Importance of Understanding Culture

A Christianity that is indifferent to its cultural environment is captive to its culture. A faith that is not aware of its culture reinforces the cultural definitions which so easily dupe the believers who live in it. Nowhere is this so evident as in the ready Christian acceptance of the cultural ideology that religion is essentially a private matter of spiritual experience, that religion is a matter of private choice rather than a universal obligation. Against that assumption, we must insist that Christian faith is intensely personal but never private. The Christian gospel is an emphatically public proposal about the nature of the world and our place in it. It is a public way of life obliged to the truth. --adapted thoughts from Richard John Neuhaus