A review of To Change the World

The call to make the world a better place is inherent in Christianity. But why have so many efforts by Christians gone so tragically wrong? James Davison Hunter observes that although a vast majority of people in the U.S. are professing Christians and many are very religious, our culture—business, law and government, the academic world, popular entertainment—is intensely materialistic and secular. Why is this? Why are religious people not changing our culture?

Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia and author of Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, Hunter argues that Christians in the U.S. have a fundamentally flawed understanding of what culture is and how cultures change. Many mistakenly hold to an idealistic, "specious social theory" that culture changes when hearts and minds—people's values and worldviews—are changed. According to Hunter, "This account is almost wholly mistaken."

Christians need a better social science. As a system of truth claims and moral obligations that is largely coterminous with language, culture is a product of a long historical process, and it changes slowly. Christians also need a better understanding of power, to which Hunter devotes a third of his book. Culture is embodied in enduring institutions and expressed through technological innovations. "The deepest and most enduring forms of cultural change nearly always occur from the 'top down,'" so the capacity to define reality "is not evenly distributed in a society, but is concentrated in certain institutions and among certain leadership groups who have a lopsided access to the means of cultural production. These elites operate in well-developed networks and powerful institutions."