Art and Authenticity, Part 1

One of the joys problems interesting repercussions of the internet world is that it’s now somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible to leave the past behind.  There was a time when it was possible to completely disappear off the face of the Earth and start from scratch simply by going to the next town over.  Now you can move a thousand miles and find a reminder of your past in a random acquaintance’s Facebook status.

They’re interesting, those little reminders of who you once were and who you once knew.  This is especially the case when it turns out that a lot of those little reminders are tossed out from people you once went to church with.  Whether this is good or bad remains to be seen.  Mostly it’s just a curiosity.

The problem with Facebook is contextual minimalism.  Someone puts up a status up or posts a picture that’s just the briefest possible snapshot of their day or week.  Adding to that is the problem that it’s almost impossible to know how much thought was put in to that particular nugget of information and how much it actually reflects who that person is and what he or she thinks.

So, basically, what I’m saying is that Facebook has largely taught me that a bunch of the people I used to go to church with are becoming crazier and crazier.  It causes problems sometimes.  Some may well be getting crazier and crazier.  We do live in a world that is increasingly rewarding and encouraging binary thinking, after all.  Since the baseline thinking of the Evangelical Christianity of my youth started from a categorical black/white, right/wrong, good/bad dichotomy, then seeking nuance is automatically discouraged while digging in at the extremes becomes a virtue.

This does not necessarily mean that my Facebook-based perception of the people I used to go to church with is correct.  I have my own set of biases and through which I view the world, too.  One of them is my increasing realization that there are an awfully large number of people who cynically manipulate the Evangelical/Fundamentalist world for their own gains and have done so by co-opting that which is largely harmless within the confines of the church.  There are things that are said by people in Bible studies that are really quite harmless but are then said on the public square by demagogues in an attempt to advance a sectarian cause.  For those who have never sat in those Bible studies it’s easy to conflate the words of a Bryan Fischer with the words of a coworker, even if they come from a completely different place.  I have to remind myself of that on occasion.

One of the things that I have learned, though, is that an awful lot of the people I once went to church with are actually pretty intellectually and theologically incurious.  I blame this on the modern Christian apologetics movement and the transition of Jesus from a part of a mystical godhead to a “personal lord and savior.”  Apologetics has become a litany of proof texts followed by out of context quote fragments from random authors (generally C.S. Lewis, Augustine, or Aquinas) and an appeal to personal experience.  Genuine theological thought has given way to the fluff and pabulum of the Christian Living section of the Christian book store.

Even if I’d only left the Evangelical world behind because I found the culture wanting, I can’t imagine deciding to go back to that empty void.  There’s simply nothing attractive or redeeming about it.  It’s honestly a little saddening to realize that things I once thought were deep and meaningful are actually little more than fluff and bullshit that people buy because they believe it really matters.  The fundamental problem is that Christian fundamentalism has spent years working towards a stripped-down life that focuses on one thing and one thing only: living an “authentic Christian life.”  And by “authentic Christian life,” they mean, “Believe this weird, stripped down, Jesus-is-my-boyfriend garbage that we want you to believe is the way it’s always worked because it’s easier to control you that way.”  After that idea has been swallowed whole Stockholm Syndrome does the heavy lifting.

Strange as it may seem, then, my morning Facebook feed brought me something from one of those still marginally in my life acquaintances that made me happy today.   It was a link to an article about a church plant in Chicago that’s attempting to be a patron of the arts.  As it happens, I kinda-sorta know Jon, the artist in residence, and I actually think it’s pretty cool.

See, in doing this, Jon stands on the shoulders of giants.  There was a time, after all, when the largest patron of the arts in the Western world was the church.  The debt the world owes to the churches in Leipzig for a quarter century worth of composition by Johann Sebastian Bach is incalculable.  And that’s post-Reformation.  Let’s not even try to measure what happened to the art world during the Renaissance.  Further, lest we forget, the Eastern Orthodox church contributed a great deal to art as well.  Sadly, much of that was lost to the iconoclasts, the Venetians, and the Ottoman Turks and we’re left to simply wonder at the magnificence that was Constantinople.

So what changed?

The short answer, really, is John Calvin.  Theology aside, his two primary contributions to the Protestant Reformation were in the removal of the air of mystery that pervaded Catholic and Orthodox orders of service and the elevation of the preaching of the Bible to the central purpose of the church meeting.  He also kicked off a Western European movement towards iconoclasty and was a key figure in the movement away from the magnificent gothic cathedrals of the Medieval period towards more simple church meeting halls.

With the rise of Calvinism (which, for all intents and purposes, means Presbyterians, Puritans, and a good chunk of the home-grown, old-timey religion of America: the Baptists and the Bible Churches and whatnot) came the rise of the primacy of the pastor and preaching in the order of service.  The formalized ritual of the high church liturgy was thrown out.  The idea of a well-appointed house of worship was replaced by a humble location where ornamentation could not get in the way of instruction in the Bible.

Things continued to evolve after Calvin, as things are wont to do.  But it was ultimately Calvinistic ideals of religion that took hold in the Americas.  Modern Fundamentalism ultimately emerged from the stripped- down aesthetic of the Calvinist system.  The idea of the pastor and the sermon being the central, culminating event of the worship service came from there, too.  While it most certainly not his intention, we can lay the plague of the celebrity pastor at Calvin’s feet.  Although Edwards probably bears quite a bit of the blame, too, along with any of the evangelists involved in the Great Revivals of the 19th Century.

What ultimately happened in this elevation of the sermon was that all other aspects of the human experience were pushed to the side in the production of the church service.  Whether this is a necessarily good or bad thing can be left open to interpretation.  But it can certainly be said that this development was bad for the arts.  It’s not just that the arts were ignored, it’s that they were actively excluded from the process unless they could contribute in some subsidiary way.

I have called my previous church environment “artless” in the past.  This, ultimately, is why.  What art there was in the church was either created to serve the Biblical teaching or pushed to the fringes.  As such music was reduced to a series of repetitive choruses lacking content much beyond, “Yay, Jesus,” and chord structures that could be banged out by anyone in the church who had taken a couple guitar lessons.  Much greater violence was done to the visual arts in the form of Thomas Kinkaid paintings and kitschy garbage that would be flat-out embarrassing to display in public turned Christian with the insertion of a Bible verse or two.[1]

So what’s the take home?  I mean, other than the fact that I’ve apparently put way more thought than anyone could have possibly expected in to this?  For the moment, it’s that it’s about damn time someone decided to incorporate an artist-in-residence in to a church.  But there’s a lot more to it than that.  Some is good, some is bad.  So I’m going to actually write several posts about an article about a church I’ve never attended to which I am only tangentially connected.

This seems like the sort of thing that would end up inviting hate mail.  You know, if more than eighteen people actually read this blog and I didn’t know at least half of them personally.  I look forward to your letters.

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[1]I worked in a Christian book, music, and gift store for a while.  My sister expressly forbade me to give her any gifts that came from there.  I’m actually sort of offended to think she thought I would…

Comments

[Melissa]

Wow. Very well-written and thought-provoking.

[GailVortex]

Hate mail? Who's gonna write you hate mail? It can't be any of The Few, The Proud, Your Handful of Regular Readers, who have been indulging your posts on After the Flood for--what is it, years?--quite some time. [Unless of course you're issuing us a challenge.] Not enough detail in your post to cause the random google to send someone likely to hate this way, either...

[Geds]

GailVortex: I just hit the point where I needed to stop. So I just decided to riff on Craig Ferguson. Whenever he says something he knows will invite letters of complaint he stops and says, "I look forward to your letters."