Evangelical Cultural Cringe

Building the quiet confidence cultural engagement evangelicals need to critique the mainstream and create real influence.

Some people like to describe evangelical culture - say megachurch worship music - as cringe.

But there’s a different kind of cringe out there, one that is a contributing factor in why cultural engagement evangelicals, the group best positioned to produce elites, have underperformed in creating those high-level people.

The term “cultural cringe” was coined to describe the view of Australians about their own culture. In cultural cringe, people at the imperial periphery see their own culture as inferior to that of the cultural center. So Australian culture is viewed, by Australians themselves, as inferior to English or London culture.

The term cultural cringe was coined in a 1950 essay by A. A. Phillips, who wrote:

Above our writers—and other artists—looms the intimidating mass of Anglo-Saxon cul­ture. Such a situation almost inevitably produces the charac­teristic Australian Cultural Cringe…The Cringe mainly appears in an inability to escape needless comparisons. The Australian reader, more or less consciously, hedges and hesitates, asking himself ‘Yes, but what would a cul­tivated Englishman think of this?’ No writer can communicate confidently to a reader with the ‘Yes, but’ habit; and this parti­cular demand is curiously crippling to critical judgment.

…

A second effect of the Cringe has been the estrangement of the Australian Intellectual. Australian life, let us agree, has an at­mosphere of often dismaying crudity. I do not know if our cul­tural crust is proportionately any thinner than that of other Anglo-Saxon communities; but to the intellectual it seems thinner because, in a small community, there is not enough of it to pro­vide for the individual a protective insulation. Hence, even more than most intellectuals, he feels a sense of exposure. This is made much worse by the intrusion of that deadly habit of Eng­lish comparisons. There is a certain type of Australian intel­lectual who is forever sidling up to the cultivated Englishman, insinuating: ‘I, of course, am not like these other crude Austra­lians; I understand how you must feel about them; I should be spiritually more at home in Oxford or Bloomsbury.’

It is not the critical attitude of the intellectual that is harm­ful; that could be a healthy, even creative, influence, if the criti­cism were felt to come from within, if the critic had a sense of identification with his subject, if his irritation came from a sense of shared shame rather than a disdainful separation. It is his refusal to participate, the arch of his indifferent eye-brows, which exerts the chilling and stultifying influence.

Cultural cringe theory became a key influence on post-colonial studies.

The general idea is applicable in a lot of domains. Domestically in the US, people in tertiary locations feel culturally inferior to coastal cities like New York. So these places tend to not produce cultural innovations or a lot of original thinking, but rather look to the metropole for their cues.

When I was primarily focused on writing about cities, I was always frustrated that Midwest cities had so few original ideas for urban development, but instead preferred to simply copy what other, cooler places were doing. I saw so much opportunity in this region, but little willingness to seize it. When the occasional place did find a leader who was able to chart its own path - such as Carmel, Indiana, the city where I live - the results could be extraordinary and influential at the national level.

Cultural engagement Christianity also suffers from a kind of cultural cringe. They tend to view evangelical culture as inferior to mainstream elite culture, particularly in its urban variety, and see that as the standard.

Evangelicals are a socially subaltern group with a culture that is often viewed as cringe in the ordinary sense of the word. It’s not surprising that the intellectual and artistic people who emerge from this culture often develop a sense of alienation from it, and want to distance themselves from it socially in favor of fitting in with their new milieu - or the milieu they aspire to join - which they view as superior.

I can directly relate to this. I grew up in rural Southern Indiana. I was raised in a hardcore, apocalyptic (end times focused) pentecostal church. After graduating from college I moved to Chicago to work as a consultant, and have spent much of my adult life living in big cities. I fell in love with cities and urban life and urban culture. As someone once told me, “Aaron, you love cities like only someone from a town of 29 people can.” I share the intellectual, cultural, and lifestyle preferences of urban America.

Combine that with the fact that I didn’t attend church during the first part of my adulthood, and I am someone who feels very alienated from evangelicalism. For the first time in my life, I’ve been attending a non-denominational baptistic megachurch here - probably the median/modal experience for evangelicals in America - and every single week it feels like visiting a foreign country. I doubt that will ever change. After we moved back to the Middle American city of Indianapolis, I have yet to encounter a church in the entire region that’s culturally resonant with me. Similarly, beyond the foreignness of seeker sensitive evangelicalism, I find a lot of culture war evangelicalism off-putting, and some of the behaviors and rhetoric I see mortifying.

I try to take as much of an academic view of this as possible. While I’m not going to argue that all cultures are equally valid or that we can’t say some things are superior to others, there’s a sense in which we should accept that something like megachurch evangelicalism is an authentic and valid cultural expression of the people who attend them. Just because it’s not designed for me doesn’t make it bad or inherently inferior.

Similarly, I try to see the good in all of these different groups. I see the different religious traditions as akin to spiritual gifts - each has things they are good at. The pentecostals, for example, are fantastic at helping people suffering from severe life challenges like criminal behaviors, addiction, homelessness, etc. Just because I’m not a pentecostal doesn’t mean I can’t recognize the great work pentecostals do.

Another thing I’ve tried to do is avoid ceasing to identify as an evangelical, something that seems to be a popular move among some in urban areas. What I’ve observed is that, like the ex-vangelical, people who do this almost always remain captive to evangelicalism in some ways (i.e., in that they are still self-defined by how they are not like evangelicals). Also, it’s important to retain a sense of affiliation with people with whom we have ties, but are nevertheless very different from. It’s like those folk libertarian, get-off-my-lawn conservatives in Indiana. They drive me crazy. But they are fellow-citizens and their preferences and well-being have to be taken into account.

Where a kind of cultural cringe really comes into play, however, is when people fail to maintain critical detachment from the milieu in which they do feel a sense of aspirational affinity.

A good example is JD Vance. His book Hillbilly Elegy was written only about three years after he graduated from Yale Law. At that point, he’d developed pretty keen insights into the hillbilly world he came from. He saw their good sides, but also the negative aspects that hobbled their ability to build functional, prosperous lives and communities.

However, he still had stars in his eyes about the new world that he’d entered thanks to Yale. He had not yet acquired the critical detachment necessary to see their flaws and foibles, the things they were getting wrong. Some of you might not like the direction he’s taken his more recently developed insights about that class, but he’s certainly developed some.

Similarly, the evangelical cultural engagement world seems not to have developed the ability to look at mainstream elite culture in a critically detached way. This feeds into an inability to create insightful analysis or compelling critiques of that culture, which in my view is related to the persistent inability of evangelicals to form people who end up in the seniormost positions in the key domains of society.

It’s rare in my experience to come across an evangelical saying something that helps me better understand or make sense of our world, much less compelling ideas for change.

I don’t think I’m alone. Which evangelical figures are followed by people who aren’t evangelical or otherwise Christian because they are providing this kind of insight? How many secular people read evangelicals to gain insight about the world? Which articles written by evangelicals have gone viral in wider society because they were so compelling? How many evangelical novels are read or songs are listened to because they are just so good, apart from the religious content?

It strikes me as uncommon (though not non-existent). Outsiders tend to read evangelicals mostly in order to find out what evangelicals are up to. Or because there’s some evangelical who will confirm all of their anti-evangelical biases by agreeing with them about how horrible evangelicals are.

Contrast that with the Catholic columnist Ross Douthat. Religious people read him because he explains the wider world to them. Secular people read him because he explains the religious world to them. But many people of all stripes also read him because he has interesting and compelling political and cultural insight and critique, such as in his book Decadence.

I’ll highlight again the Catholic political scientist Patrick Deneen, who wrote a trenchant critique of liberalism that made waves in the wider discourse. Even Barack Obama recommended the book.

It takes a degree of critical detachment from the culture, and cultural confidence, to be able to do things like this. It’s easy to prophetically criticize racism or even “capitalism.” Start criticizing something like liberalism, though, and you might get in trouble with the kinds of people you don’t want to get in trouble with.

The cultural engagement model has tended to downplay areas where Christianity is in conflict with culture while being very loud where it can be positioned as aligned with the culture (e.g., refugees and racism). There’s been less of an attempt to be genuinely prophetic, or to provide a truly unique perspective on the issues of the day. (I actually think there’s been regression here, as something like the original CCDA vision was such an original contribution, if not a perfect one).

Again, there are exceptions. For example, I’ve learned things about race from Anthony Bradley and Albert Thompson, two black evangelicals who’ve deeply studied the topic (and in fact have PhDs in subjects related to it). I’m not saying we’re at a zero here. But we are underperforming. Almost all compelling insight about the world, compelling cultural commentary, high impact research, new technologies, powerful art, etc. is coming from secular sources.

The solution is not the kind of cocky arrogance sometimes displayed in the culture war world. This is simply the flip side of cultural cringe. Rather, it’s the quiet confidence that you have something to offer the world in the domains of the Creation Mandate, not just the Great Commission. Phillips describes it well:

If I have thought this article worth writing, it is because I believe that progress will quicken when we articulately recognise two facts: that the Cringe is a worse enemy to our cultural develop­ment than our isolation, and that the opposite of the Cringe is not the Strut, but a relaxed erectness of carriage.

That’s what cultural engagement evangelicals should seek to develop. This is preconditional for high-impact participation in the key domains of society.