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Greg Forster—whose Joy for the World: How Christianity Lost Its Cultural Influence and Can Begin Rebuilding It in Tim Keller and Collin Hansen’s Cultural Renewal series should be widely read—writes today about the UVA rape story and the problem of rape systems and rape cultures on college campuses.

In so doing, he makes a helpful point about what he calls the “now-fashionable turn away from ‘politics’ to ‘culture.'”

Nowadays, we hear it preached up and down the land that “politics is downstream from culture.” It’s certainly true that almost none of our most urgent problems will be cured, or even significantly affected, by one party or the other winning the next election. But, in fact, politics is not “downstream” from culture. Politics is part of culture, and some of our cultural problems are political problems that demand political solutions. The longer we ignore this, the more women will be brutalized by the rape system that now dominates Greek life at many large colleges.

Later in the essay he explains why “changing the culture” is not a sufficient solution:

Purely “cultural” approaches will not work, for the problem is political: it involves justice and law, and any solution would disrupt organized factions’ access to money and power. But the political solution must simultaneously be a cultural solution. It must create plausibility and credibility for the necessary reforms. We need political action that will strike not just terror but shame and self-loathing in the hearts of those who sustain the rape system, and give ordinary people—the silent frat brother or alumnus, the dean with a terrified young woman in his office—the bravery to do the right thing.

After proposing his own solution, Forster writes:

Nothing is stopping us from doing this but a lack of political imagination. We must remember how to think about politics as something more than a brutal clash of forces—as an arena for constructing expressions of dignity and justice. The more we chant “politics is downstream from culture,” the less we are able to think in those terms.

With apologies to Martin Luther King: I am aware that the law cannot make frat brothers respect women. But it can stop them from raping them, and that is also important.

You can read the whole thing here.

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