Today, I continue my interview with Andy Crouch, author of Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling
Trevin Wax: In your book, you critique the emphasis that “worldview thinking” places upon analysis and thought. You believe we need fewer critics of cultural goods and more creators of cultural goods.
But considering the fact that a great number of Christians simply consume culture without critically thinking about the messages of these goods convey, I am concerned that we don’t have enough critics or creators of cultural goods.
You mention that too much analysis can keep us from purely “enjoying” art, but I’m not sure that enjoyment and thinking critically are necessarily opposed to one another. I’m also concerned that some evangelicals might take that section of your book as a free pass to watch or listen to whatever they want and to dismiss the idea of worldview-critique.
Andy Crouch: It’s a fair point. We absolutely need to be discerning in our relationship with the cultural goods around us. This is the point of the five questions I urge us to ask about every cultural artifact:
- What does this artifact assume about the way the world is?
- What does it assume about the way the world should be?
- What does it make possible?
- What does it make impossible, or at least a lot more difficult?
- And what new culture is created in response?
These questions certainly include the issues that “worldview thinking” addresses, though I think they go a bit beyond to examine the concrete effects of cultural goods as well as the ideas and values they embody. I would love for more Christians to use questions like these in all sorts of settings, for what we consume as well as what we cultivate and create.
Last week I purchased the first television our family has ever owned. You can bet I went through those questions several times before making the decision to buy that TV, because I’m keenly aware that bringing this cultural good into our home will make some things possible and other things impossible or much more difficult. Indeed, once I’ve answered those questions, part of my responsibility as a Christian is to ask what other new cultural goods I need to introduce into our family’s life to mitigate the potential “impossibilities” that the TV might create.
For example, I need to consider where the TV is placed in the house—in our case, we put it in the basement, far from the heart of our family’s life, which centers around our dining table, grand piano, and fireplace.
I need to articulate values for our kids about what we will use the TV for—watching movies we have chosen in advance rather than, God forbid, turning on the TV to see “what’s on,” and for the most part avoiding advertising-supported content since I think that advertising-supported content is almost always inferior to content that people are asked to pay for directly. (This is why HBO is so much consistently better than network television.)
I may need to strengthen our family’s counter-consumption disciplines of generosity, which is why, at Catherine’s suggestion, we gave away twice what we spent on the television to Africa Rising, an organization that supports indigenous development efforts in East Africa.
But you see that if all I do is ask those five questions, I will have done very little to harness the good and minimize the harm of this new artifact I’m introducing into our family’s culture. I can’t just be a “cultural critic.” I have to move beyond that to asking what I will create if I’m to have any hope of shaping a flourishing culture in our home.
Worldview thinking is a fine place to start, but we need to move beyond it to creativity.
Trevin Wax: Tomorrow, we’ll see what Andy has to say about the importance of “conserving” culture.
