This “crucial change” began with a small group of cultural leaders who rose to oppose Italy’s cultural and spiritual decline, which is precisely the point I made two years ago. This has always been the impetus for long-term cultural change. Throughout history it has been small groups within societies that have initiated and produced real cultural change.

Pitirim Sorokin, the noted Harvard sociologist, observed in his study of social history that within hedonistic cultures a “temperate and creative minority” can arise. As a result of the “creative minority’s” commitment to virtue and chastity there naturally follows an increase in their creative output that affects various spheres of culture such as “religion, non-materialistic philosophy, non-hedonistic and non-sensual ethics, and the fine arts.”

In other words, a competent moral minority can, in fact, produce sustainable cultural change. For example, prior to the Italian Renaissance (14th-15th centuries) there was a steady decline of sexual morality, marriage and family beginning in the thirteenth century. Nonetheless there remained a small but “virtuous” class of intellectual elites whose creative productivity increased while the surrounding culture declined. These cultural shapers ultimately laid the foundations for another minority of intellectual elites that would initiate the Protestant Reformation followed by the Catholic Counter-Reformation. This produced the intellectual, scientific, political and economic revolutions that established the preeminence of Western cultural achievement.    

In every instance, positive cultural progress and, in some cases, reversal of cultural decline was produced by a small minority who had the insight, wherewithal, and courage to act in contradiction to the cultural drift toward immorality and the resulting creative stupor. This point was strongly reinforced by Randall Collins, The Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Collins argues in his book, The Sociology of Philosophies that over the course of 3,000 years of history only about 500 thinkers have been at the center of world civilization.

Many of these were men and women of faith who, choosing to live in obedience to God, resisted the values of their culture while pressing the truth of Christ into every area of life and culture. These Christians were counter-cultural in virtually every way as well as intellectually competent in their respective spheres of influence. These two must go hand in hand in order to impact culture. In doing this they were able to establish a Christian cultural consensus that shaped Western culture for centuries.

In conclusion, Christians, competent in their faith and possessing a comprehensive biblical view of life and reality, must rise to challenge the cultural trends toward secularism, moral ambiguity, and the stupefaction of culture. We, once again, must become cultural leaders capable of exercising the tools of reason and persuasion, not political coercion, if there be any hope of reversing the deleterious effects currently unfolding in American culture.

© 2008 by S. Michael Craven

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