Several months ago, I came into possession of an extraordinary book—a hardcover copy of To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, by the sociologist James Davison Hunter. It was the personal copy of Charles Colson, the political-aide-turned-evangelical leader, and likely one of the last volumes he read before his death in 2012. Its dog-eared pages are filled with marginalia in a dynamic, staccato hand.
Colson’s time with the volume was well spent. Hunter was perhaps Colson’s most serious interlocutor. And Hunter was (and remains) committed to a strategy for Christians under the conditions of modernity, a strategy that diverged sharply from Colson’s. Sparks fly.
Both thinkers were interested in spurring Christians as Christians to do good in the modern world. Both knew the weaknesses of the “culture-warring” tactics of the 1980s and 1990s. But whereas Colson placed hope in a grassroots reclamation of the Christian worldview, Hunter stressed the importance of densely concentrated elites and networks of power. He went so far as to charge worldview theorists with “a naïveté about the nature of culture and its dynamics that is, in the end, fatal.”
A decade on, the Colson–Hunter debate remains unsettled. Disputes still rage, including in the pages of this magazine, over the viability of “winsomeness” or other strategies of rapprochement with mainstream culture. Meanwhile, the civic climate for theologically conservative Christians has darkened into what Aaron Renn calls the “negative world.” More and more, “being known as a Christian is a social negative, particularly in the elite domains of society. Christian morality is expressly repudiated and seen as a threat to the public good and the new public moral order.”
The broader Christian world never heard Colson’s response to Hunter—a response inscribed, in abbreviated form, in the margins of his copy of To Change the World. Perhaps Colson’s final thoughts may hold some wisdom for Christians navigating our increasingly “negative world.”
Few evangelicals have had so profound an impact on the American zeitgeist as Colson. A one-time “hatchet man” for Richard Nixon, he was embroiled in the Watergate scandal and took illegal steps to attack Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg—activities that landed him in federal prison. While there, he underwent a religious conversion, which he chronicled in his memoir Born Again, and became a leading activist for the incarcerated and their families, founding the international ministry Prison Fellowship in 1976. Today, Prison Fellowship occupies a distinctive space in the DC nonprofit archipelago, advocating from a theological vantage for alternatives to tough-on-crime policies.
But Colson was more than just a political figure. Late in life, he became interested in the subject of Christian worldview, or “the sum total of our beliefs about the world, the ‘big picture’ that directs our daily decisions and actions.” In 1999, he penned (with Nancy Pearcey) How Now Shall We Live?, an update of Francis Schaeffer’s 1976 bestseller How Then Shall We Live? “Genuine Christianity is more than a relationship with Jesus, as expressed in personal piety, church attendance, Bible study, and works of charity,” Colson and Pearcey argued. “It is more than discipleship, more than believing a system of doctrines about God. Genuine Christianity is a way of seeing and comprehending all reality.”
One’s worldview, of course, had implications beyond the intellectual realm. If indeed “God created us as social beings and gave us the principles for social and political institutions,” then surely it would be irresponsible to stand by as those institutions decayed. Surely Christians had a role to play as Christians in the public square.
As a theologically-minded teenager, I found this way of thinking exhilarating, and Colson’s work proved formative for me. I was inspired by his story of personal redemption, but also by his courage to carry a Christian witness into the very heart of public life. Shortly before his death, I met him at a “Doing the Right Thing” event featuring Robert P. George. At the time, I was a sophomore attending Patrick Henry College—a tiny evangelical school with the motto “For Christ and for liberty,” and a reputation for sending its graduates into government jobs. I thanked Colson for his work, and he autographed my copy of God and Government. The following summer I interned for Prison Fellowship, at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, the intellectual home base for his projects.
In 2010, James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World landed like a bombshell among Christian intellectuals. It is difficult to do justice to the scale and sophistication of Hunter’s argument, but at bottom To Change the World argued for a new “Christian strategy.”
In Hunter’s telling, the possibility of Christian social transformation had far less to do with “worldview” than with “culture,” a social matrix of values and assumptions that “often seems eerily independent of majority opinion.” That matrix was shaped by influential people “operating in common purpose within institutions at the high-prestige centers of cultural production.” These elites, Hunter argued, tended to form tight networks that exercised creative power in ways unavailable to those outside the inner rings. The decline of Western Christian influence was due to Christians’ “absen[ce] from the arenas in which the greatest influence in the culture is exerted.” (The decline was also, Hunter made clear, linked to the fact that mainstream Christian tastes “run to the lower-middle and middle brow rather than the high brow.”)
Hunter concluded that generations of Christian efforts to shape society through conversion and revival had been fundamentally misguided, because “cultures change from the top down, rarely if ever from the bottom up.” Populist groundswells, no matter how righteous, go nowhere without elite involvement. It is hard to imagine a starker divergence from Colson’s position. “If our culture is to be transformed,” Colson wrote in How Now Shall We Live?, “it will happen from the bottom up—from ordinary believers practicing apologetics over the backyard fence or around the barbecue grill. . . . The real leverage for cultural change comes from transforming the habits and dispositions of ordinary people.”
Does Christian social transformation happen from the bottom up or from the top down? A great deal hinges on the answer. If Colson was right to say that worldview comes first, then the Church ought to focus on transforming individuals’ lives and mindsets. But if Hunter was right, Christians should carve out a niche for themselves in cultural capitals.
How might that be done? Hunter argued that Christians should adopt a new paradigm of “faithful presence” over against the alleged defensiveness of the Christian Right, the assimilationism of the Christian Left, and the oppositionality of those he termed “Neo-Anabaptists.” For Hunter, faithful presence simply meant “the exercise of leadership in all spheres and all levels of life and activity,” entailing “a quality of commitment oriented to the fruitfulness, wholeness, and well-being of all.” Leadership, of course, would involve entry into the ranks of the culture-shaping elites.
In his closing pages, Hunter writes, “It may be that the healthiest course of action for Christians is to be silent for a season and learn how to enact their faith in public through acts of shalom rather than to try again to represent it publicly through law, policy, and political mobilization.” Maybe in time they could resume political action without tearing the social fabric.
To Change the World was the sort of book that demanded responses, and Christian thinkers were swift to provide them. In 2015, the Gospel Coalition published an edited volume of essays responding to Hunter’s thesis. Some evangelical leaders, such as the Presbyterian theologian and pastor Tim Keller, largely agreed with Hunter’s assessment, whereas others found his claims more questionable. Colson was in the latter camp.
In 2024, reading through Colson’s marginalia in To Change the World is an arresting experience, like eavesdropping on a lively conversation between two serious intellectuals. When Hunter charges evangelicals with “focus[ing] on evangelism as their primary means of changing the world,” and describes “nearly everyone”—evangelicals included—as “focus[ing] on politics as the central means of changing the world,” Colson’s reactions blaze across the margin: “No!” “Not me!” The “Colson strategy” somehow goes beyond either mass conversions or top-down political pressure.
“Culture is more than just a worldview,” Hunter writes. “Of course—who said it wasn’t?” Colson retorts. For Colson the issue is the relationship between culture and worldview. Hunter defines “culture” as “a normative order by which we comprehend others, the larger world, and ourselves and through which we individually and collectively order our experience.” Colson doesn’t disagree. “True, so I would also argue,” he notes. But cultural products, in whatever form, always “trace to an overarching NARRATIVE.” Hunter’s argument that “institutions have much greater power” than individuals may be correct, in a qualified sense, but is incomplete. “If you mean the family and the church, true, but what else?” Colson writes. “Media, academy, but these too are rooted in worldview.”
Perhaps the problem is the insistence on a sharp divide between individual and institution. Hunter states early on that “ideas can have revolutionary and world-changing consequences and yet they appear to do so only when the kinds of structural conditions discussed here are in place.” “Must it be either–or?” Colson wonders. His question is a good one.
When Hunter claims that “the work of world-making and world-changing are, by and large, the work of elites,” Colson retorts: “Oh please. Elitist view.” Against Hunter, Colson contends that the conversion of Rome was brought about by outsiders—not established leadership—and that Luther’s Reformation served the German people rather than entrenched interests.
Colson’s frustration grows as Hunter’s argument progresses. When Hunter, in an effort to defuse obvious critiques of his model, describes elitism as “abhorrent for the Christian,” Colson snaps: “True—take it to heart James.” After all, it is difficult to ignore the sneer in some of Hunter’s statements: “Christian presence in America has been a presence primarily in, of, and for the middle class in everything that this designation means.” “I can’t take it,” writes Colson, “what a snob.”
Finally, Colson bristles at Hunter’s charge that American Christians have improperly politicized the public square. “We were shamefully quiet in fundamentalist era,” Colson observes. As far as politicization goes, “secularists have aggressively pushed this—and we . . . just roll over and play dead.” Christians did not polarize the public square; rather, their apathy allowed fundamental worldview issues to become contestable.
An irony lies beneath the surface of this debate. Given his background, few Christian intellectuals were better positioned than Colson to understand the role of elites. Virtually none of his audience members possessed anything like his credentials, his networks, or his cultural capital. And yet he rejected Hunter’s assessment that elites were history’s prime movers.
On Colson’s account, those who become elites always act according to some worldview or other. Elites do not emerge from the void. They are drawn from somewhere, and someone teaches them a vision of the world. Even if those teachers and parents are never known to history, the worldview they transmit is in the driver’s seat.
Moreover, Colson’s emphasis on worldview presumes that rival visions of the good contend with one another in the realm of policymaking. For Hunter, by contrast, such an admission calls into question the viability of “a shalom that seeks the welfare not only of those of the household of God but of all.” But what happens when “welfare” for one is sin for another? To take a famous example, if an employee demands that the order of Catholic nuns that employs her must provide contraceptives as part of its health plan, whose claim of right wins out? In a “negative world,” common ground is hard to find.
Take, for example, contemporary art. Hunter devotes much attention to the subject, contending that Christians have largely ceded the field. “The obligation among artists who are Christians is, among other things, to demonstrate in ways that are imaginative and compelling that materiality is not enough for a proper understanding of human experience,” Hunter writes. Christian artists are to show “that there is durability and permanence as well as eternal qualities that exist beyond what we see on the surface of life. . . . In the process, it is possible to symbolically portray possibilities of beauty and fullness we have not yet imagined.”
Viewed in isolation, what Christian could disagree with this? Surely Colson would not. But the realities on the ground look rather different.
In his 2018 book Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education, ethnographer Gary Alan Fine presents intensive qualitative research into the pedagogy of leading art schools. Among other tendencies, Fine observed “a limiting institutional discourse in examining religion,” a discourse in which “expressions of faith are problematic, even when the student is exploring loss of faith. Religion is off-limits unless ‘framed correctly.’” The educational milieu is dominated by the practice of critique, which requires young artists regularly to expound the themes of their work. So what does it mean for Hunter’s strategy that, in the very spaces in which art world elites are formed, appeals to transcendence are verboten?
And what about the ideals of “beauty and fullness” themselves? Fine goes on to explain that “of all our admired social institutions, few have the same capacious embrace of deviance as the art world. Artists define themselves as mavericks. Sometimes it seems that anything goes: anything except conventional morality, traditional religion, and conservative politics. . . . Good taste is in short supply.” If Fine’s assessment is representative, might Christian faithfulness preclude elite status, in at least one domain?
Christians in the art world today have visibly struggled with this tension. In 2008, art historian Daniel Siedell published God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art, arguing for a theological reading of contemporary art objects—even controversial works like Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ. The book is compelling, if at times startling. Seven years later, however, Siedell repudiated much of God in the Gallery in a follow-up volume. “In the end,” he wrote, “I was trying to justify modern art to myself. . . . But I stand before you incapable of justifying my relationship with modern art, theologically or otherwise.” He pronounced that he had “learned to lean into my passion for modern art without the protection of a ‘Christian world view’ and free of the burden of justifying it theologically.” And in the process, he had come to an understanding of Christianity that de-emphasized coherence altogether: According to his new perspective, “Christianity is not a life system, helping me make sense of the world, making it transparent and explainable. In fact, it often makes the world more impenetrable, mysterious, and frustrating to me, creating discontinuities and sharp edges that confuse and anger me.” For Siedell, the only path forward is to embrace aporia.
Here Hunter’s sweeping rhetoric confronts a stark reality. What happens when the precondition for “faithful presence” in the contemporary art world is the refusal of the Christian worldview as a worldview? What kind of “world-changing” can take place if the price of elite status is the denial of the possibility of a Christian ideal?
Early on in How Now Shall We Live?, Colson recalls a 1996 speaking engagement at Yale Law School. The conservative Colson “wondered if the meeting might erupt into a riot—or, at least, an unpleasant confrontation.” But a preliminary conversation with Stephen Carter, a Christian law professor, soon disabused him of that fear. “When these kids come to Yale,” Carter remarked to Colson, “they are taught that the law has nothing to do with morality. And they accept that. So you can have your opinions, and they’ll find those interesting, but they won’t even bother to argue.” Carter was right: Colson’s listeners were sedate, respectful, and intellectually disengaged. “No one challenged a single premise I had advanced,” Colson recollects. “They listened politely, took a few notes, then packed up their papers and quietly slipped out of the auditorium.”
Twenty years later, when I was a student there, times had changed. The law school was simmering with political fervor. In the spring of 2022, the cauldron boiled over: Police were called in when more than one hundred Yale Law students, outraged that their school would host a defender of traditional sexual morality, disrupted an event featuring Alliance Defending Freedom litigator Kristen Waggoner. Cultural winds blow differently in the negative world.
Hunter’s strategy of “faithful presence” works best when the clash of worldviews takes place in what Renn calls the “neutral world.” In such a world, a clear distinction may be drawn between “mere presence” and “faithful presence.” But today, no one talks about the “neutrality” of scientific materialism. That delusion is long gone. Today’s intellectual combatants are aware of the incommensurability of their first principles.
Is this, then, where all debates must end—in a Nietzschean contest for control, a contest only the strong will survive? Despite his emphasis on power as the tool of cultural change, Hunter’s model cannot resolve this question.
For power becomes legitimate authority only when exercised under the right conditions and in service of the right ends. And the conditions for that legitimacy are always informed by a particular worldview.
I first read Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue between college and law school. I was intrigued, but I didn’t really understand the book. What could it mean to claim that all reasoning occurred within a particular tradition? Midway through my first year at Yale Law, during a coffee chat with the theologian Stanley Hauerwas, I mentioned my brush with MacIntyre’s thought. Hauerwas urged me not to stop with After Virtue, but to read the rest of MacIntyre’s “Virtue Trilogy,” because the three books formed a unified whole.
I took Hauerwas’s advice and read Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry in the years that followed. I began to comprehend MacIntyre’s core insight: that not merely the answers provided by a particular paradigm, but the kinds of questions posed, reflect “a specific past that is present to some degree in my present. I find myself part of a history and that is generally to say, whether I like it or not, whether I recognize it or not, one of the bearers of a tradition.” Though the word “worldview” seems to connote something fixed and static, rather than the living thing that is a “tradition,” the basic idea is clearly the same.
Colson plainly understood this, whether or not he ever read MacIntyre. “Our choices are shaped by what we believe is real and true, right and wrong, good and beautiful,” he wrote. “Our choices are shaped by our worldview”—that is, our tradition. And it is through the lens of one’s tradition that any “common good” is seen as good, or any exercise of power is seen as authoritative. Without that foundation, no project of cultural change can get off the ground.
Where does this leave Christians of the negative world? Next to a remark by Hunter regarding “interesting variations between intellectuals and populists,” Colson put an exclamation point, and declared: “Intellectuals can be populist.” That gnomic observation is Colson’s final note in the book.
Perhaps such a claim is the only way to hold together the imperative “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God . . . with all thy mind” (Matt. 22:37) with the unequivocal declaration that “Ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). Talk of the distinctive gifts of the Spirit, in all their diversity and pluriformity, must somehow hang together with the radically leveling claim that all humans bear the imago Dei. Even as Hunter is right about the mechanism of social change, Colson is right that worldview—or tradition—comes first: The circumstances establishing who counts as “elite” will always be socially contingent, but the principles that ought to guide any aspiring Christian “elites” are not.
And maybe, in the end, elite status is not worth so much after all. If the art world is any harbinger, a “post-Christian” society can, in fact, forget itself so thoroughly as to rule its own metaphysical foundations out of bounds. Under such conditions, “faithful presence” becomes impossible. A line must be drawn.
In a negative world, the price of truly faithful presence may be distance—not disengagement, to be sure, but distance. But this is no counsel of despair. As Colson knew, hopes once thought dead are sometimes born again.
