Making It Up As We Go Along

A Review of Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

Andy Crouch (©2008, Inter Varsity Press, ISBN: 978-0-8308-3394-8)

The first thing that stands out in Crouch’s writing is how different his work is from Evangelicalism’s most celebrated culture warriors. Rather than treating culture as some monstrosity to be brought into submission, he points out that culture is first of all a creation of man. He says, (italics in original) “…Culture is what we make of the world. Culture is, first of all, the name for our relentless, restless human effort to take the world as it’s given to us and make something else.” (p. 23) He goes on to say, “Culture is not just what human beings make of the world; it is not just the way human beings make sense of the world; it is in fact part of the world that every new human being has to make something of.“ What this means is that humans don’t “make culture” at all, but culture is the outcome of the things they make. We don’t write “culture” but we do write books. We don’t bake culture, but we bake bread. The books, the bread, and the vast host of everything else we create are known in sociological terms as “artifacts.” They embody aspects of the culture in which they are created, but they themselves cannot be said to be culture.

In a brisk departure from mainstream cultural critics, Crouch broadens his treatment of the topic to include far more than just worldview. He says, “The problem is an ineffectual, ‘disembodied’ Christianity, one that makes little difference in culture or even, all to often, in the life choices of its adherents.” (p. 63) Evangelicals, like George Barna, see this as well and publish book after book providing cultural analysis and even more commentary that leads to even more thinking, yet precious little cultural changes both in the lives of Christians and in the world around us. After pointing out the weaknesses of thinking “worldviewishly” as Crouch phrases it, is that we spend our efforts in thinking about culture without really creating culture, and certainly without shaping the culture.

Crouch’s remedy to ineffectual analysis is to change the culture by creating more of it. Before taking up this challenge, however, Crouch offers a set of alliterated alternatives, namely:

• Condemning culture - seen in Christian boycotts and protests of things like movies or books.

• Critiquing culture - we offer commentary on the culture around us without actually having an impact outside of our own enclave.

• Copying culture - we either slavishly do the same thing that the broader culture is doing (seen in some contemporary Christian musicians).

• Consuming culture - Selectively buying “good” products to reward those who make the things we approve of.

Instead of these, Crouch suggests that we need to be cultivators of culture who create and produce substantive contributions to the culture that flow from a maturity of discipline and accomplishment. He says that when we adopt the above as postures, an habitual stance, we limit our ability to respond creatively and meaningfully to a culture that desperately needs what we have to offer.

In Part Two, Crouch takes us on a journey through the Bible from Genesis through Revelation and beyond, peering through the lenses of a sociologist. Rather than a critique of the Bible, he provides a high-level overview of the march of culture and God’s place in creating humans to be able to shape the world around them, to make something of significance, to be creative beings in their own right and in the image of God Himself. Even when man takes off in a direction different from God’s original—whether it was the move from a Garden to a City in Genesis 4 or the move from a theocracy to a monarchy in 1 Samuel –God was able to take whatever man had made and redeem it for His own. In seeing this persistently redemptive, relentlessly loving God joining together with His creatures in creating a world, we find a sense of hope that replaces the knee-jerk condemnation so familiar among Fundamentalists and Evangelicals. Crouch offers a positive message that brings God closer to our human endeavors rather than the common theme of alienation that we hear.

In Part Three, titled “Calling,” Crouch outlines both the limits and the opportunities facing Christians as part of the culture. He begins by pointing out the great irony of our Christian endeavor—that we are called, as God’s redeemed people, to transform the world, but changing the world is precisely what we cannot do. He says:

 Indeed, the great irony with the  North American Christian community’s obsession with becoming world changers, as outsiders like Alan Wolfe and insiders like Ron Sider have documented, is that so far and on the whole we are much more changed than changing. The rise of interest in cultural transformation has been accompanied by a rise in cultural transformation of a different sort -- the transformation of the church into the culture’s image. (p. 189)

Crouch adds that we really have very little power as individuals to change the culture. Some might argue that Henry Ford and the Wright brothers were catalysts behind a cultural transformation that made such things as the interstate highway system, suburbs, and commercial air travel possible, yet we need to recognize that without the myriad contributions of a host of others, their innovations would never have gone anywhere. We have “survivor bias” in such situations. We mistakenly think that individuals have transformative power because we only see the successes. We don’t see the countless failures of those who have tried to engineer social change but have failed. Men like Preston Tucker, who are little more than a historical footnote or the countless unnamed thousands who failed to make millions before the dot com bubble burst, are more typical of those who wanted to shape the culture but failed to do so. In addition to survivor bias, we also operate under the presumptuous notion that even if we do change the culture, we will change it for the better. What is it about either the history of mankind or even our ability to positively change our own lives that leads us to this conclusion?

However, rather than leaving us feeling defeated, Crouch offers us hope that we can indeed follow the calling of God in our lives to transform the culture. He suggests that cultural power can be defined very simply as “the ability to successfully propose a new cultural good.” He warns, however, that the temptation to amass power is most acute when it is coupled to the best of intentions, citing Ralph Reed, Jr. as a cautionary example. Reed began as a founder of the Christian Coalition in the 1990’s and ended the decade collaborating with Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff looking after the interests of, among other things, Native American gambling. Instead of succumbing to lure of power, Crouch offers an alternative—grace-filled communities. Speaking, of necessity, in the abstract he closes the book with a strategy for forming transformative communities based on the actions of a small body of people who create a cultural good and are able to disseminate it to the wider culture through their grace-filled living. There are examples all around us of how this formula has taken hold in our culture. Phil Vischer and Mike Nawrocki, creators of the Veggie Tales animated series have created a cultural good that is recognized both for its quality and its consistent Christian message.

Crouch challenges all of us to leave the comfort of cultural criticism and become transforming creators in a world where God has called us to make a difference. All of us are shaped by the culture around us and none of us can escape its influence, but at the same time, each of us has the power to speak truth to culture in a meaningful way. What remains for us is to avoid being satisfied with critique and analysis and be contributors to the culture in which God has placed us.

by Rick Presley