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Here is the final installment in a 6-part interview with Andy Crouch concerning his book Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling.

Trevin Wax: John Seel has written a review of your book that critiques some of the major points of your book. Could you briefly respond to a couple of Seel’s objections here?

Andy Crouch: If you choose to write a book on a subject as vast as culture, you can be sure you will leave a lot of important things out. John identifies some areas where he wishes I had placed more emphasis. He is especially keen to stress the role that institutions play in transmitting culture’s matrix of meanings.

Indeed, institutions are very important and I probably didn’t spend enough time on them in the book. Institutions are like cultural flywheels—they accumulate cultural energy and then disperse it over long periods. When you want to talk about how cultures maintain their staying power and are transmitted from generation to generation, institutions become centrally important.

However, I am by no means sure that institutions are singularly important when it comes to the *creation,* as opposed to the dissemination and conservation, of culture. Creativity almost always happens at the margins, and the most powerful social movements, as I discuss in my book, combine actors with great institutional power (think LBJ in the Civil Rights era) and actors with no cultural standing whatsoever (think Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference).

As the basic unit of cultural change, I much prefer the term “networks” to “institutions” because I think that word captures a more flexible, responsive kind of cultural consolidation that often, it seems to me, is more crucial to cultural change than established institutions are.

In this respect I think John misreads Randall Collins’s massive book The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, which he discusses in his review, when he talks about Collins’s emphasis on “institutions.” The word “institution” does not even appear in the index of Collins’s book, nor in any chapter title, nor more than a handful of unimportant times in the book’s text. It seems to me that Collins is making a case for the power of small networks to create and perpetuate cultural change, not the role of gatekeeper institutions, even if sometimes the networks and the institutions overlap. (One can also legitimately question whether philosophy, and the way the culture of philosophy is transmitted and transformed, is a reliable model for every other possible cultural domain!)

Furthermore, an emphasis on institutions inevitably leads, in academic sociology and in John’s work, to an emphasis on elites. It is strange that John does not acknowledge at all the vast recent sociological literature that contests the importance of elites by doing sociology “from below.” This is a huge ongoing debate in the discipline and I would hate for readers to think that the matter is as settled as John suggests it is.

As it happens, I don’t disagree that elites play a disproportionate role in cultural change. But I was writing my book not for elites, but for any interested, motivated Christian.

The reality is that the number of people who really qualify as “elites” is, by definition, very very small. I go to a larger Episcopal church in a suburb of Philadelphia full of upper-middle-class, well-educated people—hardly a culturally marginalized setting—and even in that church the number of people I would truly call “cultural elites” could be counted on one hand.

So what does God have to say—what does a biblical vision of culture have to say—to the vast majority of us who are not “cultural elites”? There’s got to be some good news for the rest of us if *all* of us are created to be culture makers in the image of a creative God.

And there is good news, because God is in the business of overturning the assumptions of what is “high” and what is “low,” what is “powerful” and what is “weak,” what is “great” and what is “small,” indeed, of bringing to nothing the things that are and giving being to things that were nothing, so that no flesh may boast in the presence of God.

I wanted to write an account of culture that would do justice to that extraordinary good news at the heart of the Bible’s story of culture: that God is more than able to take “the smallest of all the nations” in the second millennium before the common era, to take a handful of fishermen, tax collectors, and prostitutes in Roman Judea, to take a subjugated people only a few generations removed from chattel slavery in the American South, and to transform culture through them.

Certainly not all cultural change happens through that kind of amazing, grace-filled intervention in the lives of the apparently powerless. But that is the kind of cultural transformation, it seems to me, that brings the greatest glory to God.

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