What People Mean when They Talk about “The Culture”

And why it's probably doing more work than you realize.

Culture is like a nose. Everyone else’s is plain to see. Our own remains largely invisible to us until we look in the mirror.

In January, someone handed me a mirror.

I spent a week with a group of church planters from across Africa at a training event near Nairobi. For an entire day we talked about communicating the gospel in ways that are intelligible and compelling to the people around us without compromising our Christian values. In the middle of this day a Nigerian pastor on the front row said he was “as Nigerian as Nigerian can be.”

To sharpen his point, he gestured to another participant seated a few chairs to his right and said, “Not like our brother over there who grew up in England. I mean Nigerian Nigerian.”

The man he spoke about was the son of Nigerian immigrants, who pastored a Nigerian church. He was educated in a Christian school operated and attended primarily by Nigerians. Now he’s planting a church in Lagos. But he was raised in a major English city. He speaks the Queen’s English, and he occupies space differently than the other Nigerian participants. (That was plain even to me.) He’s Nigerian. But to some, he’s not Nigerian Nigerian.

Being in no sense Nigerian myself, I’m in no position to judge who’s doing it right. But what I found fascinating is that this comment—and the noisy debate it set off—came up on a day we spent several hours discussing the dangers of conflating our national and social identities with our Christian identity or baptizing cultural conventions, preferences, customs, and values with the Bible. On a day we spent worrying about over-identifying with “the culture,” we paused to debate who was sufficiently Nigerian.

I just loved it.

The reason this was a mirror moment and not just an entertaining cross-cultural experience is because the internal conflict the discussion surfaced is not uniquely African. At bottom, the participants were expressing a deep sense of pride (the healthy kind) about identifying with particular history, customs, diet, language, traditions, dress, accents, ancestry, geography, folkways and more. At the same time, and in the same hearts, they held deep-seated anxiety about the corrosive influence of “the culture.”

I feel this tension in my own heart. Other American evangelicals do too, even if they wouldn’t put it in just those words. There are many who regard themselves as “real Americans” and “true patriots” while at the same time wanting to distance themselves from fundamental features of American society. There’s pride about preserving a “way of life” or “heritage,” or restoring it to its former glory, mixed thoroughly in the same heart that rages against “the culture.”

Sorting out how this happens is important for those of us who say we want to order our lives according to the Bible instead of the culture. My attempt at an explanation begins with defining our terms, just to get us all on the same page.

Some Definitions

All of us use the word “culture” (or “cultural”) in a bunch of different ways, without confusing ourselves or each other. Here are a few presumably uncontroversial ones. We talk about culture as achievement in the arts and literature and such, as in the masterpieces of “Western culture.” We use “culture” as a shorthand for customs, norms, institutions (and more) of an entire people, as in “American culture.” Culture can refer to customs and folkways of a particular group, such as “Southern culture” or even “organizational culture.” It can denote a particular lifestyle philosophy, as in “hustle culture.” And it can refer to set of values and taboos (as in “therapeutic/therapy culture”) and the means of reinforcing them (as in “cancel culture”).

And then there are a bunch of compounds that may mean any of those things above applied to particular groups: pop culture, subculture, counterculture.

There are almost certainly others. But this little essay isn’t about “culture” broadly (although it’s trending in that direction, isn’t it?). I’m intrigued by a particular usage: the culture. When we add an article “the”—“the culture”—the term changes meaning subtly but significantly.

“Culture” is a matter of sociology, history, anthropology, psychology, geography, economics, language, music, and more. In the examples above, the word “culture” doesn’t signify whether something is good or bad. It’s simply a handy way to reference the shared values or behaviors of a group.

“The culture” works differently. “The culture” is theological and ideological. For evangelicals it functions a little like “the World” in parts of the Bible. James writes, “Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world” (James 1:27). We might change that last phrase to “keep oneself unstained by the culture” and many evangelicals might not notice.

That is, with the article, culture stops being a sociological or anthropological vocabulary word and becomes a theological judgment. “The culture” is the bad parts of society, the parts that contradict my religious commitments, the parts I imagine I don’t participate in. In this sense, “the culture” works like “the media.” When we say “the media” is biased, we usually mean the media I don’t listen to is biased, while the media I consume is trustworthy. There’s something about that “the” that moves the object away from us. Whether we’re talking about engaging the culture, resisting the culture, or taking back “the culture,” we’re talking about “the culture” as if we aren’t part of it. It’s external to us. And that we get to choose how we interact with it.

This matters to me for two reasons.

First, the idea that there are parts of our own society that we don’t participate in is a comforting fiction. There is no “the culture” external to us. In fact, the things we denounce and reject in our broader society (“the culture”) can easily become our own defining feature. Norms we reject in “the culture” often have an outsized influence on our own norms. The more flexible “the culture” becomes in its views of gender, for example, the more rigid many Christians become in their definitions of masculinity and femininity. There’s a real risk that what shapes are views of gender more than the positive vision of the Bible itself is our rejection of the norms of “the culture.”¹

So the first reason this matters to me is that I like to know what’s really shaping my ways of moving and being in the world. I’m increasingly impatient with comforting fictions.

The second reason this matters to me is that I can’t order my life according to the Bible if I only allow the Bible to speak to parts of my life and experience. When we talk about “the culture” we are using a shorthand that very selectively and probably unconsciously foregrounds certain issues as problematic and carefully hides deep and crucial parts of our experience from our own scrutiny and the Holy Spirit’s. We may insist that the Bible confronts “the culture.” But if we imagine that we are outside “the culture,” then the Bible may never confront us. Without meaning to, we can protect ourselves from the Bible’s promise to separate bone and marrow. When “biblical” becomes an antonym for “cultural,” we step out of the BIble’s searching light and imagine that it shines only on other people.

American evangelicals participate in American culture as fully as everyone else. Some evangelicals are likely to denounce the nation’s sexual mores, while others are likely to denounce its economic system. It may all need to be denounced. But we can’t extract ourselves from any of it completely. In fact, those things we distance ourselves from are likely to stand out especially prominently, and cast especially long shadows, when we read the Bible. We will see the Bible emphasizing something in “the culture” that we love or hate to the degree that we love or hate it.

Okay.

My appeal here at the end is not that anyone would stop using the phrase “the culture.” The point I mean to make is that we would be mindful of the work that phrase does. It gives us the illusion of distance or difference from dynamics and values that we aren’t actually able to extricate ourselves from. It can obscure the reality that the things we resent most about our broader society very often live, in some form, within us. It deceives us into believing that we can be “biblical Christians” without be cultural ones, too.

1. This is well beyond the scope of this conversation but I can’t help mentioning it: What we view as our biblical way of life today is very often made up of mainstream elements of “the culture” from a previous time or place. Karen Swallow Prior’s book The Evangelical Imagination, for example, is a great treatment of the ways contemporary American evangelical norms and mores are deeply shaped by Victorian British norms and mores.