The necessity of Christian culture

In the past when I've brought up the Benedict Option -- the idea that Christians (and others) who want to maintain the integrity of their religious and moral tradition should consciously withdraw to a certain extent from the mainstream, where it has become too difficult to maintain those living traditions -- several thoughtful Christian critics have said no, Christians should live in the culture as a witness to it.

Yes, Christians should always be a witness to the culture, but let me tell you about what happened last weekend.

Last Sunday, around 3 in the morning -- it was Pascha -- two middle-aged Russian immigrant women were standing outside our parish hall, holding their Pascha baskets full of food. I'd left the liturgy right after communion with a friend to help set up the hall for the post-liturgy feast. One of the Russians asked us if they could come into the church hall and wait for everyone to come over so the Pascha baskets could be blessed. My friend had told me we'd need to keep the door locked until after services, so we could work without having to supervise everything. And so my friend said to the Russians, "Not yet, we're setting things up."

"But it's starting to rain," the Russian woman protested.

"Why don't you go over to the church?" my friend said.

"We can't," the Russian said. "They're having a service."

On the one hand, that's appalling: the idea that someone would come stand in the rain at three in the morning to have her Pascha basket blessed, but wouldn't go to the actual Paschal liturgy indicates a purely cultural Orthodoxy that completely misses the point of the holy day. On the other, I've been thinking in the past week that at least those Russian women have that superstitious folk orthodoxy, and if they're willing to come out in the middle of the night to receive a blessing on Pascha, perhaps they're open to coming to church, and entering into the fullness of Orthodox Christianity. Rather than look disapprovingly on their quasi-superstitiousness, maybe I should be grateful that these women retained enough of their cultural Orthodoxy to build something real on.

I was thinking about them yesterday, when, via Jape, I read a 2004 lecture reprinted in First Things that discusses the key role culture plays in preserving and transmitting faith. The author, Robert Louis Wilken, begins by denying that the United States is a Christian culture in the most meaningful sense:

Yes, there are many Christians in the U.S., but can we still claim to be a Christian society? If one uses any measure other than individual adherence (what people say if asked) or even church attendance, it is undeniable that the influence of Christianity on the life and mores of our society is on the wane. And the decline is likely to continue. Which leads to a question: Can Christian faith—no matter how enthusiastically proclaimed by evangelists, how ably expounded by theologians and philosophers, or how cleverly translated into the patois of the intellectual class by apologists—be sustained for long without the support of a nurturing Christian culture? By culture, I do not mean high culture (Bach’s B-Minor Mass, Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew); I mean the “total harvest of thinking and feeling,” to use T. S. Eliot’s phrase—the pattern of inherited meanings and sensibilities encoded in rituals, law, language, practices, and stories that can order, inspire, and guide the behavior, thoughts, and affections of a Christian people.

It's a big mistake, says Wilken, to think of Christianity as an idea, or set of ideas, that inform a culture. Christianity has historically been the culture in what used to be known as Christendom. Says Wilken, "Christ does not simply infiltrate a culture; Christ creates culture by forming another city, another sovereignty with its own social and political life."

Wilken points out that eventually the early Christians developed a distinctly Christian material culture, and over the centuries, Christianity shaped not only our material world in the lands of Christendom, but our language and our calendar (e.g., our sense of time). Here is the critical conclusion (emphases mine):

Material culture and with it art, calendar and with it ritual, grammar and with it language, particularly the language of the Bible—these are only three of many examples (monasticism would be another) that could be brought forth to exemplify the thick texture of Christian culture, the fullness of life in the community that is Christ’s form in the world.

Nothing is more needful today than the survival of Christian culture, because in recent generations this culture has become dangerously thin. At this moment in the Church’s history in this country (and in the West more generally) it is less urgent to convince the alternative culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic. This is not going to happen without a rebirth of moral and spiritual discipline and a resolute effort on the part of Christians to comprehend and to defend the remnants of Christian culture. The unhappy fact is that the society in which we live is no longer neutral about Christianity. The United States would be a much less hospitable environment for the practice of the faith if all the marks of Christian culture were stripped from our public life and Christian behavior were tolerated only in restricted situations.

If Christian culture is to be renewed, habits are more vital than revivals, rituals more edifying than spiritual highs, the creed more penetrating than theological insight, and the celebration of saints’ days more uplifting than the observance of Mother’s Day. There is great wisdom in the maligned phrase ex opere operato, the effect is in the doing. Intention is like a reed blowing in the wind. It is the doing that counts, and if we do something for God, in the doing God does something for us.

This is, again, why the Benedict Option is becoming more necessary: because we Christians live in a post-Christian culture in which what is essentially Christian informs consciences less and less. It does no good to lament this loss; the work to be done now is to shore up the fragments, and build in that the structures -- the institutions, communities, the recovered liturgies, and so forth -- that will enable a strong Christian culture to withstand the powerful currents of assimilation. (In other words, we are going to have to learn what Jews living in Christendom have always known, and struggled with; I think of my modern Orthodox Jewish friends who are not cloistered away from the world like the ultraorthodox sects, but who understand that if they are to live a meaningfully Jewish life in this non-Jewish, secular country, they have to build a culture in which to transmit their faith and culture to their children).

Wilken cites a poem by Dana Gioia paying tribute to the value of ritual as educator and protector of truth across time. Gioia wrote this poem for and delivered it at a ceremony held at a newly founded school (this context is important). Excerpt:

II.

Look at the trees that surround our ceremony—
These skinny saplings barely kept upright
By wooden poles and braided wire.

They constitute no stately grove of academe,
They give the merest inklings of an avenue. And yet
The skittering whisper of their leaves suggest

A promise rooted local to the soil—
To care and cultivate these slender silhouettes
Until they shade the games of children yet unborn.

III.

Praise to the rituals that celebrate change,
old robes worn for new beginnings,
solemn protocol where the mutable soul,
surrounded by ancient experience, grows
young in the imagination's white dress.

Because it is not the rituals we honor
but our trust in what they signify, these rites
that honor us as witnesses — whether to watch
lovers swear loyalty in a careless world
or a newborn washed with water and oil.

As Jape summed up the Wilken essay:

In other words, the Church must relearn how to be a community of practice rather than an interest group marketing its wares along the road to 'Yes!' ... [Wilken] embraces a carnivalesque humanism. Putting it pointedly: Christian renewal means virtue and the cakes and ale. This truth about the Church is central to its transforming power and the one without which, no matter how many concessions are obtained at the negotiation table by self appointed Christian representatives, it will surely fail.

You might also say that the Church needs doctrinal truth and moral rigor, but it also needs Pascha baskets at 3 in the morning more than we might think.