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17-Campbell JET 43.2\287-302 JETS 43/2 (June 2000) 287–301 RELIGION AND CULTURE: CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS IN THE NEXT GENERATION GEORGE VAN PELT CAMPBELL* Every generation of Christians faces its own challenges and prospects in God’s providence. The last generation of evangelicals, lead by such people as Carl F. H. Henry, Kenneth S. Kantzer, and Billy Graham, sponsored numer- ous initiatives intended to address the urgencies of their day. These included the founding of the National Association of Evangelicals (1942), the Evan- gelical Theological Society (1949), and the journal Christianity Today (1956), all of which accomplished positions of their founders’ visions. As we look forward to the next generation, what are the challenges and the prospects which stand before evangelical scholars? The purpose of this article is to assess those challenges which are most urgent for the integrity and eˆectiveness of evangelicalism in, and in relation to, American culture in the next generation. While there are certainly many things evangelical scholars can and must do which are here assumed, my distinctive proposals can be summa- rized under three headings. We must address issues related to the common good, the common man, and a common voice. I. THE COMMON GOOD 1. We must face the common issues raised by globalization. If we as evangelical scholars are going to speak to our world and to our culture in the future, rather than just to ourselves, we must concern ourselves with facing and giving Christian responses to common problems which aˆect the common good. One such set of problems is raised by globalization. There are two broad ways in which we can and should address issues raised by globalization (or globality, as it is more and more commonly called). The ˜rst is by addressing the major challenges which globality poses for the world at large, oˆering Christian solutions for the common good and at the same time an apologetic for the value of Christian faith. The second way we must face globality is by understanding and addressing the challenges it poses for the integrity and eˆectiveness of the Christian faith. After de˜ning globality, we will give an example of each sort of prob- lem and response. * George Van Pelt Campbell is assistant professor of sociology and humanities at Grove City College in Grove City, PA. 288 JOURNAL OF THE EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY In 1995, sociologist Malcolm Waters made clear how recent is the de- velopment of consciousness of globality when he wrote, “Social change is now proceeding so rapidly that if a sociologist had proposed as recently as ten years ago to write a book about globalization they would have had to overcome a wall of stony and bemused incomprehension. But now, just as postmodern was the concept of the 1980s, globalization may be the concept of the 1990s. ”1 Waters’s prediction has proven true. Globalization has become a major concern among social scientists, displacing the older para- digm of “modernity,” and progressively displacing also discussions about “postmodernity.”2 British sociologist Martin Albrow, in his The Global Age, declares that “postmodernity is only the latest radical form of modernity.” Instead, he writes, “We have to listen to the language of the new age in a wider discourse. It resounds most in [the word] ‘global’ and all its varia- tions.”3 The epochal change we are witnessing is not “the end of history” (in the sense of all of the ideological con˘icts of human history coming to an end), but the dawning of “the global age.”4 It has become widely recognized that the globe is “the most salient plausibility structure of our time.”5 There- fore, we as evangelicals scholars must address preeminently the issues raised by globality. A number of distinct approaches have emerged regarding how globality is best conceived.6 Based upon his recognition of a tripartite view of society (recognizing economic, political, and cultural spheres), ability to take reli- gion fully into account, comprehensiveness, and ˘exibility we must agree with Waters that Roland Robertson is “the key ˜gure in the formalization and speci˜cation of the concept of globalization.”7 Robertson opens his major study of globality with a de˜nition of the topic: “Globalization as a concept re- fers both to the compression of the world and the intensi˜cation of conscious- ness of the world as a whole.”8 By “the compression of the world” Robertson means “global interdependence.”9 Waters elaborates upon this de˜nition when he de˜nes globalization as “[a] social process in which the constraints of geography on social and cultural arrangements recede and in which peo- ple become increasingly aware that they are receding.”10 Globality is a com- plex matrix of ideas and issues, but we will address some basic issues here as samples of the sort of interaction with it that is necessary in the future. 1ÙMalcolm Waters, Globalization (New York: Routledge, 1995) 1. 2ÙSee, for example, Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992). 3ÙMartin Albrow, The Global Age: State and Society Beyond Modernity (Oxford: Polity, 1996) 8. 4ÙThis “end of history” perspective was argued in Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free, 1992). 5ÙRoland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992) 53. 6ÙSee, for example, the surveys in Simpson, “Globalization and Religion: Themes and Pros- pects,” in Religion and Global Order, vol. 4 (ed. Roland Robertson and William R. Garrett; New York: Paragon House, 1991) 1–17; Peter Beyer, Religion and Globalization (London: Sage, 1994) 14–44; Waters, Globalization 38–62. 7ÙWaters, Globalization 39. 8ÙRobertson, Globalization 8. 9ÙIbid. 10ÙWaters, Globalization 3. HALF LONG CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS IN THE NEXT GENERATION 289 The ˜rst way we can address globaliztion is by addressing the major challenges which it poses for the world at large, oˆering Christian solutions for the common good and at the same time an apologetic for the value of Christian faith. One such problem which globality poses for humanity at large is the problem of pluralization, that is, the problem of a plurality of options being present in a society (not an endorsement of the “value” of a multitude of op- tions). The dawn of the global age signaled the end of the age of social isola- tion. There are many particular ways that pluralization impacts humanity, but one is that diverse cultures and religions progressively come into close proximity in a culture. Global compression means that inevitably communi- ties which were previously isolated come into prolonged contact. One com- mon result of such contact, cultural and religious, is violence, which will undoubtedly increase globally in the future. Robertson writes, “[S]ome now claim that cultural clashes between civilizations constitute the primary source of current worldwide political and military tension.”11 As sociologist James Hunter points out with reference to religious tensions in America, “culture wars” often turn into shooting wars.12 In fact, the periodic murder of abortion doctors ought to demonstrate to us that the United States is not immune to religious violence, and that the Christian community is not above the practice of violence, particularly in an environment when the mood of the Christian community is alarmist, our rhetoric is in˘ammatory, and we have no clear philosophy of Christian social engagement to guide us and to set limits upon our eˆorts to achieve our goals. Thus, globalization leads to pluralization, and pluralization often leads to violence worldwide. Another eˆect of pluralization is that the violence it tends to generate itself spawns a sense of suspicion among those who may become the victims of violence. Religious violence around the world has thus created worldwide suspicion of religions other than one’s own. We see this suspicion in the generalized American tendency to view all Muslims and Arabs as potential terrorists, when in reality most Muslims are no more violent than most Christians, or most Americans. This same dynamic applies to American evangelicals. We live in a time when evangelicals are often pictured as extremists and as dangerous to a free pluralistic society. Among social sci- entists it is now routine to parallel Muslim Shi’ite fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism, and to lump all “fundamentalists” together as a growing social problem and threat to a civilized world order. Yet another eˆect of pluralization is the growth of tolerance, which serves as a means of coping with the eˆects of pluralization.13 Obviously, tol- erance is in many ways a very good thing, and something which evangelical 11ÙRoland Robertson, “Globalization and the Future of ‘Traditional Religion’ ” (unpublished paper presented at the Princeton Theological Seminary/World Vision Conference, “The Church and the World in a New Century: Faith and Responsibility in a Global Future,” in October 1998) 9. 12ÙSee James Davison Hunter, Before The Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America’s Culture Wars (New York: Free, 1994). 13ÙSee the analysis of tolerance in American culture in Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987) 25–43. 290 JOURNAL OF THE EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY Christians are happy to endorse. For example, the decline in the vituperative rhetoric, which often attended discussions between Roman Catholics and Protestants in the past, is a welcome result of such increased tolerance, as is the relative decline in overt racial prejudice. But in the United States, toler- ance has also often translated, for example, into a growing public acceptance of neo-pagan religious practices incompatible with Christian faith. Thus the growth of tolerance has resulted in substantial changes in American public life, and has made the incompatibility of historic Christianity with increasing numbers of contemporary American practices more apparent.
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