{"id":4593,"date":"2017-07-24T10:00:22","date_gmt":"2017-07-24T18:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/?p=4593"},"modified":"2017-07-21T15:24:38","modified_gmt":"2017-07-21T23:24:38","slug":"to-change-the-world-week-five","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2017\/07\/24\/to-change-the-world-week-five","title":{"rendered":"To Change The World, Week Five"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"To<\/a>Blog readers: Chi Alpha @ Stanford is engaging in our annual summer reading project. As we read through To Change The World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World by James Davison Hunter, I\u2019ll post my thoughts here (which will largely consist of excerpts I found insightful). They are all tagged summer-reading-project-2017<\/a>. The reading schedule is online at https:\/\/xastanford.org\/summer-reading<\/a>
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Earlier this week I saw an essay that illustrates many of the ideas from our reading so far: Why Didn\u2019t the Planned Parenthood Videos Change the Abortion Debate?<\/a> (Joe Carter, Gospel Coalition). Carter makes many points, but two stand out \u2014 the video makers failed to coordinate with institutions and they also were attacked by elite networks. To use Hunter\u2019s terminology, Planned Parenthood is an institution on the center and the Center for Medical Progress is an institution on the periphery \u2014 they had an uphill battle for which they were unprepared because they apparently held to the naive view of culture Hunter critiqued. I encourage you to read the article and reflect upon the readings so far in light of it.<\/p>\n

Hunter is now moving onto the second theme of his book \u2014 rethinking power in light of faith. He\u2019s going to focus \u201con the conservative, progressive, and neo-Anabaptist positions \u2014 because in contemporary America, these are the most prominent\u201d (page 109). As Hunter hints, there are more theological options than these. Perhaps we will discuss them as we move through this second essay.<\/p>\n

His main point in this week\u2019s reading is that in modern societies discussions of power are inevitably political.<\/p>\n

\u201cPolitics has become so central in our time that institutions, groups, and issues are now defined relative to the state, its laws and procedures. Institutions such as popular and higher education, philanthropy, science, the arts, and even the family understand their identity and function according to what the state does or does not permit. Groups (women, minorities, gays, Christians, etc.) have validity not only but increasingly through the rights conferred by the state.\u201d (page 103)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hunter says this tendency is evidence of a weak social fabric.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026the 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.\u201d (page 102)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Given that laws will multiply, the reach of the state will become ever more encompassing, and so interest groups feel it is imperative to get the state to act in alignment with their values. The state cannot simply remain neutral, as Hunter explains:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a tradition in political theory that claims that in a liberal democracy, the state is or should be neutral when it comes to questions of the good. This is wrong mainly because it is impossible. Law infers a moral judgment; policy implies a worldview.\u201d (page 103)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is, of course, the caveat that this ressentiment-driven impulse toward power-seizing is not always true of individuals \u2014 even influential ones \u2014 but as Hunter demonstrated in the previous essay the attitudes of individuals prove less significant than the attitudes of institutions.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want to overstate the case\u2014clearly what I describe here are not fully and comprehensively established realities; all is not power and ressentiment. What makes it more complicated (and interesting) is that there are genuinely public-spirited people on all sides of all issues. Indeed most people are not resentment-filled and power hungry. But consistent with my view all along is the fact that the motives of individuals and the structures of culture are not the same thing.\u201d (page 109)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This essay is off to a promising start. I\u2019m eager to see how he summarizes the three theological options he mentioned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blog readers: Chi Alpha @ Stanford is engaging in our annual summer reading project. As we read through To Change The World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World by James Davison Hunter, I\u2019ll post my thoughts here (which will largely consist of excerpts I found insightful). They are all \u2026 Continue reading \u201cTo Change The World, Week Five\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wp_typography_post_enhancements_disabled":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Summer reading project week five: why political power is the power people pursue.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[117,209,210],"class_list":["post-4593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-resources-reviews","tag-politics","tag-summer-reading-project-2017","tag-to-change-the-world"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Ded-1c5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4593"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4600,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4593\/revisions\/4600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}