Andy Crouch’s Culture Making: Rediscovering Our Creative Calling is the Christian book of the year–its Publisher’s Weekly nod for best religion book won’t be its last. The concept of “culture” has been something of a snare for American Christians–we’ve critiqued culture and we’ve copied culture, but we’ve not always cultivated viable cultures of our own. 

Evangelicals talk and think a lot about “worldview,” especially the importance of having a “biblical worldview.” As you know, there is a Christian industry that produces curriculum, training camps, seminars, and books devoted to this end. What are the points of distinction between the notion of a worldview and your work on “culture”?

Worldview is a good name for the essential idea that all of us make culture from some starting point. Every time we set out to create any cultural good, we begin with the way we believe the world is and ought to be. These questions of how the world is and ought to be have deep religious significance, so all people of faith (not just evangelicals!) should care about them.

However, while worldview is a great place to begin, it’s not a very good place to stop. All too often the evangelical fascination with worldview comes down to extended analyses or critiques of culture, and highly abstract presentations of the basic biblical convictions about the world. Yet we never get to the crucial question of what culture we are actually sustaining and making. I call it the academic fallacy: the idea that once you’ve analyzed something, your job is done. But human cultures are strangely immune to mere critique. If they weren’t, film critics would have an influence over which movies are actually successful! But I’ll bet you $84 million–the current box office gross of BEVERLY HILLS CHIHUAHUA–that they don’t. The truth is that you haven’t changed culture when you critique culture–you haven’t changed it until you’ve created culture. And that is a much more complex and messy process than the phrase “biblical worldview” usually conveys.

You’ve said you want to offer a new vocabulary to the evangelical conversation on culture. What do you mean?

I’d like to move us from the dominant postures that characterized evangelicals in the twentieth century–condemning, critiquing, copying, and consuming culture–to the language that is rooted in the Genesis stories of humanity’s creation, where we see our primordial ancestors called to the roles of cultivators and creators of culture. When we see ourselves as cultivators, we ask, what is already good, in the natural and cultural world, and how can we keep it good? When we see ourselves as creators, we ask, what is missing in the world that we need to take the risk of offering to the world? I think it’s fair to say that, right now, evangelical Christians aren’t known primarily for their cultivation or their creativity. But I think that can change.

I also want to warn us about the dangers of some common phrases we use. Evangelicals talk about “transforming culture” a lot–a term we got from H. Richard Niebuhr’s famous book, Christ and Culture–but I think that the transformation of culture is properly speaking God’s job, not ours. To borrow a phrase, it’s above our pay grade. Or to put it another way, transforming culture is very much a biblical vision, but the subject of the phrase is not “Christians,” it’s “Christ.” Christians are as caught up in the messy reality of culture as anyone else, and who are we to say that our efforts to transform it will do more good than harm? I much prefer to speak about cultivating and creating–those are human-scale, feasible activities that, if carried out faithfully, can become part of God’s ultimate work in the world.

What does culture-making mean for those of us who spend a lot of time home-making and child-rearing, working office jobs, fixing sinks or cars, etc.?

Well, this is part of why I actually ended up stressing cultivating as much as creating. Most of us spend most of the time cultivating: keeping what is already good in culture, good. So when you fix a sink, you are keeping the cultural good of plumbing good. That is actually a deeply dignified human response to God’s original call to “tend and keep” the world. When we pass on the best of human culture to others, by raising children or following generally accepted accounting principles or replacing a catalytic converter, we are participating in culture making.

But I also think that most of us are called to introduce something new into the world that wasn’t there before. If you’re a plumber, it may be as simple as creating a slightly new, different, and better way of doing business with your customers. If you’re working in an office, there are probably any number of things that don’t function as well in your company as they should. Almost all of us can be part of creating a new little bit of culture–a new way of communicating, a way to celebrate success or handle failure, a more efficient or effective way to handle tedious tasks–that can truly improve the world right around us. The best companies, like Toyota, empower every worker to stop everything–stop a whole production line worth a hundred thousand dollars an hour!–in order to identify a problem or introduce an improvement. It’s a crucial idea that is rooted in our essential identity as creative creatures. We aren’t machines. We get dissatisfied doing things over and over exactly the same way, because we all are creative, and when human organizations are functioning well–whether families or businesses or governments–they make space for that kind of creativity.

We’re having this conversation in a time when megachurches are flourishing and in some cases occupying entire regions through satellite campuses. Such churches often leave huge cultural footprints and utilize Madison Avenue skills like “branding” and “messaging.” But they also emphasize gathering in smaller groups, and having regular intimate connections. What does the megachurch offer, and what does it take away from, the project of culture making?

I like to ask a pair of questions about every cultural artifact–which includes phenomena like megachurches. What does this cultural artifact make possible? And what does it make impossible, or at least a lot more difficult? It’s worth noting that cultural innovators often trumpet the “possibilities” created by their new cultural goods, while de-emphasizing or passing over the “impossibilities” those goods create at the same time.

In the case of the megachurch, they have made possible a level of technical excellence in many domains that simply was not associated with the church in the twentieth century. Churches are now the objects of case studies at Harvard Business School–they have caught up to, and in a few cases (like lighting and video production) are sometimes leading, the broader culture. They have become expert wielders of the same panoply of technological devices that corporations and celebrities have used to broadcast their messages.

This has a strange dual effect on cultural creativity. At the “pro” level, the level of the people paid to wield those technological tools, churches are fostering real creativity. So church musicians are often every bit as skilled as the folks playing stadium gigs with touring rock bands. I would put the best preachers in America up against their counterparts on Saturday Night Live for the ability to hold an audience and make them laugh, cry, and think.

But at the level of people in the pews, all of this technical excellence simply reinforces one of the dominant trends in technological society, which is that we are less and less able to do

anything but consume the products others create. There is more professional musicianship, but less congregational singing. There is more effective preaching, but less lay education and formation. There is a widespread sense of dissatisfaction, as Willow Creek’s REVEAL study has shown, with individuals’ own ability to shape a meaningful spiritual life, “intimate” small groups notwithstanding. As the pros get better at what they do, the rest of us, quite naturally, become more passive in our consumption of their brilliant work. But the irony is that eventually this hollows out the church–it becomes a church of consumers, with all the shallowness and instability that entails.

However, there’s another question I like to ask. Once any cultural good is in the world, what new culture do people start to create in response? There is a whole countertrend going on of small churches that ask a lot of their members, that require participation rather than anonymity. And the megachurches themselves are recognizing that they need to change, though I’m not sure they yet understand how much they have relied on the technological, consumer culture for their “success.” I still expect them to make major course adjustments that may well correct some of the deficiencies we see, but it may also be that, like many grand church buildings in American downtowns, in another generation the megachurches will be largely empty shells while something else much more creative and generative is happening elsewhere.

I knew you were a Christian writer writing a Christian book, but I must say, I was awfully surprised at how much of your book on culture was about the Bible. Of all things! What does the Bible tell us about participating in culture, about making culture? I’m especially interested in why you see the Bible’s vision of culture as “radical.”

The Bible’s vision of culture is radical because it sees culture at the root of human being and blessing. Culture is not just an optional add-on or distraction from our true nature–it is the very thing we were created to do from the beginning, and will do into eternity. We are created to cultivate and create–in Ken Myers’s phrase, to make something of the world. Culture, in fact, is not our idea–it is God’s idea.

And the Bible’s vision of culture is radical because the Bible presents God as intimately involved in culture from the very beginning. When Adam and Eve do a bit of culture making after they eat the fruit, sewing together fig leaves for themselves, God responds by providing improved culture–leather garments–that will be much better suited to a harsh world after Eden. God creates a nation–a cultural tradition extended through time–called Israel and forms it with explicit (and to many Bible readers, long and boring) cultural instructions in Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Most radically, the Son of God becomes a human being and participates–for thirty years, he does nothing else!–in the life of a particular culture, the culture of Roman Judea. Finally, the Bible’s vision of the renewal of all things includes a renewal of culture. The new earth is the home of a city, not just a restored garden: a place where human culture comes to its full flourishing rather than being put back in its place, as it were. From start to finish, the biblical vision is a cultural vision, not just a “religious” or “spiritual” one.

Your call to Christians to make culture is partly eschatological. “Culture,” you write, “is the furniture of heaven.” You show how the Bible’s last book, Revelation, suggests that good, lasting cultural creations will find a place in the new Jerusalem. In what ways would you like this understanding of Revelation to reorient Christians in their approach to culture?

I believe that just as I hope to be present in the new creation in a body that is recognizably my own, while also transformed and redeemed (just as the reports of Jesus after the resurrection suggest that he was recognizably Jesus, while also mysteriously different as well), I can also hope that the best of human culture will be present, although also redeemed and transformed. Revelation says that “the glory of the nations” will be brought into the New Jerusalem.

This changes what we think we’re up to here on earth. We have the opportunity to bend our energies toward the creation of cultural goods that might actually have a chance of being called “the glory” of our own cultural tradition. This is very different from the idea of creating “Christian culture” for a “Christian subculture,” where excellence doesn’t matter so much as sticking a fish emblem on everything. The ultimate test for Christians creating culture should be, do we believe that what we are creating might possibly make it into the New Jerusalem? Are we cultivating and creating the glory of the ethnic heritage, the national heritage, that God has given us to steward and build upon? It’s a demanding but also liberating vision that can include, as we already observed, everything from art to plumbing (since I, for one, definitely think that plumbing is part of the glory of the nations!).

Finally, what are some of your favorite examples of Christians who are making culture today?

I think we are on the verge of a renaissance in the visual arts, led by artists like Makoto Fujimura and Bruce Herman. They are not as widely known as they should be, but they are doing peerless work of cultivating and creating. There are some truly amazing young artists following in their footsteps as well.

I happen to love two great examples of fast food chains that treat their workers well, respect their customers, and serve truly tasty food, both founded or owned by Christian entrepreneurs: the West Coast’s In-n-Out Burgers and the Southeast’s Chick-Fil-A. (Not that I recommend their cultural products for daily consumption, but once a month or so, boy, are they good.)

I also love countless local stories that no one has ever heard of: the mother-daughter book club in northern California that includes several Christian families along with families with other faiths and no faith; the small group of inner city residents in Atlanta who bought a bench, painted it, and planted flowers next to it on a busy street with the goal of creating “the most beautiful bus stop in the city”; the burgeoning number of churches led by second- and third-generation immigrants from Asia who are finding ways to keep their Asian cultural heritage alive while also being wholeheartedly Christian and American as well.

The truth is that Christians are already doing this, all over the place, at all scales and in all spheres of culture. We just haven’t recognized that what they are doing is at the very heart of the Christian good news. I think that is going to change.