Author JD Cowan does the autopsy on corporate Christian art and finds both secular and nominal Christian utopians holding the knife.
Living as a utopian is not dependent on where you spend your Saturdays or Sundays, it is about what you believe human nature will consist of hundreds of years after you are gone. If you believe it anything but unchanging and that reality itself can absolutely be warped by thinking the right thoughts and saying the right platitudes then you are a utopian. Since this is something everyone involved in the Christian Entertainment Industry absolutely believes, they are therefore utopian. And this is what we will keep in mind moving forward today.
Modern Christian Art is actually an incorrect descriptor. It is not particularly Christian, it is not really Art, though it is thoroughly Modern. I suppose 1 out of 3 isn’t a total failure, though they did hit the worst of them dead on.
For an example of what we are talking about, we can mention any number of things. Movies such as God’s Not Dead, books such as Left Behind, or music such as the heavily regulated and gatekept CCM industry, all exist to sell a prepackaged ahistorical soft serving of mid-20th century values and platitudes complete with their own religion heavily based on a modern view of the world that didn’t exist before Industrialization and, to be frank, no longer exists today. Their framework is hinged on a time and place that was a waterdrop in the waterfall of history.
It is in fact the makings of a religion, but it isn’t framed around Christianity. It is framed around safe, saran-wrapped modernist living for first world baby boomers that came of age over half a century ago. They are more or less 20th century Amish only still entirely dependent on the grid. They even have the three aspects one need to be considered a makeshift religion.
They have a cult: that would be “Bible-based Christianity” though a thoroughly 20th century view on what that means which is always different depending on the date of the calendar (but never before 1950 or so) and use their own “Christianese” language to speak to the ingroup. They also tend to call themselves “non-denominational” though sometimes Evangelical though that is increasingly rarer. The point is that they all share far too similar habits.
They have a code: a thoroughly modern baby boomer outlook on existence usually hinged, purely coincidentally I’m sure, on William F Buckley. You might as well look up to King Louis IX. He has about as much bearing on the modern age. More, actually.
They have a creed: this would be their stale and unchanging art meant to keep you locked down to one place and time while the world around them goes to hell in a handbasket. This would be the Christian Entertainment Industry, which fails at being Christian and fails at being Entertainment. But it does keep you complacent in modernism, and that is what matters more.
Settle in and read JD’s whole post here.
A favorite rhetorical jab that fedora tippers love to use goad Christians is the sorry state of Christian art. They’ll cite Christian rock or Thomas Kincade paintings as proof that Christianity destroys creativity. These accusations are absurd – the Pieta or the Sistine Chapel ceiling put paid to them instantly. They’re also projection. Secular utopianism has fallen into aesthetic and moral bankruptcy, and the secular utopians know it.
What destroyed contemporary Christian art was the erroneous decision on the part of many Christians to stop challenging evil. Yes, this toothless approach dates to the 1960s on the whole – and post-Vatican II on this side of the Tiber. Christians on both shores decided the best way to combat the Modernism creeping into the church was to ignore heresy and focus only on the faith’s positive content.
We may be tempted to call it preaching to the choir, but the opposite is true. Believers need to be reminded, from time to time, that Satan is prowling like a lion, and sin is always crouching at the door. Heresy needs to be rooted out before it can grow. It’s heathen cultures that need a gradual drip of Christian truth to wash away manmade accretions and reveal the good beneath that speaks to the Gospel.
Instead, 1960s Christians spoke to believers like they were heathens. The result is a back slide into heathenry, AKA Clown World.
The takeaway is that a change in approach may be needed for evangelizing online. Many Zoomers are as ignorant of the Gospel as 18th century jungle tribesmen. Condemning their errors doesn’t work. To bear fruit among the last few increasingly heathen generations, we may need to approach them as missionaries in a heathen field.
The Mecha for Us
Caveat: they are heathens who think they know what Christianity is – a weekly therapy/magical-thinking session if they think they’re Christians; a buncha hateful hypocrites out to take away their sexdrugs if not.
I think a good tack is just to spurt forth to an unsuspecting public with the greatest, holiest beauty you know. Reading out the Ballad of the White Horse on street corners is one I’ve done more than once.
I mean… when a demonimation keeps the sacraments, why wouldn’t the Liturgy double as a weekly therapy? The only Protestants who would understand are the Lutherans and the Anglicans.
The perspective I look at this from is if archaeologists from the future tried to reconstruct our society from only our media, would they be able to determine that we were Christian or that there were any uniquely American traditions? If we take just visual media my impression is like this:
1930-1975-ish – Yes, definitely.
1975-ish-2010 – You can tell that there are Christians and patriotic Americans, but no one seems to take it that seriously and it would be hard to fell much about the specifics of what either means.
2010-now – You might not even know that there is religion called “Christianity” or a country called “America.”
Nothing about post-90s culture is going to make any sense in the distant future. It’s completely nonsensical even to most living it now. Unless you know the exact factors that lead to it, the 20th century is mostly going to be remembered for certain strains of popular music, silent films and golden age Hollywood flicks, b-movies, cartoons and the 2D animated medium, pulp magazines of the ’20s and ’30s, Tolkien, Lewis, and other religious artists and philosophers. There will be an overwhelming sense of letting a fantastic opportunity slip from their fingers that will confuse anyone who hasn’t studied the era. Most of the Cultural Ground Zero source material is going to be more associated with the early 21st century, since that’s where the zombie refused to die.
Of course no one can really know how the future is going to be seen, but I would wager it would be recognized by then as the aberration that it was, even though there would be a class of retro hipster co-opting it as a clique for themselves in some kind of confused hodgepodge idea of how people of the time lived. Sort of like the pagan-larpers of today, actually.
But just imagine someone in even 20 years watching a movie like American Beauty for the first time and not thinking everyone involved had a mental disease. It’s already dated badly as it is. By then it’s going to look absolutely insane.
“There will be an overwhelming sense of letting a fantastic opportunity slip from their fingers”
Would love to see you expand on that theme.
>To bear fruit among the last few increasingly heathen generations, we may need to approach them as missionaries in a heathen field.
Way ahead of you. I’ve probably put more butts in Catholic pews than the current pope.
May it win you crowns in Heaven!
Click on his profile.
You choose peace or war?
How is the COVID situation over there?