Do you think Christians should change the world? James Davison Hunter’s book To Change the World – with all due respect to the Rev. Slaughter – is a book you should read. At the very least, even if you reject Hunter’s argument, you will find yourself sharpened by the iron of the disagreement.
Hunter’s basic thesis is that the popular notion of what cultures are and how they change is wrong. The popular notion centers on individuals and the aggregation of individual “values” as the forces that produce and shape culture. Hunter – a Christian sociologist – argues that culture is produced by institutions and networks – not individuals – and changes when elites and the institutions they lead overlap and orient themselves toward common ends.
The argument is much too sophisticated for my brief summary. You can find a 11-page talk he gave in 2002 that includes some of the arguments from the book here (.pdf).
I’ve only skimmed through the book once, but intend to turn to a more careful reading in the next month. One place I found his book helpful is in articulating some of the discomfort I have – despite my admiration for – the neo-Anabaptism of what I call the Duke school in United Methodism – Bishop Willimon, Stanley Hauerwas, and their fellow Yoderites.
(Note: Hunter has ample critiques of the traditional Christian Right and Left as well. This book is not an attack on neo-Anabaptism in particular. I just found the following passages putting in words problems I’ve had with the ideas expressed by the movement.)
In some respects, ne0-Anabaptists politicize their engagement with the world even more than the Right and the Left because they cast their oppositions to the State, global capitalism and other powers in eschatological terms. To literally demonize such powers as the State and the market as they do means that they draw much of their identity and purpose in the here and now through a cosmic struggle with them. … Their identity depends on the State and other powers being corrupt and the more unambiguously corrupt they are, the clearer the identity and mission of the church. It is, as my colleague Charles Mathewes has put it, a passive-aggressive ecclesiology. The church depends on its status as a minority community in opposition to a dominant structure in order to be effective in its criticism of the injustices of democratic capitalism.
And as Hunter points out, the neo-Anabaptist critique of both the church and the world is overwhelmingly negative and leave little resource for those Christians who do not work in the church or the sacred confines of the theological academy.
The idea that the tasks one has in life – but especially one’s job – can be construed as a “vocation” or “calling” is not only rejected by the neo-Anabaptists, but treated at times with remarkable contempt; their hostility to other believers with different views, unrestrained. …
The neo-Anabaptist view of work and Christian presence in the world has important and, perhaps, unintended consequences. As a matter of theological conviction, the neo-Anabaptists cannot offer a constructive theology of work or art or commerce. Fair enough. But they also fail to offer any wisdom or encouragement or grace to believers who have to work (let alone want to work!) outside the church for a living. Their silence on the matter declares that the daily labor (and thus much of the lives) of most believers has little or no spiritual meaning outside of their activity in the church; in effect, that God does not care what they do as long as it is not immoral; that the day-to-day concerns of most believers do not merit the attention of the church’s leaders.
My quotes are already too long, so I will stop there.
The critique Hunter raises about the nature of the theological project of the Duke school resonates strongly with my own reactions while reading the books and listening to the sermons of the major figures who have such an influential presence in the intellectual life of United Methodism today. I’ve not read Hunter carefully enough to offer a good summary of his alternative to the dominant contemporary modes by which the church tries to change the world, but I urge anyone interested in such questions to pick up Hunter’s book.
The conversation he wants to provoke would be good for us.
I am a part-time local pastor serving 
The doctrine of original sin is surely more humbling to man than the opposite: And I know not what honour we can pay to God, if we think man came out of His hands in the condition wherein he is now.
