Mark Sayers and Francis Schaeffer are both insightful and articulate cultural commentators. They both draw conclusions from their research and observations and show how they apply to worldviews. This essay will serve to show how both of these men engaged with their culture, and will conclude with general principles we can learn and apply in our own engagement with culture today.
Mark Sayers
In the book, The Road Trip That Changed The World, Mark Sayers gives a historic summary of how the concept of the road was born. He insightfully traces the development with certain cultural features, and shows how the culture of the road had an influence on culture more generally.
Sayers highlights certain aspects of the culture of the road, which we can affirm are still evident in our culture today. “It was Kerouac’s motif of the road that provided the spark that would ignite the fire of cultural change.” It all begins with the concept of rights eclipsing duties, which he calls juvenilization. People go on the road as an escape. The destination is neutral, because life has become more about the journey. This is “one of the great values that our contemporary culture holds dear – that life is a journey.”
He goes on to show that this way of thinking was not always the case. “The first youth generation, the baby boomers, have struggled with the concept of growing up and thus have simply spawned more generations like themselves.” We’ve seen a “shift from devotion to entertainment, from discipleship to self-actualization.” “After two thousand years as the driving force in the Western heart, soul, and mind, the Church has been replaced by a new power, secularism.” Not only was the Church replaced by a new power, but we can see influences within the church from secularism. The American Church is no longer “based around devotion and worship, but rather entertainment.”
What often goes unnoticed is that this entertainment can come in the form of content-neutral spirituality. When the road becomes the lens through which we see scripture, we end up with a type or moral therapeutic deism. “The uncommitted masses… who want to believe that there is a deeper magic in the world, a benevolent deity and an afterlife, and yet who revel in the hedonistic freedom that a secular worldview brings.”
This chosen dichotomy is “not an intellectual decision; it is a habit of the heart which [is] acquired through osmosis.” Because religion has not remained unaffected, it “has thus forfeited its role as the interpreter of social order and has become instead a matter of personal preference and choice, something to be adopted and/or discarded privately.” “The person of the road, whether believer or unbeliever, lives the whole of or at least a majority of their everyday life as a practical atheist.”
Sayers comments on this tension, in that “humans are contradictory creatures: we like to be logical, but our actions, wants, and desires are a far more confusing and inconsistent affair.” We have a “desire for a life of meaning and yet a desire for individual autonomy.” This individual “sense of autonomy and freedom rules over social cohesion.”
How do we deal examine was had happened, and is happening, in light of the Bible? Jesus tells the Sadducees, who were attempting to “fuse hip Greek thought with Judaism,” that they were in error (Matt 22:29. We see Biblical examples, such as Abraham and Jesus, who go on the road for the sake of the kingdom, and Sayers helps us to reconcile this with what has been argued above against the road. Abraham “offers us a road of faith, in contrast to our culture’s road of self.” “We find Jesus living out His ministry on the road…this journey has purpose and a destination.” These are three key concepts; in contrast to culture, for a purpose, and with a destination.
As believers called to evangelize a culture of the road, Sayers offers that in order “to find our way out of the impasse of the culture of the road, we must again return to our divinely given vocation in the world.” We must remember that “God’s intention was never to aid us in our escape of this planet but rather to transform life here.” He also insightfully comments that “the culture of the road offers us pleasures and experiences, but they are disconnected, and ultimately they will leave us wanting.” In light of this, we must compassionately engage our world for the sake of Christ.
Francis Schaeffer
Francis Schaeffer deals with similar issues in his book, The God Who Is There. He addresses the anit-intellectualism plaguing our culture, and agrees with Sayers on spirituality and how it “becomes exactly opposite to Christian spirituality.”
Some of his statements even seem to reference the road. In referencing existentialism, he says that “it does not really matter in which direction you act as long as you act.” He also applies the road philosophy to the canvases in art, in that when ultimate meaning is lost, personal meaning can be created on an individual basis, just as artist present their meaningless paintings.
Schaeffer highlights the concept of truth, and explains that “the present chasm between the generations has been brought about almost entirely by a change in the concept of truth.” Without a notion of antithesis, people have to compartmentalize everything. Schaeffer labels this compartmentalization as upper and lower stories of truth. In the upper story, we have subject, meaningless, personal preferences, and in the lower story we have facts and science. What we see is that when religion became personalized, it left the lower story of truth where it once was, and went into the upper story where meaning is lost. This is larger due to what Sayers had explained in the concept of the road.
However, he does echo Sayers in that the influences from an upper story – lower story distinction are not always made by a conscious decision by each individual. Rather, it is usually happens unconsciously through osmosis. “The tragedy is not only that these talented men have reached the point of despair, but that so many… really do not understand. They are influenced by the concepts, and yet they have never analyzed what is all meant.”
He alludes to the same tension which Sayers has, which causes the division of “the unity of himself, because rationality is a part of every man.” As humans who have been created in the image of God, we share certain communicable attributes with him, one of those being rationality. He encourages his readers to press into this tension and to use it for the sake of evangelizing. “You are facing a man in tension; and it is this tension which works on your behalf as you speak to him.”
Schaeffer emphasizes that “Christians should stop laughing and take such men seriously…These men are dying while they live; yet where is our compassion for them?” We have the good news that we are calling them to “a living orthodoxy which is concerned with the whole man, including the rational and the intellectual, in his relationship to God.” This is not something that their current worldview can provide. We want to erase the dividing line between the upper and lower story, whereas their current worldview will only reinforce it and therefore reinforce the tension. “Christianity as a system has the [only] answers to the basic needs of modern man.”
Conclusion
When looking at our current task of engaging with our culture, we can apply many principles from both Sayer’s and Schaeffer’s insight.
First of all, we must be unwilling to accept a two-story version of truth in our own lives. We must seek to erase this distinction and fight to present Biblical teachings as absolutely and comprehensively true. Only then will be gain credibility to be heard by those embracing a compartmentalized version of truth.
We must then fight against a culture of the road, by showing that it does in fact leave people wanting. We have something better to call them to, and we should be ready and will to offer it. We should also be willing to do what Schaeffer has called preevagnelizing, when necessary. If we want to present the gospel to someone who will only understand it as an upper story preference, we must first work to show them that this dividing line should not exist.
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