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{"id":18407,"date":"2016-09-30T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-09-30T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=158"},"modified":"2016-09-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-09-30T00:00:00","slug":"get-ready-to-rumble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/09\/get-ready-to-rumble\/","title":{"rendered":"Get Ready to Rumble"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Early in his To Change the World<\/em><\/a>, James Davison Hunter counters simplistic Christian understanding of cultural change with a series of propositions about the character of culture and the dynamics of cultural change. Proposition Eleven is simultaneously reassuring and sobering: \u201cCultures change, but rarely if ever without a fight\u201d (43).<\/p>\n

A culture, he says, is \u201cterrain in which boundaries are contested and in which, ideals, interests, and power struggle.\u201d Many, many people have vested interests in maintaining the status quo: \u201cinstitutions and their agents seek to defend one understanding of the world against alternative, which are always either present or latent.\u201d These agents are the arbiters of legitimacy and illegitimacy, normal and deviant. To allow dramatical cultural change would mean to exchange one set of ideals and practices for another, and when ideals change so do the gatekeepers. If nothing else, a circulation of elites will mean that new arbiters take their place, and they can\u2019t have that (43\u201344).<\/p>\n

Cultures are always<\/em> terrains of conflict, even when dramatic change is not in the offing. Against some versions of postmodernism, Hunter insists that cultures are not merely<\/em> war zones, and he observes that cultures change through new alliances and convergences as much as through pitched battles. Still, \u201cconflict is one of the permanent fixtures of cultural change. It is typically through different manifestations of conflict and contest that change in culture is forged\u201d (44).<\/p>\n

Given this, anyone who wants to change culture has to learn a delicate dance, swaying between familiarity and novelty. Challenges to the status quo have to be articulable within the status quo, else they won\u2019t be heard. But they must also resist absorption into the status quo, lest they fail to present a challenge. Hunter puts it this way: \u201can alternative vision of society\u2014its discourse, moral demands, institutions, symbols, and rituals\u2014must still resonate closely enough with the social environment that it is plausible to people. If it does not, the challenge will be seen as esoteric, eccentric, parochial, and thus either unrealistic or irrelevant. On the other hand, if the challenge articulates too closely with the social environment that produces it, the alternative will likely be co-opted by that which it seeks to challenge and change\u201d (44).<\/p>\n

The same dynamics are at work in congregations and denominations, which also have their settled elites who exist to protect the status quo. Would-be reformers should take Hunter\u2019s words to heart. If they\u2019re serious about reformation, they need to get ready to rumble.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"