The word culture is huge and vague at the same time, and it's easy to misuse. People use culture to refer to a nebulous set of beliefs and values that surround us like the atmosphere, omnipresent and invisible. It's like the water fishes swim in: all around them, but taken for granted.
When we think of culture in this vague way, our engagement with culture is also vague. We make sweeping statements like, "The culture is becoming more family-friendly," or, "The culture is becoming more and more anti-Christian every day."
Or we use the word in a more limited way, reserving it for the "finer things": art, music, literature, and the like. We think of a beautiful symphony or a provocative work of art in a museum. They contain powerful ideas and images, perhaps, but they don't seem to do anything real, anything tangible, to the world outside the walls. Or we can be thinking of the profit-driven production of accessible music, films, and television shows-popular culture. This kind of culture comes closer to home, streaming in to our lives through iPods and widescreen TVs, but it is still immaterial-images and ideas that float our way through the ether.
But while all these ways of understanding culture have some truth to them, they miss one of the most important things about culture. This core idea is the key to understanding how culture changes us, and how we might change it. It's also the key to understanding just why changing culture is so amazingly difficult-why cultural change requires so much courage, and why none of us are likely to change culture by ourselves.
Culture is concrete
Culture is not just beliefs, values, ideas, or images. It's actual, concrete stuff-material, corporeal, physical. It is the very tangible product of human activity. In the words of commentator Ken Myers, culture is "what we make of the world." That wonderful phrase suggests that while culture is indeed an expression of our beliefs and values, the way we express those values is to make particular things.
So to remind myself of just how tangible and concrete culture is-and to remind myself of how tangible and concrete its effects are on the world I live in-I like to think about, well, concrete itself. Specifically, the 47,000 miles of asphalt concrete that make up the United States' Interstate Highway System.
The Interstate Highway System, which celebrated its fiftieth birthday in 2006, is possibly the most significant cultural endeavor of the second half of the twentieth century. Does that sound farfetched? Well, ask yourself whether you, or anyone you know in the United States, has not traveled on a part of the interstate system in the last month. Then ask yourself whether the clothes you are wearing, the technological devices you are using, and the food you are eating today traveled on the interstate. Without a doubt, the answer is yes.
And then consider where you live, where you work, where you go to church, and the last restaurant you visited. Chances are every single one of those places are where they are because an interstate highway is where it is.
There were highways before the interstates, of course, but the creation of a nationwide network of well-maintained, uniform, limited-access roadways allowed America's transportation-intensive culture to flourish. We wouldn't have our car culture without the interstates. We wouldn't have green-lawned suburbs without the interstates-which means we wouldn't have the abandoned-lot "inner cities," created when middle-class families moved to the suburbs, without the interstates either. In fact, when the Fannie Mae Foundation asked urban planners to name the top ten factors in the way American cities developed (and decayed) in the 20th century, the Interstate Highway System was number one.
The possible and the impossible
What changes when we think of "culture" as being more like the Interstate Highway System than Beethoven's Fifth-more like architecture than like fine art? We begin to see that the most important thing culture does is define the horizons of the possible and the impossible for human beings. Culture determines what we can imagine doing, and what we can actually do-and it determines what we cannot imagine doing, and can never actually do.
Think of what the Interstate Highway System has made possible. In 50 hours (if you have a copilot or lots of caffeine), you can drive from Boston to Seattle on a single interstate highway: I-90, which stretches 3,100 miles from coast to coast. Before the vast, culture-making act that was the construction of Interstate 90, such a journey, in terms of speed and comfort, was impossible. Now it is possible. What made the difference was culture. Of course, most of us are too impatient to drive across the country, so if we can afford it, we avail ourselves of an even more audacious kind of culture-air travel-and cover the distance in a few hours. What was previously impossible, culture has made possible.
And even more remarkably, culture can make some things impossible that were previously possible. Reading David McCullough's biography of John Adams a few years ago, I was reminded that not that long ago, a vast cultural infrastructure made it possible to travel by horse from Boston to Philadelphia. There were roads, wayside inns, stables, and turnpikes along which travelers could make a slow but steady journey from one city to the other. For more than a century, culture made interstate horse travel possible. But I dare say it would be impossible now. The inns and stables of the nineteenth century are long gone. Horses are forbidden from the shoulders of the highways that connect Boston and Philadelphia, even if horses could stand the roar of the traffic that would be rushing by them just a few feet away. To ride a horse any distance along what is now called "the Northeast Corridor" would be a feat of bravery, to say the least, and quite possibly also an act of cruelty to animals. Culture has made travel by horse, once eminently possible, impossible.
Moving the horizons
So this is what culture does: it defines the horizons of the possible and the impossible in very concrete, tangible ways. I don't just believe in fast and convenient travel by highway; I don't just value it; it isn't just something I can imagine that I couldn't imagine before. It is something I can actually do. And the only reason I can do it is because someone (President Eisenhower, the members of the United States Congress, and untold numbers of civil engineers and road builders and zoning commission members and accountants) created something that wasn't there before.
And, for that matter, I might believe that we'd be better off if we didn't spend 81 minutes a day in our cars (the American average, according to the Wall Street Journal), that the days of horse travel were actually better for people and animals, and that the rapid consumption of our planet's limited supply of fossil fuels is both greedy and foolish. But it's impossible for me to live as if the highways don't exist. And, again, those impossibilities are there, whether I like it or not, because someone created something that wasn't there before.
The horizon is the point we can't see beyond. Culture brings certain possibilities into view-into reality-even as it ushers other former possibilities over the horizon and beyond our reach. It's as though we human beings live in a valley ringed by imposing mountains on every side. We can climb part way up the side of the mountain, and a few explorers may even try to escape the valley, but most of us live our lives circumscribed by the horizons we can see. We live within the valley of culture, and most of what we believe, imagine, value, and actually do happens within the constraints passed on to us by the culture others have created before us.
But there's a twist. Culture is not static. The horizons do not stay exactly the same-as hard to move as they may seem to be. In fact, every time new culture is created, the horizons move a little bit-or, sometimes, a lot. After all, when Eisenhower signed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act on 29 June 1956, the highways we now take for granted simply didn't exist. All that is possible for us now was impossible then; much that is impossible now was possible then. The only thing that changed was the creation of more culture. When culture is created, the horizons move.
Every act of culture making is an assault on the impossible. It doesn't have to be as grand as a national highway system or a headline-grabbing technological breakthrough. The horizons can move at small scales, too. Why does trash accumulate on a particular vacant lot next to a particular convenience store in my friend Paula's urban neighborhood, but the block around the small grocery store in my friend Adrianne's suburban town center is always perfectly clean? Because the horizons of possibility and impossibility are different in these two places. Cleaning up that vacant lot will require someone to breach the assumptions about what is possible (littering in that untended lot is convenient and consequence-free) and what is impossible (the city will never come to pick up the trash no matter how many times you call). And the way that will happen is to create something-perhaps a neighborhood committee, perhaps a sign saying, "Keep our corner clean," perhaps a monthly cleanup day. Without the introduction of some new piece of culture into the neighborhood-some concrete, tangible evidence of human beings making something of the world-the horizons will stay firmly in place. But if someone takes the risk of creating something new, the horizons may just budge a little bit. Or, in the long run, they may move so much that the new neighborhood is as different from the old as post-interstate America is from the days of horses and buggies.
The risk of failure
The key word in that last sentence is may. The horizons may move. Or they may not. They are, after all, the horizons of the possible and the impossible. Everything outside the horizons is, for the moment, impossible to imagine, let alone accomplish. Only if someone dares to push against the outer edges will we discover just how resistant the horizons are to change.
And much of the time, the horizons are very resistant indeed. Most attempts at cultural creativity-moving the horizons, offering something new that human beings haven't imagined before-fail. Consultants tell us that 80% of new product launches fail. (Pre-moistened toilet paper, anyone?) There are 12,000 members of the Writers Guild of America, the principal union of film and television screenwriters, most of them eager to move the horizons of TV and film, and make a living in the process-and in any given year, about 10,000 of them fail. The last ten years have been a golden age of church planting-but the North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention found that about a third of church plants fail within four years.
This shouldn't be surprising at all. There is simply nothing harder than creating new culture. Even people with tremendous cultural power fail at it regularly. Eisenhower's vision of an Interstate Highway System succeeded; but Lyndon Baines Johnson's War on Poverty did not. Johnson's Civil Rights Act succeeded in many marvelous ways (though some of the horizons it attacked are stubbornly in place to this day); George W. Bush's attempt to move the horizons of the tragic impossibilities of the Middle East, so far, has not.
The ingredients of cultural change
Courage is the willingness to risk failure. And so courage is required for anyone who seeks to be part of changing culture, by creating something that will move the horizons of possibility and impossibility. Without courage, we won't be far out of the comfortable valley of currently realized possibilities before we turn around and head right back home. It is ever so much safer to simply live within the constraints of what is already possible. Little courage is required to pick your suburb, drive your 81 minutes, and go to a church that makes it seem like these horizons have always been there. It works the other way, too: it is much safer to live within the constraints of what is already impossible. We couldn't possibly see peace come to the land of Israel and Palestine, could we? Or see Americans reduce their outsized consumption of energy in a poor and thirsty world, or see the Gospel arrive in societies that know more about Coca-Cola than about Christ? If these things are impossible, after all, we're off the hook. Only courage will equip us to ask the question.
And I suspect we will only find that courage together, in community. The truth is that culture is simply never created in isolation. No one gets to move the horizons alone. Every cultural change worth making spreads through a network of people who know and trust one another. Indeed, the horizons are so powerful that only a relatively small, tight-knit group can sustain the belief that the horizons could one day move. That is why every technological innovation, every artistic movement, every academic breakthrough, every piece of legislation, every business, and every new church begins with a small group of believers who are willing to set out on a journey together to the edge of the current horizons-to create something together and then offer it to the wider world.
For the Church to become a source of cultural creativity, we're going to need to become more aware of the people already in our midst who are exploring those horizons. We need to make it safe for one another to fail at being culturally creative-because most of the time, we will indeed fail. But we also need to keep asking one another: Are the horizons misplaced? Are some things possible in our culture-shaped world that God never meant to be possible? Are some things impossible that God never meant to be impossible? If those horizons need to move, that will only happen when we quite literally encourage one another, take heart together, and dare to make something new in the midst of the world.