Christian analysts and cultural critics (me included) have long used the concept of “worldview” as a way to understand both the implications of the Christian faith and the presuppositions of its opponents and alternatives. Today we also have a related but somewhat different concept: the social imaginary.
I once worked for Chuck Colson, the Watergate criminal turned Christian activist, writing for his radio program (also now a podcast) Breakpoint, described as “a Christian worldview ministry that seeks to build and resource a movement of Christians committed to living and defending Christian worldview in all areas of life.”
Colson defined worldview simply as “the sum total of our beliefs about the world.” These beliefs include our assumptions, our values, our purposes, and our understanding about life. Our worldview includes our religious convictions, or lack thereof. These beliefs may be conscious philosophies or unconscious habits of mind we’ve picked up from our surrounding culture. Our worldview becomes the lens through which we see and understand the world. Materialists, Marxists, romantics, existentialists, animists, modernists, and postmodernists–to name a few–all have their distinct worldviews, and so do Christians. (For a good introduction to the Christian use of the concept, see Brandon Todd Clay, What Is a Worldview & Why It Matters.)
The Christian emphasis on worldviews for Christian apologetics, critique of non-Christian perspectives, and teasing out the implications of the Christian faith for other realms of life can be traced back to the Reformed thinker Abraham Kuyper. But it goes back further to Immanuel Kant and his concept of Weltanschauung–literally, “world view”–as the mental framework we have by which we organize our sense impressions. As the Wikipedia entry for the term shows, the concept has also been used in other fields, particularly psychology and sociology.
The concept is a useful one, though since I’ve read Hamann I have become leery of Kant and since I’ve become a Lutheran I have become leery of Kuyper. In particular, I’m realizing that an overemphasis on worldview can lead to postmodern-style relativism, as in you have your worldview and I have mine, and one is as good as another since we can’t break out of our worldviews to know any kind of objective truth. To be sure, Christians like Kuyper, Francis Schaeffer, and Colson insist that the Biblical worldview is true, analyzing the alternatives so as to show those who hold them the contradictions between their assumptions and what they hold most dear, “taking the roof off” in the hope of opening them to the Gospel.
Some critics of worldview claim that in emphasizing “beliefs,” it privileges the intellect, putting an unwarranted emphasis on philosophical issues and neglecting the emotions, the will, and other perhaps more important dimensions of human existence.
At any rate, an alternative to worldview, which includes what is most salient in that concept but also other facets of the human sensibility, has emerged: the social imaginary. Wikipedia defines it as “is the set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols through which people imagine their social whole. It is common to the members of a particular social group and the corresponding society.”
“Imaginary” here does not mean made up, or not being true. It refers to what people habitually imagine. “Imagination” is simply the mental faculty that we have of conjuring up mental images in our minds. (See my book with Matt Ristuccia, Imagination Redeemed.) Thus, the social imaginary includes not just intellectual beliefs but what we picture in our minds (memories, feelings, desires, fantasies, our constructions, and what we take as real).
This collection of what we can imagine is “social.” That is, it is formed and shaped by our culture and by the social groups that we belong to.
I still think “worldview” is a better way to think of people’s collection of assumptions than “social imaginary.” World view implies seeing, not just knowing, so it includes the tangible realm of the senses and the imagination, not just intellectual abstractions. And if “worldview” privileges philosophy, “social imaginary” privileges the social sciences, which are far more restrictive and problematic in my opinion. Individuals can have distinct worldviews that are different from those of other members of the groups they belong to, whereas “social imaginary” by a slight of hand makes all beliefs and imaginings the product of a social collective.
The concept of the”social imaginary,” while used in many fields, has resonance for Christians because of the work of the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor, who wrote what has become the definitive study of secularism, A Secular Age. Tomorrow we’ll look at what Taylor has to say about the social imaginary of our own secular age, which he says affects non-believers and believers alike.
Illustration: The Global View via PublicDomainVectors, Public Domain
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