The evangelical cultural engagement world seems not to have developed the ability to look at mainstream elite culture in a critically detached way. This feeds into an inability to create insightful analysis or compelling critiques of that culture, which in my view is related to the persistent inability of evangelicals to form people who end up in the seniormost positions in the key domains of society. It’s rare in my experience to come across an evangelical saying something that helps me better understand or make sense of our world, much less compelling ideas for change.

Some people like to describe evangelical culture – say megachurch worship music – as cringe.

But there’s a different kind of cringe out there, one that is a contributing factor in why cultural engagement evangelicals, the group best positioned to produce elites, have underperformed in creating those high-level people.

The term “cultural cringe” was coined to describe the view of Australians about their own culture. In cultural cringe, people at the imperial periphery see their own culture as inferior to that of the cultural center. So Australian culture is viewed, by Australians themselves, as inferior to English or London culture.

The term cultural cringe was coined in a 1950 essay by A. A. Phillips, who wrote:

Above our writers—and other artists—looms the intimidating mass of Anglo-Saxon cul­ture. Such a situation almost inevitably produces the charac­teristic Australian Cultural Cringe…The Cringe mainly appears in an inability to escape needless comparisons. The Australian reader, more or less consciously, hedges and hesitates, asking himself ‘Yes, but what would a cul­tivated Englishman think of this?’ No writer can communicate confidently to a reader with the ‘Yes, but’ habit; and this parti­cular demand is curiously crippling to critical judgment.

…

A second effect of the Cringe has been the estrangement of the Australian Intellectual. Australian life, let us agree, has an at­mosphere of often dismaying crudity. I do not know if our cul­tural crust is proportionately any thinner than that of other Anglo-Saxon communities; but to the intellectual it seems thinner because, in a small community, there is not enough of it to pro­vide for the individual a protective insulation. Hence, even more than most intellectuals, he feels a sense of exposure. This is made much worse by the intrusion of that deadly habit of Eng­lish comparisons. There is a certain type of Australian intel­lectual who is forever sidling up to the cultivated Englishman, insinuating: ‘I, of course, am not like these other crude Austra­lians; I understand how you must feel about them; I should be spiritually more at home in Oxford or Bloomsbury.’

It is not the critical attitude of the intellectual that is harm­ful; that could be a healthy, even creative, influence, if the criti­cism were felt to come from within, if the critic had a sense of identification with his subject, if his irritation came from a sense of shared shame rather than a disdainful separation. It is his refusal to participate, the arch of his indifferent eye-brows, which exerts the chilling and stultifying influence.

Cultural cringe theory became a key influence on post-colonial studies.

The general idea is applicable in a lot of domains. Domestically in the US, people in tertiary locations feel culturally inferior to coastal cities like New York. So these places tend to not produce cultural innovations or a lot of original thinking, but rather look to the metropole for their cues.

When I was primarily focused on writing about cities, I was always frustrated that Midwest cities had so few original ideas for urban development, but instead preferred to simply copy what other, cooler places were doing. I saw so much opportunity in this region, but little willingness to seize it. When the occasional place did find a leader who was able to chart its own path – such as Carmel, Indiana, the city where I live – the results could be extraordinary and influential at the national level.

Cultural engagement Christianity also suffers from a kind of cultural cringe. They tend to view evangelical culture as inferior to mainstream elite culture, particularly in its urban variety, and see that as the standard.

Evangelicals are a socially subaltern group with a culture that is often viewed as cringe in the ordinary sense of the word. It’s not surprising that the intellectual and artistic people who emerge from this culture often develop a sense of alienation from it, and want to distance themselves from it socially in favor of fitting in with their new milieu – or the milieu they aspire to join – which they view as superior.

I can directly relate to this. I grew up in rural Southern Indiana. I was raised in a hardcore, apocalyptic (end times focused) pentecostal church. After graduating from college I moved to Chicago to work as a consultant, and have spent much of my adult life living in big cities. I fell in love with cities and urban life and urban culture. As someone once told me, “Aaron, you love cities like only someone from a town of 29 people can.” I share the intellectual, cultural, and lifestyle preferences of urban America.

Combine that with the fact that I didn’t attend church during the first part of my adulthood, and I am someone who feels very alienated from evangelicalism.

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