PreachingToday.com: The importance of culture is a thriving topic that evangelicals are really latching onto right now. In your book, you say, "We talk about culture as if it were primarily a set of ideas, when it is primarily a set of tangible goods." Talk about that.

Andy Crouch: It's true that culture is about meaning and ideas; that's very important. But what I'm trying to draw our attention to in the book is that those meanings and ideas, or those texts or narratives or whatever word you want to use—world views—have no cultural existence unless they're embodied, unless they take concrete form—literal, tangible form. Even a conversation like this, which is a cultural artifact, is moving air. Right now as you and I speak it's moving through the air, moving sound waves. Then when it's played back, it's moving airwaves again. In other words, it's embodied in the world. It doesn't just float around as an idea. I really found this out by publishing a book, because I've been talking with people about the ideas in my book for years, and I've been speaking on them and teaching and preaching on them. But it's amazing what happens when you put those ideas in the physical form of a book—something changes. We probably would never have gotten around to doing this interview if it hadn't been embodied.

What do we gain when we start to pay attention to the kind of embodied material reality of culture? Well, it opens up a lot of things that we weren't aware of as culture that actually are very influential. In the book I talk about the interstate highway system, for example. If you want to talk about our culture's world view or the sort of meanings or texts or narratives that have shaped our culture, you might never get around to talking about the interstate highway system, but the truth is, the interstate highway system has shaped the way Americans imagine that life should be, the way that they conceive of the world, the possibilities they can embrace, the impossibilities that they just reject out of hand. All of that has been profoundly shaped by essentially an act of civil engineering. These very material, concrete things—of course this applies to technology, architecture, etc.—are also transmitting meaning in a very powerful way to us and shaping our sense of the world we're in. Culture is ultimately about the meaning of the world. What does this world amount to? What does this world mean? The way that we human beings engage in that meaning-making process is to engage in a material-making process—to actually make stuff. That's how we come to our consensus and awareness of what we think it all means.

In your book, you talk about five important questions relating to cultural artifacts. What do we, as preachers, need to think about and ask about as we relate to the culture we've got right now?

For any cultural artifact—and by that I mean any tangible cultural good that human beings have created and passed on as part of the cultural inheritance—you can ask five questions that are very enlightening and kind of diagnostic about the world this cultural good creates.

The first question is: What does this cultural good assume about the way the world is? When the people who first envisioned it and made it, what were they assuming about reality? What was their starting point?

Let's look at the interstate highway system. It assumes the existence of the automobile. If we hadn't had the automobile, we wouldn't have highways, at least not the kind that we designed. It assumes the existence of this nation of 48 states that needs to be connected. So the world has these far-flung United States, and they need an infrastructure to bind them more closely together. It assumes a world of threat, because the instigator of the interstate highway system was General Eisenhower who had seen the autobahns in Germany—that gave him his idea—and the looming Russian threat, so he said, "We need a more effective way to move military equipment around the country." Therefore, the federal act that created the interstate highway system was called the "National Interstate Highway System and Defense Act." So the original plan for the interstate highways was both to be a commercial vehicle for transport of goods, but also it really assumed this military role. Many of us have forgotten that that was a very important part of why it was created. So that's question one: What does this good assume about the way the world is?

The second question points more to the meaning-making function of culture: What does a cultural artifact assume about the way the world should be? Every act of creating a cultural good is, in a way, stretching or yearning towards something that's not yet present in the world that we think should be present. The interstate highway system assumed that people should be connected more closely to each other. It assumed that it's a good thing for goods to be able to be transported to markets far away. It assumed that it's good for people to be able to move. Now, think about how this has shaped our American imagination of ourselves as a mobile people. It builds on the mobility of pioneers and caravans, but it said, "We're going to take this to another level. We're going to make it possible to cross the whole country in less than a week." This ability was completely unthinkable before, but the connectedness was seen as a good thing.

The existence of the interstate system also assumes that your experience in the world should be uniform, right? When you travel from Massachusetts to Ohio to North Dakota to Washington, the signage is going to be the same, the turning radius as you get off of the exits is going to be the same. There's a standardization that happens, which means that you're not going to need as much facility in local culture. You'll be able to travel all over the United States and encounter the same basic culture everywhere. So the assumption is that this a good thing, and it probably is a good thing in some ways. So those are the first two questions: What does this good assume about the way the world is already, and what does it assume about the way the world ought to be?

Then there's another pair of questions: What does this new cultural artifact make possible that was not possible before, and what does it make impossible that was possible before? Americans are very optimistic people, and we always like to talk about possibilities, so it's very easy for us to list off the things that the interstate highway system made possible. But nearly every cultural good, as it opens up new possibilities, also closes off things that were possible before.

The example I use in the book is something that was completely possible to our ancestors, which is to ride a horse from Boston to Philadelphia. People did that all the time in the 18th and 19th centuries, but now it's completely, as far as I can tell, impossible. In fact, in many parts of the country when you get on the interstate highway system, there is a little sign at the entrance of a horse with a line drawn through it. It was completely normal for our ancestors to ride horses between major cities, even cities hundreds of miles apart, and it's now inconceivable. Well, what did that? Culture did that. So sometimes I say that culture defines for human beings the horizons of the possible. It defines for us what we can imagine doing. For instance, yesterday I got on a plane and in two hours, with no effort on my part, I was in Chicago. I was in Philadelphia in the morning and Chicago in the afternoon. Something never possible before is now completely possible. At the same time, things that my grandparents would have taken for granted as possibilities are now all but inconceivable to me.

This really matters for preachers, because the people who come into our churches and listen to our sermons live in this valley of possibility, you might say. We all live in that valley of possibility that culture has sort of constructed for us; it's very difficult for us to conceive of life—a way of living and being—that's not within the horizons. Yet, those horizons are in some ways very arbitrary and are changeable—they have changed—so we have to begin our preaching by just asking, "What are the horizons for the people that I'm with week to week, and how can I help them?" Because we all sense that horizons are not always quite in the right place, we ask, "How can I help them envision moving those horizons in some way?"

The fifth and final question is this: Once this cultural good is in the world, what new culture is created in response to it? Culture is never static. People are always creating new culture. People look at existing cultural goods and say, "Well, now that that is here, I could make this." For example, we would not have fast food restaurants in the United States like we do if the interstate highway system hadn't been developed. Think about the Cracker Barrel restaurants, which look like rickety old shacks with country stores in them. Of course the chain has been purpose-built, and the only place you can find them is by interstate highway exits. That's a piece of culture that was created in response to the interstate highways; they'd never appeared if the interstates had not been created.

Culture is often for the most part taken for granted. In fact, we have to take it for granted a lot of the time. I mean, if you and I stopped to ponder, "We're using the English language here. What does that mean? Why aren't we speaking French?" we would get paralyzed, right? We have to just use the English language. But there is real insight that can be gained from stepping back from the English language—or from the architectural form of the church building that we worship in—that our people just take for granted: "Oh, of course that's what church looks like." This mindset creates certain possibilities, but it closes off other possibilities.

You don't talk just about culture in this book; you have a passion for culture making. How can preachers help their people be culture makers?

We've gotten all too good at analyzing culture in the Christian community. The days are past, if they ever existed, when you could ignore the culture and just preach the gospel. Christians are very aware of the need to be relevant in this sort of exigent culture, but I've really become convinced that that's an inadequate and even sub-Christian approach to culture, for two reasons. The first is that if culture's horizons are misplaced—if our culture allows some possibilities that never were intended to be possible and sees as impossible some things that God actually intends to be possible—then the only way we're going to change culture and move towards the good horizons that God intended is to make more culture. Human cultures change when people make more cultural goods; they don't actually change when people just criticize or analyze or consume. None of those postures towards culture leads to real cultural change. The only time cultures change is when someone says, "I see the existing horizons, and I think there's this new thing that ought to be in the world." And sometimes, by the grace of God, those new cultural goods actually move the horizons in a beneficial direction. So if we love our neighbor—who lives within these horizons and whom we want to see live in a more flourishing culture, as God intended human beings to live—we've got to be committed to creating culture, not just critiquing it.

What does this mean for preaching? I think it means we need to take inventory of how we talk about the culture around us. As a teacher and preacher, I'm tempted just to critique, to point out flaws, to say things like, "Well, you all really like that TV show, but let me tell you how it falls short of the gospel." But if that TV show doesn't present an adequate picture of the human life, what kind of show would you make? What would you create, what would you suggest that we create in its place? No one's going to take that TV show off the air because I critique it, but TV shows do go off the air when someone proposes a better one.

It seems, too, that Christians should be involved in proposing better movies, better ways of zoning our communities, better tax structures. Culture isn't only film and art. Zoning and architecture and civil engineering really matter as well.

Now, the other reason cultural creativity matters is that it's actually, biblically, what human beings are designed to do. It's present right in the Creation. God creates image-bearers. Who is God? God is the Creator. Who are his image-bearers? Those who will—in the world that God has given them—cultivate and create. That is, those who will do the work of culture. God's assignment—his gift for humanity before the fall—is to cultivate the world. If we omit that and give people the impression that our only job is to bring people to church and get them into the safe, eternally secure confines of the Christian community, we're abdicating what we know from Scripture that human beings were meant to do, which is to be part of cultivating and creating in the world. There's a pragmatic reason to care about cultural creativity, which is that it's only through creativity that cultures change. But there's also a deeper, more essential reason to care about it, which is that this is what human beings are meant to do, and they flourish when they're given opportunities to cultivate and create in the world.

People call this the cultural mandate. That's a good phrase, although to me it sounds like a duty, whereas, in fact, it's this great overflowing gift that comes out of the abundance of the world. This is how you flourish as a human being: to take up this calling to cultivate and create.

I love that term cultural flourishing.

Flourish is a word that is being used more and more, and it's a terrific word. In part, it comes from this recovery of the bookends of the Bible—Genesis and Revelation. Genesis begins and Revelation ends with visions of a flourishing world: the original very good world and the even more wonderful re-created world in Revelation 21 and 22. Think forward to that city; it's culture. A city is a full flowering of human culture. A garden is cultural too—it's not just wilderness. God doesn't just stick them in a field or prairie; it's already been cultivated. But a city is cultural complexity, and that's the best gift God can give to humanity at the end of history.

When you're searching for a word to describe what life is like in the beginning and at the end, flourishing is the word that just naturally emerges. The idea that the good news is about rescue from punishment, which is, it seems to me, biblical and true, has less resonance in our culture now. It's harder to get people to really latch onto that as good news. They get stuck on the bad news part. But if you say that not only are we rescued by Christ from everlasting separation from God, but we are brought into what Jesus called life and abundant life—that we are brought into human flourishing—I think our neighbors are looking for that. I don't know that they're looking to be rescued from hell, though maybe they should be, but I know they're asking, "How can I have more of a genuinely flourishing life than the life that I have? Do my yearnings towards flourishing mean something—point toward something?" That's a powerful connection with our neighbors, that we can say, "Yes, the gospel is all about that." It's not just about what you won't experience; it's also about what you will experience.

It's an unfortunate truth that when it comes to culture, Christians are known for what we're against. We're known for the things we want people to stop doing. And there are some things people should stop doing, but people will never stop doing something until you give them something else to do. What if Christians became known for the flourishing culture that we ourselves created? Or for celebrating the culture others are creating? That could be of tremendous evangelistic value—for Christians to be known as people who celebrate culture when it is at its best.

You've made a real point in your book to say culture is not just the arts, though it certainly is that. What are some other examples of culture that can help preachers communicate this vision of culture making?

The most important thing any preacher can do is to celebrate cultural creativity and cultivation. We're called not only to make new things, but also to take care of things that are already good. Let me give an example of that. I lived in Boston in the 1980s, and I spoke with a pastor of a major church there. We were reflecting on the ways the church doesn't always recognize the culture cultivators and creators in its midst. This pastor said, "There's a woman in our church who was the lead litigator for the Environmental Protection Agency for the clean up of Boston Harbor. It's occurred to me since then that she played this incredibly important role in one of the great environmental success stories of the second half of the Twentieth Century. When I started high school, no one would put a toe in Boston Harbor, it was so polluted. And now there are beaches, and people go to the beach and swim. This Christian woman lawyer succeeded in litigating that case." He said, "The only time we have ever recognized her in church was for her role in teaching second grade Sunday school. And of course we absolutely should celebrate Sunday school teachers, but why did we never celebrate her incredible contribution to our whole city as a Christian, taking care of God's creation?"

Do we just celebrate people when they use their talents in a way that benefits the church and our church programs directly? Or do we look for examples of people who have benefitted culture? When you start thinking about it, you'll realize, Oh, yeah, there's so-and-so who has started this business with employees and is running it in a really honest and faithful way, or, Oh, I heard that so-and-so has started a sports program in a neighborhood where the kids don't have a lot of opportunities to play sports. You start to realize this is actually happening in your congregation, but maybe you've never told these stories.

I have started to pay pretty close attention when I'm sitting in church—both to my own pastors and when I visit other churches—to what stories are told. When we have to tell stories of remarkable faith, who do we tell about? Unfortunately, we professional Christians often tell stories about other professional Christians. We tell a story of a missionary, or we tell a story of another pastor, or we tell a story of someone who was out in the evil world of work but gave it all up to become a missionary or a pastor. Those are legitimate stories, and I'm not saying we should stop telling them, but what about telling the story of the entrepreneur who took a big risk to start a business that she really believed needed to be started? Or the non-profit leader or the local government official? Those stories exist; we just haven't been looking for them.

In your book you say that family—our own home setting—is really where people have their most effective culture making.

When I started writing this book, I thought it was really going to be for the people we sometimes call "cultural creatives"—young, urban people with interesting hair who work as graphic designers or something. But the more I thought about culture, the more I realized that, first of all, this is not for a subset of people. There's not a small group of human beings who are naturally creative whose job it is to do culture. We're all in this, and we're all called to be cultivating and creative.

Then I started to write much more than I expected about family, because family is the place where many of us have the most opportunity to shape our culture—not just family in the sense of a married couple with children, but our household. If you're single you may live with a couple of other people; you may live in an apartment building. Whatever your household is, you probably have more scope to shape what life is like in that setting—in a sense, what the culture of that place is like—than you do anywhere else. For example, when I go to work, I can shape some things about work, but there's a lot that I just have to kind of fit in with. But in my home, the culture of my family is what my wife and I decide it will be. Will it be a culture where we manage to have dinner together every night, or a culture where we never manage to have dinner all together every night? Will it be a culture where we mostly consume entertainment products created outside our home, or where we actually build our lives around creating stuff together: cooking and making music and building a fire to sit around? We have a lot of choices in our household that, realistically, we don't have in larger scales of culture. So if you want to talk about creating culture, I'd say start where you have the capacity to create something, and for a lot of us, that's our home.

This is the human calling. It's not just a few of us who are the culture people. We're all called to cultivate the world, and that can be the garden in your backyard, or it can be the ten thousand hectares that you're in charge of if you're in agribusiness. We're all called to cultivate the world, and we're all called to ask, "What's missing around me that I need to bring into the world?"

My definition of culture, which I borrowed it from Ken Myers, is simple: Culture is what we make of the world. It's the stuff we make of the world, and it's also the sense—the meaning—that we make of the world.

In addition to having a tremendous impact on our family, we can also have a great impact on our church. That certainly relates to how preachers can talk about the culture of their church.

Yes, totally. When we think of culture as not just one big thing that's out there that we're worried about, but recognizing it happens on all these different scales, we find the same principles that apply to changing the culture on the larger scale also apply to changing the culture of our churches. So there's a lot in this book that will be helpful just as leaders within a community. You can ask those five diagnostic questions of your Sunday school program or of your own preaching: What does this make possible? What does it make impossible? What does it assume about the way the world is? What does it assume about the way the world should be? What new culture might we create in response? You can use these with your fellow leaders in your church to shape the culture of your church, not just the wider culture.

Is there anything else you hope preachers would take away from the book?

I hope that we will stop seeing culture as competition. Whenever I speak I think I'm competing with Jon Stewart. I mean, the people listening to me right now were just yesterday listening to Jon Stewart, and they're hoping I'll be half as funny and interesting as he is. And we can often think the church is competing with the culture—that we're competing for our peoples' attention and energy and commitment with the culture. I hope that we would start to have the sort of faith and confidence to believe that if the church fulfills what I think is its biblical role—to form and commission people to go out and be part of the culture and contribute to the culture—that that will not subtract from their commitment to the church but will actually enliven and deepen their commitment to the church, because the church is suddenly saying, "We care about what you're doing Monday through Saturday. We care about your whole life, and the meaning of what you're cultivating and creating, even when you're not within the walls of our building." If we saw it that way, we'd realize we're not in competition with the culture.

The more that we as preachers and as leaders equip our people to serve well and understand their calling in the world, the more they will feel truly served and excited about being part of what the church is doing in the world. So if we could eventually see ourselves not as competitors but indeed as stewards, as contributors, as responsible for the culture around us, that would be a significant, world-altering change in perspective.

Andy Crouch is a senior editor at Christianity Today International and author of Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling.