“Worldview Training” Might Be the Last Thing That Will Change the World

Read-through of To Change the World by James Davison Hunter

Photo by Abhay Ravindran on Unsplash (edited)

I was only 16 and I was sitting in the second row. I could feel my face flush with pride.

It was maybe day three of a Christian worldview training program intended primarily for those entering and already attending secular colleges and universities. Students were assigned seats in the lecture hall of the historic Grandview Hotel based on their age—22-year-olds at the front, 16-year-olds in the back. I was a zealous, freshly graduated homeschooler who had already completed most of the assigned reading and took notes furiously during each session, so when a 22-year-old no-showed for the 12-day training, the class managers chose me to move up into the second row.

I had already matriculated to a Bible college to prepare for overseas missions, and would definitely not be encountering any gender-bending, prochoice, evolutionary teaching in my college career, but I was here to learn how to change the world, and now I had an even better chance at succeeding.

In chapter two of To Change the World,¹ James Davison Hunter describes the common view of culture and the means one should take to change it, which might be referred to in shorthand as the worldview approach. He summarizes the view this way:

“The essence of culture is found in the hearts and minds of individuals—in what are typically called “values.” Values are, simply, moral preferences; inclinations toward or conscious attachment to what is good and right and true. Culture is manifested in the ways these values guide actual decisions we individuals make about how to live—that is, how we spend our time; how we work; how we play; whom we marry, and how and why; how we raise our children; whom or what we worship; and so on. By this view, a culture is made up of the accumulation of values held by the majority of people and the choices made on the basis of those values.” (pg. 6)

During this worldview training we would have heard culture referred to as “a marketplace of ideas”, one in which a biblical worldview had been shunted to the clearance rack in the back of the store. Our task was to return it to prime retail real estate, to a prominent endcap where it could be marketed as the superior product that it was. Hunter identifies three “tactics” most frequently employed by those seeking to change the world based on this understanding of culture: evangelism (most often in the form of apologetics), political action, and social reform.

The challenge, though, that we see so obviously in American culture today is that we have primarily two groups of Christians who interpret Scripture quite differently who are both seeking to change culture by these means. Hunter quotes James Dobson of Focus on the Family as saying,

“The side that wins gains the right to teach what it believes to its children. And if you do that, you write the curricula, you tell them what to believe and you model what you want them to understand and in one generation, you change the whole culture.” (pg. 13)

In chapter three, Hunter demonstrates that this common approach to changing the world is fundamentally flawed and doesn’t actually work. Not just because we have Christians on both “sides” of our so-called “culture wars”, but because culture itself isn’t simply “the accumulation of values and the choices made by individuals on the basis of these values” (pg 19). He challenges the consensus among Christian adherents to this view of culture and cultural change who say that “the reason Christians do not have more influence in shaping the culture is that Christians are just not trying hard enough, acting decisively enough, or believing thoroughly or Christianly enough” (pg. 22).

He begins the process of letting Christians off the hook for transforming culture into some ethereal ideal that exists only in the mind of God, and he rejects the individualism and pietism that feed such an ideal.²

I sat in that second row seat for two weeks and dutifully copied down pages of bullet-pointed arguments we were meant to keep close at hand and deploy the first time a university professor might try to convince us that chalk wasn’t white as a gateway to moral relativism. I spent too much time in the camp’s small bookstore, perusing books that charged me to master philosophy, apologetics, the basics of law and economics, and enter politics in order to “capture and embrace more of God’s worldview” (pg. 23).

I was 16, and this was only the beginning of my striving, the needle tip of an exhaustion that would soon burrow deep into my soul.

As I reflect now, it’s so obvious what was missing, what is missing from this approach to culture and change—community. I have grown to believe now that the church is the only hope for any change in the world, and that the church is not simply a social club of individuals who have adopted the same worldview. It is a living, breathing entity, the very body of Jesus on earth.

I wonder where my worldview campmates are today.³ I wonder if they’ve met our teachers’ expectations to change the world. I wonder if they even hold the same worldview. Or perhaps, millennials as we all are, they’re just focused on trying to pay the mortgage (or afford the mortgage), or get the kids to school, or finally stop scrolling on their phone first thing in the morning. How might our days in 2025 look different if we had been taught in 2011 that being embedded, body, mind, and spirit in a local church was the antidote to the doubt that might haunt us on our college campuses? What if instead of bullet-pointed arguments and reading lists on apologetics and philosophy we had been given the number of a young mom whose laundry we could fold while we talked about life and sipped coffee?

“Keep your teen from being a statistic”, their website urges, claiming that 70% of young adults leave the church by the age of 22. How can they know that, I wonder, when they didn’t check in to make sure we were part of the church to begin with? When they cared only that we assented to a certain narrow interpretation of Scripture and key political ideologies, but not that we understood the church as the only means Jesus ever instituted for changing the world, and for changing us?

1. This post contains affiliate links, which just means that if you purchase a book through them, I get a few pennies for my own reading habit.

2. Hunter also spends a few pages addressing Andy Crouch’s alternative view of culture as “artifact” or “a set of tangible goods” (pg. 28). However, he identifies many of the same pitfalls in this view, most notably, individualism.

3. I had neither social media nor a smartphone in 2011, so I don’t even remember most of their names.