I chose the title of this talk for a couple of reasons: first, because it sounded kind of ‘sexy’ to me, by which I mean, attention grabbing; and second, because it sounded kind of ‘sexy’ and attention grabbing—and that has a direct bearing on what I’m going to discuss today. Words are like automobiles—they’re vehicles we use to carry the meanings of our minds to other minds. However, cars have trunks that are usually spacious enough to carry a fair amount of baggage. Now, we’d like to think that the denotative sense of a word sits in the driver’s seat and that the connotative sense is a stowaway, hiding in the trunk. But quite often, the little bugger in the trunk actually climbs out and takes the wheel. Such is the case, I think, with “manifesto’. Denotatively, the word comes from the Latin manifestus, which means “plainly apprehensible, clear, apparent, evident.” A manifesto, then, is denotatively a clear statement on something. But connotatively, there’s so much more. I can’t hear the word ‘manifesto’ without thinking of Marx (and the other fellow everyone forgets). The word has a daring, even dangerous connotation to my mind—it’s a word that challenges—it’s a word of protest—it’s a word of revolution. It speaks truth to power. And that’s only my response. So much baggage for nine letters.
I think though, that the three little letters that signify the actual subject of this talk carry so much more baggage that I don’t know how they pull it together and survive. A-R-T. The connotative baggage that has accrued for centuries over so little a word is staggering. Did I say centuries? I should say millennia. ART. What is it? Why is it so quintessentially human? Why is it so dangerous? Why do we Evangelicals distrust it so much? How should we Evangelicals do it? How should we Evangelicals teach it?
As to what it is, I like Flannery O’Connor’s definition. “Art,” she says, “is a word that immediately scares people off, as being a little too grand. But all I mean by art is . . . something that is valuable in itself and that works in itself. The basis of art is truth, both in manner and mode. The person who aims after art aims after truth, in the imaginative sense, no more no less.” That’s pretty straightforward. And I don’t think she’s arguing that art is truth. She’s placing the onus of art’s truthfulness on the person aiming after art. In her view, if that person, the artist, is trying to represent the world as he or she sees it—with all the honesty they are capable of, then they are embracing that kind of imaginative truth, they are approaching the realm of art.
However, the source of that imaginative truth is often the very thing that troubles Evangelicals. There is a mystery to the process that feels suspect to us. We can comfortably think of art as a noun, as in a work of art—our museums, theaters, and cinemas are full of those. But we can also think of art as a kind of action or process, as in creating art, and no museum can house that—because it’s a Delphic moment, the how of which is hidden in mystery even from us. The story goes that Lawrence Olivier—perhaps the greatest actor of the twentieth century—came off stage one night after giving the performance of a lifetime, and his friends found him in his dressing room completely dejected. “Larry,” they said to him in surprise, “How can you be so downcast, you’ve just given the most sublime performance of your career?” “I know,” he replied. “And that’s why I’m so depressed, because I don’t know how I did it.”
The author of the Roman-era writing treatise, Peri Hupsous (On the Sublime), tries to capture this lightning of the sublime creative moment in a definable bottle, and falls short; but he or she does make some interesting observations. Sublime art, the author tells us, elevates itself “above the ordinary” and, when done right, brings about a “loss of rationality, an alienation leading to identification with the creative process of the artist, and a deep emotion mixed with pleasure and exaltation.” And I think we would be mistaken here if we confuse the nonrationality of the sublime moment with irrationality—the one is a mystery, the other, just plain crazy.
Ansel Adams, the landscape photographer wrote, “We all move on the fringes of eternity and are sometimes granted vistas through fabric of illusion.” You can find this quote on pretty posters but, ironically, they rarely include the rest of it, “Many refuse to admit it,” he goes on.” [But] I feel a mystery exists. There are certain times, when, as on the whisper of the wind, there comes a clear and quiet realization that there is indeed a presence in the world, a nonhuman entity that is not necessarily inhuman.” That ‘whisper on the wind’ is the mystery that I’d like to explore today.
La Dame de Brassempouy is perhaps the earliest known detailed—and we might say realistic—representation of a human face. It’s 25,000 years old—give or take. And for any young Earth proponents—let’s just say this is really, really old. The question that intrigues me about this is: why did an artist two hundred and fifty centuries ago, decide to sit down and carve for days? weeks? even months? on a mammoth’s tusk, until he or she revealed this? A mobiliary cameo so delicate it fits comfortably in the palm of your hand? We’ll never know the answer— but I have to think there existed in this artist a need to reproduce an image that represented beauty. And this human impulse, this need to represent, is the very thing that has troubled us for so many millennia. The Book of Exodus tells us that when Aaron threw gold into the fire, the image of a golden calf leapt out—and the people worshipped it. The worship of a representative work of art (idolatry by definition) is anathema in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and the antidote seems most often to be a prohibition against creating representative works of art. The image itself apparently is the problem, rather than our unwise veneration of it.
You may recall this image from a few years ago. It’s purportedly ISIS operatives destroying precious and ancient works of art in the Mosul Museum. Some folks want to argue that the works of art were just copies, as though that somehow mitigates the intentions of the destroyers. If there’s any doubt about their motivations, one need only recall the fate of 82-year- old Khaled al-Asaad, head of antiquities in Palmyra for fifty years. ISIS captured and interrogated him for a month but he refused to give up the actual location of the hidden antiquities, and so they beheaded him, hung his headless body from a traffic signal, placing his head between his feet, glasses still on, with a placard that read, among his other crimes, “Director of Idolatries.” I’m confident we’d all condemn the actions of these radicals without reservation.
However, lest we conclude that the impulse to destroy art resides solely in the deranged psyches of Islamic extremists, we would be wise to recall our own beeldenstorm past. In the middle part of the sixteenth century, righteous mobs of Protestants decided it was time to cleanse the local churches of Catholic idolatry. This altarpiece at St. Martin’s Cathedral in Utrecht is just one example of such zealous fury. The destruction, hidden for 500 years by a false wall, was revealed again in 1919, an all too clear reminder of our own religious genealogy. We too have gone to war, even with our own brothers and sisters, over such things as works of art and what they provoke in us. This idea of the provocative nature of art is at the very heart of Plato’s mistrust of imitation that so influences our western psyches.
Of course, Plato added a bit of nuance to the issue in the classical Greek period. He may not have used a sledgehammer, but the results were still far-reaching. Plato’s uses the term ‘mimesis’ for artistic representation. His sole concern was with truth, and he saw all kinds of art around him that didn’t measure up to his high standards for Alethéia. He argued this representation, or mimesis, was a danger because, at best it was deceptively appealing and entertaining, at worst, just a plain lie—and yet, still appealing—and therein was the greatest danger. If the true form of a thing exists only in the mind of the gods, as Plato concluded, the human representation of that form—as in say the chair a carpenter builds—is but an imitation of the ideal form, and therefore one level removed from the truth; a painting, then, of that carpenter’s chair, is an imitation of an imitation—twice removed from the ideal form and, as such, even more potentially deceptive. And the deceptiveness is the key issue here, because these imitations are so pleasing to observe that they tend to lure the viewer away from the truth and into the adherence to lies. As you can imagine, this opens the arts up to all kinds of suspicion.
As an example, Sue-Ellen Case in her article “Classical Drag: The Greek Creation of Female Parts,” suggests the western ideal of classical female beauty was the result of mimesis— the mimesis of men, to be precise—but not in the way one might assume. Every spring virtually all of Athens would turn out to see the plays presented in the great festival of Dionysus. Case suggests that since women were not allowed to perform, that the men who portrayed the women in the plays actually became the ersatz vogue models of their day, and that trend-conscious Greek women rushed out to their local fabric merchants and patterned their fashion and beauty choices on the male portrayal of feminine beauty they’d seen in the plays. Such is the power of celebrity even today.
In his perfect Republic, Plato would have allowed none of this imitative procession of simulacra, and therefore would have banned plays to prevent their alluringly deceptive imitations, which would themselves be imitated. Those imitations of imitations of imitations would have been three full levels removed from the truth. The philosopher king’s nanny state, then, would protect its citizenry from these soul-polluting deceptions for their own good. He would also ban other types of dangerous art including certain modes of music that he deemed socially unhealthy—rap, for instance, would never have made the grade with dear old Plato.
In addition to his problem with mimesis in the arts, Plato struggled with the sources of the so-called inspiration. According to Greek cosmology, in addition to Apollo and Dionysus, the Greeks had Muses, these lower-tier goddesses tasked with indwelling artistic impulses into mortal humans. When the Goddesses would inspire artists, a kind of madness would fall upon them. Manike was the Greek term from which we derive manic or mania. This divine madness was the counterpart to trained skill (Techne, to the Greeks). The difficulty was—how do you tell the difference between the truth and the lie when the art comes from the gods—as, for instance, the Dionysian plays purportedly did. A touchy situation—since you don’t want to get on the bad side of a god—especially the Greek gods, who could be a capricious bunch. The delicateness of the issue is multiplied when you understand that this mania of divine madness was also closely associated with what we might call legitimate religious prophesy—an association that would create territorial problems and perhaps even competitive jealousies for generations to come.
In our current age, we might discuss Plato’s hard-edged dualism of truth or lie in the arts, as little more than ancient history, were it not for Augustine’s thoroughgoing baptism of Plato’s system into early Christianity. Among other things, the distrust of mimesis (idolatry in Christian parlance), combined in Augustine with an intense and seemingly unabated shame and self- loathing at what he considered a profoundly misspent youth. As a young man, he attended the Roman Spectacles, which were a kind of circus-like cornucopia of various unbridled and often violent or salacious entertainments meant to keep the mob distracted.
These Roman spectacles seemingly played a major imaginative role in Augustine’s youthful dissipation and, along with Tertullian and other early Church writers, he rails against them as deceivers of the elect. Now, I have no more intention of defending Roman spectacles today than I would Nascar, the NFL, or Nudie Cuties down on Rosecranz, which are more apt comparisons then actual art; but in the early Church, these all get lumped together to support a platonic position that all unregulated imitative arts are dangerous.
The result going into the European Middle Ages is the very strong sense that the mystery of divine madness associated with art needed to be carefully controlled by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, so that when art was allowed to happen, the ‘right’ results were achieved—the ‘proper’ message conveyed. This dogma demands that we be absolutely sure where the inspiration is coming from before we allow the muse even the slightest entry. And because artistic skill is more trainable and controllable, it is always preferable to the madness of inspiration, which answers to no authority. But try as the ecclesiasts might, the process of art has remained stubbornly the same for millennia, because it’s a quintessentially human impulse—but the names in the church age were changed to protect the innocent: the Greek techne became the Latin ars, but it means essentially the same thing—skill. The divine madness of the Muses—the manike—was far too pagan-seeming and was transformed into the Renaissance notion of ‘invenio’, which is not really invention, but more along the lines of discovery, of unveiling, a piercing of the veil—It’s the genius component of the artistic moment—divine madness by another name. So, even today we Evangelicals usually recognize the Ars as the safer component—the word artisan comes from it, and we all like artisinal bread; but we maintain a constant vigilance and skepticism of the ‘invenio’. It is, after all, the invenio that usually causes offence both to us, as believers, and by extension, to God.
When we Evangelicals see, or read, or hear a work of art that breaks the accepted dogma in some way or other, we might think, “that art offends me—and by extension, must offend God,” and then we stretch this to, “that artist offends me—and by extension, must offend God,” and if we carry the thought exercise further, we might form the premise: “artists and art tend toward offenses against believers and God when given free reign;” and therefore we conclude, “since being offensive tends toward evil, and evil comes from a demonic seed, aspiring artists must be carefully guided or they will tend toward evil and become servants of the devil.” Now, clearly this is ad absurdum, and your thought path won’t take this course, but I don’t think my example is completely off from the mindset of more than a few Evangelicals when it comes to art—the only caveat being most Evangelicals add the qualifying term ‘secular’ to the art that invariably tends toward evil, inferring that ‘sacred’ art has been mostly purged such tendencies. I say ‘mostly’ because we all know that no matter how sacred the art may be deemed, it’s always going to offend someone—as evidenced in the ‘fig-leaf campaign’ of the mid-sixteenth century, when—at the behest of outraged parishioners, the ecclesiasts agreed to use proverbial fig-leafs to cover up the nudity that was so prevalent in Renaissance art. Imagine the statue of David with a fig leave hiding his genitals and you get the picture—or perhaps the picture is exactly what you’re not supposed to get.
The point is, in our Evangelical communities we struggle with this tension of how to do art. And, by extension, how do we teach art to our young? Part of that question becomes, how do we deal with mimesis and inspiration in ways that are safe and edifying? Frankly, I don’t think we always do the best job. We operate very often from a place of guarded sanction, rather than honesty. In order to keep our young artists safe, we train them to portray a kind of sanctified realty, rather than the authentic one they perceive around them. We teach them to self-censor, because it is better for them to be safe than to risk ‘dancing with the devil’. But ‘safe’ standoffishness from your subject cannot produce the art of truth that O’Connor asks of us. We need to be willing to acknowledge our subject in its entirety. We need to have the ‘ars’ but also allow the ‘invenio’. We need to teach our young artists to embrace honesty rather than correctness—or perhaps we need to accept that that honesty is the highest form of correctness. And it is possible that honesty that will best preach the truth.
Frederick Buechner suggests the “the poets, playwrights, and novelists [in other words, the artists] are the preachers for today.” And it’s not because they show us the acceptable presence of God in all things, but, rather, because they are honestly portraying their own sense of the absence of God; and that this absence preaches the Gospel better than any pulpit sermon could. For Beuchner, “telling the truth, is telling things the way they are”—not necessarily the way they ‘should be’. He sees the truth of the Gospel as a kind of ongoing cycle play, wherein our story, like Nature’s great tale of the seasons, begins with downfall and death—the autumn and winter of the human saga. That part of the cycle, he says, is the tragedy that strips us naked. It is unavoidable and must be, if not embraced, at least acknowledged, before we can move on to the comedy of spring.
He sees the play King Lear as one of the great “preachments” of all time. During Shakespeare’s three-hour procession of pain, Lear loses everything: his kingdom, his dignity, his children, his mind, and eventually his life. At the height of his crisis, he wages war with a massive storm—like lieutenant Dan, strapped to the mast of the Jenny, he has it out with God in the midst of a category-five hurricane. According to Forrest, Lieutenant Dan made his peace with God in that particular storm; there is no such rapprochement for Lear, who enters at the end of the play, carrying the lifeless body of the only daughter who actually and honestly loved him, and then dies of grief himself. Edgar provides us with the true benediction: “The weight of this sad time we must obey; speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” For Buechner, we can’t really move on to the comedy of the spring and summer, and the ultimate fairy tale of the Gospel, without acknowledging in our own lives the tragic winter as the necessary precursor. The artists are the real preachers, he tells us, because they portray the uncensored tragedy for what it is; they, like Edgar, “speak what they feel, not what we ought to say.”
This honest view of human weakness imbues the works of the Novelist and believer, Walker Percy. Percy saw the artist as a kind of canary in the mines, more sensitive to the deep pain and struggle in a society than others. His own experience in life seems cruel. Suicide ran in his family like a congenital defect—one relative overdosed on Morphine, another jumped into a creek with a sugar kettle tied around his neck; his grandfather shot himself, his father carried on the tradition, climbing into the attic of the family home when Walker was thirteen and blowing his own head off with a shotgun. A few years later, his mother drove off a bridge and drowned in her car. Miraculously, Percy somehow reached young adulthood without carrying on the morbid tradition and went off to medical school at Columbia University. A happy ending, right? Well, to add insult to already incredible injury, as an intern, Percy contracted tuberculosis while performing an autopsy, and never practiced medicine again; instead, he turned to faith and became a novelist.
The main character in most of his novels is often like a shipwrecked castaway who, having found himself washed up on a beach, realizes the ordeal has left him with amnesia. Though he tries then to become an integral part of the island culture, he never feels fully at home. In response to his haunting alienation, he combs the shores of his exile looking for any scrap of a clue that will tell him about his forgotten home across the sea.
The Second Coming is a striking example. The despondent and desperate main character, Will Barrett, decides to perform an experiment, which will prove once and for all whether God exists and—more importantly—whether is a loving God. He formulates a plan, in which he will crawl deep into a local North Carolina cave, take a massive dose of sedatives, and wait for either death to take him or God to reach out from His imperturbable silence and save him. A week later, he is harshly awakened by an excruciating abscessed tooth. He decides that though he came into this cave to force God to appear or to die trying, that pain was not a part of the plan and that he must abandon the experiment. God, it seems, has not arrived.
Still in a sedative stupor, he crawls and tumbles out of the cave, damaging himself extensively in the process, and is discovered, unconscious and battered by Allie Huger, a young woman who has escaped from a mental institution where she’s been undergoing repeated sessions of electroshock therapy that have left her bereft of most of her language skills and all of her memories. She nurses Barrett back to health and these two broken people—the man with no future and the woman with no past—become one another’s salvation—perhaps God arrived after all. Percy’s dark art provides us with very few clear doctrinal answers to our struggles, but he reveals to us a certain grace that may be discovered as we search honestly for answers whilst enduring the pain that is part-and-parcel of the human journey. He speaks what he feels, and not what he ought to say.
However, as Evangelicals, we are uncomfortable with this notion of unbridled artistic honesty—because it may portray the ‘wrong’ message; because regardless of the messenger’s intent, the message must be correct. It is my opinion that this genealogy of dogmatic rectitude is why we Evangelicals so often produce mediocre art. Perhaps I should qualify my statement. I think we produce mediocre art because we burden our artists with the need to exclusively portray some aspect of the holy. Mediocrity is not really bad or good—it is in between. “Mediocre” is a Latin term identifying the middle—that is, the place between the two extremes. So, when we describe art as “holy,” because it makes us feel “good”, or has the right message, what we really mean is, we’ve experienced something that doesn’t challenge us, or offend us, or in any way provoke us—and that it somehow worshipfully revalidates our already well-buttressed view of the cosmic order. Is this really a definition of artistic holiness? Isn’t it more accurately a description of holy mediocrity? In reality, it’s probably not describing art at all, but a kind of propaganda—that is, a work meant to propagate the articles of faith. Holy mediocrity is the result of forcing inspiration to pass through a filter of dogmatic rectitude. But dogmatic rectitude and artistic honesty are rarely the same thing. To paraphrase O’Connor, “Art is about everything human, and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting your self dusty, then you shouldn’t try to do art.”
It is with this in mind that I would like to offer some suggestions to those few brave Evangelicals who feel called to the arts, or to parents or educators who are entrusted with the rearing and equipping of the creative child. I make these statements in the style of a manifesto, but I admit that they are still speculative—trial balloons, in a sense. I also accept that some of them may not be fully achievable in actual practice, but after decades of struggling in the arts, I’d like to think they should be considered.
1) We need to stop teaching our young artists to self-censor.
The creative impulse, the ‘invenio’—to remain creative—must be unfettered. I’m aware that this sounds simply too dangerous, but it comes back to the entrenched idea that art is somehow more fraught with peril than other callings—a prejudice we should reject. If we train our young artists to self-censor so they won’t “stumble,” we’ll also prevent them from ever running. But we want them not only to run, don’t we? But to fly! So perhaps we should face the issue head on: will our young artists stumble if we encourage them to run? Without a doubt, they will stumble and fall, and because they’re moving at greater speeds than a crawl, the injuries they sustain will be that much more painful, and require that much more recovery. But this is the reality of our human journey. It’s a truism that no worthwhile achievement comes without a few scars. The well-trained runners, when they fall, bandage their wounds, get up, and continue running, trying to avoid the pitfalls that tripped them up the last time. It’s called growth.
But too often, when one of our own does fly, and finds success or even renown, we honor them, but at arms length. Because, unless their work is clearly sanctified, there is something dangerous about them now. They have stepped outside the norms of the community, and having done so, cannot now be completely trusted. There is in them a dormant virus that might infect others if they’re not inoculated. Artists, we think, tread a dangerous path strewn with the rubble of those who have gone before them and been wrecked along the journey; and their flotsam takes the form of so many stumbling blocks that may trip up the unwary pilgrim, and take them over the unseen cliff. Therefore, we convince ourselves it’s only a kindness to keep our young artists from taking that path. If they never start the journey, then they’ll never fall over the cliff.
But we may be thinking we’re not so much concerned about the artist falling—they’ve made their choice after all. We’re really concerned about those who view, or read, or listen to, or touch, or smell the art they produce. They might be caused to ‘stumble’ by the artist’s work; they might be dragged unwittingly over the cliff with the falling artist. But let’s face reality here: if as artists we must bear the burden for the potential reaction of every person who might partake of our artistic expressions, we may as well never begin—because that’s simply impossible. Flannery O’Connor argues, “If the writer uses his eyes in the real security of his faith, he will be obliged to use them honestly. . . To look at the worst will be for him no more than an act of trust in God; but what is one thing for the writer may be another for the reader. What leads the writer to his salvation may lead the reader into sin, and the Catholic writer who looks at this possibility directly looks Medusa in the face and is turned to stone . . .”
I wonder, should Michelangelo be held responsible if someone looks at the Sistine Chapel and is suffused with lust by all that nudity? Or should Tolkien be held responsible if someone reads The Hobbit and goes on killing spree with a sword? We cannot ask artists to shoulder this responsibility. Artistic vision is a uniquely individual thing, but it’s also very fragile and vulnerable, like a flickering candle. Should we snuff out the candle—rendering ourselves blind—because we fear the destructive potential of fire? Like so many things in this human walk, the very thing that can light the way through the darkness is the same thing that can burn down the house.
So, here’s what I suggest: rather than self-censorship, let’s teach our young artists honesty. If we don’t condition them to self-censor, we must encourage them to be baldly honest, to express their vision exactly as they perceive it. Now let’s be clear, I have no doubt that this kind of unbridled honesty will at times offend, but I don’t think our honesty will offend God, from whom we can hide nothing anyway. No, the offended will be our brothers and sisters, who will question our religious commitment, and condemn what they perceive as a poor Christian witness.
I’m going to make a C. S. Lewis reference here, knowing that for some the post-mortem perception of his misogyny categorically disqualifies him from any comment; but relying upon that old Appalachian proverb ‘even a blind pig can find an acorn once in a while’, I’ll risk it. As far as I’m concerned, one of his most poignant books on faith, A Grief Observed, was published under the pseudonym, N. W. Clerk, not because he felt his searing and painful honesty following the death of his wife, Joy, would offend God, but because he feared that if the towering Christian apologist, C.S Lewis, were known to harbor these thoughts, his Christian brothers and sisters would question the genuineness of his faith. So, he lied, in order not to offend his Christian audience. He was right, as it turned out; after his death, the book was re-issued under his own name, and deemed by some in the religious community to be offensive to Christianity.
However, it might be useful to remind ourselves that the most offensive person in the history of Christianity was Jesus, and those he most offended were the most religious of his day. He broke nearly every cherished rule, perhaps because his followers needed to understand that salvation would not be discerned through rules, but through relationship. All the rules, he said, are fulfilled in love. It’s responsive, it’s relational, it operates in the here-and-now. It cannot be reduced to a set of rules, as in WWJD? Because then it is no longer relational love but a set of ‘love laws’. If we want our artists to fly, we need to teach them to be honest in love—not ‘love laws’, but relational love. Love God and do your art honestly.
Martin Buber suggests that true art only happens in relationship. “This is the eternal origin of art,” he writes, “that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him. Not a figment of his soul but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul’s creative power. What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being. . .” The passage reminds me of a story about Michelangelo. It may be apocryphal, but it’s also evocative, so I’ll use it: “A visiting prince to Florence came into Michelangelo’s studio and found the master staring at an 18-foot block of marble. The artist had come in everyday for the last four months, stared at the marble, and gone home for his supper. So the prince asked the obvious — what are you doing? Michelangelo turned around, looked at him, and whispered, “sto lavorando,” (I’m working). Three years later that block of marble was the statue of David.” His contemporaries called Michelangelo ‘Il Divino’ the divine one, because the divine madness spoke so clearly to him from those blocks of marble. This is the essence of a relational approach to art.
2) Creativity is a gift from God, not the devil.
The preeminent artist in the universe is the Great Creator. God, out of His abundant creativity, brought the universe into being. Moreover, we’re told in Genesis that human beings are the crown of that great work—created in the image and likeness of God. If we accept this, then we should recognize that the creative impulse in humans is a quintessential part our being God’s self-portrait. Of course, God created ex-nihilo, and we can’t do that—we create from what we’ve experienced, a rearrangement of reality using our imaginations. J.R.R. Tolkien called this process sub-creation—like God, but without his infinite capabilities.
Yet, too often we tell our young artists that the creative imagination has been too irreparably stained by the Fall to be indulged, or worse, that it’s a diabolical gift (if there were such a thing). We cite Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians: that we should “cast down imaginations, and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, and bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ”. We infer from this that even though our imaginations were created innocent, they have since been irreparably corrupted by the stain of the Fall—that the same deception that wheedled its way into the minds of Adam and Eve has, like a Trojan- horse virus, taken up residence in our imaginations, lying perhaps dormant, waiting for the moment to open its belly and disgorge its corruption on all we think and do.
But the Bible also tells us that the greatest artist of antiquity was the ‘sweet psalmist of Israel’, the warrior poet and musician King David, who was a ‘man after God’s own heart’. Like no other, David pours his authentic pain into his poems—what could be more honest than ‘my God, my God why have you forsaken me?’ Was this the right message? Probably not, because thus sayeth the Lord, I will never leave you nor forsake you; but David’s is the cry of an honest heart. I speculate this kind of honesty was precisely why he was a ‘man after God’s own heart.
3) Christianity is not a genre.
We need to stop describing works of art as “Christian” (Christian films, Christian novels, Christian plays, etc.). There is no such thing as a Christian novel any more than there are Christian drainpipes, or Christian cabinets, or Christian stethoscopes. There are well-written novels and there are poorly-written novels, and a whole range between, any of which may be written by Christians. Describing a novel as “Christian” is a marketing scheme. A ‘Christian’ novel will more than likely be relegated to a certain section of the bookstore where only the faithful trod. Those who purchase the ‘Christian’ novel will almost universally do so because they believe the genre tag represents a tacit agreement between the publisher and themselves that insures their worldview will not be deeply challenged, they will most likely not feel offended by the material, and they may be marginally entertained, somewhat distracted, and made to feel what they might call ‘uplifted’ for a while by its content. In other words, believers label the Christian novel as such because it’s deemed “safe” for consumption.
But, what precisely is it that makes a novel “Christian”? Is it that it is written by a believer in Christ, or that it promotes “Christian” themes (whatever those might be), or that it is free of a list of banned offensive words, portrays no sexual activity and little sexual innuendo, or that it ends with the right side obtaining victory and the wrong side receiving their just punishments? By these definitions, the Harry Potter novels are all Christian. And what makes a Christian film “Christian”? Is it that it has Christian actors? Then all Denzel Washington films are Christian films. Unfortunately, we’ve become far too comfortable with our faith being merchandized. If being a Christian is marked by a saving relationship with Jesus Christ, then perhaps we should reconsider our exclusionary practices when it comes to categorizing our brothers and sisters in the arts, and restricting them based on those arbitrary categorizations.
4) We need stop trying to dissuade creative children from the arts.
If a child is gifted in one field, why try to coerce them into a field they will probably not be particularly skilled at or, worse, never be fulfilled in? David, in the Psalms, tells us to delight in the Lord and He will give us the desires of our hearts. Why then are we so ready to tell our young people what those desires of their hearts should be? Why don’t we trust that God has planted that seed? I would like to think that it’s a benevolent protective impulse based on some misconception balloons that need puncturing, such as: “Artistic careers are direct paths to poverty.”
Artistic professions are no more populated with derelicts and divas than any other. In fact, careers in the arts are, by-and-large, working-class professions. Most committed artists work far more than 40 hours a week, keep regular hours—perhaps not 9-5, but regular nonetheless—and are thoroughly devoted to their work. However, artists may—by general cultural standards—mature more slowly than parents would like. I say “by general cultural standards” because the judgment is arbitrary. Any profession has a learning curve. A carpenter begins as an apprentice, then a journeyman, then with years of work, a master. An academic doesn’t start out a full professor, but a lowly instructor. A lawyer doesn’t begin as a full partner. A doctor starts as an intern. We expect that in most professions. But if an artist isn’t fully formed three months out of college they’re told to consider their “fallback” professions. Why is that? What is the fallback profession for a doctor?
I was talking with a man not long ago (a doctor, by the way) who told me his son had gone to law school, finished successfully, and passed the bar, only to realize that what he really wanted to do was wood carving. The amazing thing here is that his father had the wisdom and foresight to encourage him to go for it. He’s a successful wood carver today, and though he may not earn as much as a full partner in a law firm, he makes a comfortable living and is fulfilled by his work. I suspect most parents would see this as an abject failure if it were their own child because we measure success by the wrong standards.
5) Artists are not necessarily evangelists.
This, of course, is one of the most challenging points to an Evangelical community, where everything we do must somehow be consciously fulfilling the ‘Great Commission’. Referencing Thomas Aquinas, Flannery O’Connor argues that, “An artist is, first of all, a person who has been given a talent to do a particular thing . . . [and that] art does not require rectitude of the appetite, that it is wholly concerned with the good of that which is made . . . A work of art is a good in itself, and this is a truth that the modern world has largely forgotten. We are not content to stay within our limitations, and make something that is simply a good in and by itself. Now we want to make something that will have some utilitarian value. Yet what is good in itself glorifies God because it reflects God. The artist has his hands full and does his duty if he attends to his art. He can safely leave evangelizing to the evangelists.”
But most Evangelicals who are artists have been taught at some point that their witness (that is, their art) must somehow be made expressly useful to God; meaning that it should, at its core, have a message that clearly points to Christ. I think to insist on this explicitly evangelical utilitarianism is to reduce an artist to a propagandist and to ignore God’s infinite ability to use anything for His purposes. It might be useful to remember that the honest cry of the heart may be more truly evangelical than any ‘correct’ message could be, as with David’s cry: “How long LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart?” It was the apostle Paul who wrote, “the body has many members and not all members have the same function.” Within the Body of Christ, being an evangelist is one of those functions, but so too, I would argue, is being an artist. O’Connor’s point is that our gifts, our talents (i.e., our callings) are from God and we should develop those talents—and in doing so we glorify Him—for the greatest thanksgiving for a gift from God is simply using it to the fullest of our ability.
6) The notion of the “sacred and profane” in the arts is a false dichotomy.
As Christians, So much of our perception is filtered through a set of irreducible Dualistic Dyads:
Good – Evil Spirit – Flesh Pure – Corrupt Redeemed – Lost Angelic – Demonic Truth – Lie Sacred – Profane
We need to stop programming these disjunctive moral dyads into our young artists. I’ve seen too many young people who feel compelled to make a false choice between being an artist or being a Christian, as though they’d been convinced the two were mutually exclusive. I had a student once who said she wanted more than anything to be an actor, but her father wouldn’t let her because, he said, she’d end up naked on a billboard—as though there were no other choices. That particular student chose a major she wasn’t really interested in, but one that pleased her parents. She became a teacher instead, fulfilling George Bernard Shaw’s arrogant little dictum:
“He who can does, he who cannot, teaches.” I hope she’s fulfilled as a teacher. At least—to my knowledge—she never ended up naked on a billboard. She also chose not to pursue her dream, and perhaps God’s call on her life because her parents saw her creative gifts as profane. She obeyed her dad but suppressed her Father.
But perhaps more troubling are those who actually pursue the dream, in the face of sometimes fierce opposition, and frame that pursuit in their own minds as an act of rebellion against a system they recognize as too rigid to embrace them. Is it really our desire to alienate creative people? We either alienate them from themselves by telling them they must suffocate their creativity, or we alienate them from the body of Christ by inferring there’s no function for them there unless they toe the line within the sacred demands of the collective. We should end this well-intended ostracizing. We need, rather, to embrace our artists just as we embrace our doctors, our entrepreneurs, our preachers, our lawyers, well maybe not that last one.
Moreover, we need to encourage them in a truthful manner. If a young person is skilled in mathematics we praise them unreservedly, and we thereby reinforce the pleasure they gain from performing that skill. We would probably do the same for a child skilled in science, or engineering, or reading, or logic. Why, when it comes to the arts, do we qualify that praise? Kids aren’t stupid. They know when they’re being encouraged and they know when their being ‘unencouraged’, but they don’t always know why.
If praise isn’t given for their artistic talents, they assume they are ‘no good’ and get the message that they should not keep trying. Either that, or they perceive that they need to rebel against the repressive system that unencourages them. They develop an either/or mentality when it comes to their artistic gifting—either I can be an artist or I can be a Christian. I can’t be both.
So, even though we might be saying with our mouths, “Fly little birds, fly!” if our unseen hands are all the while plucking out their feathers, we have sealed our children’s fate.
So, I think, for our purposes we need to define ‘art’ as neither sacred nor profane, but an honest process in which technical skill (‘ars’) combines with inspiration (‘invenio’) to produce a thing of beauty. For the artist, I think, beauty is whatever celebrates our human perceptions of the universe and our place in it. This beauty can be gentle, or terrible, or many shades between, and not all of them are “safe.” A volcano has a terrible beauty, but it can also be incredibly dangerous.
7) Christians need to form artists’ communities.
My last point today is that everyone needs encouragement, even artists. And they need it from people who understand—people who have been there. Artists who are Christians may need this more than others; not because they’re weaker than others, but because they are often criticized from all sides, from those who say they cannot be real artists because they’re Christians; all the way to those who say they cannot be real Christians because they’re artists. These communities need not be particularly large, but they should be geographically local, and most importantly, they should be critical, but THEY MUST BE NON-CENSORING. We need these communities because it’s essential to have a support system, not a set of prison guards. We need communities of Christians who understand the need for complete honesty in artistic expression. Now let me point out here that’s there’s a difference between censoring and critiquing. Then former takes place before the production of the art, the latter afterwards. What we need to develop in these communities is encouragement and critique that is neither provincial nor dogmatic, but based on our honest response the honest artistic quality of the work. It is, for instance, constructive to say, “I don’t like that painting”. However, it is not constructive to say, “God will not like that painting.” It is constructive to say, “That novel is very honest, a Christian publisher will probably never publish it.” It is not constructive to say, “You can’t call yourself a Christian and leave those bad words in your novel.” It is constructive to say, “Your film should probably come with a warning so young people don’t see it.” It is not constructive to say, “You need to edit that nudity out of your film—it sends the wrong message.” Artists’ communities can provide this kind of constructive criticism while still encouraging the creative process.
So, these are a few ideas I have been mulling over in recent years. There may be others, but I think these are challenging enough going forward.
