Faith and Culture Are Both Inside Us, Both Tell Us What To Think and Do
January 22, 2010 by O'Meara Ferguson
Filed under Daniel Conway
From Dan Conway’s The Good Steward, January 2010
In his book, The Difference God Makes: A Catholic Vision of Faith, Communion and Culture, Cardinal Francis E. George writes, “Culture is a normative system, and so is faith. If the faith and culture clash or disagree, as they always do to some extent, it is because faith is a gift from God and culture is a human construct. There will be tension in us because the faith and culture are both inside us.”
Faith and culture both tell us what to do, what to value, and what to believe. In our modern culture, the highest value is personal freedom — the right to do whatever we choose without the interference of others. For faith, the primary value is obedience to the will of God. According to Cardinal George, “in a secularized culture, belief in an almighty God, an all-powerful God, seems a threat to human freedom.” Seen with the eyes of faith, God creates us from nothing and saves us from our sins. Properly understood, there is no way God can be an impediment to human freedom. “But in a secularized culture,” Cardinal George writes, “God is implicitly, in some sense, a rival, a competitor to human beings, a threat.”
The most obvious example of the clash between faith and culture in contemporary experience is the fundamental disagreement about human life issues — especially abortion and euthanasia but also the full range of issues concerning sexuality, contraception and even the definitions of marriage and family. Faith tells us that life is sacred, that only God can choose between life and death. Our culture objects to anyone other than the individual person (or their surrogate) exercising authority over these personal, private decisions. Faith tells us that we are called to follow Jesus Christ as disciples who find true freedom in surrendering to the will of the Father. Subtly, but with great influence, modern culture bids us to become disciples of the latest fad or fashion or celebrity even as we claim to be totally independent …
