When it comes to reaching our community with the gospel, it can be very easy to fall into a few related traps concerning what people think and, therefore, how to most helpfully speak to them. One trap is that of assuming our community will necessarily think the same way as broader trends in our nation suggest while another is assuming that we have necessarily understood the broader trends in our nation in the first place.

What often links these two mistakes is our having read the latest book – or a few of the latest books – that claim to unlock the reality of how the next generation thinks, how society has changed, why the world feels the way it does to us. Some of those books may well land on some legitimate things, but they are very rarely the unifying theory of everything (so far as understanding society and culture are concerned) that we often seem to think they are. Let me explain what I mean.

If you have been around Christian circles any length of time, certain authors will frequently be cited when it comes to knowing our times. Some are Christian – like Carl Trueman – while others, such as Jonathan Heidt or Tom Holland, are not. Some of them may have helpful insights, some of them we might think are wider of the mark. But Christians frequently pick up on them because they speak into an issue with which we are particularly concerned: why is our culture the way it is and how, in light of that, do we live as Christians in such a society and engage others most effectively with the gospel? These are genuine questions Christian people want to rightly think through. And we are presented with authors who claim to have an insight into them, from both Christian and non-Christian perspectives and so we can quickly latch on.

But when you zone into your own community, regardless of how insightful these authors may or may not be, you suddenly discover people often don’t think in the terms outlined. Sometimes – like in the community immediately around my church – it is because the culture isn’t part of the majority culture. Our community is predominantly South Asian Muslim and so not only do most in the streets surrounding our church not share the basic Judeo-Christian values our country historically held, they don’t operate in the ways the majority secularist British culture does today either. They have neither come from the same root nor followed the same trajectory. Clearly such people are not going to fit the prescribed mould. But the White working-classes in our broader community are often not thinking in the terms described either. They don’t really think in terms of sociological labels and do not seem consumed with the concerns that we are often told most people in our culture are driven by. That isn’t to say the analysis is always totally wrong, just to say that it doesn’t always apply. Insisting “British culture” and “modern society” think A, B or C is always fraught with more nuance and difficulty than we often credit.

Then there is the tendency to totalise the analysis we’ve read or to accept competing analyses and not synthesise them very cogently. We hear people at one and the same time insisting we are being driven by both “cultural marxism” and “hyper-individualism” when those two things are directly at odds with one another (leaving aside the problematic origins of the term cultural marxism and assuming most people using it tend to mean something like Marxist cultural analysis). There can be a jumping onto the analysis of one commentator – particularly those who are not believers – because they perhaps put their finger on something, without giving due weight to the fact that they haven’t analysed things carefully enough (from the Christian point of view) to follow their apparently clear insight to its logical Christian conclusion. Again, that isn’t to say everything must be wrong, but we have to be a little wary of insisting the analysis of an Atheist that we think supports our position, but hasn’t led to them denouncing their Atheism, suggests we’re either reading them wrongly or their analysis isn’t as supportive as we might think it is.

But again, that totalising of apparently supportive analysis often comes a cropper when we reckon with the fact that most people in our communities haven’t read the books and aren’t thinking in the terms presented. We can so zone in on these analyses and assume everyone thinks this way that we approach and engage them as though they necessarily must think these things without actually finding out if they do at all. I suspect we would find more than a few people, in almost any community in the UK (even those predominantly White, Middle Class, majority culture ones), are not thinking in terms of hyper-individualism, cultural marxism or Judeo-Christian heritage. Many simply haven’t analysed these things in any great detail at all and, instead of worrying about why our society is the way it is, are more concerned with day to day issues of organising their families and doing their jobs. Many people think more in terms of individual issues in front of them – does this seem right to me at this moment – than they in terms of unified theories and high level principles. We can sometimes read our Christian approach to parsing everything by scripture and assume everyone is doing something similar when the reality is, they aren’t.

Theologically, we may look at passages like 2 Timothy 3:1-5; Romans 1:18-32; Ephesians 4:17-19. But if these verses tell us anything, it isn’t that 21st century British society is particularly heinous nor that we have departed from Biblical ideals in especially awful ways. Rather, they tell us this is how every society will be until the parousia. They are insightful inasmuch as they tell us the human condition, the reality of what life will be like anywhere and everywhere, in cycles where there are always things that are worse and things that are better. But they don’t really give us any great insight into 21st Century British society in particular beyond the fact that those who are not in Christ will quite understandably not be conformed to Christ. But that is as true in 21st Century Islamic Pakistan, 21st Century Hindu India and 21st Century Buddhist Myanmar as it is in post-Christian Europe. All these may all express the realities of 2 Timothy 3:1-5, Romans 1:18-32 and Ephesians 4:17-19 in their own cultural ways – in some areas conforming more closely to Biblical ideals than others – but these verses apply equally to them as they do to us. And as we look at different cultures across the world, they are certainly not all marked by the hyper-individualism of the liberal West and do not necessarily conform to Western norms if and when they leave home and settle in post-Christian Europe.

My point here is a simple one. We need to be a little careful about reading the latest book offering cultural analysis and reading everything through its lenses. We can easily become very Western-centric as we think about these things. Even where we are purposefully thinking exclusively in terms of Western culture, or British society in particular, we can be in danger of assuming all cultures are shaped and formed by these things when our community may be drawn from non-British backgrounds or simply not think in these terms. Not to put too fine a point on it, the social analysis of the council estate has often differed from that of the university educated and it doesn’t take too much probing to see how the cultural assumptions are markedly different too. As much as that is true across the class divide, it is all the more true when it comes to those who are minority ethnic and/or come from – and operate within – non-British cultures.

If we really want to understand how to reach our area, function as believers and engage in society, we need to actually understand the communities that we live in. Some of them may think in the terms outlined (at least in part) by the cultural analyses in these various books. But many of them won’t. Many won’t have countenanced these things nor fit the shape of what is described for a whole host of reasons. Which means there really are no shortcuts. Much as it would be helpful to have a book that tells us, ‘this is how people think and this is how you engage them’, the only real solution is to get to know people and engage them as you find them. I suspect we will find many of the generations of these cultural analyses do not help us all that much in the end. Rather than making assumptions about the way people operate and things they think, we are better placed simply becoming familiar with our communities and hearing straight from the horses mouth. Then we can actually engage people based on what they really think rather than making assumptions that are liable to be wide of the mark.