Religious Readings of our Culture

Culture is now quite often described as a set of symbols for expressing our changing interpretation of life [Geertz]; or as offering a tool-kit for the construction of meaning within an unsettled world [Swidler]. Small wonder that we find a new focus on the shapers and influencers of the cultural process, e.g., the media.

Culture was sometimes considered to be no more and no less than the sum total of the new life-style changes emerging from social changes. Now, however, “culture” is not so much associated with the measurable by-products of change, as identified with the hidden levers which brought about change in the first place. Social changes are a final embodiment of what had transpired earlier to ground the symbolic level – of changes in lived sensibility, first powered by a transformation of consciousness or a new collective imagining of the real. Charles Taylor speaks of an embodied (however unformulated) understanding of ourselves. Even a scholar of the business world warns that structures and processes will not be successful unless driven by espoused beliefs and values; and that these beliefs and values rely in turn on the power of underlying assumptions (philosopher Bernard Lonergan’s meanings-and-values). In all this discourse, then, “culture” must be pictured as the iceberg hiding mostly below the surface. 

Culture is considered to provide the environment for choice and identity, the boundaries of the imaginable – in short : meaning; the anchor making sense of life. In the epoch of “high culture” (sometimes called pre-modern) there was an omnipresence of anchors. As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the Second Vatican Council acknowledged the making of a move away from high culture to a plurality of ways of living together in history – in other words, to a modern era without so many anchors.

As regards Ireland , we might say that society passed from the pre-modern era to the post-modern era (almost no anchors) – without having remained long in the modern era. In making an Irish evangelizing response, it is important for Christians not to be mesmerized by faltering structures and processes, as represented by the decline of religious observance and of ecclesiastical clout in the public sphere; or not to put all their trust in the dissemination of some new catechetical programme. Rather, the approach should be to explore issues like : “What is happening in people’s deeper selves ? What is happening to their felt meanings and values ? Where do people today find fullness of meaning in their lives ?”

Certainly, religion must be brought to bear as a form of alternative cultural agency – but not prematurely : not before nourishing skills of questioning, and of discerning where people’s life-styles are leading them. In any case, several individuals may be found already resisting one or other of the dominant cultural images, e.g., the North American culture’s pragmatic image of the self-making-man.

Michael Paul Gallagher, S.J. is Professor of Fundamental Theology at the Gregorian University, Rome.