How Do We Change the Culture?

How Do We Change the Culture?

Here is an interesting summary of a part of a chapter in Andy Crouch’s Culture Making:

“The only way to change culture is to create more of it.”

Because culture is the accumulation of tangible things, not something vague or ethereal, it can be changed only by creating some new tangible things that gain a wide enough acceptance by the public to reshape their world. Since cultures are always “full,” one has to create something new that will convince enough people to set aside some current cultural good and exchange it for the new cultural good. However, Christians often choose other less effective strategies for changing the culture. Condemning the culture usually doesn’t work since people will continue to consume the cultural goods even if we disapprove of them. Critiquing the culture doesn’t work either, merely producing more sophisticated analyses that have no effect on people’s choices of cultural goods. Copying culture doesn’t work either since it merely creates a sub-culture that consumes its goods while the larger culture ignores them. Consuming culture is also a poor strategy for change since individual consumers have a negligible effect on a global, or even national, culture. Instead, the best way to change the culture is to create new cultural goods that are better or more attractive so that the public will consume them, and thus change the culture.