Contributing to the Delinquency of a Culture

There is an old legal expression, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, that assigns responsibility beyond the person who actually commits the offense. The minor may have made the choice, but the law recognizes that choices do not always occur in isolation. Someone may have encouraged the behavior, provided the opportunity, supplied what was needed, or created an environment in which misconduct became easier and increasingly normal.

I have been thinking about that phrase lately, though in a somewhat different context.

Is it possible to contribute to the delinquency of a culture?

That question becomes more complicated the longer I consider it because culture is one of those things we routinely discuss as though it exists somewhere outside of us. We complain about what "the culture" celebrates, what social media has done to public conversation, how entertainment has changed, what technology is doing to children, how politics has become increasingly hostile, or how standards that once seemed reasonably settled can disappear within a generation.

There is certainly plenty worth examining in all of that. What bothers me, however, is how easily I can speak about culture as an observer when I am obviously one of its participants.

I live here too.

I consume the products, use the technology, follow the news, watch the games, listen to the music, carry the phone, scroll through the feeds, click the links, participate in the conversations and, on occasion, become irritated by strangers I have never met over subjects about which I probably know considerably less than I think I do. I can complain about our shortened attention spans and then reach for my phone during thirty seconds of inactivity. I can lament the superficiality of social media while paying attention to how many people viewed something I posted. I can criticize sensationalism while clicking on a headline precisely because it was sensational.

At some point it becomes difficult to maintain the fiction that culture is merely something happening around me.

I am contributing to it.

That realization creates an interesting problem for anyone attempting to take seriously the biblical instruction concerning our relationship with the world. John quotes Jesus rather plainly, "Do not love the world or the things in the world," and throughout Christian history believers have wrestled with what faithful obedience to that instruction should actually look like.

One solution has always been withdrawal. If the world is corrupting, create as much distance from it as possible. There is an understandable logic to that instinct, and there are certainly occasions when separation is both wise and necessary. Yet complete withdrawal creates its own theological problem because Jesus, in His prayer for His disciples in John 17, specifically says, "I do not ask that you take them out of the world." A few verses later He adds, "As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world."

Apparently, removal was never the assignment. Neither was assimilation.

The Christian is therefore placed in an uncomfortable position: sent deliberately into a world he is simultaneously warned not to love. We are expected to participate without being absorbed, to engage without surrendering discernment, and to influence an environment that is inevitably influencing us at the same time.

That has probably always been difficult, but our technological age has added another dimension to the problem. Most of us are no longer simply consumers of culture. We have become distributors of it.

For most of human history, relatively few people possessed the ability to broadcast an opinion to hundreds or thousands of others. Today we carry that capacity in our pockets. With almost no effort, we can promote an idea, circulate a rumor, celebrate an accomplishment, humiliate another person, recommend a book, spread misinformation, encourage a friend, share something beautiful, intensify an argument, or introduce hundreds of people to something they otherwise would never have encountered.

We are all, in some small way, publishers now. And publishing means contributing.

This is where I have begun thinking about the idea of adding to the noise. The phrase is usually used negatively, but perhaps the issue is not simply whether I am making noise. Participation is unavoidable, and silence itself can sometimes become a form of participation. There are moments when refusing to speak demonstrates wisdom, just as there are moments when refusing to speak demonstrates cowardice.

The more useful question may be what my participation is helping to amplify.

That question reaches farther than whether something is technically right or wrong. I can be correct about an issue and still contribute something unhealthy to the culture surrounding it. I can defend truth while behaving contemptuously toward people. I can criticize outrage while becoming outraged. I can oppose vulgarity using language and methods that gradually make me vulgar. I can become so preoccupied with defeating something that the thing I oppose begins determining the kind of person I am becoming.

Social media makes this particularly difficult because its machinery often rewards precisely what wisdom tells us to restrain. Anger travels quickly. Nuance rarely does. Certainty attracts more attention than humility, accusation more than careful inquiry, and controversy more than ordinary goodness. The temptation, therefore, is not simply to believe questionable things but to become the sort of person the system rewards.

Even our disapproval can become part of the machinery. We share the offensive video to demonstrate how offensive it is, repost the ridiculous statement so everyone can see how ridiculous people have become, and circulate the latest example of cultural decay while wondering why cultural decay receives so much attention.

We condemn the noise while helping increase its volume.

None of this means that Christians should retreat from public life, entertainment, technology, politics, education, business, athletics, art, or the countless other places where culture is made. If anything, the opposite seems closer to the biblical picture. Jesus sends His followers into the world, which suggests that presence is not an unfortunate consequence of being alive at the wrong time; it is part of the vocation.

The difficulty is learning how to be present without allowing the surrounding culture to establish all the terms of our presence.

Perhaps that requires changing some of the questions we ask.

Instead of asking only whether I am permitted to watch something, I might consider what repeated exposure to it is cultivating in me. Instead of asking whether an article confirms what I already believe, I might wonder whether sharing it contributes truth or merely reinforces my tribe. Instead of asking whether my criticism is justified, I might ask whether the manner in which I express it reflects the character I claim to value.

The same questions apply positively. What deserves amplification? What is worthy of attention? What kinds of conversations make people more thoughtful rather than merely more agitated? What music, writing, humor, art, teaching, friendship and public discourse remind us of things that are true, excellent, beautiful or humane?

Culture, after all, is not produced only in Hollywood studios, corporate boardrooms, news organizations, universities or Washington. It is produced around dinner tables and in classrooms, locker rooms, churches, offices, text threads and social-media feeds. It develops through countless decisions about what receives our attention and what does not, what earns our praise and what earns our silence, what we tolerate long enough to normalize and what we care enough about to resist.

Which brings me back to that strange legal phrase.

Perhaps contributing to the delinquency of a culture rarely looks dramatic. Most of us will never possess enough influence to change society in any obvious way. Our contribution will be much smaller than that, consisting largely of ordinary decisions whose significance is almost impossible to measure individually.

But that is probably how culture has always been formed.

We inherit something from those who came before us, live inside it for a while, alter it through millions of choices we scarcely notice, and eventually hand some version of it to those who come after us.

The question, then, is not whether we will contribute.

We already are.

The question worth asking is what we are adding to the noise—and what kind of culture those contributions are quietly helping to create.

All of this hits home tomorrow when I will see jayopsis music go live on Spotify......