Enouraging - Culture

The biggest problem is how to create or reinforce social consensus where little exists or none could be generated organically. This is demonstrated by the simple fact that the amount of law that exists in any society is always inversely related to the coherence and stability of its common culture: law increases as cultural consensus decreases. By these lights, the fabric of the common culture in modern America has worn even more thin in the last several decades and the extraordinary amount of litigation we have seen in recent decades is just one place we see it.

James Davison Hunter, To Change the World, (Oxford University Press, NY, NY: 2010), 102.

Encouraging - Culture

Against the prevailing view, the main reason why Christian believers today (from various communities) have not had the influence in the culture to which they have aspired is not that they don’t believe enough, or try hard enough, or care enough, or think Christianly enough, or have the right worldview, but rather because they have been absent from the arenas in which the greatest influence in the culture is exerted. The culture-producing institutions of historical Christianity are largely marginalized in the economy of culture formation in North America. Its cultural capital is greatest where leverage in the large culture is weakest.

James Davison Hunter, To Change the World, (Oxford University Press, NY, NY: 2010), 89.

Encouraging - Culture

Yet the deepest and most enduring forms of cultural change nearly always occur from the “top down.” In other words, the work of world-making and world-changing are, by and large, the work of elites: gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. Even where the impetus for change draws from popular agitation, it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites.

The reason for this, as I have said, is that culture is about how societies define reality – what is good, bad, right, wrong, real, unreal, important, un-important, and so on. This capacity is not evenly distributed in a society, but is concentrated in certain instructions and among certain leadership groups who have a lopsided access to the means of cultural production. These elites operate in well-developed networks and powerful institutions.

Over time, cultural innovation is translated and diffused. Deep-rooted cultural change tends to begin with those whose work is most conceptual and invisible and it moves through to those whose work is most concrete and visible.

James Davison Hunter, To Change the World, (Oxford University Press, NY, NY: 2010), 41-42.

Encouraging - Postmoderism

The notion of postmodernism teaches children, teens, and adults that they owe their existence to random chance in a chaotic universe with no design and no designer. We are accountable to no one and live for a meaningless moment in a dying cosmos that will end in total darkness. We have no inherent value as human beings and no significance beyond our short journey on the river of time. No wonder low self-esteem and disrespect for others are at an all-time high. It is a damnable worldview that assaults the family and warps its young.

Dr. James Dobson, Bringing Up Boys, (Tyndale, Carol Stream, IL: 2001), 200-1.