Christians have been waging a culture war (or at least talking about waging one) for decades and have very little to show for it. Two of the primary reasons for this failure are, first, Christians do not understand culture and, second, they have nothing to offer in its place. While Christians are quick to criticize and condemn the "culture," they generally offer little more than puritanical platitudes as an alternative. You can't fight something with nothing. Perhaps someone should write a book about this common evangelical misunderstanding and offer real solutions to aid Christians in their noble, but misguided, efforts of "culture reclamation."
Providentially someone has, and that someone is Andy Crouch. Andy's new book, Culture Making, is a vitally important contribution to the "culture war" between what Augustine referred to as the City of Man and the City of God. Few books of recent publication have contained the perceptive insight and practical wisdom that Crouch brings to the culture debate. He understands the real issues of the culture war and dives well below the surface level of most modern musings on the subject. From his perch as an editorial director at Christianity Today International he has a bird's eye view of the culture and the various tactics and strategies that the Church has employed over the years. His book is divided into three parts: Culture, Gospel, and Calling. Because each of these sections builds on each other and because I believe that this book is the one of the most important recent books on the subject—and certainly the most readable—we will look at each of his three parts separately.
Culture
To begin with, Crouch makes the concession that the very word "culture" is a very arbitrary and confusing word. He writes: "The literary critic Terry Eagleton observes, not reassuringly, that culture has been called the second most complicated word in the English language, after nature" (p. 10). This fact alone makes fighting the culture war doubly difficult because the armies are not speaking the same language, even within their own ranks. Crouch takes pains in his first part to make it clear exactly what he means when he says "culture" and I think it is a valuable contribution towards translating what we should mean when we use the word.
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