Chapter 4: An Alternative View of Culture and Cultural Change

We’re going through James Davison Hunter’s To Change The World chapter by chapter over the next few weeks. My primary reason for this is purely selfish… I want to use some of this material in the future, and this is a good way to force myself to analyze it and preserve the important parts.

Here’s the abstract of chapter 4 “An Alternative View of Culture and Cultural Change” from Hunter’s website:

Ideas do have consequences in history, yet not because those ideas are inherently truthful or obviously correct but rather because of the ways they are embedded in very powerful institutions, networks, interests, and symbols. Cultures are very resistant to change, but they do change under specific conditions.

http://jamesdavisonhunter.com/to-change-the-world/chapter-abstracts/

This chapter centers around 11 propositions, seven on culture and four on cultural change. The propositions are:

  1. Culture is a system of truth claims and moral obligations
  2. Culture is a product of history
  3. Culture is intrinsically dialectical
  4. Culture is a resource and a form of power
  5. Cultural production and symbolic power are stratified in a fairly rigid structure of “center” and “periphery”
  6. Culture is generated within networks
  7. Culture is neither autonomous nor fully coherent
  8. Cultures change from the top down, rarely from the bottom up
  9. Change is typically initiated by elites who are outside of the centermost positions of prestige
  10. World-changing is most concentrated when the networks of elites and the institutions they lead overlap
  11. Cultures change, but rarely if ever without a fight

The chapter ends with the statement:

Christians will not engage the culture effectively, much less hope to change it, without attention to the factors here.

When first reading, I’m a little baffled at this point. Hunter still sounds like he’s advocating that Christians set out to change the world, yet the means he’s suggesting don’t fit with what I understand to be the Christian way. Actually, Hunter is merely laying a roadmap to proper engagement of culture, but that will only be clear (at least to me) at a later point in the book.

So what do you think of Hunter’s propositions?

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