The Culture of Death and the Practice of Everyday Life
One enduring question facing the Church is how to engage the modern world. Gaudium et Spes called for a new era of openness and dialogue,[1] while Pope Paul VI warned that “the split between the Gospel and culture is without a doubt the drama of our time, just as it was of other times.” For many Christians, this split seems rather obvious: popular movies and music brazenly defy Christian norms, while schools and corporations embrace late modern dogmas that are antithetical to Christianity.
Yet narrowing one’s focus to such examples prevents a fuller appreciation of what culture is, how it influences people, and what it means to be secular, or “of the age.” What follows draws on sociological models of culture and St. John Paul II’s critique of the “culture of death” to offer a deeper understanding of how modern culture works to secularize Christians—even those who maintain religious belief and practice.
Misunderstanding Culture
Raymond Williams claimed that “culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.”[2] Culture is often defined by its various features: beliefs, norms, values, narratives, frameworks, and vocabularies. But how do these aspects of culture become internalized, thereby shaping how people live? Many people seem to imagine that culture is transmitted primarily through the overt messages of the media, religious authorities, teachers, and parents.
When analyzing the predominant messaging of modern culture, it is not difficult to recognize strands of consumerism, individualism, and relativism. Scholars, pastors, and journalists regularly criticize these features of culture, and their audiences have little difficulty calling to mind examples from Hollywood, higher education, or advertising. Well-meaning cultural critics may imagine their mission as evaluating the content of such messaging and combatting it with Christian messages, whether in the form of homilies, lectures, or Christian media.
Yet this model of cultural transmission is far too simplistic. Of course, culture can be passed on through overt messages such as sermons or lectures, but research indicates such modes of transmission are somewhat limited. Cognitive psychology suggests most human behavior is not the result of intentional deliberation, but is guided by dispositions we accumulate through the practices and routines of everyday life.[3] Sociological research finds culture’s effects to be most enduring when transmitted through more subtle means: traditions, rituals, practices, and unspoken assumptions that quietly shape people’s vision of the world and their lives.[4]
For this reason, the primary challenge of modern culture is not that it contains anti-Christian messaging. After all, those who have received basic catechesis should be able to discern when overt messages are immoral. Instead of focusing solely on how bad ideas and values might infiltrate people’s minds through a sort of osmosis, Catholics ought to be more wary of how everyday social practices might initiate them into ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that undermine the necessary virtues of the Christian faith.
