Faith and Culture – Christopher Dawson

The vital problem of Christian education is a sociological one; how to make students culturally  conscious of their religion; otherwise they will be divided personalities – with a Christian faith and a pagan culture which contradict one another continually. We have to ask ourselves are we Christians who happen to live in England or America or are we English or Americans who happened to attend a church on Sundays? There is no doubt which is the New Testament view; there the Christians are one people in the full sociological sense, but scattered among different cities and peoples. But today we mostly take the opposite view so that our national cultures are the only culture we have and our religion has to exist on a sectarian subculture. Thus the sociological problem of Christian culture is also a psychological problem of integration and spiritual help. This is the key issue … We must make an effort to achieve an open Christian culture which is sufficiently conscious of the value of its own tradition to be able to meet secularists culture on an equal footing.
Page 152.  see Christopher Dawson, “The Enlightenment and Technology,” Communio XXII, no. 4 (Winter 1995) : 726.