Four tiers and/in James Davison Hunter

A reader noted that my post on four tiers or levels of Christian/theological publishing last month owed a debt to James Davison Hunter. He’s right, though I didn’t realize it at the time. As the second half of that post explains, my arrival at the “four tiers” framework was rooted in long-term frustration with limited options of high-quality Tier 2 Christian books to assign to my students, especially books written by women and people of color. Teasing out the tiers helped me to see why I kept bumping up against a wall and where the distribution of sales, demography, audience, and accessible style lay.

But more than a decade ago, Hunter already explained all this in his book To Change the World. I should know, since I’ve written about the book in two different essays while teaching it to students annually since 2017. Consider this me acknowledging my debt!

Here’s hunter on pages 41-42 (brackets and bold are mine):

…the deepest and most enduring forms of cultural change nearly always occurs [sic] from the “top down.” In other words, the work of world- making and world-changing are, by and large, the work of elites: gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. Even where the impetus for change draws from popular agitation, it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites.

The reason for this, as I have said, is that culture is about how societies define reality—what is good, bad, right, wrong, real, unreal, important, unimportant, and so on. This capacity is not evenly distributed in a society, but is concentrated in certain institutions and among certain leadership groups who have a lopsided access to the means of cultural production. These elites operate in well-developed networks and powerful institutions.

Over time, cultural innovation is translated and diffused. Deep-rooted cultural change tends to begin with those whose work is most conceptual and invisible and it moves through to those whose work is most concrete and visible. In a very crude formulation, the process begins with theorists who generate ideas and knowledge; moves to researchers who explore, revise, expand, and validate ideas; moves on to teachers and educators who pass those ideas on to others, then passes on to popularizers who simplify ideas and practitioners who apply those ideas. All of this, of course, transpires through networks and structures of cultural production.

Cultural change is most enduring when it penetrates the structure of our imagination, frameworks of knowledge and discussion, the perception of everyday reality. This rarely if ever happens through grassroots political mobilization though grassroots mobilization can be a manifestation of deeper cultural transformation. Change of this nature can only [!!!] come from the top down.

I’ve bolded the “levels” Hunter identifies: (1) popularizers and practitioners, (2) teachers and educators, (3) researchers, and (4) theorists. Pretty much exactly my four tiers. Glad to know I’m in good company on this one. As ever, whatever I know is just what I’ve forgotten I’ve remembered learning from someone else.

In addition, here is a (low-res) image of page 90 in the book, where Hunter lays out what he calls “The Culture Matrix.” It’s three columns of three rows: three tiers or levels (theoretical, higher-ed, and practical) of three types of cultural production (pertaining to the true, knowledge; the good, morality; the beautiful, aesthetics). He puts in bold the types of cultural production Protestant evangelicals focus on and/or excel in—his point being that they neither cultivate nor dominate anything at the level of theory and only some at the level of higher-ed. It’s at the grassroots or ground floor alone that they own substantial real estate:

It’s interesting that here Hunter reduces his number of “levels” from four to three. At least in Christian publishing, I find four more capacious. To use his terms, there’s definitely a difference between lowbrow, middlebrow, upper middlebrow (or low highbrow!), and highbrow simpliciter. In my post, I called these “universal,” “popular,” “highbrow,” and “scholarly.” Another reader suggested a few weeks back that perhaps my use of “highbrow” could be replaced by “professional.” I like that. In any case, the categories would cash out like this: universal/popularizers, popular/educators, professional/researchers, and scholarly/theorists. Some awkward semantic overlap, but nonetheless a general consonance or aptness between the two.

There should be, anyway, since I appear to have taken the idea from Hunter in the first place. For that reason this post should be understood as just one long hat tip to him.