Today, I continue my interview with Andy Crouch – author of Culture Making:Recovering Our Creative Calling. (Click here for Part 1 of the interview.)
Trevin Wax: Andy, you write that “the way to change culture is to create more of it” – and you focus specifically on material goods.
Look back over evangelicalism in the past thirty years and tell me what three material goods (created by evangelicals) you believe to have been the most “culture-making” (in the wider world)?
Andy Crouch: I would say that probably the most widely influential thing American evangelicals have done is invest in international relief and development.
Two years ago on December 1st, I turned on the top-of-the-hour NPR news summary and heard Richard Stearns, the president of World Vision, giving the leadoff sound bite in the story about World AIDS Day. He wasn’t being interviewed because his organization is distinctively and deeply Christian—in fact his Christian affiliation wasn’t mentioned—but rather because his organization is one of the most credible in the world on this topic. I think that is an amazing achievement and it reflects the strength of evangelicals in international affairs generally, seen in the growth of organizations like the Institute for Global Engagement and International Justice Mission. We punch way above our weight in that area, and that’s increasingly being recognized.
Probably second on my list would be the collected works of Pixar. Now, Pixar is certainly not a Christian organization like World Vision in any way. But several of its key creative talent are Christian believers, like Andrew Stanton, the writer and director of Wall-E, and they have created astonishingly excellent cultural works that have also been economically successful. Indeed, their two most recent films, Ratatouille and Wall-E, happen to be about exactly what my book is about—creating and cultivating, respectively.
Finally, you’d need to mention the very solid contributions that evangelical Christians have made to several academic fields.
George Marsden’s biography of Jonathan Edwards won the most prestigious prize in the field of American history. The Society of Christian Philosophers is the largest and most vital subgroup of the American Philosophical Association. The sociologist Christian Smith is one of the leading figures in his discipline—he just edited an issue of Social Forces, one of that profession’s most important journals, and has a remarkable book coming out from Oxford University Press next year on human personhood.
These are fields where evangelicals have created cultural goods—books, articles, lectures—that have changed attitudes and shaped the direction of research for countless others.
Trevin Wax: Tomorrow, Andy will answer some questions about how Christians should critique cultural goods.
