Uncle Tom, Sweet Jesus, and Public Urination
What is it about so much contemporary “Christian” art that makes it so bad so often? Even the complaints have become cliché.
To be sure, there are many Christian writers and artists today who strive to defy this stereotype and succeed. Nevertheless, Christian art has a problem. It’s easy to think this problem began with the cheesy evangelical movies and Christian rock of the 1980s and ’90s. But the fact is that bad evangelical art has a long and interesting history. Of course, bad art can be bad for any number of reasons (such as lack of imagination, execution, or skill). But what tends to make evangelical Christian art bad is its sentimentalism.
What Is Sentimentality?
The word “sentimental” is most often used in a context in which an object is cherished not for its monetary worth but for the feelings it evokes, usually emotions associated with the memories or relationships the item represents. In fact, the word “sentiment” is nearly synonymous with feelings or thoughts. (Pedants take note: because to have sentiments about something means to have thoughts or feelings about it, there is no need to be critical or disapproving when people say, “I feel . . .” instead of “I think . . .” The meaning is essentially the same.)
Sentimentality itself isn’t necessarily bad. But sentimentalism is an emotional response in excess of what the situation demands; it’s an indulgence in emotion for its own sake. It is emotion that is unearned. As Victorian critic Leslie Stephen puts it, sentimentalism is “the name of the mood in which we make a luxury of grief, and regard sympathetic emotion as an end rather than a means.”1 To be wary of sentimentalism is by no means to reject feelings but rather is to recognize when emotion surpasses what is warranted. Like having candy for dinner every night, sentimentalism—meaning a way of life or worldview—can cause harm when it is not recognized as the indulgence that it is and then becomes a regular habit of life or a way of conceiving of the world.
Excessive emotion can develop from within ourselves, arising from our own individual propensities or personalities. But emotionalism can also be evoked by external manipulation. This is what sentimental art does: it attempts artificially to create feelings that exceed what the situation warrants.
Television commercials using sweet puppies or cute babies to wring tears from our eyes in hopes of selling a certain brand of beer or phone service are obvious examples of the easily exploitative powers of sentimentality. So are romance novels, movies about Scottish warriors, and prints by Thomas Kinkade, the Painter of LightTM.
Sentimentality sells, as Kinkade proves.
Kinkade was born again in 1980 while he was a college student. He showed tremendous talent as an artist from a young age. After some early artistic success, Kinkade shifted his style and his methods until eventually he was mass-producing the cozy, glowing cottage scenes that are said to hang in ten million homes.2 His earliest paintings—the work of a serious artist—are nearly unrecognizable to anyone who knows the later works that made him rich and famous. Kinkade said in one interview that his moniker, Painter of Light, reflected his evangelical Christian beliefs, explaining, “Light is what we’re attracted to. This world is very dark, but in heaven there is no darkness.”3
A 2010 essay in First Things described him as “one of the most financially successful artists in the world,” having sold more than ten million works, along with licensed products that include wallpaper, furniture, and stationery.4 By the time he died in 2012 at the age of fifty-four, Kinkade’s life and legacy had been marred by lawsuits over fraud, a DUI arrest, and an accusation that he had molested a female employee.5 Additionally, and ironically, the man who had once denounced modernist art by calling it the “fecal school” of art and “bodily function” art6 was said by witnesses to have developed a bizarre practice of urinating in public places.7
In 2013, the Journal of British Aesthetics published fascinating research examining the effects on viewers of repeated exposure to bad art. The bad works of art they used? Paintings by Thomas Kinkade.8
The Authority of Emotion
If the purpose of art is to recreate human experience, the purpose of sentimental art is to recreate emotional experience. This can be harmless—such as when a souvenir from a vacation brings back warm memories of a cherished trip. But sentimentalism can do harm when emotions are evoked apart from or subordinate to other aspects of the human experience (such as intellectual, spiritual, or physical experience) and thus to the totality of what is real. Whether portraying things in terms overly sweet or overly sad, or whether interpreting people (who are complex) as one-dimensional heroes or villains, sentimentality smooths over the rough edges of reality and glosses over hard questions so as to tie things up neatly in a bow. Even glorified violence and prettified barbarity are forms of sentimentality because the emotions they evoke are distorted and thus detract from the ability of art to convey truth. There is a reason the ancients used the word “obscene” (which literally means “against the scene”) for those things not fit to be portrayed on the stage.
It’s not only art that can manipulate our emotions. Religion can too. And the connection between evangelicalism and sentimentalism is not just a coincidence of history.
A strength of the early evangelical movement was how it engaged with emerging ideas in philosophy, epistemology, and aesthetics. It might even be fair to say that evangelicalism, because it arose as a response to cultural forces more than doctrinal ones, has always reflected cultural currents, whatever they may be. This is both a strength and a weakness, of course. As a response to what had become the assumption of Christianity in the wider society, early evangelicalism rightly sought a more authentic Christianity, one rooted in an understanding of the whole person—affections, emotions, intellect, and will.
One school of thought that was growing more influential during the rise of the evangelical movement was sentimental philosophy. Sentimental philosophy grew out of a rivalry between the two dominant Enlightenment-era epistemologies: rationalism and empiricism. Rationalists believed that abstract reasoning was the surest ground of knowledge, while empiricists, inspired by the new scientific method, thought that knowledge begins with the senses—what we can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. Much discussion and debate was taking place concerning the relative powers of rational judgment versus affective responses resulting from sensory experience. This debate is the reason the term “sentiment” came to the fore, as it refers not only to conscious ideas and thoughts, as mentioned above, but also to “non-cognitive attitudes and states of all kinds—emotions, feelings, affects, desires, plans, and dispositions to have them.”9 The word comes from the same root as “sense,” which encompasses not only the perceptual senses but also “sense” in terms of the impressions we form, impressions that begin in sensory experience—as in our sense of things.
This emphasis on sense emerged from the ideas of English philosopher John Locke. In his 1690 work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke argues, “Ideas in the Understanding, are coeval with Sensation; which is such an Impression or Motion, made in some part of the body, as makes it be taken notice of in the Understanding.”10 In other words, Locke believed that our ideas began with our physical, bodily experience and were then processed through the mind.
Later, the Scottish school of philosophy called “common sense realism” developed this vein of thinking in emphasizing the role of inductive reasoning (based on facts derived from observation and experimentation) rather than deductive reasoning (drawn from theoretical concepts and abstract principles). Scottish realism, based in common sense, argued that truth was accessible to all. The influence of common sense (or Scottish) realism on Protestantism (and subsequently the evangelical movement) was so significant that this school of philosophy has been called “the key to Puritan sensibilities.”11 Its influence is present today in strains of evangelicalism that are hostile to any whiff of elitism or intellectualism. Whatever is true, such thinking goes, is accessible to the common person through basic reason and sense—expertise and credentials be damned.
The Bible, too, came to be understood within this new conceptual frame as a sort of “storehouse of facts,”12 a way of seeing the Bible that would have been inconceivable to the early church fathers (and had dramatic consequences when later scientific theories questioned the facts presented in the Bible). This school of thought also led to a view of the Bible that made less room for metaphors, literary complexity, or layers of meaning, which was a clear departure from earlier hermeneutical approaches, including those of Martin Luther and John Calvin.13
The Pietist tendencies of the Puritan ancestors of evangelicals were based on a rationalist approach to sanctification. This approach to virtue formation emphasized practices and habits (or methods, in the case of the Wesleys and their Holy Club) that could develop good character and build strong personal faith. But, influenced by the sentimentalism increasingly in the air, some evangelicals began to stress the role of emotion within individual faith experience. This development partly explains why evangelicalism came to be called a religion of the heart.14 Eventually, evangelicals came to see “the repetitive engagement of the emotions” as a means of forming habits that would develop virtuous character.15
Again, emotions themselves do not comprise sentimentality. Rather, sentimentality entails a repetition of previous emotional experience. So while evangelicalism tends to think it eschews the ritual, liturgy, and “vain repetitions” (Matt. 6:7 KJV) of earlier church practices, it has its own habits or repetitions—its stock phrases, images, actions, and tropes—too often performed with little or no awareness or reflection.16 When these repetitions aim solely to replicate certain emotional experiences, they fall squarely within the realm of the sentimental.
The Cult of Sensibility
Much has been made in recent years of expressive individualism, a modern understanding that assumes happiness or the good life depends on the fulfillment of one’s own individual beliefs, desires, and goals as well as the ability to express these.17 This increased experience of the inner world of the self as well as the sense of the interplay between the self and the world is called subjectivity.
In many ways, evangelicalism grew as a reflection of the new understanding of the self and of individual experience offered by sentimental philosophy. This shift in religious understanding took place within a much larger cultural context that placed a similar emphasis on the inner life. Subjectivity contributes, for example, to the evangelical movement’s emphasis on the felt conversion experience as the basis for Christian faith rather than mere inheritance. In some ways, then, the story of evangelicalism is the story of the attempt—sometimes successful, sometimes not—to rejoin what no man should put asunder: the rational and emotional, the objective and subjective, the interior and external aspects that comprise the totality of what it means to be human.
Sensibility—a prevalent concept in the eighteenth century—is one expression of this emphasis on interiority that developed alongside the rise of the evangelical movement. Sensibility denoted a person’s perceptiveness or responsiveness, a meaning more closely connected to sensory experience (the five senses) than what we mean today when we refer to something as “sensible” (reflecting common sense). The concept of sensibility was linked to “emotion,” which means, most literally, a movement out of—in other words, an agitation or responsiveness that begins inside the body and moves outward. For example, Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility centers on this meaning of “sensibility”; the two terms used in its title roughly correspond to what “reason” and “emotion” mean today. Austen, who published this work in 1811, was satirizing (among other things) sensibility because (as we will see below) it had grown so popular in previous decades that it had become a movement called the “cult of sensibility.”
The cult of sensibility, which peaked in the mid-eighteenth century, elevated one’s ability to be “sensible” toward (or emotionally responsive to) affecting situations, especially suffering. (Today, we would use the word “sensitive” rather than “sensible.”) According to the cult of sensibility, our moral judgments, our abilities to discern good and evil, arise from properly attuned emotional responses evoked by the powers of sensory perception, a harmonizing of experiences of the inner life and the outer world. “Proper moral action” was understood to be “predicated on proper moral feeling.”18 To be capable of feeling strong emotions (sensibility), particularly pity at any form of suffering, whether human or animal, was considered to be moral and virtuous.19 Because perceptions are capable of being directed and refined, education and experience played an important part in developing moral feeling. Thus, art that offered practice in bringing out such emotions served to instruct and thereby to advance moral improvement, a power seized on by Christians:
By connecting sentiment to sensation, Christian culture raised a series of questions about the relations between mind and body, senses and spectatorship, and whether the wellsprings of faith lay in mystery or invigilation. By valuing sensory impressions, intense feeling, and active agency, Christian artworks offered a discomforting model for a public exhibition culture concerned with the comportment of spectators.20
Although the cult of sensibility was short-lived, its influence on the broader culture, including evangelicalism, was long-lasting, becoming a defining characteristic of the Victorian age (and beyond).21 As one historian explains,
In both Britain and the United States, the Victorian extension of this idea of sensibility as a moral quantity amounted to the definition of a kind of intrinsic character element of the socially refined and cultivated person. Sensibility in the nineteenth century was something that one had or one lacked in varying degrees, in the same way that Victorians saw culture as something possessed in quantities. To have sensibility was to have a capacity for sensitivity to moral and aesthetic experience. To lack sensibility was to be a moral and/or social idiot, unable to discriminate right from wrong, good art from bad, things to be valued from those to be deplored. In some ways, this notion of sensibility is similar to what today would be described in positive moral terms as a “sensitive” character—a person who feels deeply, is inclined to have “hurt” feelings, but who is compassionate and caring, capable of higher moral feeling.22
This link between aesthetic sensibility (feeling the right emotional response arise from sensory perception) and moral sense (making the right judgment)23 led naturally to valuing the outward signs of emotional sensitivity—tears, ecstasies, and swoons. It wasn’t a big leap to come to consider the signs themselves the marks of virtue.
Entire bodies of art and literature developed around sensibility. These works offered emotion-laden scenes that encouraged audiences to tremble in fear, weep in sadness, or rejoice in happiness as appropriate. For example, Richardson’s novel Pamela, discussed earlier, elicited all of these responses, and the novel is considered a landmark in the genre of sentimental literature. Pamela’s sensational scenes depicting an innocent girl under physical and emotional attack, retaining her “virtue” through it all (and being rewarded in the end), advanced the cult of sensibility’s idea that emotional responsiveness cultivates virtue and morality. Sentimentalists held that readers who can feel with Pamela her trials and temptations, as well as the relief that comes from her triumphs, are training their sensibilities toward the way of virtue. Two and a half centuries later, when an American presidential candidate replied to a question related to the economy with the equivalent of “I feel your pain,”24 he was channeling a long history of sentimental philosophy.
Not everyone was on board the sensibility train, however. In 1782, a few decades after Pamela was published, poet and playwright Hannah More—who would soon become an evangelical—published her acclaimed poem “Sensibility.” While praising sensibility, which was so very much in fashion (and More was quite fashionable herself during these years), the poem presents a gentle critique too. For one thing, the poem observes, sensibility is too vague and “still eludes the chains / Of definition.” The poem also warns against confusing the signs of feeling for genuine acts of compassion, calling out anyone “who thinks feign’d sorrows all her tears deserve, / And weeps o’er WERTER,25 while her children starve.”26 In other words, the poem suggests, true morality is in how we actually live, not how much emotion we feel from the imagined suffering portrayed in art and literature. Although Aristotle, Sir Philip Sidney, and others have argued (rightly) that good art can train the emotions in such a way that leads to virtuous action, the lesson offered by literature must be received and applied in order for virtue to develop. This is the point of More’s complaint. Virtue is an action, not just a feeling.
Reform School
The Christian obligation to help a suffering stranger is an idea as old as the parable of the good Samaritan (which itself is an expansion of many teachings throughout the Old Testament). But the idea of proactively bettering the condition of entire social classes—the masses—was an emerging one within the early evangelical movement. It would come to define the movement, what David Bebbington termed “activism,” one of the four characteristics that define evangelicalism as described in chapter 1. In fact, it was in large part owing to the early evangelicals that the larger society began to see human suffering in a different way—as a result of systemic injustices that could and should be eased. Tremendous scientific and social improvements were becoming possible because of the scientific revolution. But it was in great part the result of the evangelical emphasis on the individual—first individual salvation, then individual morality, then individual improvement overall—that it became more possible to think about the alleviation of unnecessary suffering. (Of course, this focus on the individual meant that suffering also tended to be understood as centering on individuals. This helps explain why the evangelical movement has tended to be blind to injustices that have been baked over time into systems and institutions in ways that are often hidden from individual, conscious awareness.) Whereas the prevailing view for time immemorial had been that poverty, sickness, and calamity were God’s will for those who suffered those fates, the evangelical reformers of the eighteenth century imagined that such improvements were not only possible but attainable and desirable. They therefore set out to abolish the slave trade, educate the poor, improve conditions for laborers, and stem cruelty to animals.27 The reforms sought and achieved by evangelicals in the later eighteenth century and early nineteenth century set the stage for the “age of progress” that would define the Victorian period.
Eighteenth-century evangelicals based their vision for widespread social reform on the virtue of benevolence (which means, literally, “good will”). What underlies benevolence is “a forgetfulness of self in the recognition of our common humanity.”28 It is a fine virtue. Sentimentality, however, in centering one’s own emotional responsiveness, is a “deterioration” of benevolence.29 Because it focuses on the self and one’s own emotional response, sentimentality does away with the most important thing needed for benevolence: the forgetfulness of the self. Thus, the rise of sentimentality has been linked to the decline of robust Christian faith.30 Where evangelicalism slides into sentimentalism, it can be counted as participating in this decline.
Sentimental philosophy, along with the art it inspired, bears both gifts and curses. One great good it brought has been in making us more sensible (or sensitive) to the experiences of others around us—in other words, to empathize, although it wasn’t called that then. In fact, the English word “empathy” was coined only about a century ago, well after the rise of sentimentality, when it was translated from a German word that means “feeling-in.” (Notably, one other translation that was considered was “aesthetic sympathy,” a phrase that points to how empathy refers to feelings as both conscious thoughts and bodily or aesthetic sensations.)31
Perhaps no Victorian wielded the power of sentimentalism more effectively than Charles Dickens. Although his novels transcend the narrower (and generally inferior) subgenre of sentimental novels, Dickens’s use of techniques of sentimental art is part of what made his masterpieces so wildly successful. Dickens painted sympathetic pictures of suffering, usually those of people least deserving it (often orphans, widows, the poor). Such misery in real life was, of course, all around—in the lives of countless neglected or abused orphans, workers, inmates, and women. But such unnecessary affliction was so common and so unquestioned for so long that it had become practically invisible. By making this suffering manifest in affecting scenes within gripping narratives, Dickens helped people first to imagine suffering, then to finally see the real suffering that had been right in front of them all the time.
Dickens was not the first to highlight needless suffering in his art, of course. Poets in particular had been exploring issues of social justice, suffering, and moral sentiments for some decades. The Romantic poets William Blake and William Wordsworth are noteworthy for paying attention in their art to the pains of the commoner, a subject deemed unworthy for traditional aesthetics. But even before these luminaries of poetic imagination, lesser-known evangelical poets Hannah More and William Cowper helped transform poetry and other literary forms away from the cool, neoclassical aesthetic toward more humane, emotional, earthy warmth.
But it was the novel form, still a newly developing genre, that reached a critical mass in readership and truly transformed the modern social imaginaries, including the evangelical imagination.
On the opposite side of the Atlantic, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. A truly sentimental novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written by a white person in order to move the sympathies of white readers toward abolition of slavery. The novel did exactly that. One oft-repeated (though possibly apocryphal) legend is that upon being introduced to Stowe, President Abraham Lincoln greeted her by calling her “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”32
But the same sentimental quality that so moved Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s readers is also what renders the novel objectionable. While it humanized slaves enough to draw the ire of slave owners, the palatability of its message to those who did receive it sympathetically depended a great deal on racist tropes and stereotypes that did harm along the way—as any form of sentimentalism, ultimately, will do.
Popular novelists like Dickens (who was a Christian, although not entirely orthodox and not at all fond of evangelicals) and Stowe (whose Christian faith tended toward evangelical) proved the theories of moral philosophers from previous centuries who recognized that sensibility can cultivate morality. But, as Uncle Tom’s Cabin demonstrates, what sentimentality gives, sentimentality can take away. While sentimentality can move one to sympathize with others in their suffering, it can also, ironically, cultivate self-centeredness as “one enjoys feeling a burst of kindness for those less fortunate than himself.”33 This helps explain why sentimentality and sentimental art can be found on both sides of the liberal/conservative political divide: everyone likes to feel good about themselves. Moreover, as Lauren Berlant argues in her examination of the role of sentimentality in American culture, the personal feelings aroused by sentimental art and literature (such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin) may ultimately, and paradoxically, impede the social, political, and structural changes needed to address the cause of suffering. Because in sentimentalism the focus is too much on the personal and private rather than the public, even politically motivated sentimental rhetoric replaces “the ethical imperative toward social transformation” with a more “passive and vaguely civic-minded ideal of compassion.”34 Sentimentalism inches toward change; it does not revolutionize.
Sentimentalism reflected and enabled subtle shifts in Christian belief. For example, the emotional deathbed scenes that were so common in Victorian novels—particularly in the novels of Dickens and Stowe—were, one critic says, “clearly connected with the religious crisis” of the age. Such emotional scenes were “intended to help the reader sustain his faith by dissolving religious doubt in a solution of warm sentiment. When the heart is so strongly moved, the skeptical intellect is silenced,” and the believer is reassured.35 Reassurance of one’s saving faith is good, of course. But not if that blessed assurance is founded in feelings alone.
Sentimental Jesus
While the sentimentality of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evangelicals was oriented toward societal reform, in the twentieth century, as individualism and consumerism came more and more to reign, sentimentality came to reflect that growing individualism.
It would be difficult to find a more exemplary cultural artifact of this marriage of sentimentality and individualism than Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ.
The most famous image of Jesus in the modern world, this painting powerfully demonstrates the double power of popular art: first, to reflect existing ideas, then to deepen their hold within a social imaginary.
For much of the twentieth century, Head of Christ was omnipresent. The original, painted by Sallman in 1940, was reproduced not only in prints of every size and quality but also in Bibles and church bulletins, on prayer cards and plaques, and even on clocks and lamps. Countless millions of people have had their own image of Jesus—ethereal, luminous, serene, and sexy—formed by this picture, often without even being aware of the source, never even imagining that Jesus could look any other way.
Head of Christ did not emerge ex nihilo. The story of how the work was created and how it ended up being reproduced more than 500 million times36 offers a story within the story of how a social imaginary is formed and manifested.
Sallman had been commissioned to create the cover art for the monthly magazine of his denomination, the Evangelical Covenant Church. As he later retold the story, the image that became Head of Christ came to him as a vision following agonizing days and hours of futile effort, just before his deadline, in what he described as a “glorious appearing.”37 Sallman had more than a miracle to help him, however. Having studied at the Chicago Institute of Art, he was familiar with earlier paintings of Jesus, on which he modeled Head of Christ. In addition, having worked in the advertising industry, Sallman had marketing savvy that would help him create cover art that would appeal to the magazine’s audience. By drawing on previous paintings of Christ and on contemporary trends in portraiture, Sallman created an image both fresh and familiar.38 Head of Christ mimics the pose that was then popular for graduation photos39 and celebrity close-ups amid a rising “cult of personality”40 whose “legacy of personal promotion and facial display”41 continues even today.
In this way, Sallman managed to create a Jesus who was at once celebrity and Everyman.
Except not quite every man. Portraying a white, or at best a racially ambiguous, Jesus, Head of Christ was not so much historically accurate as it was familiar, palatable, and desirable to Sallman’s target audience. This audience consisted first of readers of the magazine, then later a far wider audience: consumers of the various reproductions of the painting. As is typical with popular art, the painting depicted “what an audience is pre-disposed to see.”42 Jesus’s warm, radiant countenance is “earnest and accessible,”43 offering “a compelling visualization of the values and devotional and religious ideas” of mainstream evangelicalism.44 In portraying Christ the way the painting’s admirers believed he would look, the work reflected their “mores, theology, social agenda, and ecclesiology,”45 serving as a kind of Protestant version of Christ’s “real presence.”46
Of course, there is a chicken-and-egg scenario here: Which came first? Sallman’s image of Christ or the glamorous celebrity Jesus that had already been conceived within the womb of the American evangelical social imaginary? Whichever the answer, the result is the same. For, as James K. A. Smith explains, “Over time, rituals and practices—often in tandem with aesthetic phenomena like pictures and stories—mold and shape our precognitive disposition to the world by training our desires.”47
In recent years, the inaccurate race of Sallman’s Jesus has been a frequent object of criticism,48 but even before that, the image was embroiled in a different controversy: not around whether Sallman’s Christ was too white, but whether he was too feminine.
While studying at Moody Bible Institute, Sallman had been exhorted by one of his professors to paint “a virile, manly Christ.”49 But as soon as Head of Christ gained popularity, opinions were divided on this question. Some saw in the painting a gentle and warm Jesus (“a vision of domestic Christian nurture”50), while others found the embodiment of masculine strength.51 One person complained, “In Sallman’s Head of Christ, we have a pretty picture of a woman with a curling beard who has just come from the beauty parlor with a Halo shampoo, but we do not have the Lord who died and rose again!”52 Artist Marion Junkin derided the work as “a prettified portrait for the sentimental,”53 while one evangelical minister, in recommending it to young people in particular, said that “just to look at that noble countenance, which expresses character, sympathy, consecration, composure, devotion, strengthens my spirit and purifies my soul.”54
Some aspects of both masculinity and femininity are connected to biological sex, of course, while other aspects are rooted in historical and cultural context. (When one advocates for masculinity, is it the masculinity of King James I in his velvet cloak and crinkled ruff, or is it that of Chad, the cartoon figure of the alpha male popular in manosphere memes? Does the hardy peasant woman sowing the fields to help feed her large family in nineteenth-century Russia meet the criteria of femininity set by today’s evangelical social media influencers?) It’s helpful to consider how some aspects of cultural expectations around masculinity and femininity originate in feelings that have grown up around our contextually based perceptions of what constitutes “masculinity” and “femininity.” Often, exaggerated expressions of masculinity and femininity (like those found in cosplaying militia groups or plastic-surgery-enhanced housewives of certain counties) are at base just a form of sentimentalism: indulgence in the feelings aroused by our own personal and cultural associations more than reality.
The debate surrounding Head of Christ is perfectly illustrative of this phenomenon, given that there is no biblical or historical record of Christ’s physical appearance, particularly in terms of his masculinity (except, as stated in Isa. 53:2, that he lacked physical beauty and majesty). A veritable Rorschach test, Sallman’s paintings of Jesus (he created many) allowed viewers to see in them (or to find missing) what they had already been taught to imagine Christ to be—and to have that image cemented in their understanding.55
More was at play, too, than merely images of Christ’s physical appearance. Form and content ultimately cannot be separated, and the forms Sallman created taught something about his Christian faith and the faith of those who gazed upon them. For example, hanging Sallman’s Head of Christ in the home communicated that Jesus was the “head of the household.”56 Similarly, Sallman’s 1942 Christ at Heart’s Door (an image that had predecessors in earlier art but was popularized by Sallman’s version) borrowed from and, in turn, further emphasized evangelicalism’s belief in the personal, private, and domestic aspect of the salvation experience.
As sensationally popular as Head of Christ was, only a couple of decades later the image was already considered outdated and became “suddenly Victorian.” Just as Sallman had drawn from earlier images of Christ, his work, in turn, yielded its own crops of imitators, updated to reflect ever newer sensibilities.57
Such a series of modified imitations embodies the repetition that characterizes sentimentality. Repetition familiarizes and, in the case of sentimentality, overfamiliarizes. This is why sentimental art (and sentimental thinking of any kind) traffics in familiar tropes and stock characters. Sentimentality reinforces rather than refines beliefs. It softens edges rather than clarifies. It serves to comfort rather than correct. There is, of course, a time and a place for reinforcement, softness, and comfort. But these must be balanced by challenges—including emotional and aesthetic challenges—that strengthen rather than pacify, that enlarge perception rather than narrow it.
“How Nice to Be Moved”
In the classical tradition, truth, goodness, and beauty are understood to be three transcendental qualities or universal realities that originate in and lead to the eternal and divine. The Christian tradition emphasizes the trinitarian relationship of these transcendent realities, each of which finds its source in and reflects God (as reflected by Augustine’s address to beauty quoted in chap. 2). Beauty is the quality that makes truth and goodness manifest.
It is easy to confuse the beautiful with the sentimental because in some ways both are aesthetic experiences. The root meaning of “emotion” is stirring, agitation, or movement, which later came to mean “feelings.” At the most fundamental level, an aesthetic experience is an affective experience, one that moves us. To be moved by something is to experience a bodily response, such as a quickened heartbeat, widened eyes, gathering tears, a gasp, a nod, or a smile. Sentimental art can move us or evoke emotion, just as true beauty does. But not all movements are equal.
Consider this famous passage from Milan Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which points to the difference. Kundera is defining “kitsch,” which is cheap, derivative, sentimental art. Kitsch comes in many forms, including amusement park souvenirs, garden gnomes, knickknacks, Hobby Lobby wall decor, Lifetime movies, and so on (see fig. 10). Kundera explains kitsch this way:
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!
The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!58
Kitsch, like sentimentalism, indulges emotion for the sake of the emotion itself. And as Kundera points out, that second emotion is self-aware and self-satisfied. Again, emotions are not bad. They are good. They are essential to our humanity. But divorced from their proper purpose of rightly driving our thoughts and actions, sentimentality is akin to pornography, as Flannery O’Connor memorably puts it. For both sentimentality and pornography sever the experience (emotional in the first case, sexual in the latter) from its meaning and purpose.59
In reality, you can’t have beauty apart from truth. Beauty apart from truth and goodness is mere sentimentality.
Yet, just as it is easy to satisfy our physical hunger with fast food rather than good food, so, too, is it easy for our appetites to be whetted and then filled by cheap forms of art and beauty, and for our emotions to be seduced by false versions of truly aesthetic experiences. Indeed, living in the age of late capitalism, defined by the marriage of consumerism and mass production, causes us to be surrounded, overwhelmed even, by opportunities for easy sentiment and cheap luxury.
Easy sentiment isn’t limited to the world of art and entertainment, however. The habit of quick and easy emotional experiences naturally transfers from objects to people and relationships. Indeed, evangelicals today “live in an aesthetic world where emotion is the currency to interact not only with other human beings but also with God.”60
In Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life, Frank Burch Brown examines the theological implications of taste. Taste, Brown writes,
plays a significant part in forming religious perceptions and identities, in creating and reinforcing religious differences, and in making possible a wide variety of religious and moral discernments and experiences. Matters of religion and morality cannot be reduced to aesthetics; neither can aesthetics be reduced to religion and morality. But these spheres overlap and interact in ways that we have barely begun to appreciate.61
Most of us in modern-day America have effortless access to art, music, and literature—we have abundant works of great truth, goodness, and beauty, and we have an even more abundant supply of false imitations. This means it is easy to forget how much sacrifice is required to truly experience what real beauty invites us to. Even the enjoyment of natural beauty usually exacts a sacrifice: for most of us, a walk in the woods requires time, attention, and energy that we are constantly tempted to spend on other things. Whatever is easily consumed—without effort or thought or cost—is rarely the genuine thing. What soothes, mollifies, and rouses not a second thought is often cheap and sentimental—and our desire for it is an indictment of the deformity of our souls.
We also have effortless access to religion (at least in the free world).
In this effortlessness—the ease, the lack of sacrifice, the mere assumption—lies the danger of the sentimental. Whenever and wherever evangelicalism substitutes the sentimental for the sacrificial, we are in danger of getting the gospel wrong.62
In Homespun Gospel, Todd Brenneman offers insightful connections between the sentimentality that characterizes much of modern-day evangelicalism and the great crises emerging within too many evangelical churches and communities.
Evangelical sentimentality is not limited to warm, fuzzy feelings about God, Brenneman says.
It is also a means to perpetuate the evangelical community and instantiate religious authority. . . . It perpetuates a specific worldview, not through intellectual assent to beliefs but through the internalization of emotional habits of seeing that world through sentimental eyes. Contemporary evangelical sentimentality is a conservative force to perpetuate authority.63
The authority of sentimentality is not unique to evangelicalism. This kind of authority is inherent in the modern condition, where authority is increasingly subjective and personal rather than objective and transcendent. Yet, some of the built-in features of evangelicalism cultivate sentimental forms of authority. The evangelical mantra that Christianity is “a relationship, not a religion,” for example, while seeking to correct the error of an impersonal, ritualized religion, can also become an error in the other direction—toward an entirely subjective, emotional experience. Namely, sentimental religion. “Friendship evangelism,” which seeks to use personal relationships for the purpose of evangelization, takes this direction even further.
Evangelical leaders, especially celebrity ones, tend to relate to the public on a more relational, personal basis than do their more traditional high church peers. Pastors and choir members are more likely to don street clothes or casual wear than vestments and robes, making them look more like friends than church officials. This is not bad or wrong in itself. In fact, I think it is to be preferred. However, such an approach can make it easy to gloss over the fact that leaders have authority, power, and influence over others even if they wear khakis and polo shirts and prefer to go by their first names. The informality of such power can make us blind to it. The failure to recognize power that doesn’t look like power creates conditions ripe for abuse of that power. The tricky thing about sentimentality within evangelicalism is not just that it exists—but that we hardly know it exists (if we know it at all). And yet, it is deeply forming and directing us.
Of course, this is true of most elements of a social imaginary—the water we swim in, to return to the metaphor invoked in chapter 1. But there are different kinds of water: seawater and freshwater, for example. Because the late-modern age in which we live is largely shaped by expressive individualism—which is inherently sentimental—sentimentalism is naturally something we easily assume rather than become aware of. Returning to the metaphor of the parts of a house, sentimentalism might be the furnace, which is felt but not seen. The unexamined sentimentalism that characterizes evangelicalism today encourages us “to encounter life through emotionally charged engagement.”64 But, Brenneman says, “there is generally minimal cultural self-consciousness about the presence and use of sentimentality in evangelicalism.”65
A lack of introspection can make people vulnerable to veiled forms of authority that don’t present themselves as authority. Sentimentality, as we have seen, is one form of authority that is largely unexamined. There are many others.
Sensible Sentimentality
Sentimentality and sensibility were never only about emotion. Both concepts are related not only to our capacity for sensory experience (which animals share with humans) but also to the intellectual faculties that, through the senses, receive perceptions and form impressions. Even having an impression depends on more than mere sensory ability. An impression requires attentiveness to the sensory event and reception of it in the mind (whether consciously or subconsciously). Think of the way we find ourselves subconsciously humming a song we heard earlier in the day, perhaps without even having noticed the song playing at the time. In this way, sensibility, which is a kind of aesthetic experience, is as connected to the rational mind as it is to emotional response. Most significantly, sentimental philosophy, recognizing that the body and mind are connected, understands that sensory experience constitutes “the basis of intellectual and imaginative constructs.”66
While we are right to be suspicious of sentimentalism wherever it might be found (even, or perhaps especially, in our own tradition), in seeing how it originated as a response to an opposite impulse, we might not only correct its error but also avoid erring in the opposite direction through overcorrection (by placing too little value on our emotional register). Virtue, as the classical tradition teaches, is the moderation between two extremes. It is a kind of harmony.