“Every society reproduces its culture — its norms, its underlying assumptions, its modes of organizing experience — in the individual, in the form of personality. As Durkheim said, personality is the individual socialized. The process of socialization, carried out by the family and secondarily by the school and other agencies of character formation, modifies human nature to conform to the prevailing social norms.”
Christopher Lasch
The Culture Of Narcissism
Please understand the import of this quote from Lasch. Lasch is insisting that culture is the mold that an individual is poured into that produces personality. All of this works to bend human nature in the direction of societal norms. Now, certainly, we would add that this process works in reverse at the same time. A handful of individuals always escape and rise out of the societal mold in order to make major contributions to the shape which the societal mold will take.
All of this is why it is so important for the Church as well as individual Christians to speak to cultural issues. If the Church surrenders her input then the norms, underlying assumptions, and the culture’s mode of organizing experience will belong to the religion and theology that doesn’t surrender on this score.
Further, Lasch’s point is that people are individual manifestations of the culture that has been impressed upon them. Pagans understand this in a way Christians do not. This is why pagans want the children for their schools. This is why the pagans want to use legislation for social engineering. This is why the pagans want to control the media levers. The pagan understands that when a culture and its institutions are pagan then the individuals will be pagan as well. Now, the fact that this isn’t universally true is the providence of God calling His people out from the cultural mold, but how faithful to their rescue and their rescuer are those who have been rescued from that pagan mold who insist that it is wicked and wrong of the Church to be culturally engaged?
If personality is the individual socialized then the Church should move heaven and hell to speak into that socializing process.
