Andy Crouch: Why We Can’t Change the World
Culture Making: Recovering our Creative Calling
The conversation on Christianity and culture has been enriched and stimulated in recent years by the insights of Andy Crouch. In his book, Culture Making: Recovering our Creative Calling (Downers Grove: IVP Books, 2008), Crouch has offered his own taxonomy of Christian responses to culture. He identifies four strategies for cultural change, based primarily on the record of American Evangelicals in the past century.
Four Failed Strategies for Changing the World
First, we might condemn culture, as did the fundamentalists of the early 20th Century. This means, among other things, withdrawing from cultural institutions ranging from the entertainment industry to politics. While this strategy may temporarily protect us and our children from influences we deem harmful, it will likely have no effect on culture. People do not give up cultural goods simply because someone condemns them.
Alternatively, we might choose to critique culture. This strategy engages the culture in a conversation akin to that of Francis Schaeffer and others in the mid-20th Century. Crouch contends that this approach, while perhaps valuable for understanding and conversing with culture, also has limited effect. It tends to fall into the erroneous academic assumption that once you have analyzed a thing, you have changed it.
Third, we might copy culture. In this case, we adopt the forms of culture, but replace its offensive content with content of our own. A 20th-Century example is Contemporary Christian Music. This strategy, however, tends only to feed a Christian subculture with knock-off cultural products that are always a few steps behind the mainstream. The effect on the culture at large is minimal.
The final strategy is to consume culture strategically in an effort to influence cultural markets in positive ways. The underlying assumption is that if Christians in sufficient numbers patronize positive cultural products and avoid harmful ones, they can steer the culture in healthy directions. However, in the contemporary global marketplace, this strategy also proves to be ineffective.
Postures and Gestures
Crouch’s description and evaluation of these four strategies rings true. But his best contributions to our discussion are two insights he offers for moving forward.
First, he calls us to distinguish between “gestures” and “postures” toward culture. A “gesture” is an appropriate response to a particular cultural artifact or good. Some artifacts should rightly be condemned and others should be critiqued. Copying some cultural goods and consuming others is also appropriate, depending on the nature of the goods themselves. These responses only become inappropriate when they become habits, or “postures” toward all of culture.
The second insight is that the only way to change culture is to create culture. Each cultural artifact affects the world around it, provoking a response, giving way to other cultural goods, changing the horizon of that which is possible. This change may be minute, but it is change nevertheless, and it is the only way that culture changes. The appropriate “postures” for Christians who would influence culture, Crouch suggests, are cultivation and creativity. Cultivate existing cultural products and trends and create new ones that are healthy and positive.
Crouch concludes that it is impossible to “change the world,” for two reasons. First, culture is only changed by the creation of new cultural goods. Second, no single cultural artifact has changed the world on a global scale.
All we can change is the culture closest to us. We can only change our world when “change the world” means “change a particular culture at a particular time and place” through cultivation and creativity.
The Cultural Task of Preaching
What, then, would we say to the warrior, the pacifist, and the diplomat? What is the preacher’s best cultural strategy?
The cultural warrior must recognize that we cannot change (transform) the world (culture) with our sermons, because culture is not a monolith, but a plurality, a paradox, a process. The pacifist must realize that we cannot hide from the world, because the church before which we stand to preach is by its very nature mission. The diplomat must see that we cannot allow the world to set the agenda because, when we do, we can only respond with condemnation, critique, imitation, or consumption—mere gestures with no missional effect.
We preachers must become cultural creatives. We need to produce cultural goods (sermons/ministry) that shape the contours of our small corner of the world (a local church) so as to create a space for God’s people to engage in a vital conversation with the gospel and with the world. Our best strategy is to nurture a community of cultural creatives—to create a culture that compels them daily to produce their own cultural contributions, and change the world, one small corner at a time.
For this we need a map, a blueprint to guide our architecture. For such a map, we turn to the one who, in a three-year ministry, constructed a culture among a small, rag-tag community of peasant preachers that would ultimately turn the world upside down. The cultural architecture of Jesus is the subject of our next post.
