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The search for the "common good" can be traced back for millennia. The idea of a "counterculture," at least by that name, goes back only to 1968. So this year's question for the Christian Vision Project—How can followers of Christ be a counterculture for the common good?—juxtaposes the ancient and the new. That same juxtaposition makes Frederica Mathewes-Green a perennially compelling voice. A veteran of the original counterculture who traveled through Hinduism before coming to faith in Christ, Mathewes-Green eventually found her spiritual home in Eastern Orthodoxy, the church in which her husband is now a pastor. In her prolific writing and speaking, she traverses the ground between movies and icons, consumer culture and spiritual disciplines. A longtime contributor to Christianity Today, she is a columnist for Beliefnet and a movie reviewer for National Review Online. Her most recent book is First Fruits of Prayer (Paraclete). Here she calls us away from preoccupation with the shifting winds of "the culture" toward a more central, and lasting, mission.

If you hang around with Christians, you find that the same topic keeps coming up in conversation: their worries about "the culture." Christians talk about sex and violence in popular entertainment. They talk about bias in news reporting. They talk about how their views are ignored or misrepresented. "The culture" appears to be an aggressive challenger to "the church," and Christians keep worrying what to do about it. You soon get the impression that Church Inc. and Culture Amalgamated are like two corporations confronting each other at a negotiating table. Over there sits Culture—huge, complex, and self-absorbed. It's powerful, dangerous, unpredictable, and turbulent. Church is smaller, anxious; it studies Culture, trying to figure out a way to weasel in.

But there are flaws in this picture. For one thing, neither party is as monolithic as it seems. There are many devout believers among the ranks of journalists and entertainers, and there are even more culture-consumers among the ranks of devout believers. Indeed, it's almost impossible to avoid absorbing this culture; if you sealed the windows, it would leak in under the door. I once heard a retreat leader say she'd attempted a "media fast," but found the gaudy world met her on every side. "I may be free in many ways," she said, "But I am not free to not know what Madonna is doing."

Furthermore, the church is not a corporation; rather, it is incorporate, or better, incarnate, carried in the vulnerable bodies of fallible individuals who love and follow Jesus Christ. The culture is even less of an organization. It is more like a photomosaic composed of tiny faces, faces of the millions of people—or billions, rather, thanks to the worldwide toxic leak of American entertainment—who are caught up in its path.

The influence of the culture on all those individuals, including Christians, is less like that of a formal institution and more like the weather. We can observe that, under current conditions, it's cloudy with a chance of cynicism. Crudity is up, nudity is holding steady, and there is a 60 percent chance that any recent movie will include a shot of a man urinating. Large fluffy clouds of sentimental spirituality are increasing on the horizon, but we have yet to see whether they will blow toward or away from Christian truth. Stay tuned for further developments.

As Mark Twain famously remarked, everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it. I think much of our frustration is due to trying to steer the weather, rather than trying to reach individuals caught up in the storm.

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March 2006, Vol. 50, No. 3