The second conversation - ‘Taking the Culture Seriously’ - falls into two parts, which got me a little confused. Sine looks, first, at the state of the world post-9/11. The threat of Islamic terrorism and conflicts in the Middle East demand that the Abrahamic faiths ‘find ways to work together to build bridges of understanding and reconciliation’. Sine backs calls for the creation of a Palestinian state and repentance on the part of the Christian West for the crusades and continuing insensitivity towards Muslim culture and faith.
By contrasting his experiences at a Christian Arab Media conference in Lebanon in 2001 with current realities Sine highlights a number of aspects of the current turbulence we are experiencing: the West is increasingly confronted with a new ‘majority world’; we face extreme economic volatility; globalization is widening the gap between the rich and the poor; and the global economy has developed a religious or imperial function, defining ultimate reality for people: ‘At the core of the modern worldview underlying globalization is the assertion that the ultimate in human experience is defined primarily in economic terms.’
Secondly, Sine asks ‘to what extent we unwittingly allow the aspirations and values of modern culture and the global mall instead of the images of an ancient/future hope to define our sense of what we are on the planet for’.
His argument is that our narrow and over-spiritualized eschatology has failed to shape our understanding of what constitutes ‘the good life and better future in the here and now’ and that the resulting ideological vacuum has been filled by the ‘storytellers of the global mall’. So how are the four streams responding to this challenge? The emerging stream is too uncritical of culture; the missional stream has developed an intellectual critique but not the practical resources for resistance; but the mosaic and monastic streams are doing rather better.
The problem is again that we have a false future hope based on the Greek idea that a spiritual ‘coming home’ consists of an escape from material existence and has nothing useful to say about everyday life. Sine then pursues an increasingly familiar critique of the Enlightenment dream of progress that has generated the ‘empire of global consumerism’ in which we all - moderns and postmoderns alike - now live. He also discusses The Devil Wears Prada, ‘The Merchants of Cool’, a documentary that reveals how ‘corporations have mounted an unprecedented campaign "to colonize”" the imagination of the largest teen generation in American history’, and several other examples of how not just American youth but all generations are subjected to extreme marketing pressures.
In light of this, Sine argue, the task before us is to take back our imaginations from the marketers and merchants of cool. First, we need to decode the messages that come to us from the global mall (a couple of resources are mentioned: within the monastic stream Geez Magazine, and within the emerging stream Alternatives for Simple Living). Secondly, we need to challenge the imperial claim to define reality: ‘To counter the imperial colonization of our imaginations, we need poets, prophets and artists to help us create subversive imagery that challenges the reigning reality.’
Well, the pace hasn’t slackened. This is a fast-moving, sometimes rather jumpy book, but the analysis is well grounded both in research and personal observation. A bit more depth to the assessment of how well the different streams are responding to the challenge of economic globalization would have been welcome as this synoptic perspective of the current renewal movement is one of the most interesting aspects of the book. Perhaps we’ll get more later. I’m relieved to see that Sine is not attempting to change the world in the way that McLaren does in Everything Must Change, and I like the emphasis on finding ‘our way home by reentering our ancient story and rediscovering a new vision of our future hope’. I’ll be interested to see how that thought gets developed.
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