Modeling Christian Public Discourse

“All models are wrong, but some are useful” – British statistician George Box

I first ran across this famous quote early in my science career while writing my thesis on the effects of habitat variation on recruitment of pink salmon in a southeastern Alaskan stream.  Using a remarkable but unanalyzed data set, I had built a new model of salmon population dynamics as the old model no longer fit recent survival and recruitment data.  Yet I knew that my new model would eventually come up short given the inherent complexity and changing conditions of biological systems. 

Box’s aphorism seems self-evident, that all models invariably fail to account for the complexities of reality.  Yet there’s an inherent attraction for analytic tools which reduce the dimensionality of our world.  Such tools can shed light into underlying causes, but they can also lead us in wrong directions.  The remedy is to keep a healthy skepticism about the veracity of our model and never forget that the goal is increased understanding – to predict, summarize, decide, or discover something about the real world. 

Green’s Model of Christian Public Discourse

There was a bit of a Twitter dustup yesterday over an article entitled “The New Shape of Christian Public Discourse.”  Responding to his perception of a “sea change in American public life,” the author, Jay Green, considers the old binaries such as left vs. right, religious vs. secular, traditional vs. progressive as “a bit creaky.” We need, Green says, a new way to look at the “significantly altered shape of Christian public discourse.”

Green then did that using a two-dimensional model of goals and strategies for Christian public engagements.  His x-axis provides a continuous measure of the ‘differences of opinion” regarding “American culture wars.  On the left are Emancipationalists, those focused on social equality, blind justice, and personal freedom.  On the right are Civilizationists, those focused with “aligning national priorities with the principles of a historic “Judeo-Christian heritage.”

The y-axis denotes the means or tactics by which these social goals are achieved.  On the one end are Minimalists, those bound by commitments to liberalism.  On the other end are the Maximalists, those willing to do whatever it takes to achieve their goals.  (as an aside, the recent debate about Tim Keller’s “winsomeness” provides insight into the fierce debate within the religious right over these tactics).

Green’s model met with mixed reviews. Some considered his analytic frame useful whereas others saw its weaknesses. But the controversy arose when Green began assigning names (without any further analyses or justification) to the four bins created by the 2 x 2 matrix. 

A Different Model

Aside from Green’s imprudent decision to sort people as a test of his model, attempts like his to probe the underlying drivers of observable Christian public speech and actions are worthwhile.  And it got me thinking so I sat down this morning and sketched out a model that was similar but yet different in important ways.   

I asked two questions.  How should Christ followers engage with culture? And how should Christ-followers be known within the public square?  The first question is really a 2000-year-old question related to the mission of the church.  The second is a more fundamental and important question about our understanding of what an ekklesia called to be “His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works” should look like in society.  Here’s what I came up with.

X-Axis Measures Christ’s Church’s Call for Cultural Engagement

Let the x-axis denote a continuous variable representing the degree of cultural engagement.  Relying on the works of Hunter, Yoder, Smith, Hauerwas and Niebuhr, there are three general modalities of Christian engagement over time. On the left is cultural disengagement, on the right is activist engagement, and in the middle is an “in but not of the world” engagement (Hunter’s faithful presence).

Cultural disengagement anchors the left end of the axis. It includes those who believe sin in society is irredeemable. Christians should seek “purity from” culture and such purity is only possible by retreating from the world. Cultural influence is a one-way street. When the church rubs shoulders with the world, it’s the church that is changed, compromised by its exposure.  The best known of these groups are the Hutterites, Mennonites, and Amish.

Cultural activism anchors the right end of the axis.  It includes those seeking to improve society rather than simply reforming the church.  They see the levers of political and cultural power as useful, necessary tools to accomplish righteous ends.  Some activist engagements are in opposition to culture whereas other activist engagements seek relevancy to the culture.  Both types use yardsticks that are practical, situational, and secular: measures such as right to life, freedom of choice, religious freedom, and personal liberty.

The relevancy activists see large differences in wealth and power, the plight of the poor, racial and social injustice, and other social inequalities as the great challenge, antithetical to God’s call for justice in his creation.

The oppositional activists see rising secularism as the great challenge. Their call is to reform society, where success would be witnessed through a resurgence of the church and its prominence in society with the overall goal of restoring a Christian worldview throughout social and political institutions. 

In between are those who seek to be “faithfully present,” where the exercise of faith, hope, and love toward occurs in all spheres of life, This way of living, they believe, was modeled for us by Jesus and is “the best way for Christians to engage the world, not by setting themselves up in contrast to the world or in a direct assault on those who have a different view of how the world should be run. 

Y-Axis Measures Christian Formation

Let the y-axis measure Christian praxis or behavior along a Galatians 5 defined binary of “flesh” and “fruit.” On the one end are “love, joy, peace, longsuffering…against which there is no law.”  In a previous post, I called that a “fruit-forward faith.” On the other end are “hate, fighting, obsession, losing your temper, competitive opposition, conflict, selfishness, and group rivalry.” I called that a fight-forward faith.”

The value of this binary comes into sharper focus when we consider culture war sensibilities that Green builds his model around. Fighting, competitive opposition, conflict, and group rivalry are four works of the flesh born of an ingroup/outgroup mindset. Conflict and hate are two works of the flesh begotten of culture war’s steady diet of outrage and fear.  With the rise of these “works” comes the loss of spiritual fruit as scripture says you can’t have it both ways.

Discussion

Green created his model to better frame Christian public disagreements about culture.  My model asks a more general question as its interested in how Christianity intersects culture.  Note how it’s horizontal axis, denoting type of cultural engagement, lumps progressive and conservative activists together.  By clumping the two together, rather than Green’s polar opposite separation, it shows how activists of both sides operate from the same engagement frame of reference with respect to the intersection of the gospel and culture. 

Hence, Green’s x-axis about “goals” applies primarily to the cultural activism side of my graph.  It doesn’t well represent the “goals” of those disengaged or those “faithfully present.” But it could conceivably be used as a third dimension in my model to help address the cultural conflict portion of the Christianity and culture intersection.    

The vertical Galatians 5 axis shows how our behavior aligns with the cross.  It replaces Green’s secular type of tactics with some sort of measure which reflects spiritual formation. 

Isn’t the Y-Axis Really All That Counts?

First answer: no, because our mode of engagement matters when you consider that God’s redemptive purpose on this earth wasn’t just to save individuals. In the language of Keller, Christians should be a community radically committed to the good of the city, working to fulfill, as part of God’s Kingdom plan of reconciliation, human flourishing in every dimension – physical, emotional, social, and spiritual. How we do that matters.

Second answer: but its close.  We are called to in the words of theologian Grenz “to be the reflection of the divine character, love, where we show the world what our God is like.”  How we do that matters even more.

Are These Charts Useful?

Perhaps.  Green hopes that his charts “while far from perfect, might give us a more sophisticated way of talking about differences of perspective and priority among Christians debating one another in public, and more clarity on what we mean when we seek to gauge our differences.” Then by stimulating debate and causing others to reflect and perhaps improve on his models, our understanding about Christianity and culture may advance. 

Model usefulness, however, will be affected by how terms are defined.  Like ships passing in the night, “Christian values” mean different things to different people and the range of views of what Christianity means in the public square varies widely.

Another issue will be the invariable fallout from model misspecification, which in the scientific world, arises inter alia from omitting important covariates or including spurious covariates and incorrect specification of the model’s functional form.  This latter type of error make models like Green’s difficult to develop and tricky to implement.  Keeping one’s biases away from influencing model structure and application is challenging enough.  But anticipating all the potential response of people coming from different socio-political locations makes it particularly difficult.

One benefit might be in the development of metrics for use in academic studies about this intersection between Christianity and culture.  Imagine, for example, a hypothetical research project where several hundred Christian leaders in the public square are discretely and confidentially surveyed using a questionnaire assessing their Galatian 5 and cultural engagement sensibilities along with other variables of interest (e.g., religiosity).

Hypotheses could be developed looking at trends over time or with respect to demographic variables.  More specific hypotheses could be developed such as the more activist one becomes, the less fruit-forward behavior they exhibit. Or, to characterize the hypothesis more bluntly, the more activist one gets, the less like Jesus they become.

(James KA Smith in his book “You Are What You Love” shows that the harmful outcome of political influence is a repeated refrain throughout history.  Earthly power is assimilative and through that assimilation our loves become distorted, away from the mission of the kingdom. Although we desire to shape culture, culture ends up shaping us; rather than witnessing the transforming power of the gospel, the gospel instead becomes transformed. It’s because our loves are informed by what we are devoted to, and our devotions are drawn to the battle.)

Now this hypothesized trend line, could be nonlinear, rising more steeply for certain types of cultural engagement. These would be statistical relationships, of course, showing association and not causation.  The trend line’s goodness of fit would bring additional insight. Obviously some activists would demonstrate a fruit-forward faith whereas some disengaged would display works-of-the-flesh behavior. But it would be worthwhile assessing the proportion of variance in Christ-like behavior explained by the degree of cultural engagement. And, as I mentioned earlier, we might need at least one more dimension to the model as the type of activism would likely matter too (e.g., MLK)