By Regis Martin
Crisis Magazine
July 7, 2025
So, then, what is Christian Culture? What does it look like? Are there certain defining features that distinguish it from what passes for culture these days? And if so, how are we to recognize them?
What it is, at the deepest level, is an answer to the question raised by the Hebrew psalmist in a time of unprecedented anguish and desolation, when the People of the Promise are forced to endure exile and captivity. They have lost their land, their freedom; the temple where they worship the living God is in ruins, while they, God's beloved children, remain utterly prostrate beneath the Babylonian boot. "There by the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion" (Psalm 137).
And as they hang their harps in sorrow upon the willows that mark the water's edge, their captors demand of them yet another humiliation-that they should make music:
They that carried us away captive required of us a song;
and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying;
"Sing us one of the songs of Zion."
To which the voice of Israel, in the words of the Jewish psalmist, replies:
How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
Now, to be sure, in the context of the Old Testament, amid the unhappy circumstances of a people held captive, it is unmistakably a cry of lamentation, of heartrending sorrow. A people in bondage are very likely to be candidates for despair. But since the coming of Christ, the Glory of the Lord, who brought eternity into time, grace into nature, Heaven into history, the world is no longer strange or menacing.
It has become, instead, a place of redeemed actuality, a setting made radiant by the presence of the One who vanquished all the darkness. The world has become a wedding, a sacrament, confected for the sanctification of men. And everywhere you turn, there stands the sign of our salvation, looming beneath the bright shadow of the Cross and Resurrection.
Here is the birthplace of Christian Culture, of the true marriage of Heaven and earth, of the happy convergence of vertical and horizontal perspectives. An incarnational humanism, no less, in which the world is accepted and affirmed as a good place to be. Why would God stoop to enter a world He felt so little affection for? How different this is from an eschatological humanism so fixated upon dreams of flight from a world steeped in corruption and death that immediate escape from its coils becomes the only imperative.
So, what then is Christian Culture? It is what happens when enough men and women wedded to Christ, spousal recipients of His love, undertake in a decisive and public way to profess their common faith and devotion by soaking everything in the grace of the Gospel. All that they are and know and do-including their institutions, civil arrangements, arts, education, family life, work and play-immersed in the Blood of the Lamb.
The question, therefore, is not How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? But rather, it is how shall we render our experience of a land that, owing to Christ's sudden appearance among us, ought no longer to be strange, and thus sing the Lord's song with ease and felicity, with joy and delight?
Why not make a world where it is easier for men and women to be good? Even to try and do so, never mind the numbers of good men falling short, is enough to sound the great theme of fraternal love and solidarity amid an otherwise rampant and atomized individualism. Not the cry of the self-centered self, the solipsistic self, but the self both steeped in God and solicitous of neighbor. The self for whom solidarity with others becomes the informing principle of the public life.
"Let us," as Eric Gill used to say, "create a cell of good living amid the chaos of our world." A world whose prototype ought not to be the ant hill or the rat race but the Mystical Body. Not the beehive, where everyone is a drone, but the Blessed Trinity, where the logic of the gift prevails and people discover themselves precisely in giving themselves away.
Let me put it this way. In order for the life of faith to succeed in a more than haphazard or private way, it really has got to penetrate the public life, which is that larger space where culture puts down its roots. Otherwise, the generality of men may find it well-nigh impossible, amid so many secular and profane distractions, to find genuine and palpable evidence of the sacred.
Not the least rumor of God could survive in a world where no one ever spoke of God. And the reason they don't is because-educated opinion having convinced men of His irrelevance-they no longer turn to Him for counsel or consolation. Not to mention those primordial reasons men have lifted their eyes on high, to give praise and adoration to the God who made them and the universe.
We have lost, as a dear friend and mentor used to say, "the poetry of the transcendent." And when a people live in a world made suddenly flat as a map, they no longer look up at the stars.
This is not what the architects of Christian Culture had in mind when they sought to configure all things to Christ. They did not aim to leave anything out of account, free to shape itself without reference to Him. Why should we not build a society in such a way as to heighten and augment the natural tendency we have for the true and the good and the beautiful? To allow our natural gravitation for God, who remains the deepest longing of all, to be shored up by a society whose institutions conspire to draw all things to God? Isn't that the most logical and obvious outcome of a society for whom most members are already Christian?
And doesn't this happen when, at the very least, impediments are not put in the way of the search for God, the delight one feels in the discovery of God? Why must it be such a great trial and tribulation to get to Heaven? Or even to get to Mass in the morning? Why must there be roadblocks thrown up to challenge and frustrate the effort simply to practice the virtue of piety? It is a matter of justice that God be given His due, to which end the two orders of the sacred and the profane, society and the Church, need not cross swords but rather harmonize their efforts in helping man fulfill himself both in this world and the world to come.
If the meaning of life is that it becomes "a vale of soul-making," as the poet Keats liked to say, then statecraft becomes nothing other than a matter of soulcraft-of helping to shape the soul-not just for time but for eternity as well.
This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.