More recently, a few Christian leaders and writers (drawing inspiration from the late sociologist Philip Rieff) have picked up the term “anti-culture” as a way to describe the current “climate” in the United States. The basic idea is that if culture is understood, as Carl Trueman puts it, to be “the elaborate structures and materials built in to the very fabric of society for the refinement and transmission of its beliefs and its forms of life from generation to generation, connecting past, present, and future,” then the United States today does not even have a culture anymore. Instead, they say, we have an “anti-culture” that forbids nothing and runs on chaos.
In Crisis Magazine, for instance, English professor Anthony Esolen writes regarding the sanctity of human life that “you can’t have a culture of life if you have no culture at all.” Culture in America has been thoroughly destroyed, he maintained, “and the most energetic destroyers have been the very people whom we charge with its care: teachers, professors, statesmen, and artists.”
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