I recently had a conversation with an intelligent, passionate believer, and our conversation drifted rather quickly towards a tired, and necessary, topic for many of us: the Christian’s “engagement” of the culture. As a writer, this is a discussion that interests me, and one that bores me. Yes, Christians should be in the world, but not of it. Yes, Christians should seek to understand and have a discourse with the culture. Yes, Christians should be contributing good books, good movies, good poems, good everything to culture. Yes, we are called to redeem everything with the creative employment of our hands and heads and tools and words. And to redeem a thing is to understand the content and form of a thing. So, yes, Christians should engage the culture. I’m tired of reading articles saying as much, but I think we see so many articles and books and essays about engaging culture because we’re still not sure how to do it. As for me, I write stories. My job as a writer is to move past the whole “Let’s reclaim the culture for Jesus!” conversation and get on with writing good stories.

But not so fast.

In my conversation (the one that started this post), my friend said, “I think engaging the culture is oversold to believers.” He went on to say that the church accepts too much trash and artless obscenity (in movies, music, etc.) for the sake of “engaging” the culture. He said we want to be accepted as authentic, as hip, as with-it as the world. And in so doing, we corrupt ourselves.

So, for discussion…is “engaging the culture” oversold to believers?