Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Are Christians stuck with 3 approaches to cultural engagement?
Are Christians stuck with 3 approaches to cultural engagement?
Jul 13, 2025 4:50 AM

How are we to be in the world but not of it? How are Christians to live and engage, create and exchange, cultivate and steward our gifts and relationships and resources here on earth? Beyond getting a “free ticket to heaven,” what is our salvation actually for?

These questions are at the center of Acton’s film series, For the Life of the World: Letters to the Exiles, whichbeginswith a critique of mon approaches to Christian cultural engagement: fortification (“hide! hunker down!”), domination (“fight, fight, fight!”), or modation (“meh, ok whatever”).

The es from Pastor Greg Thompson’s paper “The Church in Our Time,” in which Thompson summarizes the paradigms as follows (bold emphasis added):

The fortification paradigm suggests that the fundamental calling of the church is to guard the integrity of its divinely wrought life against the assaults of the world. In this view, the basic task of the church is vigilant preservation and the basic threat to the church is the destructive character of the larger culture…

…The domination paradigm suggests that the fundamental calling of the church is to triumph over her cultural enemies. In this view the basic task of the church is to extend its own values into the world while the basic threat to the church is those whose values differ from its own…

…Contrary to fortification, the modation paradigm suggests that the fundamental calling of the church is collaboration with the world in the service of the larger good. From this perspective the basic task of the church is active partnership with its neighbors in the interest of social renewal, and the basic threat to the church is its own separatist tendencies.

Each stems from a legitimate theological starting point, but each also tends to falter, in part due to the typical confusions and conflations between the sacred and secular. In Thompson’s paper, he seeks to avoid these pitfalls, attempting to pave a “fourth way” forward by drawing on James Davison Hunter’s notion of “faithful presence.” In For the Life of the World, we see a similar but slightly different path, one framed around embracing a position of Christian exile and “seeking the welfare of the city.” Rod Dreher has been busy exploring yet another. And the list goes on.

But what if the answer is a bit simpler and sits closer to those three basicparadigms? What if the solution is less about disregarding this orthatcategory and more about carefully orienting ourselves around a “both-and” or an “all of the above” perspective?

In a new series at The Green Room, Greg Forster offers this challenge, asking whether devising a “fourth way” (what-have-you) is the best way for the church to reflect and respond to all this. “Has any progress been made by this constant war peting models?” Forster asks. “Or are we each just trying to build our own little kingdom around our pet option?”

Perhaps it’d be better to focus more directly on better discernment between our strengths and weaknesses and responding in turn. “Each of these types exist because it is responding to a real and important theological impetus,” Forster writes. “For this reason, each type has strengths that are theologically and missionally important. However, because each category tends to pay attention to its own pet concerns to the detriment of other concerns, each develops characteristic weaknesses.”

For Forster, that analysis looks something like this:

What if, instead of running around in circles trying to build a perfect church in the sky, we focused on the concrete models of godliness we find in other kinds of churches around us?”

What if a dominance-oriented church looked at the fortification church down the street and asked, “wow, they’re doing a great job calling people to holiness and discipling new believers out of their vices and spiritual enslavements. How can we look at what they’re doing and find a way to do something like it?”

What if that fortification church then looked up the street at the dominance church and said, “Wow, they’re glorifying God by taking a stand for justice in the public square, how can we find ways to do that?”

And what if they pared notes with an modation church on how to serve the poor and contribute to the needs of the munity better?

It’s a helpful prod for our consideration, and I’m eager to see where Forster goes in the series. I have plenty of reservations about “settling” with or outright embracing this or that category, but even if you disagree that we’re “stuck” with these particular paradigms, the success of any “fourth way” theory or proposition is likely to hinge on whetherit’s pursued with some level of self-awareness, honesty, and humility.

If we really are a “church in exile,” for example, how might we consider the practical ways in which we can relate to those more familiar methods of engaging? And how might we do so in ways that aren’t overly critical or dismissive of the downsides and take care to elevate the strengths? Further, Thompson and Forster are focused mostly on pastors and congregations, but as tricky as sorting through all that may be as congregations munities and subcultures within the church, allof uscan begin by applying this sort of strengths-and-weaknesses assessment on ourselves— on our own individual attitudes, perspectives, and preferred plans of action as it relates to cultural action.

As we cultivate healthy families, engage in economic activity, transform our cultural and governmental institutions, and pursue God’s glory in the economies of wisdom and wonder, where might our blind spots be? Where canwe, ourselves, use a nudge in our day-to-day faithfulness and from which peting streams” might we learn? It’s a question we’d all do well to ask.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
NBER on Globalization and Poverty
From the abstract of a new paper from the NBER, “Globalization and Poverty,” by Ann Harrison: “This essay surveys the evidence on the linkages between globalization and poverty. I focus on two measures of globalization: trade and international capital flows…. The collected evidence suggests that globalization produces both winners and losers among the poor. The fact that some poor individuals are made worse off by trade or financial integration underscores the need for carefully targeted safety nets.” ...
Estonia and Centesimus Annus: A Universal Message of Hope
Dr. Mart Laar, former prime minister of Estonia, discusses the relevance for the papal encyclical Centesimus Annus for Europe today. “The message of Centesimus Annus is not a message of left or right. It is a universal message of hope. We can see these same ideas in most groups working on the future of Europe. The only problem is in finding political leaders ready to implement them in reality,” he writes. Read Dr. Mart Laar’s mentary here. ...
The Spirit of Nationalism
The spirit of nationalism is a positive thing in my view. Most people inherently love their country. Christians should not be alarmed by this very normal human emotion. I shared in it by observing the Fourth of July parade in munity. As the band played and the fire trucks blared their sirens I found myself feeling a sense of pride about munity and my country. I watched the politicians go by, seeking recognition and votes, and thought to myself, “Elections...
The Digital Ad Fontes!
The Drexel University Libraries have posted video and audio from the Scholarly Communications Symposium convened earlier this year. The event, held on April 28, 2006, included a presentation by me, “The Digital Ad Fontes!: Scholarly Research Trends in the Humanities,” as well as Rosalind Reid, “Access, Inertia, and Innovation: Turbulent Times in Scientific Publishing” (Dr. Blaise Cronin was ill and unable to attend). The video is divided into two parts and is archived in the streaming content library (scroll down...
Initial Post from the World Meeting of Families, Valencia
Blog post: July 5, 2005. 11:30 PM, Valencia time. I am writing from the Fifth World Meeting of Families, held this year in Valencia Spain. This periodic event is sponsored by the Pontifical Council on the Family, chaired by the formidable Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo. I e at the invitation of His Eminence to give a presentation on The Family, the Social Doctrine of the Church and Social Questions. In addition to the Theological and Pastoral Congress, the Meeting also...
How Green Were the Nazis?
A new review on H-German by John Alexander Williams of Bradley University examines the edited collection of essays, How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005). The volume’s editors contend in part that “the green policies of the Nazis were more than a mere episode or aberration in environmental history at large. They point to larger meanings and demonstrate with brutal clarity that conservationism and environmentalism are not and...
Live Blogging from Bryn Mawr Next Week
I’m leaving tomorrow to attend the Advanced Studies in Freedom seminar sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies and hosted at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. The conference runs from July 8-14, and will “take a deeper look at topics such as spontaneous order, social development, and public choice, considering them in both a historical context and in light of issues today.” Seminar faculty include Randy Barnett of Boston University (Law), Stephen Davies of Manchester Metropolitan University (History), Sandy Ikeda...
Don Bosch: Best of the Blogs
Acton PowerBlog contributor Don Bosch (aka The Evangelical Ecologist) had his post, “Guilt Free Ecology,” picked up and recognized by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in their feature “Best of the Blogs,” on June 18. Good job, Don! ...
Second Post from the World Meeting of Families
Late evening, July 6. My session finally took place today at about 4:15 pm. Cardinal Martino presented the Compendium of the Social Doctrine. He pointed out that the family was given pride of place in the document, listed before the economy or government or international relations or the environment. Most memorable statement: “The family is not a function of society or the state. State and society are functions of the family.” Madame Boutin made her presentation. She is an plished...
Balmer’s Partisan Polemics
Noted evangelical scholar Randall Balmer castigates the religious right in a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The critique, in my view, amounts to little more than a slightly more sophisticated version of Jim Wallis. The criticisms leveled by Balmer and Wallis are the same ones made by leftist enemies of the religious right for decades; the difference is that Balmer and Wallis are evangelicals themselves and, therefore, their critiques are “internal” and, for some, pelling. I happen...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved