Culture and Counterculture

It is often said that Christianity is countercultural, and I think that’s true — at least, it ought to be true most of the time. If Satan is indeed the “god of this age”, as Paul wrote, and “the whole world lies in the power of the evil one”, as John put it, then, for Christians, aligning ourselves with any new movement in our culture is more likely than not to be a step in the wrong direction.

But even when someone unremittingly evil is pulling the strings, you can’t be sure everything happening around you is intrinsically or pervasively wicked. Satan disguises himself as an angel of light, sometimes using genuinely good things to mask his involvement and agenda. Nor can we trust emerging social trends, however welcome they may initially appear, or rely on them not to suddenly reveal deeply negative aspects we could not anticipate. Satan’s apples are full of cunningly concealed Gillette products, and Christians are wise to mute their approval when others are cheering unreservedly for universal implementation of the latest big idea.

Apples and Razor Blades

Nevertheless, while the enemy’s power and influence over the affairs of men should make believers careful not to condemn ourselves in what we approve, it is undeniable that even social trends with bitter aftertastes often have positive aspects, and vice versa.

It is possible to draw a line of causal connection directly from the end of slavery to the bitterly divided American nation of today and the #BLM riots. Would it have been better if emancipation had never happened? Surely not.

Foreign aid efforts that saved millions of starving children in the Third World have resulted in exploding populations, widespread poverty, chronic political unrest and the invasion of Europe. Should we have left babies to die instead? You tell me.

The welfare state leads to lower intelligence, greater apathy, more abortions and widespread substance abuse among its beneficiaries generation after generation. Efforts to save the environment through “green” solutions are actually destroying it faster. Should we give up caring for the poor or trying to regulate the use of the world’s resources?

The feminist movement spawned abortion rights and waves of sexual incontinence that have destroyed millions of marriages, but it also gave abused women a voice and autonomy previously unknown. Would young women with poor judgment be better off in Solomon’s harem or working in the American porn industry?

Okay, that one might be a bit of a saw-off. There are probably other options.

Inverting the Countercultural Argument

However, the point is this: since cultural movements are rarely unmitigated goods or evils, it is insufficient to talk about Christianity as countercultural if by this we mean consistently and unremittingly opposed to the zeitgeist or the spirit of the age. We need to ask ourselves which aspects of our current culture Christianity aligns with and which it opposes, and of course we need to have a strong, scriptural sense of why that is.

In fact, the countercultural argument is now being inverted and used against us. We are told that trans people, lesbians and gays live countercultural lifestyles, a persecuted minority in a society that looked down on them. Since Christianity is also countercultural, these folks argue, the church should embrace those who identify as LGBT as allies and fellow travelers, the modern “publicans and sinners” with whom the Lord Jesus would happily have dined.

There are several ways to counter such specious assertions. The most obvious is to demonstrate that approval of LGBT lifestyles is no longer countercultural, as I have done here. In fact, it is as mainstream as mainstream can be. But if we understand that our relationship as Christians to the world around us is not always a binary choice between full-throated acceptance or outright rejection, then the false argument that the enemy of my enemy is my friend loses whatever force it might have.

Adages like “Christianity is countercultural” may serve as useful summaries of viable positions. Equally, they can obscure necessary distinctions and lead us to erroneously believe truth is always simple to formulate.