The Symbols of the Culture War

Over the past six years, I’ve been playing culture-war-catch-up with American Christianity. Just when I figure out what everyone is yelling about, another bit of drama blows into town like so much tumbleweed.

I really need a flowchart just to keep up with it all.

But this week I read something that got me thinking.

The flash of inspiration came through a read of a 1964 article by Jaeger and Selznick entitled “A Normative Theory of Culture.” It’s technical and I won’t bog you down with the details, but they argue that culture is essentially the product of shared meaning-making activity in a society. Culture expresses what matters to us. While I don’t think they get everything right in their definition of culture, they do make this rather interesting claim: culture encodes not just meaning, but normative meaning.

In other words, culture encodes values.

What’s this got to do with the price of eggs?

Well, I got thinking about culture and symbols. In particular, the kerfuffles in American evangelicalism over the past few years, and how so many of the spats have been attached to potent symbols. For example:

• Black Lives Matter
• MAGA
• Canadian Trucker Convoys
• Face Coverings and Mask Mandates
• Critical Race Theory

I am fairly confident you felt something as you read through that short list. Why? Because each possesses symbolic force, representing a set of values and meanings beyond the cultural object itself.

It’s not really about the Red Hat, or the Black Fist, or the piece of cloth on your face. It’s about the world of meaning each of those have come to represent. These symbols are powerful because they are efficient carriers of meaning, and because they evoke a powerful response in the user and beholder.

But you probably already knew this.

So here’s what I propose. I hypothesize that this notion of “normative culture” may give us a frame with which to more productively parse the symbols bandied about. If Jaeger and Selznick are right, then I suspect we should be able to “reverse engineer” these symbols to discover the values encoded and represented by them.

In other words, I propose we shift the discourse from the symbols themselves, to the meaning and value systems behind those symbols.

My assumption is that the symbols themselves mean less than the meanings they carry. To be blunt: it’s not really about the Canadian trucker convoy, or mask mandates, or Critical Race Theory. These are important to people, to be sure. But they are important because of what they represent. They function as concrete touch points which enable people to articulate and express the constellation of their dearly held beliefs, convictions, fears, and hills-to-die-on.

It’s no secret that public discourse is a hot mess right now.

And it’s not getting any better. We are self-selecting ourselves out of churches, social-media circles, even geographic regions. There’s a great deal of volume, but little careful argument, and even less empathy.

Yet imagine if we could move beyond the realm of the symbolic to the realm of ideas, and actually engage those meanings in public discourse. If we could not only examine the quality of particular values, but the interrelation and interaction of various combinations of values—and then intelligently argue about their merits, deficiencies, even blind spots.

I suspect this shift would substantially transform the nature of our conversations. It might even allow us to see the very real human beings behind the ideas, and allow us to better love our neighbor—rather than war with them.

Of course, this is tricky business.

It requires mature virtues of intellectual honesty, humility, sympathy. In seeking to understand a particular group, all manner of sloppy identifications are possible. This project will fail without a robust commitment to understanding and articulating the operative constellations of beliefs and convictions at work. If we are to make progress here, we must actually listen to the bearers of the symbols.

The difficulty lies precisely in the fact that symbols are potent because they evoke strong emotional responses. The labor of listening to the meanings behind the symbols requires that the interpreter exercise significant emotional restraint in her or his own perceptions.

So what does this look like, practically?

We start by asking what deeper values this symbol points to. When we see a crowd in the street with fists raised and banners held high, what does it mean for the participants? When we walk past a MAGA hat, what does the act of wearing it do for the wearer?

“Fine, but how am I supposed to know what other people are thinking?” It’s a fair question. A good place to start is to reflect on the symbols in our own lives. Why do I resonate with this symbol? Why do I feel so strongly about that cultural object?

Interrogate your own reactions, affinities. Ask yourself what it represents, why it matters, how it resonates with your own experience.

Having primed the pump, another good step we can take is simply to ask others what the symbols mean to them. I fear we have sometimes withdrawn so far behind our tribal boundary lines that we forget that people are individuals who make choices based on their beliefs and who will generally be more than happy to talk about their opinions if given the opportunity to elaborate in good faith.

If we choose to take the answers to those questions seriously, we have the opportunity to make real progress. And I suspect that we will see little real progress in society—let alone within American Christianity — without serious conversations that go beyond the symbolic, to the heart.