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Andy Crouch's very fine Culture Making will be joining the short list of books that I read again and again, and fervently recommend to others, for insights into how we are to live as Christians. On behalf of one of my employers I have placed an advance order at my favorite bookstore, Byron Borger's Hearts & Minds, for ninety copies to share with my colleagues, and students in one of the undergraduate courses I teach will be reading Culture Making early in 2009.
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Culture Making is rich in provocations—for example, in its re-telling over several chapters of the overarching story found in the Christian Bible and the implications drawn from this re-telling, or in its critique of H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture, or in its definition of cultural power as "the ability to successfully propose a new cultural good." I was particularly struck by the distinction that Crouch draws between cultural gestures and postures.
"Our posture," Crouch writes, "is our learned by unconscious default position, our natural stance. It is the position our body assumes when we aren't paying attention, the basic attitude we carry through life." In response to the various circumstances we encounter, we make a variety of gestures through the course of a day—Crouch lists as examples stopping to pick up mail, curling up in a chair to read to a child, reaching for something high on a shelf, embracing a spouse, or warding off the attacks of an assailant. "Over time," he suggests, "certain gestures may become habit—that is, become part of our posture":
I've met former Navy SEALS who walk through life in a half-articulated crouch, ready to pounce or defend. I've met models and actors who carry themselves, even in their own home, as if they are on stage. I've met soccer players who bounce on the balls of their feet wherever they go, agile and swift. And I've met teenage video-game addicts whose thumbs are always restless and whose shoulders betray a perpetual hunch toward an invisible screen. What began as an occasional gesture, appropriate for particular opportunities and challenges, has become a basic part of their approach to the world.
Expanding his observation into metaphor, Crouch makes this connection: "Something similar, it seems to me, has happened at each stage of American Christians' engagement with culture."
Crouch argues that American Christians adopted broadly four stances in relation to culture during the course of the 20th century, in each case taking an appropriate gesture toward certain elements of culture and inappropriately expanding it into a comprehensive posture toward the common culture in general. While some cultural products (like sex trafficking) demand outright condemnation from Christians, a posture of condemnation fails to account for the goodness of culture, warps Christian testimony to hope and mercy, facilitates hypocrisy, and—particularly in response to artistic works—comes across as "shrill and silly." Critique, by contrast, is an entirely appropriate response to works of art, the more so the better the art. But a posture of critique diminishes the delight to be taken in many good products of culture, and encourages a certain kind of cultural passivity that overemphasizes analysis and underappreciates participation and production. A pot of tea, a loaf of bread—the best first response to these is savoring consumption. But a posture of consumption limits us to living "unthinkingly within a culture's preexisting horizons of possibility and impossibility." Consumerism is capitulation to the existing culture at a deep level, allowing our very identity to be defined by what we can purchase. Copying from a culture is, at best, a recognition of "the lesson of Pentecost that every human language, every human cultural form, is capable of bearing the good news." But copying as a posture produces inauthentic, dated, and tame results.
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