Saturday, September 1, 2012

Culture Is Downstream From Politics – Can Conservative Christians Work Together?

From John Stonestreet at crosswalk

When Hillary Clinton claimed there was a “vast right-wing conspiracy” against her husband, many conservatives just laughed. “Work together?” many of us thought. “She apparently doesn’t know conservatives as well as she thinks she does.”

But Jonathan Chait, writing last week in the left-leaning New York magazine claims there’s actually a vast left-wing conspiracy, but this conspiracy isn’t located in Washington, D.C. This conspiracy, Chait argues, comes from Hollywood, which is “mainly transmitting an ethos in which greed is not only bad but the main wellspring of evil, authority figures of all kinds are often untrustworthy, sexual freedom is absolute, and social equality of all kinds is paramount.”

Chait goes on: “You don’t have to be an especially devoted consumer of film or television to detect a pervasive, if not total, liberalism.” He then points to “the modern family in 'Modern Family,' not to mention the girls of 'Girls' and the gays of 'Glee'…” as evidence.

In the end, Chait concludes that “the uncomfortable reality is that the culture war is an ongoing liberal rout. Hollywood is as liberal as ever, and conservatives have simply despaired of changing it.”

This is something that all Christians concerned with the state of our culture must hear and learn. We have tended to see the culture wars as being primarily a battle of ideas, which almost exclusively takes place in the political sphere. But as we often say here on BreakPoint, politics is downstream from culture. Politics is most often a reflection of cultural values, not a source of them.

Read the rest here …

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