Beyond the Culture War Matrix
Beyond the Culture War Matrix
Paul Anleitner
On End Time Theories, Strategies and Outcomes
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I was taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that land that I live in
Has God on its side — Bob Dylan
Though I did not have the language for it at the time, as an evangelical kid in the ’80s and ’90s, I felt an ever-present looming threat of annihilation and assimilation. Though I didn’t quite find myself in ancient Israel with the Babylonian Empire beating down my door, the fears of such things didn’t feel completely unwarranted. We must forgive the boomers and Gen X ers—whether Christian or not—if they were dealing with a bit of anxiety. In hindsight, it wasn’t so much that these anxious feelings were unfounded, but rather it was what so many of us did with those fears. My grandfathers fought in World War II against foreign powers cut from the same cloth as that ancient Babylonian Empire. I remember seeing old footage that graphically displayed the horrors of Nazi Germany not too dissimilar from the ways the Babylonians stacked the bodies of the slain in the Valley of Hinnom (or Gehenna, as Jesus would later refer to it.)
After beating the Nazis, Americans immediately faced a new existential threat from the Soviet Union, a clearly atheistic regime that offered justifiable concerns about the decline of Christianity and the rise of this rather amorphous secularism being an internal tactic of Communist subterfuge intended to destabilize and de-Christianize our nation. The destruction of the world in a nuclear holocaust wasn’t really off the table in most people’s minds until the red hammer and sickle flag that flew over Moscow finally came down on Christmas Eve of 1991.
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As I look back, certainly with remorse but also with an ever-so-slight tinge of dark humor and nostalgia, the dystopian portrayals of the “end times’’ by dispensationalist prognosticators in the popular Christian books, movies, and the infamous “chick tracts’’ I consumed as kid had many parallels to the real religious persecution many Christians faced in the former Soviet Union. What percentage of our end-times nightmares were projections of our fears of an eventual Soviet States of America? I suppose we can only speculate.
Granted, by the mid-’90s, we felt far less threatened by the prospects of annihilation from a foreign power, but the concerns of assimilation by shadowy, internal “secular” powers did not wane. In fact, in the evangelical contexts I inhabited, it seemed as if the anxieties surrounding the prospects of cultural assimilation by secularism only intensified, with deep suspicions and outright animosity shifting from the Communists in Moscow to the “liberals” in Washington and our own neighborhoods.
Kindergarteners in vacation Bible school marched and sang, “I may never march in the infantry / Ride in the cavalry / Shoot the artillery / I may never fly o’er the enemy / But I’m in the Lord’s Army.” After reciting your daily pledges of allegiance in our Christian school to the American flag first and then to the Christian flag, you could head off to your first period apologetics class focused on defending your faith and winning souls. Even as a young man in my early years of ministry, we sent our youth groups out to conferences called “Battle Cry.” The language surrounding our formative practices was clear—we were psychologically and spiritually training soldiers for the Culture War.
As I grew up in this environment, I had been reading the story of the Bible as a story about a God-sponsored, cultural supremacy where God blesses one righteous team who does what’s right, defeats the bad guys, and wins. Those that loved God were on the winning team, and my mission was to convert as many people as I could to the winning team. However, when I took a step back from my Americanized, verse of the day, fortune cookie–style reading of the Bible, I started to notice a little problem with this interpretation. Throughout the biblical narrative, the people who were on God’s team were frequently losers. This Culture War reading of the Scriptures where God blesses the winners and curses the losers turned out to be desperately wrong.
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When I began traveling around the country doing ministry in my early twenties, many pastors and itinerant “prophets” in the Charismatic niche I inhabited preached about taking dominion over the “seven mountains of culture” as the God-inspired strategy for staving off cultural assimilation and “taking this country back for God.” Much of this dominion theology in the mid-2000s was a dialectical critique of the perceived cultural withdrawal and defensive fortification strategy many Christians in the ’80s and ’90s employed.
Within our own evangelical subculture, divergent parties were emerging. One faction of the subculture responded to the fear of cultural assimilation by attempting to separate from the wider macroculture and build insular, isolated communities where we could have our own Christian entertainment and our own science. In this “Christ Against Culture” approach (borrowing a term from the 20th century theologian, H.R. Niebuhr), we devoted much of our energy to fortifying our ideological boundaries, only emerging from our cultural wilderness when we wanted to convert heathens or protest legislation. In a subculture deeply concerned about winning the souls of outsiders, it was a peculiar strategy.
Philip Myrtorp
The other “Seven Mountains” faction saw this strategy as weak and ineffective. They argued that we needed Christians to climb to the top of the entertainment and political hierarchies in order to grab our power and take this country back from the secularists and godless liberals. In the 2016 and the 2020 election cycles, it was the theological epicenters of the “Seven Mountains” dominion strategy that would become some of the most vocal supporters of the MAGA movement, the “Trump as an anointed King Cyrus archetype” narrative, and even the spread of the QAnon conspiracy culture within the church. The “Christ Against Culture” faction and the “Seven Mountains” movement were both operating under the shared premise that Christians in America were being exiled and that victory against the Secular Empire would require a training of the next generation to be zealous, ideological soldiers that could return us to the top of the sociopolitical hierarchy.
And yet, it was the good that I found in my evangelical subculture that God eventually used to unplug me from the Culture War Matrix and help me realize that these assumptions were wrong. I was taught to read the Bible, to follow the Jesus found in the pages of those Scriptures as Lord, and to courageously embrace any dissonance between the Kingdom of God and my surrounding culture, even if that made me a Jesus Freak. What I did not immediately realize was that in giving myself to the Jesus of the Scriptures, I would begin to find immediate dissonance between the historic, biblical Way of Jesus and the prevailing Culture War narrative of my evangelical subculture.
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In the Adamic and Noahic covenants in Genesis, God made it clear that His salvific disposition was toward all people—even to all plant and animal life, too—and with Abraham, God calls a people to a specific job that will advance his salvific purposes to all the world. This covenant was a vocational calling, not an exclusive salvation contract. Abraham was blessed to be a blessing to the world that God loved; he wasn’t blessed because he and his descendents were the only people God cared for. This call did not come with a promise of sitting atop the hierarchy of the world order—rather, Israel was a kingdom of priests called to mediate the goodness of God to the world around them.
In Jesus, God’s inclusive, broad salvific intention and his exclusive, vocational calling would collide into a new covenant. “For God so loved the world . . .” was the loud and clear missiological announcement. Now, through faith like Abraham in the resurrected Christ, people from every tribe and tongue could be grafted into the family of Abraham and enlist to become partners in God’s renewing work in the cosmos. If fulfilling this mission was dependent upon holding positions of cultural power and influence, then Jesus himself was an abject failure.
As this truth from the Scriptures became unmistakably obvious to me, it was just as deeply upsetting to my own cultural bias. I was forced to ask myself whether God would actually allow us to lose the Culture War. Americans like to think that we’ve never lost a war, but Christians throughout time and geographic location were frequently losers on the lower rungs of society. Were they doing something wrong? Did they not have God on their side?
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By the mid 2010s, there was mounting evidence that the Culture War strategy had truly failed. All of the training to be Christian soldiers in the Lord’s Army hadn’t staved off cultural assimilation. In fact, it only seemed to make matters worse. So many of my fellow ’80s and ’90s youth group kids ended up leaving the church in droves. From 2000-2020, church membership dropped from 70 percent of the nation to 47 percent. Many millennials didn’t actually leave the Culture War even though they left church. I saw many retain their Culture War programming and simply swap allegiances to one tribe in the Culture War for allegiances to the other tribe, trading in an incessant consumption of Fox News for MSNBC. By this time, it was clear that Culture War Christianity had objectively failed.
Despite this supposed failure, the true, biblical mission of the covenant people of God has never been contingent on obtaining or maintaining sociopolitical power by winning a culture war. In fact, the work of God has often thrived when the people of God have been sojourners in exile. What if we unplug from the Culture War Matrix and find ourselves in Babylon?
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Six centuries before the birth of Christ, an apocalyptic invasion of Jerusalem led by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II threatened the covenant people of God with a disconsolate conclusion to their otherwise remarkable story. After a siege upon Jerusalem that lasted between 18 and 30 months, Nebuchadnezzar broke through the walls of the city, razed the Temple to the ground, slayed an untold number of God’s supposedly chosen people, and hauled off those he saw fit to survive back to Babylon as living spoils of war.
For those who were transplanted to the shores of Babylon, a new chapter of this kingdom of priests would begin. But what would be God’s strategy? They were not completely annihilated, but as a cultural minority in Babylon, there was a new threat: assimilation. When God offered His strategy, it sounded a bit more poetic than pragmatic:
Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper. (Jer. 29:4-7)
Really, God? This is your strategy? Plant a garden? Pursue the well-being of Babylon? This proclamation holds very little programming within the matrix of “Christ Against Culture” or the “Seven Mountains” strategy. It also wasn’t a passive acquiescence to cultural assimilation where the people of God lost all cultural distinctiveness—just look at the stories of exiles like Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to see how the faithful remnant responded when the dominant macroculture demanded idolatry of them.
No, this was an entirely different way from the Culture War. This way of the exile proposed that one’s own flourishing was inextricably linked to the flourishing of one’s neighbor—even if that neighbor is your enemy. Sound familiar? The way of the exile is the Way of Jesus.
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During this cultural moment, where the programming of the Culture War Matrix seems to be escalating and short-circuiting on all sides, and where the incidents of real tribal violence are increasing, we are afforded an incredible opportunity as followers of Jesus to distinguish between our failed efforts to preserve a conquering empire of Christendom and efforts to disciple others into the Way of Jesus.
Our vocational calling is not contingent on our position in the cultural hierarchy. If you so happen to be on top, bless the world. If you are on the bottom, bless the world. Grow something beautiful that lasts, because Babylon will not. What is not in harmony with the good and functional ordering of God inevitably reveals itself as dysfunctional, and entropy is unkind to dysfunction.
Shut off cable news; tell a better story. Stop trying to win political debates on Twitter; foster nuance. Direct your energy toward the movements of grace and the slow work of God that will produce fruits of the Spirit in your life and the lives of others. If you unplug from the Culture War Matrix, the principalities and powers will lose the energy of outrage that they feed upon. Plant your garden, write your poetry, and raise your children to be disciples of Jesus, not culture warriors. Remember that it is the peacemakers who will inherit the world that is coming.
Paul Anleitner
Pastor & Podcaster
Paul is a pastor in an old church, exploring the intersection of theology & culture, science, philosophy. He has a Master's in Christian Thought and hosts the podcast Deep Talks. He recently released his first book Dis-Ordered: A Christian Journey Through the Problem of Evil & Suffering.
Photography by Ravi Patel
