Culture and Christianity: Adjusting Doctrine to Suit Culture (Book Notes: Who Shall Lead Them?)
Christianity is a religion founded on the concept of orthodoxy, or "right belief." What this means is that being a Christian is contingent on believing the "right" things, even if you don't always behave in the right way. At the same time, though, Christianity's success at spreading around the world lies with its ability to adapt to local cultures. Adaptation means adjusting beliefs and practices to suit local needs.
In Who Shall Lead Them? The Future of Ministry in America, Larry A. Witham explains how Christianity had to adapt in order to become popular with South Koreans:
[C]ultural adaptation in South Korea itself, according to some, allowed the evangelical explosion of the 1960s to happen, typified by the Yoido Full Gospel Church of Pastor Paul Y. Cho. The historic Korean belief in hananim — or "God in heaven" — is unique in Asia and a good fit with Christianity. Yet just as important, some believe, was the Korean reliance on shamans: for centuries these ceremonial and dramatic individuals mediated with the gods or spirits to aid people in the "fulfillment of material wishes."
To succeed in Korea, Christianity "had to be 'shamanized,'" said one Korean sociologist. The South Korean theologian Jing Yong Chung said: "Korean Christians' attendance at church, and their enthusiasm for dawn prayers and generosity in offering to the church are all intimately linked to their desire for this-worldly wish fulfillment." ... Korean faith mostly fosters pietism. So a shamanistic Christianity, with its pleading to God for good fortune, has, "catered to this-worldly, materialistic, fatalistic, magical, and even utilitarian tendencies of Koreans." Korea's fastest growing churches have featured sermons on healings and blessings. When the Gallup organization surveyed South Korean Christians, half said heaven is in this world, not the next.
All of this is at least partially compatible with historic and traditional Christianity. There is a solid basis in both the Old and New Testament for the idea that with enough faith, God will provide for people's material needs. The great emphasis and focus on this that we see in some forms of Christianity, though, would appear to move them outside the boundaries of a strict Christian orthodoxy. The people who adhere to these forms of Christianity would deny this and would instead insist that they are as orthodox as anyone — or perhaps even argue that they have reclaimed a "lost" orthodoxy which everyone else has forgotten.
This is what happens when the need for orthodoxy comes into contact with the need for adaptation. If orthodoxy wins out, the belief system usually dies out. Thus adaptation must win, but the need for orthodoxy must also be preserved otherwise the group will slowly disappear because it lacks the means for separating themselves from other groups. So if orthodoxy is to be preserved in the context of adaptation, then the new beliefs and practices must be treated as if they were "real" orthodoxy all along.
This is just what we see in American Christianity. It doesn't take much investigation to notice that Christianity in America is very different from the forms of Christianity we find elsewhere in the world — there can even be significant differences when compared to European Christianity, which should in theory be fairly close. At the same time, though, American Christians are typically convinced that they are absolutely faithful to traditional, orthodox Christian faith.
The reason for the differences lies in the fact that American Christianity is heavily influenced by American culture. The reason for the self-confidence lies in the fact that people simply don't recognize the influences of their own culture on their religion because they don't recognize any division between the two within themselves. Being American and being Christian have become synonymous, such that they can't really be separated anymore.
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Comments
The passage just quoted is visceral to me. I remember when I was a little kid that these shamanistic tendencies were not present in the children’s service. Perhaps I thought that’s because children don’t suffer as much as their parents! I always, but especially when I became an upperclassman in high school, noticed these tendencies, but I didn’t make the connection between that and shamanism, which I didn’t know the word for but nevertheless also noticed when I went to my paternal grandmother’s funeral. My shyness and, more importantly, my lack of a critical attitude toward the differences between shamanistic and sine-shamanistic characteristics, even when they were obvious to me when I went to American churches, prevented me from not only recognizing that Yahweh was a god who did not deserve my worship but also from asking questions to religious leaders or other respected people, such as the elders, why these discrepancies that may perhaps disintegrate the validity of a One True God existed, but I think a little voice told me whenever I visited my parents’ service that the materialistic prayers that were being uttered during the beginning of the service were somehow inconsistent with the anti-worldly values that Christianity was supposed to espouse, as the Bible tends to repeat constantly and thus make it into a major theme of the Holy Book. As someone who has been introduced to atheism by Kline’s blog, I am satisfied that he posted this article on his blog, and how cultural values affect religious practices still interests me to this day.