Culture

One of our goals for Cumberland Books is to help our readers find answers to two very important questions: how did we get into this mess? and, how do we get out of this mess? We think that the second question is the more important one, because as long as you agree with us that we are in a mess, it is better to spend your time and effort on getting out than on studying the details of how we got here.

Still, there are good reasons to learn a few things about how we got here. Such knowledge can make us more discerning about possible remedies, it can identify for us the deep and subtle influences that we need to resist, and it can strengthen and encourage us to continue down a difficult path by reminding us that it is the right path.

We think that the explanation for why we got into the current mess could probably be contained in a small, straightforward book, but that book hasn’t been written yet. In the meantime we point our friends to a fairly small collection of books, each of which contains important pieces of the puzzle.

• Neil Postman. His three books on culture books qualify Neil Postman as one of the most perceptive social observers to grace modern times.
• Jacques Ellul. A French intellectual and theologian who looked deeply into modern society's problems and explained them from a Christian perspective.
• Ideas Have Consequences. Richard Weaver had a deep understanding of the superiority of agrarian over industrial culture. This book is a devastating critique of the latter.
• All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes sets out to answer the following questions: What is popular culture? Where did it come from? What forces shape it into what it is? How does it influence Americans in general and Christians in particular? The answers are disturbing.
• Henry and the Great Society. This unpretentious little book tells how one man, unwittingly and with the best of intentions, exchanged self-sufficiency and contentment for wage slavery and modern conveniences, in seach of what he thought would be a better life for his family. The results reflect in miniature the grand tragedy of modern industrial society.
• Better Off. City-bred Eric Brende was curious to know exactly how much technology was required to live a good life, so he and his new wife spent eighteen months living in a plain community. The story he tells is engaging and insightful.

• Modern Fascism. What most of us consider to have been an aberrant and short-lived social movement is in fact a vital and ongoing worldview, and one which poses a major threat to Christianity. You cannot understand the history of the twentieth century without understanding the sources and trajectories of fascist thinking.
• Postmodern Times examines how certain ideas have gripped the nation’s universities, which are busily turning out lawyers, judges, writers, journalists, and teachers who embrace and promote the notion that truth, meaning, and individual identity simply do not exist.
• Heiland. In 2020 A.D., America is divided into two societies: the Insiders and the Freemen. One is founded on the worship of death—the other on a new obedience to God. Can they continue to live side by side in the same country?
  

• Summer For the Gods tells the story of the Scopes Monkey Trial, a small, well-documented historical event where three cultural tensions converged—belief in a created order vs. scientific materialism; fundamentalism vs. modernism; activist government vs. individual liberty.
• The Basic History of the United States tells the story of our country in a straightforward manner, not burdened either by statist propaganda or by starry-eyed idealism about the founders.
• Basic American Government is a study of government as laid out in the United States Constitution, rather than as it exists today.
• The Underground History of American Education asks a simple question: what is the purpose of American education? According to this book, modern American education is a curse rather than a blessing, a tool developed by 19th-century industrialists for taking a self-sufficient agrarian population and turning it into a pliant workforce that would show up on time, follow instructions without question, and be grateful for the paycheck they now needed in order to survive.

• How Should We Then Live? is a comprehensive examination of the condition and direction of Western civilization, from ancient Roman times to the Middle Ages, through the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, up to our present scientific Atomic Age.
• State of the Arts examines a question that surely very few people are asking, namely, What role should the fine arts play in the Christian life?
• Modern Art and the Death of a Culture offers a Christian perspective on the cultural turmoil of the radical Sixties and its impact on today’s world, especially as reflected in the art of the time.