The universal category that encompasses us all (namely, image-bearers of God) ultimately trumps particular identities and gives us the right to claim some level of first-hand knowledge and experience of other peoples’ stories.

Cultural appropriation—the art of appropriating aspects (songs, stories, apparel, traditions, rituals, etc.) of some (minority) culture by an entity that doesn’t inhabit that culture—seems to have secured its rank among the cardinal vices of our age. Those found guilty of said vice in fairly recent times include university choirs, various sports teams, and select individuals such as Jessica Krug and Rachel Dolezal (though Dolezal, it should be noted, succeeded to some extent in exonerating herself by pitting the secular virtue of “self-identification” against the secular vice of cultural appropriation).

I confess that most present-day vices and virtues fail to impress me, largely because they strike me as watered-down (if not parasitic) versions of vices/virtues with more substantial historical-moral roots and are almost invariably being touted in an obvious effort to secure the higher moral ground (read: “advantage”) in some largely inconsequential power play. That said, cultural appropriation has been on my mind of late, not so much because of any recent news story, but because of a conversation I had last week with a high school student who suffered through an 8^th grade Bible class with me as her teacher several years ago. As we talked, my high school friend somewhat blithely accused a performing arts teacher at her current school (not my own) of “cultural appropriation” for requiring white students to perform roles in a play depicting black American slaves, presumably with the ultimate goal of expanding their acting abilities and inculcating in them the virtuous counterpart to cultural appropriation (namely, cultural appreciation).

The verdict that I reached in my own moral musings this week is that cultural appropriation is really standard Christian fare. One might even call it critical to a proper understanding of the Christian gospel and experience of the Christian life. Relative to Christian living, it might be noted that Christians have dabbled (if not fully indulged) in the “vice” of cultural appropriation in, for example, their historic practice of praying, reciting, and singing Israel’s Psalms in order to give expression to their own experiences in life. A significant number of those Psalms relate Israel’s experiences of slavery in Egypt and/or captivity in Babylon. Christians for centuries have, without any obvious moral misgivings, prayed and recited those Psalms to give voice to their own anguish and faith in the midst of challenging national, familial, and personal circumstances.

Protestant traditions are specifically blameworthy in this regard insofar as they made it their custom to sing the Psalms as an aspect of corporate worship from an early date. Carl Trueman drew attention to this fact several years ago, pointing out that denominations like Scotland’s Free Church, who might on the surface seem particularly culpable of cultural appropriation for encouraging rousing renditions of, say, Psalm 105 or Psalm 137 in congregational worship, might be more culpable of “pastoral kindness” than anything else. The gradual demise of Psalm-singing in a large number of Protestant traditions over the years may have (unwittingly) served to align those traditions more closely to present-day moral positions on the “vice” of cultural appropriation. It has almost certainly, wittingly or not, rendered those same traditions less capable of meaningfully (i.e., emotively) articulating their struggles and triumphs in life. In summary, whatever one thinks about the emotive well-being of present-day Protestant denominations, the mere existence of the Psalter in the canon of Scripture would seem to suggest that God himself not only permits but intends us to appropriate another culture’s stories and songs (even, or perhaps especially, those that invoke a history of slavery and oppression) to give expression to our contemporary faith and feelings in the face of life’s varied difficulties.

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