Reading culture wisely

CHRIST AND THE CULTURE WARS:
Speaking for Jesus in a world of
identity politics
By Ben Chang
Christian Focus. 229 pages. £11.99
ISBN 978 1 527 109 766

Ben Chang’s highly readable primer on how Christians might engage more effectively in our ‘cancel culture’ is his first book, and I certainly hope it will not be his last.

His personal passion for Christ shines through every chapter. The book presents a concise account of where we are in Western culture and how we got there. It looks at how the church has responded to date, and the limitations of those responses, and how we might do better at presenting the claims of Christ in a moral environment in which reason and argument are limited in countering the supremacy of deeply internalised core feelings of personal identity.

The first section traces the history of four of the ‘biggest social justice movements: feminism, racial justice, gay pride, and the trans rights movement’ and then identifies some of the underlying narratives of them all.

These include: ‘expressive individualism – the idea that meaning … can be found though the external expression of internal emotions and desires’; society is seen as a corrupt source of suppression of this human expressive freedom; the Marxist ideology that society is the struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors; and, most important of all, the rise of postmodernism, which sees all truth claims as relative, thus denying the very existence of objective truths.

The second section of the book explores the three principal patterns of response to these movements from Christians. Mirroring or giving back the same kind of treatment is the first response which is critiqued, and the author is not afraid to name names of Christians he considers have fallen into the trap of using, for example, ‘language specifically chosen not merely to oppose … but to mirror the accusations made by Black Lives Matter’. Though rightly praising the reasoned apologetics so influential in his own coming to faith, the author maintains that in a postmodern world reason is increasingly insufficient. Finally, the commonest strategy adopted by many churches of simply ignoring the issues and hoping they will go away is merely wishful thinking. What then is the better way that the author points to?

Telling stories both from our Christian experience and from Scripture that resonate with the underlying theme of identity politics such as equality, the evil of oppression, liberty, identity and justice, giving plenty of Biblical examples, speaking the language of the culture (citing I Cor. 9:22) and ‘living redemptively’ – in a way that demonstrates Christlikeness as well as speaking of Christ.