Can There Be a Christian Culture? -- Part 1

Over the next week, I will summarize and explore an intellectual debate that took place among a number of theologians, philosophers, social critics, and political leaders in Europe and the United States. I am particularly interested to ask what their concerns might teach us about current Christian reflection on culture, relativism, and the meaning of human existence.

"Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization."

These famous penultimate words were spoken by Winston Churchill before the House of Commons on June 18, 1940. Delivered the day after France surrendered to Nazi invaders, Churchill's speech was intended to steel British resolve, yet perhaps not surprisingly, in retrospect it also raised important questions about the nature of Western civilization itself.In his 1947 Gifford lectures, the theologian Emil Brunner observed, "All Europe uttered a sigh of relief when those words were spoken."

That they were spoken as words of comfort and of determination suggests that a consensus, however fuzzy, still existed among many in Europe. For Brunner, however, Churchill's words raised a rather sticky question: can there be a Christian civilization, and if there can, does it follow that the Occidental world could in any sense still be considered Christian?

These were questions that many twentieth-century historians, philosophers, cultural critics, and theologians struggled with, and between the 1930’s and the 1950’s, a huge number of lectures, essays, articles, and books were generated on the issue of Christian civilization and history. For some, such as philosopher John MacMurray, European civilization could not understand itself or its success and failure without remembering that its origins were in Christian culture: “To understand Christianity is to understand the crisis of civilization in which we are involved." The twentieth century’s violence and loss of meaning were traceable to the incoherence of the West, he contended.

Historian Christopher Dawson, too, felt in 1949 that the relationship between Western and Christian culture had to be delimited. He held that every society at its heart was based on a religious vision. What distinguished the West was its long-term instability; the Christian consensus had always been a dance between temporal and eternal impulses, and this imbalance had led to its productivity and power. such moments of vital fusion between a living religion and a living culture are the creative events in history, in comparison with which all external achievements in the political and economic orders are transitory and insignificant.”

Poet and cultural critic T.S. Eliot was also convinced that a people's religion and their culture were intertwined, "culture being, essentially, the incarnation (so to speak) of the religion of a people." Culture is "a "lived religion," though no people ever have a perfectly pure religion. By incarnation, Eliot meant neither a simple relation nor an absolute identification but something more like two elements existing in tandem with one another. One cannot finally understood a civilization without having a sense of the religious vision that historically informed it, no matter how faded and shabby it has become. Yet Eliot was not claiming that Europe was somehow nor or had ever been a perfect place. Europe has always been more or less Christian, never totally so.

Theologian John Baillie, following Eliot, believed that what made the past Western civilization Christian was its common belief and opinion, and what made it vaguely one in 1945 was the continued presence of some Christian influence. Baillie, a Presbyterian, compared this to infant baptism, observing that a society with Christian influence need not be wholly full of Christians. He concluded that this was the best one might expect in a fallen world; there can be no final utopia on earth: "no pax Britannica no less than the pax romana, and Christendom no less than Babylon and Troy." Perhaps the days were simply limited in which such a Christian world could continue.

Brunner agreed, but like MacMurray, held that the crisis of the West was already quite far gone, “in some parts . . . more than shaken, in fact shattered and even annihilated.” There was not much of a Christian civilization left to hold on to. Yet even this crisis, Brunner thought, attested to the power of the gospel traditions that they could have such dynamic, long-standing impact “even where life has been only superficially touched by them, or where they are present in very diluted and impure manifestations.”

Notice that to make such claims required a sense of history, as to where the West had been and where Christianity had been with it, as well as some intimations as to where it was going. That these reflections occurred around the global cataclysm of World War II is quite understandable. Much that had seemed solid and stable was now in flux and troubled. Nonetheless, they explore the first question worth considering: could European culture (and the U.S. by extension) have ever been considered a "Christian" culture? And if so, what would that imply?