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It's possible to influence weather within limits, to seed clouds for rain, for example. And it is right for us to consider what we can do to provide quality fiction, films, and music, and to prepare young Christians to work in those fields. We can do some things to help improve ongoing conditions. But it is futile to think that we will one day take over the culture and steer it. It's too ungainly. It is composed of hundreds of competing sources. No one controls it.

What's more, it is already changing—constantly, ceaselessly, seamlessly—changing whether we want it to or not, in ways we can't predict, much less control. If you take the cultural temperature at any given moment, you will find that some of the bad things are starting to fade, and improvement is beginning to appear; simultaneously, some good things are starting to fall out of place, and a new bad thing is emerging.

Not only can we not control this process, we can't even perceive it until changes are so far developed as to be entrenched. Chasing the culture is a way to guarantee that you will always be a step behind the times.

One of my favorite classic films is It Happened One Night (1934), starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. This comedy won five Academy Awards and deserved them; it has some of the most original characters and clever writing you'll find in any American film. The underlying premise is that a couple will not have sex before marriage, and this romantic tension drives the plot.

Yet that does not guarantee uniform "positive values." Everyone in the movie smokes, including the heroine (while wearing her wedding gown). It's not even safe smoking: We see the hero light up in a haystack. What's more, the hero regularly directs physical threats at the heroine; he says, for example, "She needs someone to take a sock at her once a day, whether she's got it coming to her or not." While the cultural barometer in recent decades has been falling on sexual morality, indicators for smoking and violence against women have indisputably improved.

But the most striking element is the attitude toward drunkenness. The first time we see Gable's character he is roaring drunk, and this is assumed to be hilarious. His drunkenness is encouraged and subsidized by other characters. In the post-Prohibition decades, being drunk (as opposed to merely drinking) was seen as rebellious, cool, and fashionable, and people who objected were depicted as prudes and squares. That fad eventually passed, when the damage done by alcoholism could no longer be romanticized away.

Now, in the post-sexual-revolution decades, being promiscuous is seen as rebellious, cool, and fashionable, and people who object are depicted as prudes and squares. That fad will eventually pass, too, when the damage done by abortion, divorce, and sexually transmitted diseases can no longer be romanticized away.

We cannot instigate this change by appealing to morality, but simple common sense has a stubborn tendency to re-emerge. By the '70s it was becoming apparent that alcoholism dealt too much disease, divorce, and family disintegration to be all that funny. This change was not achieved by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) finally coming up with the bulls-eye slogan that would "change hearts and minds." Instead, people just came to their senses.

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March 2006, Vol. 50, No. 3