Christianity And The Cultural Problem

By R. J. Rushdoony

Santa Cruz, California

ONE of the insistent problems facing Christianity is the present persistent inability of Christian faith to produce its characteristic culture. Although often made up of a sizeable minority and sometimes even a majority in many areas today, Christianity is marked by a generally derivative and mainly secular culture. In America, it has for generations been noted that the sons of the Protestant clergy have a preponderantly significant role in national life, and the total contribution of the Christian home to national culture has been as decisive as its analogous inability to make use of the same ability within its ranks.

In dealing with other cultures, Christianity has shown a like weakness. Significantly, the two areas of greatest weakness in the missionary enterprise have been Islam and American Indians. Mohammedanism, although increasingly subject to the potent ferment of nationalism, still remains the most vital non-Christian culture, and in cultural cohesion is second to none. Its missionary activity in Africa today outstrips Christian efforts, and one of its main appeals is this: Mohammed presents a practical and unitive morality which is easily followed, while Jesus offers a standard which none of His followers are able to live up to, with divisive and pharisaical consequences.

At the other extreme, American Indian culture is either on the decline because of the onslaught of American life, or has virtually disappeared, leaving a cultural vacuum. Here, ostensibly, is an opportunity for reconstruction by means of Christian faith, but here again we encounter a significant resistance or indifference to the missionary enterprise.

The relationship of Christian missions to rival faiths and cultures can thus be summarized under; three heads: 1.) In facing its strongest rival, Islam, Christianity has made little or no headway. In part, this has been due to the prohibition of missionary activity in Moslem countries, but, even where permitted, the Christian mission has been largely unsuccessful as far as practical Christian results are concerned. The major impact on Islam has come from western secularism and from Russian communism, and Christian missions have too often been more successful in mediating secularism than Christianity to Moslems. 2.) Christian missions have been likewise unsuccessful in dealing with broken and declining cultures, as witness its continuing impotence in dealing with American Indian cultures. 3.) In the areas of its success, Christian missions have too often been more successful in fostering secularism with its attendant disintegration of the old culture, and the creation of a new rival, materialism. In particular, the educational products of Christian missions are too often the pioneers in a corrosive nationalism and a bitter materialism.

In order to understand the Christian cultural task, a review of the scriptural precedent is necessary. The institution of the Passover marked the beginning of the national life of Israel and was noted by a calendar change. With the Passover, Israel became the redeemed people of God and the chosen nation. And yet, significantly, the celebration of this holy day was not so much national as familistic (Ex. 12:14–28, 42). The relationship of Jehovah to His people is predominantly described in familistic imagery and symbolism: the Lord is the faithful Husband of the faithless wife; He is the loving Father chastening His sons whom He loves; He is the Bridegroom coming to claim His bride; the loving Father of the prodigal son; and the Father-Son relationship is used to describe the inner relationship of the Trinity.

In the Law, the family has a place of central significance. Two of the Ten Commandments, the fifth and seventh, deal directly with the family. In Christian civilization, the death penalty has been most commonly invoked for offenses against human life, the state, and the church. In Scripture, the death penalty for murder and kidnapping (Ex. 21:16) is clear-cut. But treason is unknown as a capital offense and the most serious offenses are those against God and the family. The various laws prescribing the death penalty for sexual offenses against the sanctity of the family are too familiar to require repetition. Less familiar is the fact that rebellion against parents was related to rebellion against the Sabbath and the Lord (Lev. 19:2, 3). Exodus 21:15 declares, “And he that smiteth his father, or mother, shall be surely put to death”, while Exodus 21:17 goes further to aver that, “he that curseth (or revileth) his father, or mother, shall surely be put to death”. This commandment is restated in Lev. 20:9 and Prov. 20:20 while Deut. 21:18–21 provides for the death penalty for a son who “is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard” (cf. Lev. 21:9, Prov. 1:8; 15:5). These commandments are underscored in the framework of grace rather than law by the New Testament, Jesus Christ Himself restating them in Matthew 15:4 and Mark 7:10. Paul, in Ephesians 6:1–3 reminds his readers of the primacy of the family “in the Lord” and declares of the fifth commandment that it “is the first commandment with promise; that it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth” (cf. Ex. 20:12; Deut. 5:16).

The levitical laws of holiness or separation enforced a line of cleavage between the covenant people and the world. The covenant man could neither dress as other men, being forbidden the use of linen and wool in the same garment, nor sow his field with mingled seed (Lev. 19:19), nor round the corners of his beard, nor tatoo himself (Lev. 19:27, 28), nor eat non-Kosher foods. In these and other ways, his associations with the world in terms of the life of the world were made difficult or impossible. At the same time, the covenant people, while prevented by the laws of holiness from entering into unbelieving organizations and homes, were enjoined to open their homes to the stranger. The same chapter which commands love of the neighbor (Lev. 19:18), i. e., the fellow Israelite and covenant brother, defines also the stranger, often an unbeliever, as a neighbor (“But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself” Lev. 19:34), and therefore the object of love. The unbelieving home, life, and organization are closed to the covenant man, but the covenant home must be open to the world in love commanded by God as a witness to His grace. The privileges of the covenant people are not for their sakes, but for the Lord’s sake. The covenant people exist as God’s witness to the world, and that witness must be central to the life of the covenant. Israel sinned when her life became an end in itself and the service of herself. For his restriction of God’s grace to the covenant people, Jonah was punished and humbled. Psalm 87 celebrates Zion as the mother of the faithful from many lands and peoples, identifying Zion with the spiritual body. Solomon, in his prayer of dedication, asked that the Lord in particular “do according to all that the stranger calleth to thee for: that all people of the earth may know thy name, to fear thee, as do thy people Israel” (I Ki. 8:43). Thus, special privileges were asked for foreign believers coming to the temple, that their witness among unbelievers abroad might be the more glorious. Our Lord, on cleansing the temple, declared its function to have been perverted. It had been erected as the house of prayer for all nations (Isa. 56:7, Lk. 19:45–48), but the Jews had separated the Gentiles, isolating them in a court of the Gentiles, and then expressed their contempt for the Gentiles by defiling that court with livestock, money-changing, buying, and selling. They had in effect made it a house of prayer for one nation. The covenant and covenant people exist for the Lord’s sake and with a world-wide responsibility to manifest His majesty and His mercy, His sovereignty and His grace. This function and purpose applies to all covenant institutions, church, home, and school.

It is apparent that in biblical society the family was the basic unit of society, and a type of the union of Christ and His church.[1] The Hebrew family became the cultural unit of the nation, and, when both temple and nation disappeared, continued to perpetuate Judaistic culture, and, more than that, develop it. Through the often much less forceful Christian family, the basic unity was given to Christendom which enabled the Christian faith to survive the downfall of Roman, Holy Roman, Papal, and now Renaissance, civilizations. The biblical emphasis is on the family as the basic unit of society, the first and last church, school and state of man. A contemporary sociologist has protested against the attempts to understand man by approaching him through “the Trobriand Islanders or the primitive man” and has insisted that “the sociological relations between familism and civilization in western society are not only necessary for understanding future western society, but also for an intellectual comprehension of the basic family sociology of all mankind”.[2]

And yet, despite this inheritance, the characteristic approach of Christianity to the cultural problem is in terms of church and state. A number of Churches, eastern and western, as well as the adherents of the social gospel, see the solution in terms of the Christian state and its supremacy. Others, notably the Church of Rome, see the solution in terms of the Church. Presbyterian and Reformed Churches have tended to share in this weakness, although offéring as well the only potential alternative in sphere sovereignty.

This failure in facing the cultural problem can be specifically illustrated in terms of Indian missions. The data that follow are derived from the situation among the Paiutes and Shoshones of Owyhee, Nevada, but are generally applicable to other Indians with minor variations. Three separate main groups of Indians were placed on the Western Shoshone Reservation, friendly Shoshones, peacable Paiutes, and the defeated and war-like Pauites under Chief Paddicap. The concern of Christians and of the U. S. government was the peaceable assimilation of Indians into American life and Christian faith. Restriction to the reservation destroyed the old hunting life, and rations were substituted for some years, thereby sapping the vitality of Indian character. Boarding schools were established for the children, first located in the community, then in distant places which involved a total break with the Indian family. Parents refusing to enter their children in the boarding school were arrested and publicly exposed to shame by being chained to an iron ball in front of the government building. The haircut and dress of the white American and instruction in Christianity were required. Despite frequent local conflicts between agent and missionary, these tensions seemed to be no more than “inter-tribal” disagreement to the Indian, inasmuch as the missionary had his place in the scheme as an instructor in the school curriculum, teaching Christianity. The comparatively recent abandonment of compulsory Christianity and chapel attendance met with considerable disfavor among the Churches. In order to “improve” on this situation, various Churches established and maintain diverse educational and other institutions to further the Christianization of the Indian, all with meager returns.

From the Indian’s point of view, all this is alien and hostile. The whites can be divided into two classes: the one is made up of the indifferent men, often morally lacking, who are mainly concerned with their own jobs in school, government agency, or business; the others are “do-gooders” with a fundamental disrespect for Indians and Indian life, who feel that they, rather than the Indians themselves, constitute the hope of Indians. The school, whether Indian boarding or public day school, constitutes a constant threat and menace. It teaches the child, whom it possesses during most of his waking hours, an alien standard, in terms of which the Indian parent is peripheral and wanting. Movies, athletic contests and other activities further alienate the child. The “do-gooder”, Christian and otherwise, enters the picture, sees the instability of the child and his lack of character, and feels that he “must do something about it” and his program only further alienates the child and further emphasizes the parental impotence and irrelevancy. Then follows the characteristic pattern of declining civilizations, common today not only to Indian but white American life. The breakdown of the family leads to a cultural crisis in the civilization, or threatens the very life of the civilization. In order to counteract this decline, civilization calls on the state and the church and public or private agencies to assume an active role in checking delinquency, decline, formlessness and the typical ennui of the homeless of all ages, a satiety with life and a craving for constant sensation and entertainment. But catering to this craving only hastens the decline, and the debacle becomes inevitable.

The church today concentrates on the youth problems rather than on the family. Through conferences, camps, programs, colleges, parochial schools, and day schools (which have their place), it attempts to meet the cultural crisis and the rising rebellion, and manages to get only limited returns. In dealing with American Indian and Moslem cultures, it gets very limited returns and thinks in terms of retreat. It is incapable of meeting successfully the true test of its faith—a broken culture, or a strong and functioning culture. Missions have tended to “succeed” only where westernization has been successful. Thus secular western culture has carried Christianity as a by-product to its marvels of technology. As a result the growing rejection of colonialism and imperialism is at the same time a rejection of Christianity. Today, most Churches have withdrawn from the Moslem field, and in the main only a limited Presbyterian and Reformed missionary enterprise remains, with indifferent returns. Churches maintaining missions to American Indians are subjected to constant criticism from within for continuing an expensive and unfruitful program. In both instances, the results are criticized rather than the basic missionary methodology, and the failure in these fields is not related to the failure in the home Church.

It is true that the failure of Protestants in this direction has not been as marked as Roman failures. Furnas, in commenting on the variety of heretical cults in the South Seas, points out that they appear in Protestant areas and constitute “the native’s unstable effort to reassert himself against the steady pressure of mission and trader … whereas the natives of Catholic-dominated islands seldom developed anything but a cowed, childishly dependent acquiescence in anything the good fathers saw fit to do”. The total effect of Christianity was thus not the revivification of local life but its smothering by the imposition from above of an alien culture. Protestantism at least gives enough impetus to the native to make rebellion possible. Furnas cited Rivire’s verdict on Batailion, the great Marist missionary bishop of Wallis Island who built a great cathedral but “remains a great figure among those sowers of religion who harvest only barrenness”. On Mangareva, principal island of the Gambiers, Pre Laval, very much like the Franciscans with the mission Indians of California, used forced labor and obedience to establish his Christian colony. In like manner, when the culturally defeated population declined, he organized expeditions to the Tuamotu to capture fresh and fertile pagans to replenish his dwindling stock. His jail was always crowded with offenders against chastity. Every night all unmarried girls were locked up to prevent fornication, and on the eve of every holy day, married women were likewise imprisoned.[3]

If this seems a hideous caricature to Protestants, they should remember that their own converts in Fiji were taught such strict legalism as to permit a ship to break up on the Sabbath and refuse assistance, and Williams, the greatest Protestant missionary, prided himself on his natives, who, while adrift and starving, refused a good opportunity to catch fish because it was the Sabbath. Such legalistic faith, lacking cultural roots and a familist basis, is often unstable and weak when separated from missionary supervision. More important, Protestants should realize that their primary area of emphasis has not been, and is not, the home and the family, but the impersonal school. The Protestant school has been destructive of every tie in the local society and barren in producing a Christian culture. A Christian school is valid only as the outgrowth of the Christian home. As far as the mission school is concerned, its best fruit has been secularism and nationalism, and from the islands of the Pacific to the corners of Asia, the products of Christian schools have been far more vital in such causes than for Christ. But this is not different from the situation at home, where the sons of the church have a predominant influence in national life but are lost to the church.

The present cultural impact of Protestant Christianity is authoritarian and oriented in terms of church, state, and school. It speaks through monolithic institutional voices, an official press, an official curriculum, official schools and a controlled life. Christian family culture, if dedicated to biblical patterns, is authoritarian but pluralistic, and its characteristic life is apparent in the concept of sphere sovereignty. It insists that Christian activity is not circumscribed by the church and that the first institution is the family which, with the church, the free school, the free artist and the Christian state, is equally a part of the Kingdom of God.

The Christian family and its culture has been the neglected area of Christian thinking. Problems of church and state, but not those of the family, concern the seminarian. As the basic unit of civilization and of culture, the family has all but been forgotten. In missionary work, apart from attacks on promiscuity and polygamy, it has been a minor element. Too often missionaries have destroyed dowry systems, which give social and economic stability to the family, and made the family rootless in terms of native culture. The biblical dowry gave marriage an economic stability and rendered divorce an exceedingly unwise measure. Basic to all biblical home life and marriage was the dowry. At the time of our Lord, as in the Old Testament era, there were legal minimums set for dowries (Ex. 22:17). The dowry for virgins was at least 200 denars, 100 denars for a widow, while by action of the priestly council at Jerusalem, the dowry for a priest’s daughter was 400 denars. The denar was equal to a day’s wages for a laborer. The actual sum was often far in excess of the legal minimum. To the groom’s dowry was added the father’s dowry, in money, property or jewelry. Orphans received a dowry from the parochial authorities. The dowry made the wife, who in authority was under her husband, the economic security of the family. The virtuous woman was praised, among other reasons, for her ability to handle her estate and increase it (Prov. 31:10 ff.). The dowry could not be alienated from the family, nor could the husband use it without responsibility for any loss or without payment of its tithe to the wife for pin money. A divorce meant the return of the dowry to the wife.[4] Thus the biblical family had, by virtue of the dowry, a close integration of religious, sociological and economic factors, all combining to strengthen the basic covenant institution. The dowry was not without its broader connotations; all that added to the life and security of the home was, figuratively, a dowry; thus, Leah, on bearing her sixth son, declared, “God hath endued me with a good dowry” (Gen. 30:20). Historically in biblical and non-biblical cultures, the absence of a dowry usually signifies concubinage.

Too often missionaries, on encountering the dowry system, react to it in terms of western secularism and individualism, and with a background of outdated and naive anthropology. The dowry is viewed as wife-purchase and a degrading materalism, and converts are asked to break with the system. Both psychologically and sociologically this tends to reduce the wife to a concubine. The social disintegration which follows has unhappy consequences not only for the pagan culture but for the Christian society, which is asked to assume the atomization of western individualism together with Christian faith. This synthesis is deadly enough in the homeland; on the mission field, it is even more devastating.

And yet at no other point is there a closer contact between Christianity and paganism than the family. Through creation grace, even the most decadent cultures retain a sense of the centrality and religious function of the family. Even where pre-marital promiscuity seems most flagrant this is clear-cut. Among certain American Indian tribes, pre-marital promiscuity is commonplace and among the youth of many peoples even regarded as socially necessary, but even here the object is marriage, and the encounter is generally a contest between the girl, desiring pregnancy and marriage, and the boy often seeking to avoid it. In such cultures, there is a strongly favorable response to missionary activity which shows a respect for the authority of the indigenous home while emphasizing that the true life and authority of the home is possible only in Jesus Christ. In such a familistic culture, the potential convert sees cultural hope rather than suppression and annihilation. Christianity becomes not a western Juggernaut but the local hope.

The responsibility for an effective answer to the cultural problem rests with Calvinism, which by its very nature must insist on rigorous fidelity to both its biblical foundation and its catholic scope. This familist approach moves more slowly than does the method of imposition, but it moves more surely and effectively. Confronted today with a world-wide cultural crisis, the Christian church needs to evaluate anew its effort. The necessity for a Christian sociology was never more urgent, and central to that discipline is the Christian family. The Protestant emphasis on the school has produced the atomistic individual, ready to seek hope in impotent and isolated individualism, or look to the imposing power of nationalism and the state. Christian schools are needed on the mission fields, but they must be the outgrowth of the life of the covenant people, geared to the conditions of local life rather than to the educational standards of an alien people and culture. The school is destructive of the covenant if it is not the outgrowth of the life of the covenant people. There is no attempt here to deny the value or need of schools sponsored by Christian society (rather than the church) but an attempt rather to delineate the impact of present schools, whose clear-cut purpose is to supplant the old culture with a Christian one. As such, their purpose is specifically challenged: Is the school the proper bearer and guardian of Christian culture? Is Christian culture a scholastic discipline? Can the impersonal, atomistic and intellectual discipline of school life ever reproduce the vitality of Christian culture, which cannot see the individual except in terms of his relationship to God and Christ and through and in Him to all society? It could be further asked to what extent the ostensibly Christian school represents Christian faith and to what extent it imparts western secular knowledge and faith in technology, education and science as means of salvation. The Roman emphasis has produced subservience and monolithic authoritarianism. Characteristically the Roman church in Italy and in Mexico have in common only the hierarchical structure and the liturgical language. Such native culture as persists and the native faith that exists is either the raw paganism of pre-Christian times or an uneasy syncretism, and both represent a survival rather than a product. As a result, anti-clericalism becomes the truculent or implicit faith of cultural hope.

The difficulty of most solutions has been their inability to deal effectively with the nature and status of pagan culture. It has varied from an unhappy continuity which simply baptizes paganism and develops the old culture, rather than producing a Christian one, to the radical discontinuity claimed by Barthianism and applied by pietism, which almost assumes a continuous dichotomy and clash between nature and grace. Pietism fosters family worship and strengthens the home but limits the relevancy of the home in its relation of God to society. The Calvinist answer to this must be an insistence on the relationship of pagan culture and creation grace. Specifically, it can and must assert that the home and the family is the primary area of Christian activity and the key institution of Christian life. It will therefore avoid the obliteration of the family through the agency of church, school, or state. But it will insist that the family outside of Christ is itself an instrument of social disintegration and a part of history’s continuing crisis because it lacks a true foundation. In Western society, marriage is established on the flimsy foundation of personal feeling, and dissolves with the decline of sexual desire. In pagan cultures, the foundations, sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker than the present Western basis, vary from economic considerations to ancestor worship. The crises, limitations, and failure of such societies are measurable in terms of their family sociology. In answer to this, the Christian can point to the Christian family, established in grace, a type of the relationship of Christ and the church, a microcosm of the social macrocosm in that it is church, state and school as well as the basic enonomic unit, and productive of a life and culture which is both popular and authoritarian for time, and rooted on the level of the people, and yet established on divine authority. If Calvinism be faithful to its concept of sphere sovereignty, it will reconstruct Christian society in terms of the family and will reorder church life and activity in terms of a more limited function of church, state and school and a greater activity for Christian society.

Secularism has progressively pushed back the frontiers of Christianity towards the inner life, and limited the relevance of the home to society. Life has been reduced to bread, to economics, and the separation of church and state has in effect been interpreted as the separation of religion from the state and society. But non-Christian societies, being largely, except for China, exempt from the plague of secularism, see life in essentially religious terms. This particular insight needs to be retained in Christian terms. The aboriginals of Australia are often assumed to be the most backward of peoples and most retrograde in their treatment of women. According to Kaberry, however, these women have a function which is not merely profane but also sacred. The woman’s economic, marital, and social functions are all part of her total religious life, so that her life is not merely a profane task and burden but in very real terms a sacred function and calling.[5] The church cannot offer only a baptized secularism to new converts. It has been unable to offer a Christian culture, even a transplanted one, to new converts on the mission field, because no such culture exists. The church has too often failed to see the responsibility of the covenant people in all of life, associated the covenant with education and made the school the central covenantal institution, and been content to remain on the periphery of western culture rather than to challenge its false presuppositions, not only intellectually but in terms of a vigorous Christian life and culture. Confronted with this task, Calvinism has a healthy foundation, but to rest content there without further building leaves the task unfinished, even barely begun.

Notes

1. R. J. Rushdoony, “Calvin in Geneva: The Sociology of Justification by Faith”, Westminster Theological Journal, XV, 1 (Nov. 1952), pp. 34 f.
2. Carle C. Zimmerman: Family and Civilization (New York: Harper, 1947), p. 659.
3. J. C. Furnas: Anatomy of Paradise (New York: Sloan, 1948), pp. 281–302.
4. Alfred Edersheim: In the Days of Christ. Sketches of Jewish Social Life (New York: Revell, 1876), pp. 149 f.
5. Phyllis M. Kaberry: Aboriginal Woman; Sacred and Profane (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1939).