Why I Am a Conscientious Objector in the Culture Wars 0 comments

I have a confession to make: I've burnt my draft card to the culture wars. It may sound unpatriotic and irresponsible, but I have come to the conclusion that these wars are unjust and illegitimate, and I will not fight in them. If necessary, I will move to Canada.

By now, the term "culture wars" has become part of our public vocabulary, referring to the constant political clash of opposing worldviews—call them traditionalist versus progressive or conservative versus liberal. This conflict manifests itself in a number of issues, including abortion, euthanasia, welfare, homosexual rights, the relations between church and state, and the public funding of controversial art.

My objection to the culture wars does not mean that I have no principles or refuse to stand up for them: I have strong opinions on most of these conflicts, and am willing to give voice to them when appropriate. What bothers me is the manner in which these wars are conducted.

As sociologist James Davison Hunter has pointed out in his two recent books, Culture Wars and Before the Shooting Starts, issues that are at root philosophical and theological have become completely politicized. In other words, genuine debate and reflection on the issues has been replaced by the clash of factions fighting for absolutist, ideologically pure visions. In a recent interview for the Mars Hill Tapes, Hunter called this a conflict between "competing utopian politics that will not rest until there is a complete victory." Thus the culture wars are fought out in the political realm. Hunter concluded: "The only thing left to order public life is power. This is why we invest so much into politics."

Of course, the causes of this politicization are numerous and complex, stretching back into our spiritual and intellectual history. But the urgent need at the moment is to recognize that we cannot reduce culture and its various modes of discourse to nothing more than a political battleground. The political institutions of a society grow up out of a rich cultural life, and not the other way around. As its etymology indicates, the word culture is a metaphor for organic growth. Reducing culture to politics is like constantly spraying insecticide and never watering or fertilizing the soil.

Christians have not been immune to the pressures of living in an ideological age. They have tended to either embrace secular liberalism or react violently against it. The result is a constant movement toward one extreme or another: the Zeitgeist or the fortress mentality, trendiness or philistinism. What is needed is not some form of compromise, but a more profound sense of where the real tensions and paradoxes lie.

In his book Christ and Culture, H. Richard Niebuhr pointed out the limitations of seeing Christ "in culture" or "against culture." Niebuhr offered another model, the kind embraced by St. Augustine, which envisions the Christian mission as a continual transformation of culture. In today's political atmosphere, the idea of transformation or conversion is seen as a highly offensive "imposition of values," but Augustine and Niebuhr were not theocrats. They believed that the life of culture ought to involve a dialectic between nature and grace, human culture and the revelation of God. Grace without nature becomes abstract and inhuman. Nature without grace tends to despair and meaninglessness. The true paradigm is the Incarnation: Word made flesh, the human and the divine unified.

Image was founded on the premise that Christians have an obligation to nourish the culture of their time, and to enrich their faith by deepening and extending their imaginations. Image does not speak the language of politics but the language of art inspired by faith. That form of speech lies at the heart of our culture and it must not be allowed to become a dead language.

The format and graphic design of Image embody these convictions. At the risk of being called "elitist," we have chosen to feature longer stories and essays, rather than cater to short attention spans and the desire for pre-packaged polemics. We have also invested in expensive four-color reproductions in order to do justice to the visual arts. We realize that all this might convey the impression that we are "high art" snobs, but we are confident that the work in our pages is so grounded in a sense of reality that we won't be accused of separating art from life or substituting art for faith. Our hope is that Image should, both in form and content, invite contemplation and provide aesthetic delight.

Above all, we want Image to play an important role in restoring a central tradition in art to the public square. Without projects like Image, the culture wars will continue to expand and our civic life will be increasingly politicized and tribalized. Our culture will then be like the place in Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," a country "where ignorant armies clash by night."