Is the Bible, or Your Perception of the Bible, Shaping You?

We have to guard against being bent by cultural winds.

If someone asked what you were doing as you surfed the web, you probably wouldn't say, "Oh, I'm being discipled." You probably wouldn't say you were "receiving moral instruction" while you watched last week's primetime lineup. And it's highly unlikely you'd say you were heading to a political rally to learn how to navigate the moral questions facing humanity.

Yet, for many of us, that's exactly what happens each time we ingest pop culture, media, and the latest celebrity goings-on.

It seems as though plenty of Americans receive their moral compass not from a set of established beliefs or philosophy, or even majority rule. It seems as though the average American's moral compass is tied to the cultural winds—as if pop culture, politics, or celebrities were the ultimate moral arbiter.

Unfortunately, Christians aren't immune to this phenomenon. In churches throughout the country, you'll find average believers, church leaders, and pastors whose morals and values are formed by the external culture rather than their Bible. Christians have too often become a people whose discipleship depends more on the political Right than on righteousness, more on the gospel of social causes than on social causes driven by the gospel, and more on People than Proverbs.

If you're an average American Christian, you know how easy it is to let your values be formed by culture rather than your faith. So how does a believer escape that trap—and how can you avoid it in the future?

Morality … or Conviction?

There are at least two ways Christians can let popular culture, instead of Scripture, disciple them. The more obvious way is to throw out the exhortations of the gospel, the calling of God's kingdom, in favor of a culturally acceptable version of faith. But there can also be a flipside. Christians can also equate their learned-from-culture convictions with the Christian gospel, when they are no such thing.

This happens all the time. The most obvious example is in our political system. How many times recently have you heard politicians from both parties claim to be better representing God than the other party? There's a "Christian health care plan," a "Christian budget," a "Christian foreign policy," and a "Christian response" to everything. But Christians in both parties can sometimes forget a very simple fact: no political allegiance has a monopoly on the Bible.

This kind of attitude can extend to other cultural convictions as well. Christians immersed in a particular culture can assume that their cultural interpretation of Scripture is "what the Bible says." But sometimes that's not the case—Christians around the world can bring very different experiences and perspectives to a passage of Scripture. For instance, some Christians (particularly in the United States) believe that people of faith ought not to drink alcohol. Yet in much of the world, it's not only acceptable for Christians to imbibe, it's not strange to see alcoholic beverages served at a church function. Such convictions shouldn't be confused with the teachings of Scripture, which clearly contains examples of saints imbibing along with vehement encouragement to avoid drunkenness and causing another believer to sin.

It's important for Christians of all persuasions to remember that the Bible gives us a wide range of ways to respond to many things. That's a not a relativistic stance—there are many "non-negotiable" aspects of the Christian faith. But there are many more areas where Christians can, in good conscience, disagree. It's an important part in the life of any Christian to determine whether or not their opinion is guided more by Scripture or by culture. It's not necessarily bad for a conviction to come out of a cultural understanding—but it's important to recognize that those convictions are not the same as scriptural values.

In the World … and of the World?

If some Christians believe their cultural convictions are scriptural, many other Christians ignore Scripture in favor of more palatable cultural values. That stance is usually more obvious than the more subtle shading between conviction and command.

Examples abound in American Christianity. Perhaps the most subtle (and prevalent) is the difficulty for many people (and many Christians) to believe in the miracles recorded in Scripture, especially the Resurrection. Our culture doesn't value things it can't understand or that can't be explained by observable experimentation. Scriptural values such as healing, miracles, and a God who rose from the dead become impossible to believe for many people in today's world.

Or consider the recent debates over hell. There are several orthodox positions on hell Christians can take, but so many of the debates on hell are based on the idea of "I just can't imagine a loving God sending people to hell" rather than on a rigorous analysis of Scripture. Faithful followers of Christ can disagree on what Scripture says about an eternal place of punishment, but an argument that depends on the whims of a culture will fall apart immediately.

Of course, the most glaring example in modern culture is sexual ethics. A new study from the National Association of Evangelicals suggests that 80 percent of unmarried evangelical Christians aged 18-29 have had sex, over half of that number in the last year. Add to this the debates about same-sex activity, divorce, cohabitation, and contraception, and it's clear American Christians are confused about sexual ethics. It seems more and more that Christians are getting their sexual values from popular culture rather than the Bible.

Though culture is certainly not the only influencer, it's obviously affecting the increasingly lax attitudes toward chastity, fidelity, and the holiness of sex within a Christian, sacramental marriage between a man and a woman. Christians watching TV or movies see example after example of sexual relationships that aren't God's intended plan. Without an instilled biblical sexual ethic, it's all too easy to ingest the sexual values seen on screen rather than the ones in Scripture.

These kinds of cultural values can become extremely difficult to resist because they seem so normal. From an objective, cultural sense, it's a weird thing to not have sex before you get married, or to regard marriage as a sacramental commitment long after the infatuation stage has worn off. But those are things Scripture calls Christians to.

So how do you tell if your morals are based on the Bible or pop culture? Well, the best way is to try. And then to surround yourself by a Christian community that tries. Whenever you're making a decision for your own life or are trying to discern if you agree with another decision, challenge your conclusion—is it based on Scriptural values, or is it just something you learned from culture or celebrity endorsement? Is your stance a personal conviction that doesn't need to be shared by every Christian, or is it a clearly biblical stance of righteousness? If you're genuinely not sure, ask someone you trust to challenge you on it. Then, together, you'll start to discern what a biblical morality really looks like.

You'll mess it up—there will be times when you'll look back and realize you've aimed too low, accepting cultural values in place of biblical morals. Or you'll realize you held someone to a standard of your personal convictions, not a standard advocated by Scripture. But as with every part of the Christian life, the key is to ask for forgiveness—from God, from anyone you've hurt, from yourself—and to keep going. Over time, the freeing morality of Scripture will embed itself within you and you'll find yourself pursuing holiness with all your heart.

Ryan Hamm is a writer in Orlando, FL, where he lives with his wife, spends as much time at Disney World as you would expect, and is at work on his first book. You can find him on Twitter @RyanECHamm.

Related Bible Studies

Free Newsletters

More Newsletters

Follow us