what do you know about the culture war that rages?

You may often hear people talking about the "cultural wars." On the surface you may think differences in religious beliefs or cultural issues with globalization. However, it actually involves factions of a single society trying to win control of public policy that affects each party's rights, such as marriage, life, speech, religion, privacy, etc. Culture wars have always existed in history, but can be more pronounced or obvious in democratic societies where power to affect what goes on in society is decided by the public, not by authoritative tyrants.

Culture is basically defined as the norms and values of any collection of people, we will call a social order. Culture itself is an informal control system that is embraced by the social order. When some of the people want everyone "to march to their drummer", there is a race by opposing parties to turn cultural norms and values into law. This is generally where the war begins. Over time, laws and policies turn the informal control of culture into formal control, thereby it is no longer culture that influences what people do, but regulation. This is why people who fight the cultural wars proclaim that policy follows culture, not vice versa. So, when law is enacted, the cultural war is over.

 So, where best is the war of cultures waged? The answer may be in how culture is formed and changed? Culture is an interesting phenom since no one really can see it, like the wind. You can see its effects on people's behavior, but you cannot see "it". Societies usually represent their culture with symbols and ceremonies. Symbols come in many different forms and ceremonies really flow from how people are "rewarded" and "punished". I want to focus on symbols, but more specifically one type of symbol, WORDS.

One of my very first posts and a favorite lecture topic is "If a word can mean anything, then it means nothing."  http://profoncall.blogspot.com/2011/02/if-word-can-mean-anything-then-it-means.html
This deals with the way culture works to redefine a word so that something that is not true becomes true. This is the outcome of relativism. redefining words to define new "truth" is so important because of my second point on WORDS, the power behind the narrative. The US culture has moved more liberal and away from its roots because of these two points - liberals have controlled the choice and use of words - mainly through controlling the intellectual centers of education and society's mouthpiece, media and entertainment.

There are so many examples of this a student could write a Ph D dissertation just on this topic. I wrote in my last several blogs about the words "justice", "deserves", and "rights." The most foundational word to the cultural war has been redefining the word "tolerance" and raising the new definition up to be society's highest virtue. "Tolerance"no longer means "to respect a different idea or opinion." It now means that we must consider any different idea or opinion as equally true to what we believe is true or we are bigoted and vile.

Even the Christian faith has been caught up in the cultural winds of change. We can no longer "judge" because that is discriminatory. But "to judge" has historically meant discerning right from wrong or guilt and innocent, not condemnation. This meaning of "judge" no longer has place in our culture. Historically, being guilty or wrong may have had punishment associated with it, but now judge has been changed to mean condemnation, so "to judge" is no longer a virtue. Everybody must win, no one can lose.

Now "righteousness" has become the right behavior or doing good things, not being justified or made Holy by God. The word Christian has been so redefined that we have to put "evangelical" in front of it to mean Christian and now we have to qualify "evangelicals" as being "true evangelicals".  Ay yi yi

This topic is so big I can not do it "justice" in this blog. I can only say that until those whose calling is to "fight" the cultural battle learns how to control the narrative, to defend the absolute and unwavering meaning of key words, they cannot win it in the legislative and legal systems. One final point on controlling the narrative - you cannot begin any argument with a core assumption that threatens the listener. For the narrative to penetrate and transform the culture, the starting point of any argument must be understandable and accessible to society so that people are willing to go down that path with you. Do not start someone on grasping the power of faith with "faith in God", People who are adverse to God or ignorant of God must first grasp the realities and truths about faith itself and then discover that God best delivers that reality.

Those in politics and religion, who feel that society is off path and needs correction, need to do a lot of pondering on this .....