about them and what they're supposed to mean as cultural monuments. That's counting a farm's worth of chickens when there aren't even any eggs laid. Write the books, see if they can even get published, then see whether they have any legacy. Christian pundits have for generations frontloaded the intended legacy into conversation irrespective of actually making anything that might end up having a legacy. Christian academics seem to assume that given enough metacultural speculation and theorizing the culture will just take care of itself or that their theories will catalyze triumphant cultural production. Sure, and the socialist realists in the Zhdanov era thought that, too. Metacultural speculations are interesting in their time and place (sometimes) but they are not cultural production.
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