Christ and Culture: An Interview with Greg Forster (by Matthew Claridge)

Is Christ with, for, or against culture? Whatever the answer, we cannot be content with an ambiguous “and.” This is an issue of increasing concern and urgency to evangelicals as they watch whatever common ground they assumed was in place in American culture swiftly eroding under their feet. Yet it is in these times of uncertainty and shifting worldviews that the church has the opportunity to scrutinize its role in society unclouded by cultural arrogance or ignorance.

It is a pleasure to have Greg Forster back with Credo for an interview on his new book Joy for the World: How Christianity Lost its Cultural Influence and Can Begin Rebuilding It. Forster is among a cadre of evangelical intellectuals rising to the challenge the new century presents for the church. I count him among the “sons of Issachar” whom God has gifted with an “understanding of times, and what (the new) Israel ought to do” (1Chron. 12.32).

Greg Forster (PhD, Yale University) is a program director at the Kern Family Foundation and a senior fellow at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. He also the editor of the group blog Hang Together and a regular contributor to the Gospel Coalition, First Thoughts, and other online resources. Forster is the author of numerous articles and six books, including The Joy of Calvinism.

In recent years there have been many evangelical books coming out about engaging culture. What does your book contribute to this growing body of work?

Where most books look at “culture” generically, I look specifically at the American experiment in religious liberty and what it means for the role of religion in our civilization. I also ground my approach in scriptural teaching about how the Holy Spirit transforms the lives of believers. And rather than champion the church against the institutions of human culture as some do, or champion Christian cultural life against a commitment to the ministry of the local church as others do, I affirm the necessary roles of both. The ministry of the church (preaching, worship, sanctification) and the civic institutions of culture (family, economy, citizenship) are all necessary to a godly life and a flourishing civilization.

The conceptual center to your book is the word “Joy.” What do you mean by this term and what has it to do with influencing and rebuilding culture?

When I talk about joy, I don’t mean simply a feeling of happiness, because I don’t think that’s what the Bible means when it uses that term. “The joy of God” is the flourishing of our minds, hearts and lives, which believers have as a result of the special work of the Holy Spirit in us. Our thoughts are changed, our emotions are changed, our actions are changed. That transformation inevitably has an impact on the relationships and institutions within which we live, and thus it intersects with our culture. This is the place to start when we think about how Christianity influences culture, because this is the only thing that is really unique about Christianity. This is the one thing we bring to the table of our culture that no one else can.

I found your discussion of religious freedom quite fascinating. What are the blessings and problems of this arrangement? Can religious freedom be consistently upheld without the majority influence of the Christian tradition?

The greatest blessing is the space it creates for virtue and conscience. I think most people have forgotten that it’s very rare in human history to have a culture where people are expected to shape their lives according to an understanding of what is right. In most civilizations historically, 98% of the population was simply told how to live, and that leaves no space for people to be moral creatures. One challenge this creates is that religion and even morality can come to seem optional. Another is the fragmentation of our moral language – if you and I have different religions, we may still agree that murder and theft are wrong, but we’re likely to disagree about what actions should count as murder or theft. It becomes very challenging to hold a society together without returning to the old way of just having the elites at the top simply tell everyone how to live. Can we uphold religious freedom over time if Christianity remains a minority view? We may not need to find out, if we can reform the church effectively enough to seek revival. But if the Lord doesn’t grant that, I suppose the answer will depend on what the predominant religion ends up being. I believe that religious freedom is morally right, and I believe God gives a conscience to all people and not just to believers, so in principle it should be possible. But “possible” is a long way from a guarantee.

Explain this statement: “The people who don’t need to get into the inner ring are the people who really keep a civilization going” (157).

In that quote I’m discussing a magnificent address C.S. Lewis gave to college students about how the world works, called “The Inner Ring.” In every profession and in every other cultural group, Lewis says, there is an “inner ring” of bigshots and important people at the top of the social ladder. Many people spend their lives trying to move up that ladder, and they burn up tons of their energy and opportunities focused on that goal. It’s the people who ignore the ladder of social importance who tend to get their jobs done properly and build authentic social relationships. That’s the only thing that keeps all the professions and cultural groups from collapsing in a great heap.

Unpack this crucial strategy for cultural engagement: “embedding our opposition to the bad within the framework of the good is the best way to strengthen and empower our transformative impact” (89).

One of our greatest deficiencies in the evangelical world today is that we don’t embrace and affirm our culture and its structures. Everything outside the church, everything that doesn’t have a cross stamped all over it, is assumed to be inferior. We are especially wary of anything that smells like love of country – I can testify from experience that the fastest way to get jeered at in the evangelical world is to say something good about your country. I understand there are good historical reasons for this; we’re in detox from the Jerry Falwell generation. No one wants to go back to the Religious Right. But God loves the nations. He says the structures of human culture are ordained by him and have his blessing, and that they contribute to human flourishing. God ordains government to uphold justice. God ordains economic structures to produce the goods and services people need. God ordains the family – and not just in Christian households. By God’s grace, even after the fall these structures have a good role in the divine plan. We should love our country; we should love our democratic constitution, which gives us a role in governing; we should love the modern, entrepreneurial economy that has raised more than a billion people out of poverty. And once we truly love these structures, and prove by our actions that we accept them and want them to flourish, we will suddenly discover that we have earned the right to be heard when we criticize them. Would you let an atheist tell you how to run your worship service? No? Then why should the American people let you tell them how to run America, if you don’t identify yourself as an American who loves this country as much as they do?

Do you think the argument of Ryan Anderson that exclusively recognizing heterosexual marriage is in the best interest of the state for the raising of children is a sufficient and effective argument in the public square?

I would not limit the argument for marriage just to the goal of raising children. The state ought to institutionalize marriage only between a man and a woman for other reasons as well. And I think it is important to stress (as Ryan also does) that this is not a particularly Christian view. The proposition that marriage is intrinsically a heterosexual phenomenon is almost the universal voice of all human culture, regardless of religion, until just the other day. Even the cultures in which homosexual relationships were widely accepted and legitimized never dreamed of treating such relationships as marriages. They saw that something different was at stake in a man-woman relationship than in a same-sex relationship. As for whether the argument is “effective,” I think it is as effective as any philosophical argument can be nowadays. The deficiency is not in Ryan’s argument, but in the responsiveness of our culture to rational argument. Without leaving philosophy behind, because philosophy is critically important, I think we need a major increase of investment in other ways of making our view intelligible and plausible, such as storytelling.

You make an impassioned case for economic growth and the task of Christians to build cities, not utopias, for the benefit of others. But what about Cotton Mather’s famous statement, “piety begat prosperity, and the daughter consumed its mother”?

We have to distinguish between the warning that wealth creates temptations to sin, and the view that wealth forces us to sin by some kind of inevitable power. The latter view was held by the ancient pagans as part of their cyclical view of history; people believed they were trapped in a permanent cycle in which poverty teaches thrift, thrift leads to prosperity, prosperity leads to vice, and vice squanders wealth, leading back to poverty, and so on forever. To say that this cycle is inevitable implies that human beings do not have free will and are merely puppets. That is what the ancient pagans basically believed in – all is fate. You certainly can’t square this view with the teaching that the Holy Spirit has been given to the church to empower us to live godly lives under any kind of circumstances.

In the early modern period, this fatalistic view of economic history experienced something of a revival, and since then a lot of well-meaning Christians have been taken in by it. In scripture we find stern warnings that wealth creates temptations, and we should take that seriously. But we also find that God commands us to work for the flourishing of our households and communities – very much including their economic flourishing. And we find that the Holy Spirit has been given to the church to empower us to sustain godliness. In the Old Testament, God warns his chosen nation that they are going to get rich and it’s going to tempt them to evil – but the reason he gives this warning is because it is his intention to bless them with fabulous wealth! Israel becomes wealthy in the promised land, we are told over and over again, because it was given the law of God and it learned virtuous behavior. So does that mean God is responsible for Israel’s sin, because he taught them virtue and made them wealthy? Do we think God was just kidding when he wrote the Proverbs? The command to do honest work that creates wealth and increases the well-being of our households and communities is repeated in the New Testament. We have to avoid a prosperity gospel that says faith creates wealth by some automatic process, but at the same time, we have to avoid saying that God doesn’t care if people starve to death or die of polio. And unfortunately, the prevailing current in Christian intellectual life these days is very anti-growth. I guess I’m just not as smart as the people who take that view, because unlike them, I simply don’t know how to love my neighbor while hoping that my neighbor loses his job. In general and on the whole, virtuous behavior tends to create wealth and health for most people. God is in favor of that.

What’s the problem with “rational self-interest” as a platform for Christians and non-Christians to pursue economic growth together?

It sounds very plausible to many people – as long as we can get people to be enlightened enough to realize that lying, cheating and stealing are not in their self-interest, can’t we get everyone to behave themselves without any need for the difficult call to rise above self-interest and put other people’s needs ahead of their own? But it founders on two basic problems. First, it’s not true that lying, cheating and stealing are absolutely never in my self-interest. Mere “rationality” or “enlightenment” is not enough to transform self-interest from a selfish vice into a socially harmonious force. If I become more rational without any overcoming of the self, my rationality simply makes me more effective at cheating without getting caught. If we don’t call people to a level of moral virtue that rises above self-interest, people will not in fact behave themselves. The second basic problem is that we can’t have a legal and economic system that forbids lying, cheating, and stealing unless we have a pretty broad level of public agreement, as a culture, about what kinds of actions are going to count as lying, cheating, and stealing. People can all agree that any action that falls into these categories is wrong, yet disagree about what particular actions fall into these categories. In order to have a social system that works, you need enough shared morality to define the content of these terms. And in spite of centuries of attempts by some of the brightest minds around, it turns out you just can’t get that out of an ethic of enlightened self-interest. You have to transcend self-interest before you can really have a moral worldview.

Your key statement, when it comes to Christians and politics, I believe is this: “the most important task in political life is building moral consensus.” In what ways is this a Christian project?

Yes, that’s the top political action item in my view. We have to build consensus across all sorts of cultural lines – religion, political party, ideology, you name it – and identify shared moral commitments that define us as a people. In one sense this cannot be an exclusively “Christian project” because the whole point is to build something that has its own integrity as a shared possession. We can’t build a shared sense of who we are as a culture if we start with the presupposition that the shared culture will be distinctively Christian. At the same time, I think there is one sense in which building moral consensus is likely to be a predominantly Christian project, because it is Christians who ought to be the first to let their guard down and reach out across boundaries. Shame on us if we call ourselves Christians but don’t love our neighbors enough to try to find a way to live together in peace and harmony.

Matthew Claridge is an editor for Credo Magazine and is Senior Pastor of Mt. Idaho Baptist Church in Grangeville, ID. He has earned degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is married to Cassandra and has two children, Alec and Nora.