Our Thin Culture
One of the first things Kim and I noticed when we came to Mongolia was the Western influence on the youth here. They love hip hop and for the most part dress like anyone you might see in LA or New York. They even have hip hop shops that sell only G-Unit shirts and American basketball jerseys and hats. With that love of hip hop has come graffiti; but the strange thing is that they didn’t start with the style of graffiti we’re used to seeing on freeways in our cities. They started by tagging the names Green Day, Linkin Park, Wu Tang Clan, and Shakira around the city - not their own names, but western music groups.
I was amused and baffled at first. I’d walk around the city and wonder, “Why are those the things they’ve grabbed on to?”
I listened to a lecture by David Wells one morning helped answer that question for me.
Our western culture has spread globally because it is built on a very thin foundation of consumerism. Previously, cultures were localized and defined by a shared history, language, and religion. Those borders have, for the most part, been demolished as western culture has become global. Why? Because the only point of entry, the only thing that bonds people in this consumeristic culture together is an agreement to consume. Our culture is appealing because it is thin and entry is only a matter of brand names and dollars - things they can even come by in a developing nation.
In a lecture he gave a couple years ago, Tim Keller told a story relayed to him by a missionary friend in Romania. His friend said that under the Communists, the Romanian majority tried to get rid of the Hungarian minority by oppressing and assimilating them. The Romanians tried to destroy their cultural identity by not allowing them Hungarian education or to practice or participate in those things which their culture was built on - in a sense, trying to remove the shared history, language, and religion of the Hungarians. As a result, under the persecution the Hungarians actually became a stronger cultural group.
The twist is that his friend told him that the Hungarian culture in Romania is now on the verge of vanishing. Not because of oppression or the Romanians….but because of MTV. The youth have become taken with western culture and have bought into the global consumer capitalism, abandoning much of their heritage.
We cannot argue that there is a one world culture that we are all apart of. We are no longer just citizens of America or France or Mongolia, but of the world. In a blog from a few days ago, Dr. Ben Witherington III said, “Post-Modern Christians talk a lot about being world Christians, and about global anything and everything — the global economy, global politics, global missions and evangelism, global poverty initiatives, and the like….Whether one agrees or disagrees with this post-modern view of reality, Christians will increasingly have to reckon with it.”
This is, of course, all true.
Christianity has always had a global view. We are to preach the Gospel to all peoples, all nations. Paul covered the Roman Empire, one city at time. But, I have to ask, in a time of increasing Biblical illiteracy; in a time where much of the western Church has ejected Jesus, the cross, sin, or anything offensive (or substantive) in the Gospel; in a time emphasizing “deeds not creeds”; do we have the same global view that Jesus and Paul had? Or are we confusing the ability to reach the world, with the Biblical view of bringing the Gospel to the world? Is our western, consumeristic mindset that is content with selling a malnourished culture influencing us to bring a malnourished Gospel?
