Elites, Institutions, and Networks: How Cultural Change Really Happens

Many Christians gaze out at the current state of American culture with a certain resigned despair, mixed with a hopeful yearning for God to pour out His Spirit on our nation as He did during the 18th century. At that time,  in what scholars call “the Great Awakening,” a tremendous spiritual revival broke out in the Thirteen Colonies, that saw countless lives transformed, and enormous crowds gathered to hear the preaching of the Gospel.

Benjamin Franklin reports in his Autobiography how he heard the traveling evangelist, George Whitfield, preach from the top of the court house steps in Philadelphia, to a crowd estimated to be as large as 30,000 people (It’s estimated that one out of every four members of the Thirteen Colonies personally heard Whitefield preach).

Your average Christian today is apt to feel that the answer to our nation’s ills lies in experiencing another such Great Awakening that will see people pour into churches, and public morality improved. But this is to misunderstand how cultures actually change. In fact, according to UVA sociologist, James Davison Hunter, the United States could experience another Great Awakening and it would have little or no effect on our culture. To understand why this is the case, it’s important to understand what culture is,  and how it really changes.

According to Hunter, culture is 1) a system of truth claims and moral obligations, 2) both a resource and a form of power, and 3) includes both ideas and infrastructure—it takes shape in concrete institutional forms. Importantly, not all institutions have the same cultural impact, or cultural authority. There are 150 Christian colleges and universities in the United States, and all of them combined won’t have the impact of just one Ivy League university—don’t believe it? Name one supreme court justice, senator, president, or CEO of a Fortune 500 company who is an alumnus from a Christian college.

This is not to say that Christian institutions of higher education aren't important. They are (I myself am a graduate of one!). It’s just to point out that cultural impact is not a question of numbers alone. How then does culture change? According to Hunter, it changes in part, as a result of the work of those in positions of cultural power, and the networks of institutions they build.

This is why the ministry of Cambridge House is so strategic. It is an institution located at one of Virginia’s “public Ivy Leagues” that works with exceptional students, many of whom will go on to positions of influence where they’ll have an outsized impact on our culture (Ethan Good, whom we profile in this month’s newsletter, is currently working to help shape educational policy nationwide.) In addition, Cambridge House is part of a network of thirty-seven other study centers located at other top universities engaged in the same work. Therefore, Cambridge House's potential for long-term cultural impact is much greater than if it existed by itself. 

Cambridge House, and the larger study center movement of which it is a part, is just one of the ministries that God is using to not only reach this generation for the Gospel, but also to bring about long-lasting cultural renewal. If you're depressed about the state of our culture, why not consider supporting the work of Cambridge House as it works "to set a table with the riches of the historic Christian tradition, for the moral, intellectual, and spiritual flourishing of the William & Mary community?"

* Work referenced is: To Change the World: The Irony Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World by James Davison Hunter, Oxford University Press, 2010