Bjcorbin's Blog

(Written several years ago)

Over the last several years the “7 Cultural Mountains” doctrine has become very popular in many circles. Ostensibly, it explains both the loss of “Christian” influence within the culture and gives “the church” a strategy for a return to prominence. At first blush, it sounds fairly plausible, but upon closer examination, significant flaws emerge.

For those who are not completely versed in this paradigm, it is based on the premise that there are seven primary areas that tend to shape any culture; which are government, religion, education, the family, business, arts & entertainment and media.  These areas have been dubbed cultural molders, pillars of culture, or more popularly the “7 Cultural Mountains”.  The idea is that if you can have an effect in those areas, you will in fact impact the culture as a whole. 

If you extrapolate from this solid base assumption, you can begin to trace the fall of the Christian influence within the larger American culture to its breakdown within these seven specific categories.  A study of the last half century in America’s history would certainly seem to confirm the steady descent of the Judeo-Christian influence within the culture; and it begs the questions, “What caused this descent?” and “How do we as Christians regain a place of influence within our culture?”  It is in the answer to these two fundamental questions that I find the most problematic elements of this movement.

The generally accepted answer to the first question is that Christians have separated themselves from the culture and essentially abandoned the other six cultural mountains in favor of camping on the religion mountain.  This claim is generally supported by pointing to the Christian subculture created by things like books, music, movies… that are specifically marketed to the church.  But a broader look at the people who count themselves as “Christian” in America doesn’t seem to support that premise at all. 

If Christians have truly segregated themselves to the religion mountain, then there ought to have been a marked shift toward orthodoxy in the church, instead of the rampant abandonment of traditional church doctrines and it ought to be easy to find groups of highly devout Christians, sequestered away from the culture at large (akin to the Amish people); but that doesn’t appear to be the case either.  Considering that more than three quarters of adult American’s profess to believe in some form of God and that most of those profess some form of Judeo-Christian basis for that belief, such a mass cultural exodus would be difficult to conceal. 

As I look around, I see people who claim some form of Christianity in positions of prominence throughout the culture.  The mayor of my town, the governor of our state, and the President of our country are all professed Christians; so is the Senate Majority Leader and so are the majority of people who hold government office in this country.  Many of teachers at my children’s public school are Christians, as are several of the players from the last Super Bowl teams, so was the winner of this year’s Daytona 500, and at the Grammy awards, several of the artists thanked their “Lord and Savior”.  Wherever you go in this country and no matter what field you look into, you can find Christian people in a position to influence their environment. 

The idea that the church has separated itself from the culture would seem to imply that Christians in America are so committed to their principles that they are unable to relate to the things of the world, but the overwhelming evidence suggests that the opposite is true.  Statistics for things like sex outside of marriage, divorce, abuse, addiction to internet pornography… indicate no discernable difference between the church and the world.  I would submit that the failure of the church to effectively engage the culture has more to do with the fact that the American brand of Christianity has become so dilute and compromised that the church as a whole has become undistinguishable from the culture.  I also believe that for those who have not compromised, the chasm between the pure truth of God’s word and what the culture holds as truth, has become so wide that they doubt their ability to bridge the gap.

A possibly more dramatic example of the flaw in concluding that Christians have cloistered themselves on the religion mountain can be drawn by an examination of the religion mountain itself.  If Christians have put all their eggs in that basket, than this is the one area of culture that they should firmly control; but the truth is that their influence appears to be diminishing just as rapidly on this mountain as it has on all of the others; as traditional forms of religion give way to the rise of Humanism, Scientology, Mormonism, Islam, New Age and Wicca. 

If we have drawn the wrong conclusion about the question of how we got to this point then undoubtedly our answer to the question of, where we should go from here, will be off base as well.  If the conclusion is that we’ve disconnected ourselves from the culture, than the answer is sure to be aimed at establishing a stronger connection; but if our problem is in fact that we’re already too connected to the culture, then such a strategy could be a recipe for disaster. 

As I review the strategy that’s being developed for “taking back the cultural mountains”, I caught myself trying to find some biblical context for it.  Undoubtedly we are meant to have an impact on the culture around us, but my understanding of scripture would indicate that this impact was meant to be a by-product of our on-going, dynamic connection to God and was never meant to be the object of our pursuit.  If Jesus was out to conquer the culture, why wasn’t He born in Rome or at least in Jerusalem; why did He spend His brief season of ministry with ordinary people instead of appealing to those in positions of power; and why don’t we see the apostles doing those kinds of things either. 

It is the enemy’s game to make us feel as though we lack what we need to live the life that God has ordained for us and yet this strategy seems to be predicated on the idea that “if we only had the right people, with the right credentials, in the right places, then we could impact the culture for Christ.”  If that is what it takes, then how did Jesus change the world with twelve uneducated men, who possessed little earthy influence?  This proposed strategy seems to be more rooted in futurist philosophies than in biblical principle. 

The sad news from my perspective is that we’re already in a position to impact the culture if only we’d surrender ourselves to God and to His purposes.  We seem to think that we can win the world with our ideas, but the word tells us that to those who are perishing, the cross is foolishness and it’s too easy for the world to see the disparity between what we preach and how we live. 

Our role has always been to be “salt” and “light”.  Salt was never intended to be the main course; it was only intended to flavor the things it touches.  Light itself is rarely the center of attention, but its presence is illuminating to everything it reaches.  If we’d simply live what we profess to believe, our culture would be revolutionized.  If we loved our wives like Christ loved the church, women everywhere would want to marry a Christian man.  If we loved our neighbors as ourselves, people would want us to live on their street.  If our “yes” meant “yes” and our ‘no” meant “no”, businesses would want us as their employee’s.  If we could be identified as Christians because of the way we loved & supported each other, we wouldn’t have any trouble getting people to come to church.  If people could see the character of Christ within us, they’d be drawn to it.  Unless the world sees something within our existence that they want for their own, they have no reason to accept that our version of the truth is any more credible than theirs. 

The danger in this doctrine is that it threatens to keep the church focused on the culture instead of the Author and Finisher of our faith; and as humans we tend to become whatever we behold.  It also threatens to keep us focused on what is seen, instead of looking to the unseen realm, which is where both our weapons and our enemy exist.  This philosophy seems to hinge the healing of our land on our ability to change the minds of the ungodly, while God’s word ties the healing of our land to His children changing their minds. 

It strikes me as more than a little ironic that the period in which Christianity reached its most prominent position within culture has come to be known as the dark age of the church.  Unless the church that bears the name of Jesus Christ becomes connected to Him in a way that causes His image to be accurately projected to the world, it will continue to be irrelevant to this or any other culture.

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