What culture is left for Christianity to address?

Christians need to wake up to this. We have no culture to engage, let alone transform. It is thus time to drop the hip rhetoric of cultural engagement and transformation that comforts us that we are part of some non-existent dialogue and that grants the world of our opponents a dignity which it simply does not deserve. I am not entirely sure that Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option is the way forward, partly because it seems at the moment to be a work-in-progress with regard to the practical details. But one of its basic premises—that awareness of the antithesis between church and world is becoming vital to the Christian mindset—is surely correct. The church is a culture and the West is now an anti-culture. And we can no more engage or transform anti-culture than we can hunt unicorns or turn lead into gold. Or find a mildly coherent insight or a hint of lasting musical merit in a Lady Gaga song, for that matter.     Carl Trueman in First Things

What would Niebuhr do today? Now more than 65 years ago, H. Richard Niebuhr famously suggested five different ways for Christianity to relate to culture:

• Opposition
• Agreement
• Christ above culture
• Tension
• Transformation

The first two choices are the extreme ends of the spectrum. Opposition is sort of the Amish option in which Christians oppose all culture around it as "worldly." Agreement takes the other extreme in which nothing distinctively Christian exists and the faith is fundamentally compatible with the culture around it. The last three choices attempt to mediate between the extremes. The "Christ above culture" option was advocated by Thomas Aquinas and suggests that they are not merely incompatible but as different as night and day. The tension option, seemingly the position of Luther, puts the Christian into a tension between Christ and culture, in but not of the world. As citizens of two worlds that are often at odds with each other, the Christian is to chart a course of faithfulness. The final option fits the Radical Reformers and was advocated by Calvin (among others). In this view, the relationship between Christianity and culture was transformational, or reformational, renewing what was tainted and redeeming what was sinful.

But what happens when the culture has disintegrated into at best a pop culture and at worst nothing recognizable as culture? Then how does one related to culture? To be sure we still have our cultural artifacts -- our buildings and institutions and political structures -- but when these no longer have much impact upon us or power to shape us, with what are we left?

For those who would protest against this, what ties do we have with our past? We have a legacy of Christian faith and life but this is now being reduced to merely a right to private worship and the very dogmas of this Christian past are being rejected wholesale by the powerful among us (media, politics, and law). We have no fabric of shared values to bind us together; we cannot agree on what life is or when it begins or ends or it possesses some sacred character that must be defended. We equate the battle for which restroom someone chooses to use with the great battles for civil rights as if they were morally equivalent. We have halls of learning in which opposition to the politically correct views and speech of the day are considered more than offensive but abusive. We have an anti-culture but we do not have a recognizable culture to engage. We have pop culture which is constantly and rapidly evolving and is no more enduring than pop stars and pop songs. But we do not have a culture to transform.

Even Luther would wrestle with the prospect of how to relate to a kingdom of the left which has almost ceased to be a kingdom at all. Anarchy is not only the absence of boundaries and law; it is also the existence of so many competing boundaries and laws that none can speak to or for all people. When the culture no longer is a culture but merely the individual and his or her freedoms, preferences, and choices, how does the Church related to the State?