A friend of mine likes to quote G. K. Chesterton, who said, “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” I’ve just published a book called Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (which may or may not illustrate Chesterton’s axiom). So you might think that I’m eager for Christians—and any member of our society who cares about its preservation and renewal—to get out there and make something, anything, rather than simply marinating in the consumption and critique that so often are our default postures in the world.

And indeed there’s something to that. The best and most important things most of us will do with our lives—friendship, marriage, and parenthood, not to mention cooking, gardening, singing, and praying—will probably not be the things we do best, especially at first. They are worth doing badly, especially if the alternative is not daring to do them at all.

But what if we want to recover our creative calling and do it better than badly? What are the ingredients of the lasting excellence that can lead to the creation of cultural goods that have a widespread influence?

Here are five thoughts.

There’s a running joke in Washington, D.C., that the most-read section of a political memoir is its index, where the powerful turn first to find out how they, their friends, and their opponents are portrayed. Michael Lindsay’s impressive survey of evangelical “movement leaders” and “public leaders” is likely to prompt plenty of index-surfing in the coming months, for no one has covered the amazing variety of evangelical Christians in American culture with such depth and breadth.

What would you say to 1500 students at a Christian college, sitting in their biweekly required chapel service, as the guest speaker at the beginning of “Alcohol Awareness Week”? Here’s what I said—after two Scripture readings from Genesis 9 (Noah’s episode of drunkenness a few narrative moments after getting off the Ark) and John 2 (Jesus’ first sign at the wedding at Cana). As with all talks, it falls short of my standards for writing, but it still seems worth sharing. Cheers.

I have this feeling that I’ve been given a nearly impossible speaking assignment. Shane Claiborne was here on Tuesday, and I’m just not nearly as interesting as Shane. Shane lives in radical community in one of Philadelphia’s grittiest neighborhoods; I live in a cozy little suburb of Philadelphia with two kids in a lovely single-family home. I do not have nor have I ever had dreadlocks. I do not have a cool East Tennessee accent. And I do not make my own clothes. We may all be in for a boring time. Plus I’m here as part of Alcohol Awareness Week, and surely there is nothing so truly deadly as a speaker you’ve never met trying to make you “aware” of “alcohol.”

The only things I have going for me—the only things we have going for us—are these two crazy stories from the pages of Scripture. Two stories that give us two very different pictures of what alcohol means for people who want to be biblical people, who want to follow this story all the way to its surprise ending.

As our family sits together, eyes closed, we say grace. Today it’s Timothy’s turn. “God, thank you so much for all we have,” he begins in what turns into a typically prolix nine-year-old’s prayer. Eventually he is done—"in Jesus’ name, Amen"—and I turn the key. We have just filled up our car with gasoline.

There is just one reason we are saying grace at the gas station: a few months ago I read J. Matthew Sleeth’s book Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action, which very sensibly suggests that if Christians bless God for food, we also ought to bless him for fossil fuels. Those of us who say grace at restaurants know the discomfort one feels bringing a visible expression of religious gratitude into a public place. I can testify that it’s stranger still in a gas station, where one becomes aware just how unprayerful the act of pumping gas normally is. Unlike a well-prepared meal, gasoline does not prompt gratitude unbidden. The stuff is smelly, dangerous, and not at all self-evidently good in itself. It is a means to my ends, juice for a momentary sense of power and control. It is surprisingly hard to remember to stop and say thanks before I pull out, a little too quickly, into traffic.

Early in my college career, the distinguished literary critic Wayne Booth paid a visit to a class in which I had managed to wangle a seat. The text of the week was Booth’s Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, an attempt to rescue reasoned discourse from the clutches of corrosive modern skepticism. Asked a question about a point on one particular page, Booth borrowed the teaching assistant’s copy to check the exact wording. He looked up in surprise, a slight smile on his face, and said, “I see that the owner of this book has written in the margin, ‘Bullshit.’”

As the graduate student in question turned bright red and the rest of us laughed out loud, I noticed that Booth seemed strangely satisfied. Someone was paying attention, even if they didn’t exactly respond with “the rhetoric of assent.”

I can only hope that Roger Gottlieb is half as indulgent as the late Dr. Booth should he ever come across my copy of his book A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet’s Future. While I believe the marginalia are free of scatology, they do betray a fair amount of frustration. There are few causes in which I would more hope a writer to succeed, and there are few books that strike me as more likely to injure the cause, at least among one pivotal constituency: the evangelical Christians who, if books like Gottlieb’s can be kept from doing too much damage, may yet become the decisive constituency for environmental stewardship in the 21st century.

The online magazine StudentSoul interviewed me recently about cultural creativity, why we can’t settle for cultural critique, and how college students can prepare for a life of creating culture.

What does “culture-making” mean and how might it go hand in hand with or differ from “cultural transformation”?

Cultural transformation is something that a lot of Christians talk about and aspire to. We want to be a part of transforming the culture. The question is, how is culture transformed? Does it happen just because we think more about culture, or because we pay more attention to culture? As I was thinking about cultural transformation I became convinced that culture changes when people actually make more and better culture. If we want to transform culture, what we actually have to do is to get into the midst of the human cultural project and create some new cultural goods that reshape the way people imagine and experience their world. So culture-making answers the “how” question rather than just “what” we are about. We seek the transformation of every culture but how we do it is by actually making culture.

The Christian Vision Project begins each year with a big question. In 2006, we asked, How can followers of Christ be a counterculture for the common good?

We knew from the start that any set of articles, no matter how compelling, would provide an inadequate answer. Every how eventually has to be lived out by a who. Making sense of our moment in history, in other words, requires us to make a wise choice of heroes. Fortunately, over the course of 2006, we found one.

Infuze Magazine is an online journal of Christians and cultural creativity. Their editor Matt Conner interviewed me by email, showing tremendous patience in waiting for my replies, over the past year. It’s a wide-ranging conversation about culture-making and the church.

I’ve read an article of yours in which you discuss the idea of differing generations pushing for key influencers in culture in differing areas. The older generation pushes for Christians in political leadership to influence culture, while the younger tends to push for influencers in entertainment. Can you describe this further? Is there a problem with this?

Let’s remember that forty years ago, white evangelical Christians were largely disengaged from culture in general. [And from now on, when I say “Christians,” I’m going to be talking about white evangelical Protestants. Little of what we’re saying here will be true of Catholics, mainline Protestants, or black Christians.] They had a strong, not to say rigid, dichotomy between the sacred and the secular, between the church and the world. Both in rhetoric and reality, Christians simply didn’t connect their faith, conceived largely as saving souls for heaven, with any kind of cultural activity.

Nathan Bierma and the staff of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship lured me into a pleasant conference room a few months ago, set a recorder in front of me, asked some interesting questions, and caught me saying some alternately perceptive and foolish things about worship, power, technology, commercialism, cell phones, tall blond people, organic food, singing, and my favorite church in North America. 

Not long ago I attended a strategy session for the culture war.

Participants examined the decline of marriage, the cheapening and flattening of human sexuality into contextless pleasure, the exploitation and destruction of unborn human beings. Speeches were given. Brows were furrowed. Resolutions were made.

War, I was reminded, does terrible things to the warriors.

As the “tech editor” for NBC’s Today Show, Corey Greenberg spends most of his on-air time shilling for the latest technological gadgets. (Literally, shilling—last April the Wall Street Journal revealed that several technology companies had paid him handsomely for his promotional efforts.) He can tell you why you need a video iPod, what you’re missing without satellite radio, and where to put the fifty-inch flat screen TV. But on January 29, 2005, he was enthusiastically undermining half a century’s worth of high technology.

In the Today Show studio, Greenberg lathered up his face with English shaving cream and a badger brush, whipped out a vintage double-edge razor, and made a passionate case that the multi-billion-dollar shaving industry has been deceiving its customers ever since 1971, when Gillette (no small advertiser on network television) introduced the twin-blade razor. Everything you need for a fantastically close and comfortable shave, Greenberg said, was perfected by the early 20th century.

When I tell my grandchildren about America at the turn of the century, I will tell them about houses and wars.

I will tell them about houses in places like Wheaton, Illinois, a one-time center of mild, middle-class, Midwestern evangelical Christianity, where grand teardown mansions loom where bungalows once stood. I will tell them about the heady days of option ARMS, cash-out refinancing, and homebuilders whose stock prices made the front page.

I will tell them about our wars, fought with blustering confidence and dubious competence, ambitious and precarious, like a teardown on a tiny lot.

Then I will tell them two of Jesus’ most misinterpreted parables.

How do you change a culture? Ask Christians in the last few decades, and you would likely get distinct, though overlapping, answers from two camps.

On one side would be seekers of the power of the poll and the ballot box, of school boards, legislatures, and judicial benches. Their contemporary heroes are scrappy fighters like Judge Roy Moore, the defiant defender of keeping the Ten Commandments on courthouse soil. They stay up late parsing voter rolls, and in their dreams, all paper is legal size.

Others focus less on political clout and more on the persuasive power of imagination. Their contemporary heroes tend to be artists like Switchfoot, producing bestselling music infused with faith. They stay up late watching for Christian appearances on Leno, and they dream in stories.

Address to the Harvard Graduate School Christian Fellowship on the occasion of Jeff Barneson’s 49th birthday, 17 September 2005.

I’m very grateful for the modern advertising industry, because I’ve found that advertisers tell us truths about ourselves that we might not say out loud. Not long ago a lavish 16-page booklet from the motor car manufacturer Jaguar tumbled out of my Economist magazine.  It featured two-page spreads, beautifully illustrated and cleverly worded, on each of the seven deadly sins—lust, envy, sloth, greed, and so forth—assuring me that the Jaguar motor car excelled at fulfilling each one of them. Where else could you find such honesty?

Well, when I arrived in Harvard Square yesterday I found another example of advertisers’ willingness to say what we would never say quite so directly.  In this case the advertisers were the makers of Bass Ale, and they had taken over the entire subway station to reinforce something we all know but rarely acknowledge in so many words here at Harvard, namely, that we have an extraordinarily high opinion of ourselves.  As part of their “Reach for Greatness” campaign, they had created custom-designed posters just for Harvard Square, such as, “In the world’s search for great minds, the paths converge here.”

The first swift kick to my youthful idealism was delivered—not so surprisingly, in retrospect—by the Beastie Boys.

In the late 1980s I took a year off from college to work at a retreat center in the mountains of north Georgia, hosting youth groups that drove up from the Atlanta suburbs. They would tumble off church buses dressed in Hard Rock T-shirts, well-scrubbed teenagers steeped in the New South’s blend of genteel religiosity and upward mobility. In those days before the iPod, they came laden with Walkmans and bulging pouches of cassette tapes. These were mainline Protestant kids, mostly Methodists and Presbyterians, and their musical choices seemed largely to have escaped parental oversight. No self-respecting Baptist would allow their child to go off to church camp with a box full of Black Sabbath and AC/DC tapes, but these youth showed up with unapologetically secular collections—heavy metal for some, Celine Dion for others. They spent their free hours in the still, green Georgia mountains sitting on the porches of the cabins, plugged in to the sounds of home.

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Thanks for your interest in my work and writing!

—Andy Crouch