MOUNTAIN VIEW, Ark. – The young man playing the guitar and mandolin 21 stories underground here in Blanchard Springs Cavern has, quite inadvertently, helped me to understand the dangers of a pervasive culture.
He, his sister and his mother are entertaining 100 or so of us with Christmas carols and seasonal songs. They’re quite engaging.
But in words he uses to introduce a song, the man makes it clear not just that he is a Christian but that he believes all the people gathered in this amazing underground chamber full of stalagmites and stalactites, flowstone and other formations also are Christian. He may well be right, but the possibility that a Jew, a Muslim or a Hindu is here seems not to have occurred to him at all.
So he preaches a little Christian gospel and sings his Christian song.
As a Christian, I try to imagine that I’m in church and not in a national forest owned and operated by a government obliged constitutionally not to promote one religion over another. But it’s not the church-state separation matter that most distresses me here today. Rather, it’s the unspoken assumption that all of us share the same culture and values.
I felt the same discomfort when friends who live near here took my wife and me to a community event in nearby Heber Springs. Called “Christmas in the Country,” it was emceed by the city’s mayor-elect and featured all-white singers and dancers performing Christmas music for an all-white audience.
At one point I asked our friends (in ironic jest, of course) how the Heber Springs “Ramadan in the Country,” “Hanukkah in the Country” and “Kwanzaa in the Country” performances had been. Our friends acknowledged that hardly anyone attending this Christmas performance ever would have imagined such possibilities.
My reaction to having such a thick cultural blanket thrown over me was much the same this past summer when I was in the old market area of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and one of the five daily calls to Islamic prayer rang forth from a loud speaker. The understandable assumption was that all of us were Muslims and would know just what to do and how to do at noon-hour prayers.
I’m not arguing that either the Christian culture of northwest Arkansas or the Islamic culture of Saudi Arabia is somehow inherently bad. Not at all.
But I am suggesting that when we become part of a culture we tend to forget that the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily share that experience with us. Now, there certainly are some universal values (human rights, freedom of thought and so on) that we must promote. But cultural practices are different.
When we assume that our culture is normative for the whole world, that it is what the rest of the world should aspire to because it’s right and good and even God-given, we set ourselves up for destructive conflict.
The question is why we can’t enjoy our own cultures and traditions without requiring the rest of the world to share them or without imagining that others have different and equally valuable cultures.
As friends here have driven my wife and me around, we’ve seen countless homes decorated with Christmas lights. It’s impossible to escape the impression that this area is a landslide for the New Testament.
The idea is not that northwest Arkansas should change its culture or the religious roots that give it shape. But I wish all people deeply infused with their own culture and traditions would acknowledge that people elsewhere don’t necessarily share them. Too often the way things are become the way we think they must be or the way we imagine Providence designed things to be for all humanity.
So far this year, aside from Missouri and Kansas, I’ve been in California, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Florida, Michigan, Vermont, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Arizona, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Arkansas, not to mention Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Turkey and Germany. And I can tell you that no one has a monopoly on lively culture. People who imagine they do are the farthest from it.
Bill Tammeus is an editorial page columnist for The Kansas City Star.
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