THE ROCK February 1997
About Cults and Cultures
In their indispensable book 1066 and All That – A Memorable History of England, comprising all the parts you can remember, including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates (Methuen & Co., London, thirty-first edition, 1946) the authors, Walter Carruthers Sellar and Robert Julian Yeatman, described certain incidents in English history as Good Things whilst others they deemed to be Bad Things.
This distinction has informed many people's understanding of history my own included. In particular it has come to be applied to pairs of words, etymologically indistinguishable but of which one has become regarded as a Good, the other a Bad Thing.
Two such words in current parlance are Cult and Culture: the former being perceived as a Bad Thing; the latter generally a Good Thing.
Cult is associated with such things as the Pop Scene at one end of the scale and Religion on the other. Its badness in people's minds consists in three things:
– an unhealthy idolization of a particular person or persons (a pop-star evangelist, or TV personality, for instance);
– a slavish following of his ideas or ideals leading in some instances to complete infatuation;
– thirdly what C.S. Lewis called the "Inner Ring" mentality – being the pleasure which some people derive from feeling that they (and they alone) are "in the know" about something – in this case the particular sensations and experiences which the cult in question seeks to promote; and consequently the feeling of superiority they enjoy over those who are not "in the know"
Culture, by contrast, is something which people want to share with others: Art, Religion, History and Folklore all come under this heading of Culture, which is therefore thought of as a Good Thing.
But there are a number of difficulties for the "Culturalists" as I will call them., the greatest being that there is a distinct preference on the part of The Young (who are the natural targets for the older, "Cultured", generation's endeavours) naturally to prefer the Cultic to the Cultural.
The reasons for this are not hard to work out:
In the first place the Cultic yields an instant dividend in the form of some kind of satisfaction. Whether it be the decibels of Heavy Metal or the amplified Revivalist Service, or the sensations attendant upon taking drugs or imbibing alcohol, having sex, or the heat-cum-press of attending a pop concert, the result follows very quickly upon the experience.
Secondly, enjoyment of a Cult does not depend upon understanding anything about it. In fact the less that people understand or ask the better, because understanding is not the name of the game; experiencing is. To ask the question "Why the hell am I doing this?" is to run the risk of realising that "this" is not worth doing in the first place. Far better follow the advice of the Cult-leaders "Lie back, enjoy yourself, and don't ask questions!"
Contrast this with the effort needed to enjoy the Culture which others are so anxious to share. What demands does it make? Learning, studying, understanding, reading, self-discipline, hard work. Those are just a few of the things which are required of those who want to enjoy, other than at the most superficial level, the benefits which Culture offers.
Small wonder then that Culture, however Good a Thing it is, comes off a very second best when the choice lies between, say, Hard Rock on the Cultic front and Hieronymus Bosch or Handel on the Cultural.
But there is worse news yet for the Culturalists. They are discovering that some of those whom they have been looking to as the guardians and purveyors of Culture are, as the saying goes, "No better than they ought to be." The number of scandals, sexual and otherwise, which have been traced to, and laid at the door of, the traditional Guardians of Culture, bishops, clergy, teachers and professors of this and that, has grown out of all proportion during the last 20 years.
The conclusion which people draw from this – that those who fail to live up to the ideals and values which they publicly promote therefore don't believe in them – may be false; but it is a very common one.
It is only a stone's throw thence to the conclusion that all such ideals and values which Culturalism sought to promote were false in the first place. Again this is a non sequitur because the values which Jones-the-Teacher professes are something quite distinct from what Jones-the-Human actually practises; indeed if Jones is a Christian he will be the first to admit, with regret, that this is so. But that is not how it appears to those whom Jones-the-Teacher is trying to influence.
In recent times many a Jones-the-Teacher has taken the easy way out of this. He has told his pupils that questions about Morality and Religion are best treated as matters of personal perception – like preferring van Gogh to van Dyke. It may indeed be helpful in making a choice for his pupils to be able to distinguish between them, but in the end it's no use arguing about matters of taste.
But this evasion only ends up raising more problems than it solves. Once questions like "is this true or false?", "is this right or wrong?" or "is this good or bad?" cease to be asked about religion, morality or art, then the only criteria left for judging anything is the subjective one, "Do I or do I not like this?".
Now, since there is no earthly reason why everyone should like the same thing, or like it to the same extent, it follows that the only question that matters is "How do I feel about this?": to which the answer may be "Differently from how I felt yesterday, or how I will feel about it tomorrow"
The strength of those who lead and support movements like ACC Canada and Forward in Faith has been the fact that we have made it our job to safeguard the truth about God, about Jesus Christ, about the Holy Spirit, the Incarnation and the Atonement (to name but five articles of the Creed). These, we believe have been entrusted to us and are therefore non-negotiable. They are statements of fact about a God who "changes not" although the precise terms in which these truths are expressed and propagated can, and probably should, change.
Consider the teaching of our Lord himself. The truth which he came to proclaim, indeed the Truth which he was and is, is something unchanging and unchangeable. He is "the same yesterday, today and for ever"; but in his teaching he made use of many images and analogies, some of which, if pushed too far can conflict with each other or be downright misleading.
That is why Jesus used so many different parables: Truth cannot be encapsulated once and for all in a single image or formula to be trotted out ad lib.
For the Truth is not a formula at all but a person; and that Truth, that Person, needs to be explored and "broken open" in terms like "well, it's rather like this in some ways, but on the other hand it's more like that in others."
The Cultic mind is contents with the mindless formula. The Culturalist is constantly seeking to become better informed about why things are as they are, what the formulae actually mean, and how those who wish to become educated about such things can be most effectively educated.
Speaking of Education leads me on to write about a fascinating study of the different attitudes to Education amongst a group of Russian secondary-schoolchildren and their English counterparts.
The following report appeared in the Daily Mail Education Notebook on 17 December 1996 and was reproduced in the Times Educational Supplement (whence it can be downloaded from the Web). It was entitled Failing the Attitude Test, and it quoted amongst others the following findings:
A GROWING number of studies shows that success at school boils down to the right attitude. High expectations of pupils by teachers and parents, allied with good discipline, are the keys to high achievement.
While the arguments go on over resources and class sizes, it seems we would be better tackling the attitude problems of many low achievers. Easily said and fairly obvious to most parents, yet excuses continue to be made for the failure of thousands of teenagers compared with those in other countries.”
*****
“Academics at Sunderland University have just carried out a study comparing attitudes towards education among 14-year-olds in North-East England with those of Russian teenagers in St Petersburg. They found striking differences which they concluded played a major role in the higher standards achieved by the Russian children despite massive social upheavals there.
“The team found that more than half the 1,320 Russian children surveyed said the main reason they worked hard at school was to become an educated person. Knowledge and culture were seen as desirable in themselves.
“By contrast, three-quarters of the British children saw getting a qualification was their main reason for doing well at school. Fair enough – except that physical education, art and design, and English and drama were ranked as favourite subjects compared with the Russians’ choice of algebra, English, and history.”
“Despite higher levels of achievement, the Russian teenagers were convinced their academic performance was no more than average or good. They believed their teachers and parents held similar views about them. The British teenagers, however, were far more pleased with the standards of their work and believed their teachers rated them just as highly. They were also twice as likely as the young Russians to believe their families thought they were doing very well at school.
So much for self-esteem as the key to high classroom standards. Often, it seems to be a delusion covering the harsh truth that too little is being demanded of many pupils.”
"It all comes down", the article concluded, "to a question of attitude". Our problem today is that the attitude which has infected the minds of the young English people – that learning is nothing more than a means to an end – is beginning to appear in the ranks of Traditionalist Christians.
Evidence? The difficulty we have in persuading our members to commit themselves to anything which resembles serious intellectual study.
People come in their droves to Events, (Pilgrimages, Festivals and the like) but only in relatively small numbers to Study Days and Lectures. In this we are beginning to resemble, uncannily, the Cultites for whom an Event (or preferably a never-ending series of Events) is what life is all about.
But let me end on a brighter note.
Having recognized the warning signs have two significant weapons in our fight against Cultism.
The first is New Directions and Forward Plus, our monthly and quarterly periodicals respectively. They cater for people of different intellectual levels, but both of them seek to engage people's minds in the belief that they will, if given something which "everyone else" is reading, feel the urge to read it too, even if only in order to "keep up with the Joneses". In that way we are using one of the characteristics of Cultism which I mentioned earlier – the desire to be "in the know" – as the very means by which we persuade people to graduate from Cultism to Culturalism: the "Culture" being the Catholic Faith which we believe and propagate.
New Directions is available by subscription (£30.00 per annum). Forward Plus is available free in any quantity, though Forward in Faith would be grateful to have the postage reimbursed to them.
Our second weapon is the Videotape Training Project on the Faith which is being produced in association with the Traditional Anglican Communion (to which ACC Canada belongs). There are already seven sets of tapes each consisting of between twelve and twenty-four 45-minute lectures on the following subjects: Introduction to Old Testament; Introduction to New Testament; Pentateuch and Prophets; The Gospels; General Survey of Church History; The Life of Prayer; and Patristic and Credal Theology.
To these, we in England will shortly be adding the following series: Dogmatic and Sacramental Theology; History of the Early Church and Christian education, Missions and Church Music.
When complete, the series will contain between two and four hundred lectures. The Videos will be playable both on the US and UK systems which are, between them, more or less universal throughout the world. We aim to produce an educated and theologically literate People of God who will be able to convert people's preference for Cultism into a fertile Culture of the Faith once delivered to the Saints".
Cults are by definition, sterile. They appeal to those Gnostics who believe that fulfilment can only come through Knowledge, and that the more arcane such knowledge is, the more fulfilling it will be.
In contrast and opposed to Cultism, is the Culturalism of the Catholic faith. This tells us, without making any bones about it, that the only Knowledge that really matters to us in the end is the Knowledge of God the Father, of Jesus Christ whom he has sent, through the Holy Spirit which he has given to us.