Cultural Context Matters

Hello again Salt & Light Stories subscribers! I hope you’ve had a good week. Today we’ll look specifically at why cultural context matters.

It is important to note, though, that cultural context shapes how we apply what it means to be salt and light. More and Wilberforce still lived and operated in a broadly Judeo-Christian framework — they could take for granted that most people still attended church somewhat regularly and believed in God (or at least a “higher power”). Our current context, however, is different. We, as 21st-century Christians, do not have that same luxury — there is not that same cultural compulsion to at least nominally attend any kind of church service regularly or believe in anything beyond ourselves. We can certainly learn lessons from the past, but if we misapply them it can be counterproductive

For example, we must remember that America is not a type of new Israel — we cannot act and live as thought the United States is (or ever has been) a Christian nation. If we try to apply how God called Jews to be in Israel, and Israel to be as a uniquely covenanted nation, we can draw some dangerous conclusions for how we can be salt and light in the United States (and the West more generally) today. The better metaphor would be that Christians in American (and the West) are like the Israelites in Babylon — we are “strangers in a foreign a land” — our first allegiance is to Jesus and his Church, but we live under the rule and authority of the government of the United States. So, we must adjust how we live as salt and light in the world today. 

But we can still learn from More and Wilberforce, and the many other lives whose stories we will be telling, that no matter the cultural context, Christ has called us to proclaim the Truth of his life, death, and resurrection. How we do that may look different for each of us, but the essential message should not change, for Jesus is, “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).

-Emily Mitchell