Does Our Culture Define Our Faith?

"In Him we live and move and have our being." (Acts 17:28).

Studying God means wishing to understand God. In our faith, we seek understanding, because we want to know the author of our faith and that this Divine Being is revealed to us in our human experience. Therefore, the culture and context of our experience is a vital element of our search for God. "Contextual theology" means exercising this study within a particular cultural context in relation to our own personal experience, for example the "woman's" experience, the Black, Jewish or Native American experience and so forth.

Modern thought and new methods of research such as the internet influence the choices we make when it comes to ethics. Although no one segment of society holds ultimate truth, the majority of people put pressure on how to best define our moral norms. For example, many celebrities and politicians recently have been taken to task for being "politically incorrect" or using out-dated and discriminatory language. Despite the push for personal speech freedoms in the 60s, there has been a backlash of sorts now on those who do not conform to what popular culture feels is acceptable. This is done by protest in public forums including Congress and by boycotting advertisers or financial backers.

How society arrives at some kind of conformity over these cultural norms is a mystery, other than majority rule. The fact that so many are so ready to abide by whatever is most expedient financially or politically is even more repugnant since those standing outside the margins of cultural complicity oftentimes are the ones who represent the best alternative viewpoints by which we grow - take Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" for example.