I remember hearing a comment some years ago now from Tim Keller that gave me great encouragement in my studies at the time (it’s so long ago I can’t remember where it came from now). Keller, if I remember correctly, began with the somewhat provocative statement that Christians ought to be the best of all cultural critics. Not because we are smarter or funnier but because we begin from the principle that nothing in this created universe is completely good (only God is utterly good), and nothing in this created universe is completely evil (only the devil is utterly evil). This is not a position shared by everybody. Some ideologies will force me to hold, for example, that capitalism is always and everywhere ultimately bad, or that patriarchy is without exception evil in every case. End of conversation: pen down, and mind closed.
But Christians should push further than such dogmatic and blanket judgments, refraining from snap decisions about any cultural phenomenon, whether positive or negative. As a Christian, I come to any cultural artefact or movement with the assumption that it will contain something that is true and good, however muffled and distorted, and the fingerprints of sin, however subtle.
This doesn’t mean that we can’t praise, and it doesn’t mean that we can’t or shouldn’t sometimes condemn. What it should mean is that our understanding of the world always forces us to think below the surface and beyond labels, places a ban on reductive ideologies, and makes us open to carefully considering all manifestations of culture.
