The Top-Down Fallacy

Closely related to the Culture War Fallacy of culture change, the Top-Down Fallacy views political power as the primary driver of culture change. But, true and lasting culture change requires so much more. Instead of Creating the Good Life, and Creating for Change, So Others Will Join, the Top-Down Fallacy relies on raw, unadulterated power. Sometimes it works. But usually not for long.

“We Just Need to Elect the Right People Into Office”

“Conservative evangelicals found that they could win elections, but not change the culture. They had captured a party, but failed to reclaim a nation.” – Daniel K. Williams

If warfare is one’s mode of cultural engagement, then politics is the weapon of choice. Over time, as evangelicals have gained ground politically, insomuch as electing “the right people into office” can be considered gaining ground, then the religious right has doubled down on politics being the dominant tool of cultural change. Unfortunately, this has been to the deprivation of all other, more truly transformational modes of cultural engagement. But when all you have is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail. (Or, if all you have is a hatchet, as you will read in the case study of Prohibition below…)

This teaching comes straight from the pulpit of nearly every conservative evangelical church in America, particularly in the South. “It is not an exaggeration to say that the dominant public witness of the Christian churches in America since the early 1980s has been a political witness.” [18]

The logic of the top-down fallacy is simple: if Christians can just vote the “right people into office”, pass the right laws, and then uphold those laws, then cultural change will happen. James Dobson of Focus on the Family puts it bluntly, “The side that wins gains the right to teach what it believes to its children. And if you can do that, you write the curricula, you tell them what to believe and you model what you want them to understand and in one generation, you change the whole culture.” [19]

Christian politicians—and politicians catering to Christian voters—have done nothing to dispel this notion. Tom Delay, an outspoken Christian politician in the early 2000’s deftly maneuvered the mounting Christian frustration with moral deterioration across the land into a values-based charge to vote for his party. “It’s time to put our politics to work to renew our culture, to defeat the mounting effort to expel all religious belief from public life.” [20] “What Congress can accomplish with a Republican President will be incredible. It will be nothing less than a rediscovery of the values that made America a great nation and that have made Americans a good people.” [21]

The Shortsightedness of Graspings for Political Power

But as UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner in The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence argues, any power gained by force is finite and fleeting, but it is only when we do the long, hard work of creating for change and participating in the public square of ideas then we effect truly lasting cultural change. After nearly twenty years of research ranging from companies like Google and Pixar to the infamous San Quentin State Prison, he discovered “the surprising and lasting influence of soft power (culture, ideas, art, and institutions) as compared to hard power (military might, invasion, and economic sanctions).” [22]

The top-down fallacy is not unique to conservatives. The more moderate National Association of Evangelicals, an organization that represents more than 45,000 local churches from 40 different denominations [23] advocates a belief that the nation is “caught in a profound culture war” and insists, literally, that politics is the weapon we must wield to win the war. “Evangelical Christians possess the weapons to win that war.”

To be fair they certainly advocate for a spiritual element to this war with a renewed focus on prayer, though political engagement appears to share equal footing. “The NAE believes that the combination of more intense prayer and increased voter participation can have a significant impact on the cultural crisis in our national life.” To accomplish this, the NAE’s Board of Administration approved initiatives “to stir evangelicals more fully to meet their civil and biblical responsibilities as citizens, and thus to strengthen their influence in public life.” The purpose of which is to “recruit millions of evangelicals to pray more specifically and knowledgeably for their political leaders, and register one million new voters.” [24]

Whether one is advocating for temperance or traditional marriage, if we skip steps and “go right to the top” in order to legislative change then though we may experience short term political victories—sometimes quite impressive, as in a nationwide Prohibition of all alcohol sales, and this after significant groundwork has been laid, though not enough, as time would tell—then we have already kicked sand in the face of the very culture we are trying to influence.

In the same way that long term diplomacy can be sacrificed for short term political expediency in the practice of statecraft—as when a country resorts to military action and the “nuclear option” and in so doing, permanently burns bridges for other peaceful, less aggressive options—so too, when we do everything we can to get our candidate into office and then jam our laws down the throats of an unwilling public, we are setting ourselves up for future cultural pain.

Culture is Upstream from Politics

Culture is upstream from politics. “While cultural conservatives bemoan judicial activism that reinterprets the plain meaning of the written Constitution, they forget that the courts are only finishing on parchment a job already begun in the hearts of the American people… Politics is largely an expression of culture.” [25] In short, it is impossible to legislate true, lasting, large-scale cultural change. It is only possible to formalize true, lasting, large-scale cultural change via legislation after a significantly vocal and influential block of the constituency is actively demanding it.

James Davison Hunter describes this fallacy as the conflating of the public with the political. [26] In other words, believers can hold a stunted view of what it means to engage culturally, reducing our public witness to a political one. The church has no public witness other than its political witness. [27] “And so instead of the political realm being seen as one part of public life, all of public life tends to be reduced to the political.” [28]

This is especially true for our corporate witness as a body of believers in a local church. Some churches are quick to hold quasi-political rallies—careful to pay lip service to the endorsement of issues, not candidates, so as not to run afoul of IRS non-profit guidelines and compromise the tax status of contributions received, of course—but do not even have a vocabulary for promoting Christian witness in the arts, business, and the many other areas that make up the culture around us.

Encouragingly, churches are also beginning to see the error in this culturally reductionistic view of politics, thanks in no small part to contemporary thinkers like Andy Crouch, Tim Keller, Jordan Raynor, Francis Schaeffer, Makoto Fujimura, and others. In these churches, the risk is now that the proverbial pendulum will swing too far in the other direction, and Christians will lose our political witness.

But we are called to be a transforming presence and create for change in every area of life over which Christ is Lord. Every square inch. That is, all of it. Business, art, politics. Everything.

And we should do more than just create “Christian culture” for other Christians. (Read More: The Christian-Culture Fallacy)

Prohibition As Culture Change Case Study

Roving packs of shifty-eyed, rootless men roamed the streets, intent on getting their next fix of creaturely vice. Good, upstanding citizens peered around drawn blinds; women held back children behind their petticoats, determined that something must be done. Small towns like Fort Collins, Colorado were “full of idle and vicious men, driftwood from railroad and ditch camps, irresponsible creatures, without home or friends who hung about the saloons and brothels” [1] and concerned citizens feared that “one-third of the men of this community are surely traveling the road that leads to destruction of mind, of body, and of soul… manhood destroyed, intellect in ruins, families made miserable.” [2]

In the eyes of most conservative Christians the root cause of this widespread social degradation was singular in nature. American society was said to suffer more from this one particular sin than all other forms of sin [3] and was “the cause of three fourths of all of the disease and poverty and sorrow and crime in our land.” [4] This singular cause of widespread social panic, if you haven’t guessed it already, was alcohol. And in the years leading up to one of the greatest mobilizations of social activism by Christians in United States history, the lessons we can learn today from the American Temperance Movement, Prohibition, and its subsequent repeal are instructive for any of us today who wish to affect widespread and lasting cultural change.

In short, the movement exchanged creating for shalom with an attempt to control the culture around them.

Alcoholism Prior to Prohibition

Prior to Prohibition, alcohol consumption was increasing to such dizzying levels that even young people were not immune from this high proof cultural sea change sloshing across the land. “By 1830 the average American older than 15 years of age drank the equivalent of 88 bottles of whiskey a year, three-times as much as their 21st-century descendants drink.” [5] And the economic impact was even more significant. “At the time, Americans also spent more money on alcohol each year than the total expenditures of the federal government.” [6]

Pastors Mobilize

On February 13, 1826, in Boston, MA, two Presbyterian ministers, Lyman Beecher and Justin Edwards, decided to do something to “rid the world of an amazing evil” [7] and thus motivated, formed the American Temperance Society (ATS). Within ten years there were over eight thousand local groups with total membership of over one and a half million people, all of whom had taken a pledge to abstain from drinking distilled spirits. In the beginning, members were allowed to drink beer and wine—just no distilled spirits—but over time the ATS along with other temperance groups increasingly pressed for total abstention from all alcohol. And, as their ranks swelled, and their membership became increasingly more fundamentalist and militant, they morphed from advocating for a lifestyle of voluntary abstinence to a full out legal prohibition of alcohol. [8]

Prohibition Propaganda

At its height, the American Temperance Movement was a propaganda machine. In the 1979 book, The Alcohol Republic, author W.J. Rorabaugh wrote “Temperance reformers… flooded America with propaganda” [9] citing the American Tract Society as a chief example, the organization having distributed in excess of five million temperance pamphlets by 1851. And they were not an anomaly. “Pamphlets and propaganda were an essential aspect of the American antiliquor crusade, from the Temperance Movement through the Prohibition Era.” [10]

Pamphlets, posters, and even songs and poems were utilized to sway public opinion. Physicians and ministers teamed up to present both scientific and moral reasons for the dangers of alcohol. Much of this cultural output was explicitly targeted at children, and heavily utilized pathos to make an emotionally driven appeal for children to avoid the evils of alcohol.

Examples include “Grandmother’s Boy” [11] and “Look out for the trap!” [12] Much of the most effective children’s literature included the parents as secondary targets. In “Grandmother’s Boy” the protagonist, a young boy raised by his grandmother, and who has taken the temperance pledge, confronts his alcoholic father with this reprimand, “If I’d known you drinked such stuff, I shouldn’t wanted to come and see you. It makes folks drunkards, and makes them so wicked they can’t go to heaven.” [13] Other popular songs of the day like “Father’s a Drunkard and Mother’s Dead” [14] and “Girls, Wait for a Temperance Man” [15] made such nakedly emotional appeals in support of the Temperance viewpoint as to be cringe-inducing to modern ears.

(Read: The Properties of Propaganda)

The Role of Women in Prohibition Activism

Women played a key role in the burgeoning temperance movement. In 1849, The Lily, a journal originally started specifically to advocate for temperance, was published by Amelia Bloomer for the Seneca Falls Ladies Temperance Society. Within a few years, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other suffragettes formed the New York State Women’s Temperance Society. In 1874, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was founded, eventually spreading around the world.

In one of the most famous examples of female temperance activism, Carry Nation, a hulking woman who dressed in all black, and with a personal vendetta against alcohol after being married to a drunk husband, was arrested over thirty times for destroying saloons with a hatchet, Bible in hand. “I ran behind the bar, smashed the mirror and all the bottles under it; picked up the cash register, threw it down; then broke the faucets of the refrigerator, opened the door and cut the rubber tubes that conducted the beer… I threw over the slot machine… and got from it a sharp piece of iron with which I opened the bungs of the beer kegs, and opened the faucets of the barrels, and then the beers flew in every direction and I was completely saturated.” [16]

This unique brand of temperance vigilantism soon drew other adherents she labeled “Home Defenders” who would attend her thundering speeches she termed “Hatchetations”, eager to shout and yell, buy miniature hatchet pins, and encourage each other in the wanton destruction of Saloon property. “I want to do what God tells me to do,” she recounted telling a judge after yet another “hatchetation” arrest. “God commands me to… ‘Lift up thy voice like a trumpet.’ You see here I am commanded to cry aloud about sin and not to whisper about it.” [17]

Carry Nation would collapse during yet another diatribe on the evils of drink. It is not clear if she maintained grasp of both her hatchet and her Bible. She would die two months later.

Churches Wield Political Power

Despite this level of grassroots activism, both in cultural output via literature, songs, and poems, involvement from both the religious and medical community to argue against the dangers of drink, and the millions of temperance volunteers, ranging from those who would sign a temperance pledge to those who would destroy a bar with a hatchet, one of the most prominent American Temperance organizations, the Ohio Anti-Saloon League, formed in May 24, 1893, would implement a strategy that would begin to sow the seeds of the movement’s own self-destruction.

They would begin using churches as a lever for political change, all done in the name of creating for control rather than creating for shalom, and with this new development, churches began to experience the short-term caffeine rush of political power and influence, only to abdicate their responsibility to influence the culture in other, broader ways, and after their temporary election cycle driven political influence would wane, the repercussions would have long lasting effects for how the American church engages culture that we still experience today.

The church would wield political power for short-term benefit, but it would come at the cost of it’s long-term witness and short-circuit it’s effectiveness at changing the culture.

The Hummingbird that Flew to Mars

The American Temperance movement placed such confidence in legislating change that Senator Morris Sheppard, one of the leading prohibitionists in the United States Congress, boastfully proclaimed that “There is as much chance of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment as there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail.” [29]

But despite being the law of the land for thirteen years, Prohibition proved ineffectual and was ultimately repealed.

Legislation is Not Enough

Though the American Temperance movement began as a bottoms-up, organic, and grassroots effort to promote widespread social change, and the success of those early years is exemplary, as soon as dry leaders prematurely grasped the shiny lever of political power, the reliance on political machinations soon proved partial, shortsighted, and temporary. It is worth restating: it is impossible to legislate true, lasting, large-scale cultural change. It is only possible to formalize true, lasting, large-scale cultural change via legislation after a significantly vocal and influential block of the constituency is actively demanding it. Prohibition is case in point that one can garner enough votes to change laws without garnering enough support to change the culture.

Prohibition reveals that “cultures are profoundly resistant to intentional change—period. They are certainly resistant to the mere exertion of will by ordinary individuals or by a well-organized movement of individuals.” [30]

Prohibition, in many ways, was a case of too much, too soon, a classic example of government overreach. Consensus was building around the prohibition of distilled spirits and other heavy liquors, and then hardline dry activists, sensing an opportunity to propose legislation that would gain enough votes to pass—it is worth noting the Eighteenth Amendment enacting Prohibition did pass convincingly: the vote was 65 to 20 in the Senate and 282 to 128 in the House—pushed through legislation prohibiting the buying and selling of all alcohol, including not just liquor and distilled spirits, but wine, beer, and other drinks of lower alcoholic content.

This came as a surprise even too many advocates of Prohibition and is representative of the top-down fallacy and its tendency toward one-sided, dictatorial pronouncements. Yes, political power corrupts absolutely too. Ultimately, “Legislation may be passed, and judicial rulings may be properly handed down, but legal and political victories will be short-lived or pyrrhic without the broad-based legitimacy that makes the alternatives seem unthinkable.” [31]

When Should We Use Political Power for Culture Change?

So, when is the right time to use political influence? What about the importance of strategically placed elites in positions of influence? Should we try to change the culture? Isn’t it important to speak up for what you believe in, and even more so, to do so from a position of power and influence? Yes and no. Not only is the story of Daniel instructive in teaching us how to create shalom in the world around us, but another young Jewish teenager placed in unfamiliar surroundings provides us additional perspective.

When we want to change the culture around us, when is the right time speak up?

How should we speak up?

In the next fallacy, The Speak-Up Fallacy, we learn what to do, and what not to do when we try to communicate with the culture around us.

(Read more Culture Change Fallacies: The Culture War Fallacy, The Speak-Up Fallacy, and The Christian-Culture Fallacy)

[1] Ordinances of the City of Fort Collins, Intoxicating Liquors, Chapter XIV § Ordinance No. 8-1896. Watrous, Ansel. History of Larimer County, CO. Fort Collins, CO: The Courier Printing & Publishing Company, 1911.

[2] Emily Abbott “A Woman’s Appeal.” Fort Collins (Colorado) Courier, August 12, 1880. Last accessed August 23, 2019. https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/cgi-bin/colorado?a=d&d=FCC18901211&e=——-en-20–1–txt-txIN——–0-

[3] Julia Colman “Christian Temperance Catechism.” 19–? Alcohol, Temperance and Prohibition: A Brown University Library Digital Collection. Last accessed August 23, 2019. https://library.brown.edu/cds/catalog/catalog.php?verb=render&id=1096473619546875&view=pageturner&pageno=1

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ken Burns & Lynn Novick Prohibition http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/ Last accessed August 23, 2019.

[6] Joe Carter 9 Things You Should Know About Prohibition The Gospel Coalition January 16, 2019. Last Accessed August 23, 2019 https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/9-things-you-should-know-about-prohibition/

[7] David J. Hanson Ph.D. https://www.alcoholproblemsandsolutions.org/american-temperance-society-led-prohibition/ Last accessed August 24, 2019

[8] Ibid.

[9] W.J. Rorabaugh The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979 p 196

[10] Leah Rae Berk Temperance and Prohibition Era Propaganda: A Study in Rhetoric Brown University Library for Digital Scholarship Written in partial fulfillment of requirements for UC 116: Drug and Alcohol Addiction in the American Consciousness (Professor David Lewis — Fall 2004) https://library.brown.edu/cds/temperance/essay.html (Last accessed August 26, 2019)

[11] “Grandmother’s Boy.” New York: National Temperance Society and Publication House, 188-?. Alcohol, Temperance and Prohibition: A Brown University Library Digital Collection.

[12] “Look out for the trap!” New York: The National Temperance Society and Publication House, 187-?. Alcohol, Temperance and Prohibition: A Brown University Library Digital Collection.

[13] “Grandmother’s Boy.” New York: National Temperance Society and Publication House, 188-?. Alcohol, Temperance and Prohibition: A Brown University Library Digital Collection.

[14] Parkhurst, E. A. “Father’s a Drunkard and Mother is Dead.” Washington, D.C.: John F. Ellis, 1866. Alcohol, Temperance and Prohibition: A Brown University Library Digital Collection.

[15] “Girls, Wait For a Temperance Man.” New York: C.M. Tremaine, 1867. Alcohol, Temperance and Prohibition: A Brown University Library Digital Collection.

[16] Carry Amelia Nation The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation F.M. Steves & Sons, 1908 p 166

[17] Ibid. p 338

[18] James Davison Hunter To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World Oxford University Press (April, 2010) p 12

[19] Quoted in an interview with John Hockenberry, DayOne, ABC News, 21 September 1995. Transcript available at The Transcript Company, www.transcripts.tv (accessed on 22 October 2009).

[20] “Dem’s Charges ‘Pathetic’ DeLay Says,” www.NewsMax.com (accessed on 5 May 2000).

[21] Tom Delay, “Rediscovering Our American Values: The Real State of the Union” (Heritage Lecture #654, Heritage Foundation, 1 February 2000).

[22] Dacher Keltner in The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence Penguin Press, May, 2016

[23] National Association of Evangelicals, About NAE https://www.nae.net/about-nae/ (Last accessed August 22, 2019)

[24] The NAE’s fiftieth anniversary convention in 1992 produced a press release entitled “NAE Inaugurates Prayer and Voter Registration Campaign,” 3 March 1992. All quotes in this paragraph are taken from this statement.

[25] William B. Wichterman The Culture: Upstream from Politics (Published in Building a Healthy Culture: Strategies for an American Renaissance, ed. Don Eberly; Eerdmans, 2001; pp. 75-100).

[26] James Davison Hunter To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World Oxford University Press (April, 2010) p 105

[27] Greg Forster To Love the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of To Change the World Essay taken from Revisiting ‘Faithful Presence’: To Change the World Five Years Later The Gospel Coalition, November 2015

[28] James Davison Hunter To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World Oxford University Press (April, 2010) p 105

[29] Charles Merz (1969). The Dry Decade. Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press. p. ix.

[30] James Davison Hunter To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World Oxford University Press (April, 2010) p 44

[31] Ibid. p 45