The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

American Christianity has offered Christians a seamless package of family, work, national culture, and church as a response to God’s calling to be human. Unfortunately the positive value of this American version Christendom is lost when American Christianity becomes Americana Christianity. Small wonder we have so regularly dehumanized those who cannot participate in the whole package. But is the Americana Christian vision of what it means to be human that found in scripture?  The foundation of the Biblical narrative occurs in the Garden when God, knowing that a person should not be alone, creates of the one, two and commands them to be fruitful and multiple.  Relieved of the kind of false specificity that leads to perversions like asserting a literal seven day creation we see in this story almost all we need to know about what it means to be human. It begins a narrative arc that will carry us to the so-called summary of the law. “Love the Lord you God with all your heart, soul...

What is being called the 4th Industrial Revolution, or sometimes the 2 nd  Machine Age is already disrupting human societies, and that disruption will both spread and increase. More specifically it is beginning to disrupt traditional educational goals, and will demand that educators develop new goals, and new forms of collaboration. In the coming world shaped by the 4 th Industrial Revolution education to foster human relations will be as important as education to teach human vocations. And that shift for an emphasis on vocation to relation is the challenge educators will face in the coming decades.  Let me elaborate. Traditional education has had one or more of five goals.  The earliest of these was vocational; teaching students how to do a job. The first universities were vocational. They had three schools: medicine, law, and theology. The first prepared doctors, the second lawyers, and the third church administrators. In the medieval period kings and princes didn’t go ...

In my previous post I tried, however artlessly, to make two points. First there is no freedom in a church that manipulates its members. Secondly if the church is in the business of  manipulation it will, if it hasn’t been already overwhelmed by the superior ability of artificial intelligences.  In making the first point my linking of emotions with manipulation was rightly challenged  by the fact (which I accept) that appeals to emotion are a necessary part of any kind of motivation. Put another, motivation isn’t necessarily manipulation. Further, an emotional experience may be an entry into a genuinely spiritual experience. Or it might not. The problem is that emotions are notoriously non-discriminative and easily misled. Take, for example, the way that natural feelings of love for and pride in one’s family, clan, tribe, and nation can be turned to hatred for strangers and foreigners. There is a reason that right in the heart of the formation of the nation Israel was God’...

Freedom from sin in the contemporary age is the same as from freedom from manipulation. To the extent that the church itself is manipulative it is just another manifestation of sin.  Sin manifests itself in different ways in different times. In our time the rise science based marketing, large data mining, and artificial intelligence are actively and openly used to manipulate individuals and societies into making decisions for the benefit of corporate and state interests. This manipulation has two specific impacts. It shapes behavior away from freely choosing to serve God, and it seeks to shape identity to conform to the service of idols. In short it is sinful, and in the abstract is Sin itself.  The church has participated in this sin for a long time. It began when mid 19th century evangelists consciously adapted emotional manipulation to persuade people to commit themselves, usually temporarily, to Christ.  As a 6 year old I attended a Nazarene summer church camp. On the...