Intro to the 7 Mind Molding Mountains of Cultural Influence
Beginning to understand the subtitles behind why we believe what we believe as a culture
Essence
The 7 Mind Molding Mountains of Cultural Influences are threaded through every facet of a culture and they influence and shape our hearts, minds, behaviors, desires, and habits.
But where do they come from? How are those ideas and influences set and advanced? Who sets them? We’ll take a look at all of that.
People have been doing work in the 7 Mountains of Cultural Influence for over 30 years and each person has merit in their conceptualization of them. I conceptualize them and order them as: Faith, Governance, Money/Work, Education, Health/Wellness/The Family, Creativity/The Arts, and Media.
Over time, we’ll get into why I order them as I do, but in a nutshell, it’s the order necessary for an ideal society. That’s what I believe people all over the planet are longing for: the ideal society. Humans have been longing for this since the beginning of time as we know it. But can it happen? Is it even possible? I wholeheartedly believe it is, but there are hard choices to make and we’ll get into all those. There’s a reason the youth are clamoring for socialism while their elders cry. “Oy vey! Haven’t we tried this before and it didn’t work?” All sides have valid points worthy of exploring and I believe they all have answers. We may not like some of the answers, but there are answers.
The purpose in sharing the 7 Mountains of Cultural Influence is to incite an adventure in you because it has in me. If you’ve never heard of them and you start to look into them, you might be surprised how much is out there on the subject—I was. My purpose is to share my unique perspective and worldview concerning the 7 Mind Molding Mountains of Cultural Influence is in the hopes that you find YOUR gifting to engage in YOUR critical role for this particular moment in history—for your good and society’s even greater good.
More Color
But why would this motivate me? I mean, I’m nice, but I’m not that nice!
Because the world is better for ME when YOU are fully functioning in your gifting!
I have personally found that I’m a more peaceful, more fulfilled, more complete, kinder, gentler human to deal with when I’m operating in what I’m designed to do. But it has been a LONG and arduous task even finding what I’m designed to do. Some have a harder time with such things than others. And there are life seasons when what you’re designed to do won’t pay the bills, so what do you do then? We’ll wrestle with some of these questions.
I hope you’ll join me on an adventure. My hope and aim is to provide interesting and challenging resources in an infinitely loving way—because that’s my heart. My hope is to challenge us all and have fun doing it. Who says growing and maturing has to be drudgery, boring, and a buzz-kill? Isn’t it actually exciting, thrilling, and highly valuable? Okay, so it’s definitely irritating and sometimes royally sucks, yes. But anything worth doing is hard and the irritation of the sand in the oyster is what produces the pearl. And I LIKE pearls!
In general, the 7 Mountains perspective is coming from a Biblical, Christian worldview. But they are still ideas and concepts worthy of evaluating if you’re not of that worldview and the principles still apply. No one has to believe as I do to get nuggets of gold from my perspective. Take the good and useful, leave the rest.
I think we all feel the heat of the cultural war happening among us. I would actually venture to say that every decade or generation has their own version of a cultural war or revolution. One generation seeking to be their own apart from the yokes and confines of the previous generation that drove them nuts because parents drive their kids nuts—it’s a “thing.” I constantly tell my child, “I’m a delight! I don’t know what you’re so upset about.” She stares at me not nearly as amused as I am. None of this is new, just maybe new to us. Every generation must choose who they’re going to be, what they are going to stand for, and how they are going to make their mark on society and history. What path will they choose? Will they take the good from the previous generation and take it to new heights? Will they correct what the previous generation didn’t do well? Will they repeat all the same pattern even though they’re desperately trying to be the opposite, not realizing those roads lead to the same place?
You can look at the 7 Mountains of Cultural Influence in any decade and see what they were advancing and subsequently see how those ideas and principles blossomed and bloomed within the greater culture. Sometimes it’s good fruit and sometimes it’s really, really bad fruit. Any of the various decade documentaries out there beautifully encapsulate this principle.
For some reason, this current cultural war seems particularly intense. Maybe that’s just how it feels and it’s no more intense than any other. But maybe the stakes are higher because of the rapid acceleration of technology and increase in population. I don’t have any hard data at my fingertips to support that, it’s just a hunch.
I see this culture war as being highly localized. Meaning with the world becoming more and more decentralized (and in a lot of ways I’m a fan of decentralization), the positive influence you can have is really within your particular sphere of influence. I suppose it’s going to take all hands on deck and you are of vital importance! Your voice matters. The way you see things matters. The people in your circles and unique fields of interest care about what you think about things.
But we must take the time to understand why we believe what we believe and flesh those ideas out so that we can engage in meaningful conversations. We must be willing to acknowledge that there are certain topics we haven’t put the time into and that’s okay. We have to realize that maybe we’ve been busy with the wrong things and course correct. We must also be willing to subject ourselves to people and ideas that are the antithesis of our own. As infuriating as that can be, the more you do it, the more you get used to it and you begin to see the value in the exposure to other schools of thoughts. It makes you better to do so. We must be willing to question & challenge ourselves and our thinking because that’s when beautiful things happen that are good for everyone, especially ourselves.
I first became interested in the idea of the 7 Mountains of Cultural Influence several years ago as I watched our culture slip further and further into the abyss of humanistic, secular paganism. I was observing the devastating effects on our communities and I was so perplexed. What’s the big deal with separating faith and schools? What’s the big deal in making a divide between the two? Why is everything seemingly spinning out of control? Bizarre.
As I did what I do: research and read, I discovered that secular humanism is a religion, even though it posits not to be a religion. That is part of the deceptive nature of it. Time to call a spade a spade: secular humanism and paganism is an institutionalized system or set of beliefs, attitudes, and practices that is absolutely a religion. Every single civilization in history had religion threaded through its civic side of governance. Humans are designed to worship something—either self or God. Today, America is no different.
The move since the ‘60’s has been to replace the Christian faith in this nation with secular, pagan humanism that leaves God out of the equation. The human and self is the center of the universe, not God, we don’t need Him. Usually, that spins out into a variety of deviant consequences. Even the highly rational Roman community around 80 A.D. was advanced technologically, but had an insatiable hunger for violence as demonstrated by the colosseum practices and was a highly sexualized culture.
Rationalism does not necessarily equal civility, refinement, kindness, or restraint, especially on large scales. Curiously, it has a tendency to actually do the opposite. My theory is that in a stand off, the human heart and seat of desire trumps the rational mind. The rational mind can only hold off the desire so long. Point to the chips calling to you from the pantry or the donuts someone brought in the break room that are out of reach but you can still smell them. Or the pair of shoes you can’t afford but just.can’t.live.without, and you’ll have a simplistic example of this principle at work. I’ll tell you right now I pound those chips, sneak by the donuts and pop it real fast (no one’s looking), and bought those damn shoes every single time. That was after I did and excellent job exerting willpower.
About 12 years ago, I had been in clinical settings for several years working on my masters in clinical psychology so issues of addiction, trafficking, lawlessness, homelessness, emotional and physical disorders, and so on were not new to me.
What was new was the fact that those maladaptive ways of thinking and living, historically relegated to clinical settings, were not only becoming mainstream, but they were being championed and advocated for as “freedom & tolerance.” They were being bred. But I knew they were not “freedom” for the individual. I knew they were emotional hell and torture often leading to prison or a homeless shelter—I had just been in the bowels of it. I watched as people drank in lies and falsehoods that promised life and freedom from the pain and wounds, yet delivered death and bondage and more crippling pain. It broke my heart and I felt powerless to help people and often myself out of the snares. On a grand scale, I was watching the deviant preferences of the loud few trump the needs of the collective whole and it wasn’t good.
I was observing aberrant ideals and behaviors emerge from the far corners of society into the main highways. As long as you have humans, you’ll have these types of issues. But the hope is that it’s a small portion of the larger population not the majority and you certainly don’t want to breed it like rabbits. Pretty soon, the rabbits take over. Nature has checks and balances and so should we. Bring in a wolf pack or a coyote and the rabbits stay in line.
Aberrant behaviors and ideals do not make a society more civilized. It makes it more uncivilized because that’s what secular humanism or paganism is—anything goes—down to cannibalism and when you’re everything at once, you’re nothing. At a certain point, the script flips on you and a solid identity is key in guarding against that. We used to have that in America, but somewhere along the way, we lost it.
To exhibit some proof of how far down the path of secular humanism we’ve come, earlier this year I read an article from the New York Times making a cogent case for cannibalism. The author was perfectly reasoned, thoughtful, and even balanced. Yet the topic being advocated for from a global source originating in the United States of America was humans imbibing other humans as a meal. There’s also a movement of people seeking to have sex with children be classified as a sexual preference. Neither of those ideas or schools of thought are good for the individuals that participate in them and they certainly aren’t good for society as a whole. But how did we get here? We lost our identity.
It felt like I was observing a systematized strategy on society executed with great precision. But how was that happening on a such a large scale in the United States? I really don’t believe there’s Dr. Evil in the background purposefully executing a systematized and coordinated assault on humanity. Or is there? We’ll get to that.
When I discovered the 7 Mountains teaching, I found that people had been warning about this culture shift for many years. Once you start to see how all the 7 mind molding mountains are connected and how they tap into one another and influence each another, you’ll start to understand how fruitless ideas, thoughts, habits, and behaviors have infiltrated this nation at every level and you see just how it was done. It helped me make sense of some things that I couldn’t before and I hope the same for you.
I also don’t necessarily believe a lot of this cultural sliding was done on purpose. Maybe some people consciously knew what they were doing, but I believe the human experience is a slippery slope and often good or noble intentions lead to wretched consequences. Often we don’t really realize just how unwise we are until we’re bitten by the consequences. So often, humans just don’t have the foresight or courage to cut things off before they become full blown. Or they don’t believe things until they get so bad, they can not longer deny the negative consequences. That has certainly been true in my own life. In my view, that’s just a reality of the human experience. It’s what we do when we feel the negative consequences that matters. Do we face and correct what needs to be faced or do we double down on stupid? I marvel at how many times I’ve doubled down on stupid and genuinely thought it was a good idea at the time. Wow. Well that was stupid. Geez, Kelli, get it together!
We’ll explore each of these 7 mountains, various leaders within them, and how they have pivotal and significant influence on the hearts and minds of humanity. They either point a human soul to life or death. They either advance principles that foster life and thriving or death and emotional imprisonment, sometimes physical imprisonment. The leaders within each of these mind molding mountains either consciously or unconsciously advance ideologies that foster hope, freedom, and self-governing or fear, bondage, dependency, and lawlessness.
America has a unique responsibility in this because so America goes, so the world goes. All eyes are on America and have been for some time. You can make all kinds of argument against this, but the fact remains that the world is interested in what America is doing, thinking, believing, buying, saying, wearing, listening to, watching, and so forth.
So will you join me on an adventure of exploring the 7 Mind Molding Mountains of Cultural Influence and see what we dig up? I hope you will! We’ll have a lot of fun! It might get messy along the way, but that makes the hot bath so much sweeter.