Andy Crouch’s Articles

Near the end of his masterful book To Change the World, we discover that James Davison Hunter does not believe we should (or can) change the world. Nor should we be ” ‘redeeming the culture,’ ‘advancing the kingdom,’ ‘building the kingdom,’ ‘transforming the world,’ ‘reclaiming the culture,’ [or] ‘reforming the culture.’” It’s a surprising turn, given that a casual reader might naturally think, for the first hundred pages, that To Change the World is about how to change the world. And therein, as they used to say, lies a tale worth telling.

It is a tale of three “essays” originating in a talk that Hunter gave a number of years ago, also called “To Change the World,” which has circulated widely among leaders in the evangelical movement. The substance of that talk, with its analysis sharpened and extended, forms the first of Hunter’s three essays in To Change the World, and it maps fairly neatly onto the “irony” signaled in his subtitle.

The irony is that there is no phrase more beloved to a certain kind of Christian than “to change the world.” But in Hunter’s persuasive account, the strategies those very same Christians have pursued are, by themselves, woefully incapable of changing the world. (Hunter’s greatest interest is clearly Christianity’s theologically conservative varieties, though he attends to mainline and progressive Christianity as well.) One group focuses on personal renewal and national revival, while another—championing a “Christian worldview”—locates the necessary condition for cultural change not so much in the heart as in the mind. Either way, the premise is that once the hearts and minds of ordinary people are properly revived and informed, the culture will change. “This account,” Hunter says flatly, “is almost wholly mistaken.”

One of the best things that ever happened to me was getting pneumonia when I was 22 years old. It was the last in a series of minor calamities that hit me that first year out of college, alone and adrift in a Boston winter. I found myself flat on my back for the better part of two weeks, slowly recovering.

Sometime during those two weeks, something I had known for a long time became palpably, personally true: I was going to die. Not of pneumonia at age 22—there was never any real fear of that. But someday, I suddenly understood, I would lie down for the last time and never again get up. I understood it—which is to say, I stood under that reality, was grasped by it, accepted it. And without a lot else to do in my small apartment, I pondered it.

Death, whenever it came, would come too soon. Between now and that moment, what did I want my life to be?

I pondered the question of memory. It struck me that just a few decades after my death, the only people likely to remember me with any clarity at all would be a handful of family members. It was, and still is, exceedingly improbable that my life would be memorable enough for anyone else to take lasting notice. And then I strained to remember the names of my grandparents’ parents—and realized that very soon indeed, even to my own descendants, I would be a hazy and ultimately forgotten ghost from a past as distant to them as the nineteenth century was to me.

There was only one thing I was really sure would last after even those closest to me had forgotten me and passed into their own forgottenness. “Seek first the kingdom of God,” Jesus had said. I was, and still am, as sure as I could be (which is to say, just barely sure enough) that the kingdom of God had come and would never pass away, would indeed hold everything else in reality. But what did it mean, concretely, to seek the kingdom? What could I do differently with whatever life I was granted once the pneumonia was gone?

Sometime in high school, I acquired the idea that attending a rock concert, for a middle-class kid anyway, was a transgressive act. It was a step out of the sedate norms of suburban life into an exhilarating, dangerous netherworld, an intoxicating haze of smoke, primal rhythms, and throbbing sensuality—throwing off the shackles of predictable conformity and throwing down the gauntlet of rebellion.

Well, earlier this week I joined 60,000 Midwesterners at U2’s 360 Tour concert at Chicago’s Soldier Field, and can report, with faint disappointment, that the most transgressive act I managed to commit, or indeed witnessed all evening, was talking with some friends in the narrow stairway of section 443 before the concert began, thus impeding the path and incurring the wrath of the vendors of Miller Lite. (“ONE CAN LIMIT,” their coolers proclaimed.)

The concertgoers streamed into the Chicago Bears’ home stadium in attire that can best be described as Apple Store Clientele—casual cool with an extra helping of organic sustainability. Befitting U2’s long and protean career, they were strikingly intergenerational. Four teenage boys wearing school T-shirts from the Near North Side, cleancut and fresh-faced, stood right in front of me, singing every word through the whole show. A couple rows down, two late-40s parents escorted their teenage daughter and preteen son. Or was it the other way around? I saw lots of parents accompanying pre-driving-age teenagers, making me wonder whether the parents or the children had been the ones to make the case for going to see U2. Perhaps the predominant demographic, at least in the nosebleed seats, was twentysomething couples, few of whom betrayed the nervous electricity of first dates: my bet is they were either married or contentedly cohabitating. All in all, it was a perfectly domestic evening.

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett reiterated his best-known investing principle in the New York Times last week: “Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.” It’s a vivid way of saying that the best investors are, to borrow a phrase from macroeconomics, counter-cyclical. Their investing sentiments are set by simply observing the prevailing mood in the marketplace, and doing the opposite.

Something like this maxim applies to the work of any Christian who wants to discern the times and speak truthfully about our culture. Reinhold Niebuhr famously said he wanted his preaching to “comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable”—strangely akin to Buffett’s guideline. The whole record of the Hebrew prophets is counter-cyclical, seen most vividly in the transition from Isaiah 1–39 to Isaiah 40–66. The first half of the canonical book contains searing denunciations of a complacent, compromised people at the height of their comfort. The second half, its sights trained on a decimated population in exile, begins, “Comfort my people.” And Isaiah has his own version of Buffett-style counter-cyclicality: “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low.”

Well, our culture is pretty afflicted right now. Which is why I am more hopeful than I’ve been in a long time.