What Is Culture and How Does It Shape Us?

Defining Culture as What Humans Make of the World

Well, we're looking forward to what is in store with MAVEN, and your experiences being in Stand to Reason for 14 years, in a way, has shaped now your project with John Stonestreet. So you wrote a book called A Practical Guide to Culture.

This book really lays some excellent groundwork on dealing with the culture and its impact on not only our children, but us as well. So, at the outset, why don't we just go into the book a little bit.

I'm curious about MAVEN. But at the outset, maybe it's best to define a key term here. So in the title of your book, you have culture. What is culture? And how does it shape us?

Yeah. And if anyone doesn't have the book, you know, you can get it on Amazon. A Practical Guide to Culture. Yeah, that's a great question to start off with. What is culture? We use this term a lot. In fact, I think a lot of times the way we talk about culture, there's just kind of this assumption in the Christian world that culture is this bad thing out there.

And we're, you know, we have to be careful of it. We have to watch out for it. We have to guard against it. But if we kind of pause for a second and define what culture is, actually, I think we'll see, we'll have maybe a little more careful view of culture and its influence and impact on us.

So, you know, we talk about in the book that culture is simply what we make of the world. Culture is what we make of the world. It's what humans make of the world. So that includes our institutions. It includes our ideas.

It includes, you know, all the different things that make up culture. This is just what we do with the world that we live in. So on that definition, you can see that culture in and of itself is not immoral or wrong or something to be avoided.

There may be parts of culture that we do have to, we label as immoral or whatever, but not all of culture is. There are good parts of culture. There are bad parts of culture. There may be neutral parts of culture.

And I think this just makes us, gives us a little, I think one of the problems that we have in the church is that we're often on the defense. We often have this defensive posture, right? And when we have that view of culture, culture's bad, it's out there, it's debauched, Hollywood, it's social media, it's whatever.

Then we take this kind of defensive posture and a posture of avoidance. Well, I need to avoid that thing, right? I need to stay away from culture. I need to pull my kids out of culture. And certainly there's legitimate, you know, protection of kids from culture, but not everything from culture is bad.

In fact, we as image bearers, we as followers of Jesus, we are actually tasked to create culture, right? So we're supposed to make culture and give it back to the world. We're supposed to do good things with this world that God has given us.

It's what, you know, theologians refer to as the cultural mandate. We have this mandate to go to not only be fruitful and multiply, but to subdue the world. And so I think that that's such an important question to start off with, what is culture?

Because how we define it, then often will maybe help us to see and examine our posture towards it. And so often we're just defensive, we might retreat and, you know, kind of isolate ourselves. And I don't think that that should be our posture.

Culture as Waves and Under Currents

Mm-hmm. Staying on the idea of culture for a little bit longer, in the book, you break it down. And I think one of the helpful things about the book is the way that you, you know, you take concepts that may be heady, maybe a little dry, but you break it down so that we can understand them.

And I was picking up on a surfer theme throughout the book, which was really fantastic. But you break down culture in a way where you talk about culture as being waves and undercurrents. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Yeah. Well, I've grown up in Southern California. I surf. As I started having kids, I had this dream of taking my kids to surf, teaching them how to surf. But I realized, I mean, the ocean's a big place and there's a lot that's going on in the ocean.

And how did I get my kids... My long-term goal was to get my kid to surf the waves just like I was surfing them, to be able to paddle out beside me and surf with no problem. But how did I get to that long-term goal?

Well, there was a step-by-step process and training and teaching, right? I didn't just throw them on a surfboard, push them out and say, go for it. No, it was, there's protection, but then there's teaching and training because I have to teach my kids that there's a number of different components of the ocean that they have to think about and they have to be aware of and they have to be familiar with.

And so, number one, if you have ever been to the beach, you know, of course, there's the waves that you can see. And you can see, all right, it's a small day. There's small waves. They're not big pounding waves, but on bigger days, you can just feel the thunder when a wave crashes, that kind of thunder sound and feel.

And you know, okay, those are bigger waves. I've got to be more careful, but there's also stuff that's going on underneath the surface. There are rip currents. There are currents that you could, you could be swimming along and you could be in kind of a mellow part of the ocean.

And then all of a sudden you hit a rip current and it just pulls you out. And you know, people have drowned from that. So, in the same way, I thought, you know, this is a great analogy for culture. You know, culture is like an ocean.

There are these scene elements, like the surface of the water and the crashing waves that are challenging, but there's also these unseen elements, the undercurrents that we have to be aware of as well.

And in the same way in culture, there's both unseen elements and more visible elements that we have to be aware of. So, for us in the second part of the book, John and I, we outline, you know, some of these key undercurrents in the culture that have powerful influence on us, that shape us in very, you know, big ways.

And so, for instance, something like our views about identity, what it means to be a human and how we kind of ground that now and what we put that into, or technology or the information age, right? These are these undercurrents that are not always so visible.

I mean, you just think about it, kind of technology is omnipresent in our lives and we don't even really think about it. This is just the world that we live in. But that undercurrent of a technological society shapes us, right?

The mediums that we use are not neutral. So, that's something we have to pay attention to, are these undercurrents. And then you've got the waves, the things that are really visible. So, these typically are the things that pop up in the cultural conversation, right?

These are the things you'll hear on news, you know, a news source or talk shows or, you know, Twitter or whatever. These are things like gender identity or same-sex marriage or, you know, we have a case tomorrow that the Supreme Court is going to hear on a baker who refuses to bake a cake for a same-sex couple.

So, there's questions of what marriage is there and religious freedom, you know, those kind of things. So, we cover eight of these different topics in our third part, which is dealing with what are the waves that are kind of crashing on our students right now and crashing.

On us that we have to navigate. Yeah. And that's what I really appreciate is, I think if I'm being honest, when I went into the book, I was expecting just going right into those current issues. What I really appreciate is that you start off by teaching us how to view the culture because one thing that we know for sure is that the culture is going to change.

And so, what the hot-button issues are now is not going to be the hot-button issues now maybe 10 or 15 years or 20 years down the road. So, give us the principles to be able to gauge the culture at whatever year this is, and then we have what we need.

And I really appreciate that. I mean, that's alone right there. You can show the book again. That's worth the weight of the book right.

There. Yeah. That's the book cover.

Oh, okay.

There's the book. But the book does not look as good as the cover. This is what you'll see at Amazon .com.

All right. That's wonderful.