SOCIAL ECOLOGY AND THE NOMINALLY RELIGIOUS WORLD VIEW: CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION OR ACCOMMODATION BY THE CHRISTIAN LIBERAL ARTS *JEFFREY P. SCHLOSS* Assistant Professor of Biology Westmont College There are at least three important differences between ants leaving the rookery and Christian post-adolescents leaving college as they embark upon adult lives as citizens in their respective societies. First, being sterile sisters, none of the ants will have had sexual intercourse. Second, we can expect virtually all the ants to live lives of abandoned investment in and selfless sacrifice for the common good of their society. Third, the ants' sacrifice will be quite literally selfless, rather than self-giving. Since ants do not appear to recognize individuals, recall interactions, or develop personal relationships, the self, at least insofar as it is a sociologically constructed entity, does not exist. ECOLOGICAL BACKGROUND This is the great irony of social organisms: the inclination toward broad social cooperativity seems to decrease as evolutionary sophistication increases. In general, the greater the ability to respond with a flexible behavioral repertoire to particular individuals (as opposed to reacting with fixed behaviors to classes of organisms), the more interspecific aggression and less interspecific cooperation exists. For all its methodological flaws and ethical abuses, sociobiology has at least enabled us to understand the evolutionary significance of the fact that helping behavior appears limited to kin and those organisms within the social group from whom a tangible return can be expected. Limited cooperativity is reproductively adaptive; hence genes enabling such behaviors, to whatever extent they exist, will be preserved. This characteristic of social vertebrates entails good news and bad news for us humans. The good news is that the narrow and cynical picture of human beings as essentially aggressive, territorial, hunter-apes painted for us by many popularizers of ethology is both simplistic and inaccurate. While the extent to which our biological natures influence human behavior remains unclear, what is clear is that social cooperation is not alien but rather innate to our biology. The bad news is that the biological default level of social cooperation is very limited in higher organisms. This presents a problem because modern human societies require extensive cooperativity, largely because of technology, which generates both the ability to impact people and the need to rely on people far outside the domain of a small homogeneous tribal unit. We are required to exercise ever expanding degrees and varieties of cooperativity at a rate that certainly exceeds that of biological evolution and may exceed that of cultural evolution as well (moral and religious reformers, for example, often radically redefine the boundaries of kinship and social relatedness, and/or exhort us to love those outside of such boundaries). If Habits is about anything, it is that our ability to temper the inclination to individual self-interest with culturally sustainable patterns of corporate commitment has not kept pace with the increased need for cooperation generated by culture itself. We might consider this a kind of eco-sociological "future shock." A biblical analysis must go on to incorporate two additional but related challenges. First, the illness itself is more acute than mere future shock. Because of sin, people can be expected to violate perversely even those inclinations to cooperativity that they possess naturally (e.g., Habits points out that not only has broad communitarianism evaporated in the modern age, but utilitarian and expressive individualism has eroded even basic commitments to limited social complexes like family and friendship). Second, the cure required is more extreme than mere renewal of civic spirit. It is not enough to seek greater corporate commitment for the sake of our own survival. According to the gospel, we must be willing to give unreciprocated commitment at the cost of our own survival. Although these concerns are not emphasized from the largely sociological perspective of Habits, its analysis can help us to understand more fully the way "the world and the things of the world" serve to inflame the illness and obscure the cure. The book's model of individualism and commitment can also help us explore what education needs to do for cultural transformation. SOCIOLOGICAL PROBLEMS The authors of Habits outline the contours of four broad areas of social disintegration or uncoupling. Hopefully, education can help to reintegrate these areas. This section of the paper will use their model to raise questions about what education ought to do. The final section will make suggestions about how we might do it more effectively. All suggestions, and the notions that prompt them, are tentative; the only reason I feel at liberty to describe them is my confidence in your goodwill and our joint agreement to share ideas in progress. 1. Uncoupling of Responsibility and Freedom According to Habits, "We have committed what to the republican founders of our nation was the cardinal sin: we have put our own good, as individuals, as a nation, ahead of the common good." (Habits: 285) This tendency is not new. While Winthrop viewed freedom as a means "to that only which is good, just, and honest," by the time Tocqueville came to America he noted that the average person was inclined "to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself." Tocqueville believed this tendency to "owe no man anything" and "forget their ancestors" (and even descendants!) was mitigated by "habits of the heart." However, the egalitarian democracy that was the manifestation of these habits was, in Tocqueville's view, tied to unlimited resources and westward expansion. One of the things the book leaves largely unexplored (its emphasis on "social ecology" notwithstanding) is the possibility that a decreasing sense of community responsibility relates to decreasing resources and heightened competition in our modern age. This is probably true even on a micro-temporal level. The increased careerism and decreased social concern documented in present day undergraduates compared with those of the late sixties, may relate to intervening changes in the economy. While recognizing these challenges, most of us still hope that the resources and concomitant freedom that education places at the disposal of our graduates, will become empowerments for service rather than opportunities for gratification. An example worthy of holding up to our students might be Mordecai, who, in his position as prime minister under King Ahasuerus, was both "one who sought the good of his kinsmen and one who spoke for the welfare of his whole nation." (Esther 10:13) 2. Uncoupling of Profession and Calling If one views freedom as a means to self-service rather than self-sacrifice, then the nature and goal of work will be understood differently. Profession, previously associated with a calling to a life of service and obligation to a community, "took on new meanings when it became disconnected with the idea of a calling and came to express the new conception of a career, in the sense of a course of employment that offers advancement or honor." (Habits: 118) This is probably the pivotal point of the book's entire analysis, and we will never understand the book's suggestion for cure if we treat lightly the threefold implications of careerism. First, involvement in community eroded because "career was no longer oriented to any face-to-face community, but to impersonal standards of excellence, operating in the context of a national occupational system. Rather than embedding one in a community, following a profession came to mean, quite literally, `to move up and away.'" (Habits: 119) Second, commitment to personal friendship was compromised by the siren of achievement and heightened mobility. If we "never stop thinking of the good things we have not got" and "clutch everything and hold nothing fast" to use Tocqueville's words, how can we sustain personal relationships? This is especially tragic, since in the book's view "it was the virtues indelibly associated with friendship that were central to habits of the heart." (Habits: 116) I don't think we can minimize the importance of college as an opportunity for students to realize truly heroic-life-long, and life-changing-friendships. I wonder if they see the lives of faculty enriched by such relationships. Third, and growing out of the first two, was a subtle but radical transformation of our notion of personal worth. Apart from friendship and intimate community, worth came to be assessed by "objective" measures of achievement and national standards of excellence. (This tension is reflected in the contemporary controversy between absolute versus value-added notions of academic excellence.) Once people and institutions came to be valued largely in terms of their contribution to productivity, people themselves often came to be spoken of as resources to be "managed." Education was not immune from this effect, as described by Raymond Callahan in Education and the Cult of Efficiency. Educational magnate Ellwood Cubberly maintained that "our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw materials (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life." (Cult: 152) Of course, this view changes the very value we place on knowledge itself. In a 1909 address to the National Educational Association the speaker argued that vocational efficiency was more important than citizenship, and concluded that "ordinarily a love of learning is praiseworthy; but when this delight in the pleasures of learning becomes so intense and so absorbing that it diminishes the desire, and the power of earning, it is positively harmful...A man without a vocation is more to be pitied than 'the man without a country.'" (Cult: 10) Andrew Carnegie summed up by observing "I have known few young men intended for business who were not injured by a collegiate education. Had they gone into active work during the years spent at college they would have been better educated men in every true sense of that term." (Cult: 9) While we reject that form of outright anti-intellectualism in higher education, the underlying principles of professional achievement, national recognition, reputational excellence, and competitive success are not at all alien to the academic subculture. In fact, most colleges use these values in their marketing to prospective students, motivating of matriculated students, and soliciting of graduated students. Westmont is running with the pack. We need to be willing to ask how our institutional rhetoric helps students develop a sense of calling, as opposed to a mere ambition for professional achievement. We need to examine whether our academic programs succeed not just in equipping students for outstanding achievement, but in motivating them for competent service. Certainly many of our extra curricular programs, which are often viewed as competing with academics, are highly successful in this regard. 3. Uncoupling of Public and Private Lives "Domesticity, love and intimacy increasingly became `havens' against the competitive culture of work," and, consequently, today people are "locked into a public world of competitive striving and a private world supposed to provide the meaning and love that make competitive striving bearable." (Habits: 43) Often, though, the private world cannot even bear the weight of its own lack of love and meaning, let alone that of another world. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman offers a model of private/public worlds that may help us understand their disintegration. Goffman views selves as actors, whose lives include both frontstage and backstage domains. We present ourselves to our audience frontstage; we let teammates with whom we collude in impression management "backstage," where theatrical secrets and stage props are kept. The effective communicator, a disciplined actor, "is someone with 'presence of mind' who can cover up on the spur of the moment...if a disruption of the performance cannot be avoided or concealed, the disciplined performer will be prepared to offer a plausible reason for discounting the event, a joking manner to remove its importance, or deep apology and self-abasement...Actual affective response must be concealed and an appropriate affective response must be displayed." (Self: 217) Of course this sounds like the description of a president--either national or collegiate--since it is precisely the ability to manage impressions in the public arena that contributes to the success of a president or any public figure. (Perhaps, in this context, Gary Hart was not presidential material.) It is somehow not surprising that the president of a well-known evangelical organization recently told our students at a leadership seminar, that the factor that would most critically limit their ability to contribute to society would be their ability to communicate effectively with a group. Not faith, love, hope, holiness, wisdom, diligence, or any other species of virtue, but rather an ability--the ability to produce the desired effect. Habits refers to this as the "Manager" type. The great danger here is not mere hypocrisy--the incongruity between front and backstage. The real danger, as Gordon MacDonald is trying to tell us in Ordering Your Private World, is living one's whole life front stage, the place where effects are produced rather than attitudes evaluated and motives refined. The ultimate risk is the complete loss of backstage. When this happens we experience an atrophy not only of our ability to cultivate the authentic interaction between front and back stage that we call personal integrity, but also of our capacity to extend the generous invitation to backstage that we call intimacy. Then we may successfully manage others, but we cannot effectively develop or even radically follow a genuinely transforming moral vision. Nothing but the most pathetically superficial display can be maintained. I grieve for our students; many have told me they cannot even go to the dining hall without several hours of cosmetic preparation. I grieve for us; for although we have come together to share things deeply important to each of us, most of us have been very concerned to properly orchestrate our verbal props to achieve an optimal impression. It would be contrary to the emphasis of Habits if we stopped the analysis at pointing out the personal, psychological implications of the schism between private and public worlds. There are also important sociological impacts. First, morality becomes a private affair, and the notion of civic virtues may disappear completely. David Riesmann has suggested that this may relate to the fact that technology has made the moral character of a worker irrelevant to the quality of his work: one needn't care much about one's job if a buzzer sounds each time the Egg McMuffin is ready. Jacques Ellul maintains that not only do we not need to care, but we actually need not to care: mass technique makes caring unendurable. Second, and more interestingly, is the notion that mass technique makes caring unbelievable. The managerial strategy of leaders and public figures causes us all to be cynical about the authenticity of civic spirit and public discourse about values. None of us believes advertisements. The more "sophisticated" we are, the more we tend to view all attempts at communication through the media as, in effect, advertisements--attempts to manipulate our perception of value. Yet we yearn to believe that someone actually feels sadness behind tears that fall or mirth behind laughter that rises in the public arena. Ronald Reagan appeals to this longing. So did Jim Bakker. So does Robert Schuler, who disillusioned many by his impassioned appeal from in front of the Great Wall on behalf of the Chinese people he was visiting. Had not the solicitous letter inadvertently been mailed several days before his actual departure for China, we never would have known that the "great wall" he stood before was in Universal Studios. Existential fraud! He experienced nothing of what he claimed. Bakker may have concealed from the public the true picture of his heart's struggles; but Schuler presented to the public an enhanced, special effects picture of his heart's struggles. He advertised. [As early as 1925, during the height of the efficiency revolution, Bruce Barton claimed in The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus, that Christ "would be a national advertiser today...as he was the great advertiser of his own day." (140)] It is little wonder that the very chic have come to suspect all emotional display, as attested to by the unemotive, corpse-like expressions of models in magazines like Cosmopolitan or Vogue. At Westmont, we try to close the gap between public and private worlds of involvement by living-learning programs like urban and Europe semesters, by faculty opening their homes to students, and by our emphasis on educational mentoring and modeling. However, this is not a panacea, and may even have toxic effects. For when we "invite the audience over for dinner," so to speak, we may end up merely arranging our backstage props like Woody Allen does before he invites a girl over. Then we have turned back into front stage; we have made merchandise of our private lives. The currently fashionable emphasis on pedagogical modeling sometimes sounds more like manipulative pretense than vulnerable intimacy. Certainly we should never be insensitive to the effects our example has on others. But our left hand is also not to know what our right hand is doing. If we want students to be passionately devoted to Jesus Christ, we should be less concerned with the effective impact of how we model and more concerned with our affective devotion to Whom we model. 4. Uncoupling of Moral Language from a Normative World View Our present society is characterized by the "the inability of the old moral order effectively to encompass new social developments"--the ecological future shock discussed in section one. What remains is the "readiness to treat normative commitments as so many alternative strategies of self-fulfillment. What has dropped out are the old normative expectations of what makes life worth living. [We] think of commitments--from marriage and work to political and religious involvement--as enhancements of the sense of individual well-being rather than as moral imperatives." (Habits: 48) We still have traditional moral and religious language, but we don't live as if we were obligated to conform our lives to it. In The Invisible Religion, Thomas Luckmann offers a profound socio-epistemological analysis of why this may have occurred. Luckmann, like Durkheim, sees life as consisting of sacred (transcendent, mysterious) and profane (routine, common) domains. It is the job of religion to make sense of the times when day to day profane experience is interrupted by the mysterious and problematic (as in death). But it must also give meaning to the rather predictable and mundane (profane) elements that constitute everyday existence. It does this by relating the profane to a transcendent and sacred cosmos via an integrative world view. The essence of religion and, in Luckmann's view, all morality, is developing personal identity through a socio-historical world view. This relates strikingly to what many of us view the mission of the Christian college to be. But a world view is not a mere cognitive scheme. It is an existential perspective on "socially relevant categories of time, space, causality, and purpose" that relates them to subjective values and priorities. A world view is whatever it is that legitimizes whether we stay married, how much we pay our employees, what we do with our Saturday afternoons, what kind of clothes we wear. The most urgent pedagogical question is probably "what kind of a world view are students developing while at Westmont?" In simple societies, the sacred cosmos permeates institutions like family, work, and the use of power; virtually all social interactions validate and are validated by the world view. Conversely, in more complex societies the social validity of the sacred cosmos is supported and objectified by separate religious institutions. But such "institutional specialization of religion always contains the possibility of an antithesis between `religion' and `society.'" (Invisible: 67) The religious values may conflict with those of other social institutions. Such conflict is, of course, one of the reasons the evangelical college movement built up speed earlier in this century. There is the possibility of an up- or a downside to the conflict between institutionalized religion and society. The upside is that religion may transform society by acting "as a catalyst of social change." Many of us view this as the prophetic tradition, and we hope Christians and Christian colleges will function in this capacity. The downside is not so much that society will transform religion, but rather that religious values may cease to give meaning to the events of everyday life: sacred and profane elements of the world view may become "dis-integrated". Then "The effective system of subjective priorities (and this is the truly sacred) may become divorced from matters that are [merely] defined as being of `ultimate' significance." (Invisible: 75) The values which are used to judge, prioritize, and give meaning to daily decisions (e.g., profit, personal fulfillment, productivity, achievement, etc.) may not be recognized as religious, but they are treated as truly sacred and are the true religion of the age. (Hence, Luckmann refers to them as "the invisible religion.") We might not recognize them as such, but such values coincide with the biblical notion of idols. Values recognized as religious may be converted into routine behaviors with only nominal sacred quality (e.g., church attendance, quiet times, tithing). As such, the values underlying these behaviors (e.g., piety, service, sacrifice) do not determine decisions and priorities outside of the "religious" sphere; and the acts themselves are often displaced by obligations to other spheres (e.g., family, work, friendships, romance). In recent years at Westmont, for example, we have seen the disappearance of Wednesday night prayer meetings, the opening of the library on Sundays, and the reduction of chapel from four to three times per week. We have recently talked of cutting the chapel period in half, and making attendance optional. In doing this we claim that devotional activity, like prayer, is too easily routinized when sequestered from everyday life. Yet most events of everyday life at Westmont, (e.g. committee meetings, classes, faculty-student advising, and even job interviews) do not normally contain prayer either. Nor do they resort to prayer or biblical exhortation when things get tough. These behaviors are then described as appropriately belonging to the "religious" sphere, like chapel, devotionals, or special prayer meetings! These examples may seem mundane, but that is precisely Luckmann's point: truly religious values are those that order mundane existence. It is not at all clear that we run our institution as though we're convinced our corporate good depended on the same values and behaviors that we tell our students their private good requires. The response of some Christian institutions has been to reaffirm their commitment to legislated religious activity. We recognize that the problem demands a more profound solution, for it involves not generating more religious activity, but making more activity religious. We must help students see the world in a way that allows Jesus Christ to influence their actions in every sphere. This is much harder than many of us might think, because when the sacred cosmos comes to be "formulated and interpreted by a specialized group of experts...primarily involved in matters related to the sacred cosmos, in `theory,' and in the administration of a specialized institution...they may become divorced to some extent from the typical routines and crises of the laymen." (Invisible: 76) At face value this appears to apply to the institutional church in certain ages, but I submit it is remarkably applicable also to the evangelical academy as it strives to help students achieve a "Christian world view." As academicians we are a highly specialized group, moving about in a tightly delimited world. The world view we talk about is also highly specialized--very highly cerebralized. I suspect that what we call the integration of faith and learning forces most of our students to memorize approaches to questions they will never deeply ask, and is virtually unrelated to most of the day-to-day decisions they grapple with at an intensely existential level. I am not suggesting we be anti-intellectual. I am just wondering what it would be like to design an educational institution that defined success not in terms of cultivating Christian scholars, but in terms of helping Christian lay people earnestly use academic disciplines and their faith to clarify values related to everyday issues of leisure, parenting, health, career, conformity, security, friendship, fashion, sex, romance, lying, and soda pop. I hope we are helping our students develop a concrete vision of what a spiritually transformed person would look like right here in the 1980's. If we are not willing to help people construct world views that will answer questions they are asking, the end is a tragic case of future shock. "Religion changes at a slower rate than the `objective' social conditions that codetermine the predominant individual systems of ultimate significance." (Invisible: 83) The reason this is so tragic is that it usually does not involve, in "the typical case, a conscious rejection of traditional forms of religion." At least then we would know we had "lost our faith." But this usually is not necessary. The conflict between religious claims "and the socially determined circumstances of everyday life rarely, if ever, becomes acute--precisely because it is generally taken for granted that these claims are rhetorical." (Invisible: 101) This is precisely the uncoupling of moral language and normative expectations Habits describes, although Luckmann's analysis suggests it is better understood as the uncoupling of sacred and profane--the process of secularization. Likewise, the result is the same for Luckmann as it is for Habits, for it "reinforces the restriction of specifically religious representations to the `private sphere.'" What we do in "the world" is determined and legitimized largely by practical judgment and refined self-interest. It strikes me as absurd to think this process is not occurring in evangelicalism. When I ask my students if they know anyone who actually lends without expectation of receiving back, or gives a dinner party for those who will never invite them back, they, of course, say "no." But many also say they don't know of anyone who desires to live this way, nor do they think Jesus actually meant that we should live this way when he used these exhortations in the Sermon on the Mount. In the words of a graduating senior, known for her positive and cheerful disposition, and recipient of the highest service award the institution can give, "Westmont teaches people how to live successfully with nominal Christianity." Now the job is done. Religion has become completely privatized. Yet the private world is increasingly inaccessible. Bellah, et al., conclude "we have never before faced a situation that called our deepest assumptions so radically into question. Our problems today are not just political. They are moral and have to do with the meaning of life." (Habits: 295) DOING SOMETHING Who are Westmont students? If they are anything like Bellah's interviewees, they are not knowingly "selfish, narcissistic, `me generation'" types, intentionally "devoted to `personal ambition and consumerism.'" But I suspect they may be those things unknowingly and unintentionally. The lack of calling and sense of moral meaning in work, plus the pluralism and segmentation of society prevent people from feeling validated in a comprehensive social context. They may retreat to private seclusion and/or aspire to public visibility. Both require "personal ambition and consumerism." If existence within the insular family is our ultimate goal, we must attain some measure of vocational success in order to acquire leisure and purchase the practical and recreational commodities that free us from the clamoring public domain. But family and friends may not be enough--we also need community affirmation. The desire for "fame"--public recognition, professional achievement, or even social notoriety--may arise out of the need for validation from a society too diffuse for the individual to grasp or be grasped by. The nebulous but ubiquitous media culture inflames the ambition to attain noteworthiness and exalts the conspicuous consumption necessary for its acquisition. Jonathan Hinkley may have had this in mind when he said of John Lennon, the man he murdered, "he created me." And Andy Warhol anticipated this when he observed that everyone born in the 21st century would be world famous for about 15 minutes sometime during his life. It may even be in this sense that many of us yearn for the vapid affirmation of teacher of the year. (Many who don't may have simply transferred their professional identities from the college community to a broader, more diffusively nationalized setting--that of the professional guild.) When we have made the transition from calling to career, from communitarianism to individualism, from sacred to secular meaning-systems; when there are such tentative and superficial peer groups to support us, and such tenuous and rhetorical values to commend us--we seek solace in the pseudo-intimate sharing of worldly pleasures and the semi-satisfying receipt of public acceptance. What is the way out? In Luckmann's view the problem to be corrected is that "the traditional legitimization from `above' (for example, the ethic of vocation) has been replaced by legitimization from `within' (for example, productivity)." According to Habits, "a change in the meaning of work and the relation of work and reward is at the heart of any recovery of our social ecology." We need to reduce "the inordinate rewards of ambition and our inordinate fears of ending up as losers" and pursue a "reappropriation of the idea of vocation or calling, a return in a new way to the idea of work as a contribution to the good of all and not merely as a means to one's own advancement." (Habits: 287-9) This may seem both too idealistic and too narrow a therapeutic strategy. But it entails a radical redefinition of vocation, serious reflection on the notion of "a life's work," and clarification of what is worthy of the investment of ones life. What would it mean specifically for a Christian liberal arts college to pursue a healing of our social ecology? How can our programs and institutional structure help reduce "the inordinate rewards of ambition and our inordinate fears of ending up as losers"? I. Institutional Rhetoric: I heard a buzzword when I died A. Academic Excellence There are two problems with describing ourselves as committed to academic excellence. First, we end up searching for definitions that will enable us to call whatever it is we're doing excellent (and people doing different things end up preferring different definitions, as the absolute versus value-added debate suggests). The whole enterprise conjures up the description of Hell given by Shaw's Don Juan: "Here you call your appearance beauty, your emotions love, your sentiments heroism, your aspirations virtue...but here there are no hard facts to contradict you." Would we ever be able to admit that God had enabled us to be "just pretty good" academically? Second, and most importantly, nearly all our notions of excellence are highly individualistic. Absolute excellence and its connections to measurable achievement, national recognition, etc., are clearly embodiments of utilitarian individualism and its attendant emphasis on career success. Value-added excellence emphasizes the subjective experience and personal development of the individual student, which is perfectly consonant with expressive individualism. I would suggest we consider abandoning completely the rhetoric of excellence in favor of a concept like "competence." Competence involves the unapologetic confidence in our adequacy to accomplish a task. Rather than focusing exclusively on the relative abilities of the individual, the emphasis somehow affirms the importance of the task. For a Christian the task is love, or service. There is a tradition outside the evangelical academy of viewing education as developing "competence for service." I view that as much more consistent with the vision of restored social ecology in Habits and Shalom in the scriptures. B. Educating Christian Leaders It is not clear what would be wrong with simply educating Christians (for one thing, most of our students have neither been nor will ever be leaders). In using this rhetoric, we reinforce culture's exhortation to seek impact, recognition, and position. And as long as we claim to be educating Christian leaders, instead of, say, training Kingdom workers, I fear we will end up merely conditioning evangelical managers. C. Integration of Faith and Learning There are two problems with what we often mean by this phrase. First, it is too accommodationist, in that it often assumes faith can and should be integrated with learning. Our president goes so far as to say that faith and learning don't even need to be integrated, because they are not in any real way segregated or antagonistic. Westmont seems to have tacitly accepted Niebuhr's fifth view of the relationship between Christ and culture. But in so doing we estrange ourselves from two millennia of vital Christian debate on the relationship between Jerusalem and Athens. We also deprive ourselves of a rich variety of thinking on faith/reason from Christian contemplative, activist, anabaptist, holiness, Lutheran, mystical, and other traditions. If we desire to transform our social ecology, we might consider Luckmann's model of religious nominalization: failure of the prophetic office arises out of the unwillingness to endure acute and possibly irreconcilable conflict between sacred and secular domains of knowledge. Second, it is too passive. We always seem to speak of integrating nouns that refer to bodies of knowledge, like beliefs with scholarship, revealed truth with discovered truth, biblical perspectives with disciplinary perspectives, i.e., sacred and secular representations. But if we are to develop a more praxis-oriented, culture-transforming focus, we need to speak of integrating what are often seen as sacred and secular behaviors: believing with researching, worshiping with working, serving with studying, obeying with achieving, loving with surviving. D. All Truth is God's Truth This evangelical shibboleth easily degenerates into self-serving, epistemological egalitarianism. (If all valid knowledge is of God and all genuine learning is ultimately God-honoring, then professors occupy a priestly office indeed!) But this view of truth is highly individualistic, first because it fails to distinguish between propositional and relational truth. Second, it fails to assess the value of truth by its impact on the community, which is one New Testament principle for distinguishing between godly and worldly wisdom (both of which may be "true"). For example, what does it mean to say that valid principles of witchcraft or the factual resolution of an issue the New Testament calls a "foolish controversy" (both of which may be ontologically true) are "God's truth"? The saying of the catholic contemplative ("That learning is good that leads to love.") suggests an alternative to "all truth is God's truth": That truth is God's, that leads to love. E. Developing a Biblical World View What we have in mind when we use this term may not even qualify as a world view at all, since it exerts so little impact on everyday experience. We help students develop cognitive approaches to challenging intellectual issues that have little relation to behavior (e.g. creation/evolution, freewill/determinism) or ethical dilemmas that may come up only once or twice in an average lifetime (e.g., euthanasia, abortion). We might be better off using something like Jim Wallis's notion of discerning a biblical agenda for action, or Gordon MacDonald's vision of ordering your private world by God's priorities. Both of these emphases are existential, behavior-oriented, and potentially culture-transforming. F. Modeling Christian Commitment; Modeling Caring Relationships What is wrong with just being committed to Jesus or simply caring about students? Is the genuine article so threatening that we would rather be "models"? (The dangers of this rhetoric were mentioned earlier.) The amusing irony is that we are so afraid of being an "evangelical finishing school"; yet we so commonly speak of "modeling"! And it doesn't stop there. We overtly state that our goal is to help students achieve "an attractive Christian witness" and "a winsome Christian testimony." The language is symptomatic of a deep pathology in the relationship between private and public worlds, between what the scriptures describe as being pleasers of men and pleasers of God. We would do well not to attempt an improvement on the adjective the scriptures most frequently use to modify witness and testimony: faithful. Then maybe we will be somewhat more willing to substitute camelhair and leather for Hart, Schafner, and Marx. G. Providing a Fulfilling Learning Experience Whatever happened to plain old "learning"? This rhetorical emphasis is a classic manifestation of what Habits calls the psychotherapeutic perspective. Personal experience is the measure of meaning, with little focus on the intrinsic value of work, obligation, commitment. Along with cabin attendants who provide a travel experience and hospitals that provide a birthing experience, we capitulate to the rabid consumerism of our culture by offering an educational experience. Again, the added irony is that we are so afraid of being an "evangelical country club." Our rhetoric, however, deeply affirms the country club notion of aristocratic leisure. We have the rhetoric of aristocracy in terms like academic protocol, academic regalia, academic pedigrees, academic High Tables, and even our own species of virtue--academic (not common) integrity. We go to professional meetings (not conventions), belong to learned societies (not clubs), subscribe to scholarly journals (not magazines). We have the rhetoric of leisure in terms of gamesmanship like catch the gist, miss the point, on target question, drive home an argument, draw a blank, wrestle with issues, run down a source, parry an assertion, score brownie points, blow the exam, place third on the midterm, win the fellowship, field the question, beat out my roommate, and, my favorite, ace the test. In addition to considering how the competitive imagery of much of this rhetoric reflects values our pedagogical practices transmit, we should also consider how to speak of learning in ways that suggest it is more than a hobby of the leisured class. G. Enthusiastically Christian I have always loved the "enthusiastically." But the "Christian" is symptomatic of the great "adjectification" of our faith. What difference would be conveyed by saying, for example, "enthusiastically Christ's"? I recently went through the "college issue" of Campus Life. Its contributors used the word Christian more than twice as frequently as the combined usage of the words Lord, God, Jesus, and Christ. Adjectives describe people and identify cultures; Jesus calls people and transforms cultures. Christianity is marketable, but Jesus Christ is a little more difficult to turn into an over-the-counter product. H. Inviting Jesus In Thank God that He does indwell us, and that anyone who calls on his name, no matter how faintly, shall be saved. But we need to help students see that the notion of `inviting Jesus into your life" is not found in the scriptures. For it is Jesus who does the inviting, and he invites us out of our lives as they are individually constituted and into obedient fellowship with Him, loving communion with the saints, and sacrificial service to the world. Out of gratitude to the Father's loving initiative, the Christian is to live a lifestyle of thankful and committed sacrifice to those who either cannot or will not return the favor. II. Institutional Posture A. Faculty Most of us are not personally and intimately involved in the lives of the poor, socially dispossessed, or even deeply sin-ridden. We tell ourselves that we are ultimately having a greater redemptive impact by training front-line combatants who will be directly involved in such ministries. But we claim this without any substantial data to verify that our graduates converge on such a destiny. (Much of the available anecdotal evidence suggests exactly the opposite to be the case.) It could just be that the evangelical academy is one of the greatest rationalizations for complacent self-interest that Christians have ever invented. The way to ensure this will not be the case is to take seriously the literature on ethical development that describes the impact of modeling both assertion and activity. If we assert that sacrifice for the needy is a virtue but make few significant sacrifices (as Luckmann describes), most students will make the same nominal assertions, unaccompanied by actions. If we claim to be helping the dispossessed by equipping others to be involved with them in a first hand way, most of our graduates will probably "delegate" the activity just like we do. Lord deliver us from the judgment described in Matthew 25. Somehow I don't think it would go well to say, "Lord, perhaps we did not actually visit the sick or give food to the hungry or water to the thirsty, but we did discuss with students the theological ramifications of biomedical ethics, world hunger, and global desertification." B. Administration The dominant cultural model for an administrator, using the categories of Habits, is that of a manager; but the biblical model for such leadership is that of a lover. The concern of several administrators at various times has played a critical role in my own development and survival as a faculty member at Westmont. It is a joy and a privilege to have that kind of relationship. But our administrators are a diverse lot, and it would be grossly dishonest not to acknowledge that there are some top administrators, a few by their own admission, who have a deep antipathy to faculty. I cannot imagine another quality (not even the lack of communication skills!) that would more effectively disqualify one from the right to leadership, than the inability to love the led. Many problems of employee morale may reduce to the simple and at times legitimate conviction of faculty and staff that their leaders don't care much for them. One of my friends in administration is fond of saying, "The most important thing I can do to teach my children, is to make sure they see me loving their Mom." I suspect one of the most important lessons students take with them from Westmont involves how they perceive leaders treating their employees. C. Trustees The dominant cultural model for a trustee, using the categories of Habits, may be that of a successful entrepreneur; the biblical model for one entrusted with maintaining and developing a community's sense of mission involves prophetic vision. I am amazed, and in fact inspired, by how much the trustees I've met just plain care about Westmont and Westmonters. But our trustees are not an especially diverse lot. It makes sense that the composition of our board reflects the constituency we serve, since we desire to pass on shared values. But we also desire for our students to grow beyond the prejudices and, at times, outright heresies propagated by subcultural provincialism. Should not our board include those who can articulate biblical visions stemming from backgrounds of poverty as well as plenty, activist as well as moderate politics, the trades as well as the professions, racial minorities as well as the majority, radical as well as conventional lifestyle and ideology? I do not think our board even contains an academic. (Maybe that's why Westmont is still solvent!) I believe the bottom line is the board of trustees, not in terms of influencing institutional structure but in terms of determining educational outcomes. If we do not believe that people from these varied backgrounds have anything to offer in helping us understand and implement our Christian mission, then it's a cinch our students will not embrace values that grow from these perspectives--students won't be ministered to by people with such perspectives, and probably won't end up ministering to them either. D. Career Development If we take seriously the notion of restoring social ecology, or of reintegrating any of the four areas of disintegration Habits describes, vocational development must become the singularly most important goal of our enterprise at Westmont. Although career development, in the traditional sense, must decline in importance, calling development--professional embryology--should be the specific goal of every academic and non-academic program. What more important task can we have than helping students sort out the biblical issues involved in constructing a life mission and equipping students to serve Jesus Christ tangibly in their daily lives? In this sense, the Bible colleges, whose mission is often contrasted with that of the Christian liberal arts, may be way ahead. Although liberal arts colleges may utilize a different strategy, they should seek the same ends as Bible colleges. The mission of every Christian educational effort should be to foster the desire and ability to advance materially the Kingdom of God in whatever one spends most of one's life doing. E. Practices If Luckmann is right, we can use our daily institutional behavior to assess the elements that truly comprise our world view. Why do administrators get paid more than faculty and faculty more than staff? Why are course evaluations not required of tenured faculty for promotion or even self-assessment (even though the institution claims to value teaching preeminently)? Why do almost no tenured faculty elect to have their courses evaluated? Why did a small, private, Christian, undergraduate liberal arts college like Westmont choose as its only instrument of student course evaluation a tool used and developed by a large, public, secular, graduate level, research university like the University of Illinois? Why do so few faculty consort with staff or administration with faculty? Why do we faculty think the college should aspire to be an academically elite institution? Why are staff workers not allowed in the faculty dining room? All these conditions reflect implicit assumptions about power, ambition, social obligation, individual and community worth, and all reflect an existential world view. III. Institutional Programs In Educating for Responsible Action, Nick Wolterstorff has a whole battery of suggestions for educational reform that apply very pointedly to transforming social ecology. They read almost as an appendix to Habits on pedagogical applications. I won't repeat his suggestions, but just raise several more. First, it seems that market pressures and disciplinary specialization (two of the very things Habits laments) have caused us to abandon the integrative and analytical functions of the liberal arts. For example, amidst lively complaints of vocationalism by liberal arts purists, Westmont recently instituted a major in computer science. But while the very existence of the major was challenged, no one raised concerns about the content of the major. In a professional field that some claim will account for the next wholesale revolution of human culture, our majors do not even take a single course in professional ethics, computers and society, or the history of technology. And it goes beyond lacking a course requirement for majors--Westmont does not have such a course to offer to anyone. In the midst of a technological revolution that raises questions profoundly related to our world view, we are scrambling to construct a major that is as rigorous as those offered at the university, that will boost recruitment, that will earn our graduates acceptance in the rapidly developing marketplace. But we are making no attempt to analyze the nature or direction of development in that marketplace, nor are we equipping our students to function prophetically as they engage it. This is not unique to one major. Nearly all our professional and pre-professional majors not only fail to require but fail even to offer such comprehensive, evaluative courses. In the whole college, there is just one course, instituted just this spring, that takes such an interdisciplinary, analytical approach. I understand that as educators we have the difficult task of trying to help students successfully fit into culture, as well as creatively to assess it. I do not, however, see anything more than a token commitment to that latter goal reflected in our curriculum. Second, class structure almost invariably reinforces the very type of individualism Habits wishes to see subdued. Learning in most of our courses is competitive, individualistic, achievement-rewarding, non-service-emphasizing, and world-view-disintegrating. I need help, and would like to hear of faculty experiences with group assignments, service projects, experiential learning, and other structural approaches to emphasizing more communitarian educational values. Finally, if we desire to change students' lives through our educational ministry, we should listen carefully to what students claim to find life-changing. One does not have to listen very carefully at all to hear the inevitable superlatives students use when talking about out-of-class, off-campus, and residential programs. We should capitalize on this by cooperating much more closely with student development staff, by offering a greater opportunity for students to explore alternative lifestyles in off-campus programs, by deepening the chance for personal involvement through residential programs with faculty and students. Simply put, we should pursue with each other and with students the very type of community and style of life that Habits describes and that we hope graduates will exhibit. I understand that what we hope for is not a matter of consensus. But the main impediment to achieving the type of renewal described in Habits is probably not so much lack of consensus as it is lack of will. "It is not clear that many Americans are prepared to consider a significant change in the way we have been living. The allure of the packaged good life is still strong, though dissatisfaction is widespread. Americans are fairly ingenious in finding temporary ways to counteract the harsher consequences of our damaged social ecology." (Habits: 294) To this unreflective persistence in reflex individualism, which indulges appetites without fulfilling hunger, God says "Why do you spend money for what is not bread, and your wages for what does not satisfy?" (Is 55:2) Habits concludes, therefore, by encouraging us to acknowledge anew that things aren't working. "Above all, we will need to remember our poverty. We have been called a people of plenty...yet the truth of our condition is our poverty. We are finally defenseless on this earth. Our material belongings have not brought us happiness...In the late twentieth century, we see that our poverty is as absolute as the poorest of nations. We have attempted to deny the human condition in our quest for power after power. It would be well for us to rejoin the human race, to accept our essential poverty as a gift, and to share our material wealth with those in need... Such a vision seeks to combine social concern with ultimate concern, in a way that slights the claims of neither." (Habits: 296) Their plea is reminiscent of another, older exhortation, "Because you say `I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,' and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, I advise you to buy from me gold refined by fire, that you may become rich, and white garments, that you may clothe yourself, and that the shame of your nakedness may not be revealed, and eyesalve to annoint your eyes, that you may see." (Rev. 3:17-18) What we shall actually see if we let God renew our vision is described by Isaiah, appropriately enough, in a jubilant ecological image, "For you will go out with joy, and be led forth with peace; The mountains and the hills will break forth into shouts of joy before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands! Instead of the thorn bush the cypress will come up; and instead of the nettle the myrtle will come up. And it will be a memorial to the Lord, for an everlasting sign which will not be cut off."