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If cultivating and creating are so central to our biblical vocation, why have they been put aside?

The disenfranchisement of conservative Christians from cultural power at the dawn of the 20th century elicited strong reaction. Just two generations after evangelical Protestants had been intimately involved in building almost every major post-Civil War cultural institution, they either were kicked out or left voluntarily. People who wanted to hold on to theologically conservative beliefs thought you couldn't do that and participate fully in mainstream culture. We've spent a century working our way back from the fallout of that.

Last century we also saw the rise of mass consumption as a way of life in America. When you look at newspapers from 100 years ago the principle word used to refer to Americans in general was citizen. Now the word USA Today uses most often to refer to all of us is consumers. And if we want to talk about people in their civic role we don't usually call them citizens but voters. Think about how different those words are, how much thinner a word voter is than citizen. It's not just Christians but Americans in general who have adopted a posture of waiting passively for cultural offerings. We think it's our job simply to figure out what we like and buy it.

Finally, being an effective cultivator and creator requires certain disciplines—cultivating a certain awareness and willingness to work at things in the world. Consumer culture has made it easy to get along in many spheres without learning basic skills, whether it's how to keep the garden growing or how to cook. Although technology gives us an amazing sense of power and infinite capacity, it does so by taking over all these things that our parents and grandparents knew how to do. But there is a backlash. People are starting to realize that we've lost some capacities that we don't want to lose.

Your book returns us to a much older story—the biblical story—and shows where humans stand in that greater, ancient narrative.

One of the things that has hindered evangelical cultural creativity has been a nostalgia for the nineteenth century when we were dominant culturally in a way that we will probably never be again. Ancient Israel is a much better place to start because it was so small, always beleaguered, always overwhelmed by empires around them, and yet they sustained this incredible, world-changing culture. That's a much more instructive picture than hoping that we can reclaim the kind of cultural control that evangelicals briefly had at one point in American history.

You challenge the use of the word culture as an abstraction. Why is it so important to understand that all culture making begins locally?

This is one of the things I care about most in the book. We get paralyzed by thinking of culture as one monolithic, huge thing out there, when in fact the larger the scale the less anyone can claim to shape it. Much that's of paramount importance in culture happens only on a local scale. While my neighborhood is affected by forces that stretch all the way up to global levels, there are many things about my neighborhood that can only be cultivated locally. No government agency can do it. No Hollywood movie can affect it. It's up to me and my neighbors. And that's a very significant portion of the culture that I'm responsible for. If I spend all my time preoccupied with grand, global scales of society I'm likely not to be responsible in the one place where I could probably make a difference.

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September 2008, Vol. 52, No. 9