Please say: exactly, where is the Breakdown of Culture?

As I write, I hear Chuck Colson making these same comments some 15 years ago on Breakpoint radio. These are not new, but I hear them afresh today.

Why does it matter?

Perhaps more now than then. Today, the deteriorating cultural currents are deeper and wider and more swift. We can feel it; the falling away is going on around us as the beliefs and values that once held up institutions and organizations are dissipating. We do not live in a cultural vacuum. Just picture the Mississippi River becoming wider, deeper and more swift. And because our children and grandchildren will be caught in some cultural milieu, passing on the Faith is at stake.

A few comments on the nature of culture:

1. Cult-ure defined literally means:– the beliefs of a cult.
2. Culture is like a river going somewhere… mostly downstream. Sometimes it is contained in stagnant waters, other times in oceans of the dominant mainstream and other times in a mighty rushing river. Our beliefs and values can change; they move one step away from what the previous generation held; they are in revolt, or in reaction, or simply stay the same– completely unchallenged. In which current are you?
3. People often flow concurrently with culture –by osmosis or unawareness we get pulled into thinking, believing and doing like others around us. We conform.
4. Decisions today; effects tomorrow. We live within the wake of decisions and beliefs made in previous years/eras. Our decisions today show up most– later.
5. Culture breaks down on at least 2-3 ways:
   1. People hold beliefs that aren’t true. Or partially true.
   2. People hold beliefs– yet do not live out of those beliefs. An orthopraxy of integrity doesn’t follow.
   3. People live with inferior values that do not ascribe to the more excellent way.

This happens both places:

a.) Within the Church b.) Outside any faith community.

It’s easy to blame everyone else: the government, politicians, the schools, an anemic Church, Church leadership, the media, but most likely, it befalls on most of us from not living out of a full understanding of all that we say we believe. The motive here is not to place blame, rather to encourage all to step up and assume more responsibility in our own neglected niches.

For example: For years, I taught English– The Art of Language– without anchoring ideas to the transcendent, the eternal and the universal. I was bothered in both heart and mind, yet I operated out of my training in order to hold a job. My orthopraxy did not match what I said I believed.

I accommodated the breakdown within the Humanities Departments all across the western world.

And in a broader way: a secular education is being funded by our tax dollars. For decades and up onto the present moment, people of faith have and still are accommodating and funding secular public education.

The devastation on the human development and personality? It is tragic. We’ve only begun to see. Real people and real young lives are at stake. Even as we speak, we are funding — the breakdown of culture.