Thinking Clearly About Culture - P.S. [Part 4 of 3]

2 final thoughts regarding what I believe are common errors about culture -

What culture is not:

1. The adjective 'cultural' is not a synonym of the adjective 'relative'. A person shouldn't say, 'Music standards are just cultural' when he means to say, 'Music standards are just relative'.

How about a quick test? Does the phrase 'objective cultural standards' strike you as an oxymoron? If so, I believe you're thinking about culture improperly. It is contradictory to speak about something as 'objective and relative', but not 'objective and cultural'. Relativity varies between individual people; culture varies between thousands or millions.

So when St. Paul talked about 'being all things to all men', he affirmed a discernable objectivity existing within cultures [e.g. When I go to the Far East, I KNOW I SHOULD take my shoes off before entering ANYONE's home; when I go to the Middle East I KNOW NOT TO pass ANYONE's dinner platter w/ my left hand; etc.]

2. Culture should not be confused w/ my immediate community or context. When someone says, "Tatoos aren't a sign of rebellious individualism in our culture. My three best buddies all have tatoos and they don't see them as rebellious or vain," they're misusing the term.

Culture is something bigger than me, my three buddies, or my neighborhood.

If life were a forest, cultures would be oaks visible from airplane windows or the next ridge over through binoculars. They possess trunks too thick to wrap your arms around - they are not the seedlings hugging the forest floor.

Too often, Christians dismiss criticisms and admonitions by titling all standards of evaluation as being merely 'cultural'. As if this were a trump card, rendering any further conversation moot.

But if we actually mean to call something like aesthetic standards 'cultural', we have not just ended the conversation; we've just begun it - by inviting investigation from a whole new angle. [ex. If something truly is cultural, then how do we go about establishing what is actually a cultural norm versus a fad. What is cultural as opposed to universal and just rarely ackowledged?]

How often might our simple sloth and sloppiness keep us from seeing our spotted sacrifices and will-worship for what they really are.