The Culture War. The mere sight of those words on a page arouses a variety of knee-jerk reactions within all of us. Whatever your perspective, there can be little question that one result of this "war" has been a fundamental transformation in how America views people of faith.

No longer the guardians of the sacred, we have degenerated into a special interest—just another voice in the cacophony of pluralistic democracy. This bill will appease environmentalists, but could anger the Christian Right. The Christian Coalition is seeking to defeat the proposal, but the National Council of Churches is putting out a statement of support. We have adopted an us-against-them mentality and responded by creating, in essence, a culture within a culture.

We view public schools and their leaders with distrust and contempt, so we pull out of public education. We despise the state of popular culture, so we roundly condemn it and make up our own. We hate the "Northeastern elite" so we deride and avoid their institutions. In so doing, we marginalize ourselves to such an extent that even the most faithful life is often lived completely out of sight of those we most wish to affect. We have allowed ourselves to become a caricature.

The damage to Christendom is vast, but not irreparable. Change can and must come. However, I submit that change can come, not from looking forward to wholly new strategies and methods, but instead by looking to the past—by following, in part, the example of the Christian generation that came before us.

On Monday evening, November 9, 1998, one of the most remarkable women I have ever known died. She was my grandmother, Ruth B. French. She lived most of her life in two small towns that you have never heard of—Lexington, Tennessee, and Byhalia, Mississippi. She was a mother, a grandmother, and a teacher. Born in 1917, she survived the Great Depression, World War II, the premature death of her husband, and the difficult, painful turmoil of the Civil Rights movement in the Deep South. She helped farm cotton, taught Keats and Longfellow in a one-room schoolhouse, and, always, lived a life of simple, quiet faith. At every turn, she broke down barriers. A faithful member of the Church of Christ, she married a Methodist at a time when such unions were unheard of. At all times, she treated her African-American neighbors as friends and equals. She gave her children an unshakeable foundation of faith. Her grandchildren, including me, all learned of love, humor, and the beauty of words and poetry while sitting on her knee.

More than all that, she knew and lived a truth that we seem to have lost. She did not fight a "Culture War" as we know it. There was no "new" struggle against "new" evil. She saw, instead, the same struggle that has captivated the world since Adam drew his first breath. We have always been able to choose whether to be people of the light or people of the darkness. In Ruth French's mind, that choice had very little to do with tax policy, the lottery, or Walt Disney. It had everything to do with love, fidelity, and faith. It had nothing to do with the ability to shape and form words to fit the purpose of the moment, or with the ability to lobby and advocate legislation or judicial action. It had everything to do with peeling back ignorance and bringing knowledge. The questions were large, not small: Faith or disbelief? Truth or lies? Knowledge or ignorance? Law or license?

The days of light, inasmuch as they have ever existed, have not been characterized by proper social policy or the presence or absence of judicial activism, but instead by an abundance of faithful lives, simply lived.

Of course, Ruth French's Christian generation was hardly perfect. Some of her fellow Christians actively worked to perpetuate a litany of injustices—from Jim Crow to a kind of mind-numbing fundamentalism that was all too often characteristic of the religious rural South. However, these criticisms—cited with mantra-like regularity by many Baby Boomers—do not mitigate or diminish her generation's outstanding, currently relevant quality. That quality was cultural—not political—engagement. The older Christian generation was a part of society in every way. In many ways, they were the culture. Except for some isolated fundamentalist sects, Christians shaped America from the inside out. Entertainment, education, and even politics were fundamentally different because those who created and those who taught were different. Now, having largely abandoned those fields, Christians, from our enclaves of suburban churches, family bookstores, and Christian schools, seek change from the outside in, as activists rather than participants. Rather than being salt or leaven, we try to be the baker himself, bending and kneading the dough of society until it forms a shape we can accept. We don't educate. We try to bend other educators to our will. We don't entertain. We try to stop others from entertaining.

In short, we have ceded our virtues to our purported foes. We are the angry ones. They are the compassionate ones. We are the tyrants. They are the democrats. It was not always this way, and we only have to look a short distance back to see when it was not. Ruth French was not a political activist. Instead, she engaged in the infinitely more challenging, infinitely more consuming struggle to live a life defined by who she was rather than how she voted or even what she said. In America, 1999, night presses around us. The Ruth Frenches of the world bid us farewell. Who will stand in their place?

David French (daf@gdm.com) is an attorney and writer in Lexington, Kentucky. His first novel, South Pacific Journal, will be published later this year by Broadman & Holman.

Originally published in re:generation quarterly, January 1, 1999.

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