Last week I mentioned that artists who enhance our culture are doing sacred work—acts of worship. Unfortunately, however, as author Andy Crouch has pointed out, too many Christians in the last century have had negative “postures” toward culture—similar to our negative attitudes toward work. One might wonder if the two are related.

Go back in the last hundred years and you’ll note that many Christians simply condemned certain aspects of culture. Take music. If music was not performed or written by Christians it was condemned as secular and not sacred.

Over time we moved toward another “posture”—one of critique. We analyzed everything under a “sacred” microscope (remember the days of burning “Christian rock ’n roll” albums?). After that, we copied everything the world came out with—again, in terms of music we’ve had Christian punk, screamo, rap, etc. And now finally, we’ve simply become consumers. These days we listen to just about anything without condemning or critiquing. We’re talking postures—assumed stances or positions toward certain aspects of culture.

Now let me be clear that there are certain things we ought to condemn about work and culture. Not everything that comes under the guise of work or art is sacred. There are business ethics, for example, that are not ethics at all. And there are some things considered cultural works of artistic expression that in my books are simply profane. Take much of modern art; I have very little patience with famous art similar to the one featured in this post (yes, I created that—and yes it took me less than five minutes, and yes I could easily come up with an “existential” explanation for the design and arrangement of each shape and line).

My main point here regards postures—a default position, perspective, or attitude—toward work or culture, rather than gestures (something I will explore in my next post), as Andy Crouch so well unpacks in his work, Culture Making. Rather than condemn, critique, copy, or consume as our overall stance, we ought to assume those as gestures (“motions” and responses in the moment) and rather take on two Biblical postures described in the Genesis narrative.