Culture Shock

If you have a minority population in your youth group, then you probably shepherd young people who go through culture shock on a regular basis. I've worked with students who were one of the few Blacks at their school or the only White girl at church, and they regularly had to deal with other people's ethnocentric ideals.

These kids tried to reconcile two different cultures that contradicted each other at times. They needed authority figures who recognized their own cultural prejudices and could lay them down and hear the cries of these students. If one denies ethnocentric tendencies, he or she then denies a cultural norm and cultural differences, and the idea of true cross-cultural communication will be lost.

Moral Issues

Then more questions arise. Is everything that seems weird a cultural issue? Or are some things just weird? Or even wrong? How do I know the difference? No one will deny there are some things we can think of that shouldn't be accepted in any culture.

I especially felt that way after hearing a cultural defense for female circumcision. I was talking to a young man who remembers his rite of passage experience fondly. All the 16ish-year-old males in his village gathered to learn how to be a man. This time concluded in circumcision as a symbol of leaving their boyhood behind.

He then explained that with the Westernization of certain African villages, female circumcision was ended. He argued that since then, there has been something missing—something lacking. Another gentleman chimed in with a cultural defense for the partial or complete removal of the clitoris, prepuce or labia of a girl or young woman—a procedure that kills many girls every year. Some societies sew a young lady's vagina shut as a coming of age process so she can be pure on her wedding night.

He bashed Westerners for forcing their cultural ideals on others. He thought that since this man had fond memories, there might be women with fond memories of the similar experience. Of course, very few men die of male circumcision.

The argument was simple: "If a culture deems something necessary for their girls to know they're now women—something most Western cultures lack—what right does anyone have to condemn it?"

Culture can be used to defend anything. So, multicultural communication gets very sticky when we find it difficult to respect an aspect of another culture. I'll always be morally opposed to female circumcision no matter how culturally tied it is to a woman's coming of age.

We should be careful not to confuse reasons for one's behavior with excuses for one's misbehavior. The example of female circumcision didn't end when the village was Westernized hundreds of years ago; it ended when the society was Christianized. There's a difference between what one is politically opposed to and what one is morally opposed to, and I cannot tolerate nor appreciate a procedure that kills girls (not to mention maims and debases them). There are some things that deny the power of the gospel, and Christians shouldn't accept those in any culture.