I had seen color images of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) projected on a screen in the darkened room of an art history seminar and as a black-and-white reproduction in H. H. Arnason’s History of Modern Art. But one spring afternoon in 1977 I encountered the artist’s work firsthand. Nearly twelve feet high and more than twice as wide, the monumental canvas occupied an entire wall in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. As I stood before the contorted shapes and strained, sweeping lines of Guernica, it beckoned me to enter the brutality and slaughter of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)—a conflict that, until that moment, I was entirely ignorant of.
My encounter with Guernica was arresting, but as a kind of aesthetic experience it was hardly unique. From my late teens onward, I came to the world of visual art expectant, believing that paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings and photographs could cast fresh light on deeper things. I was fascinated by artists and their ability to ply visual media to express thought and emotion. More than that, their imaginative labors produced objects and spaces that I could study with my eyes, examine with my hands and encounter with my body. Today, this earlier sense that art could be a means to apprehend beauty and meaning is my deep and settled conviction, the lens that frames the whole of my aesthetic vision.
Like most vocations, becoming an artist entails important choices, not least the pursuit of credible training. With that goal before me, I completed a BFA in painting and drawing at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, an MFA in painting and drawing from Cranbrook Academy of Art and, some years later, a smattering of graduate courses at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, mostly in art history and art criticism.
My decision to pursue the visual arts made sense. After all, I had “eyes to see,” considerable facility with a variety of media and a fertile imagination. But offsetting these talents were serious misgivings about the legitimacy of art as a vocational endeavor. The primary source of this doubt was the conservative Protestant community to which I belonged.
The root of my spiritual life taps deep into the soil of American evangelicalism. I was reared by devout Christian parents who sought to live what they believed at home, at church, and in their professions. To friends and coworkers alike, Kenneth and Marjorie Anderson modeled commitment, generosity and kindheartedness. In my eagerness to emulate my parents, these same church communities became my spiritual home, the place where I learned Bible stories, hymns and gospel choruses. Along the way, extracurricular activities like Daily Vacation Bible School, summer Bible camp and youth rallies augmented weekly church attendance. The earnest zeal of church leaders—especially visiting missionaries who, it seemed, had “counted the cost” to follow Jesus wherever and however they sensed he had led them—never failed to impress me.
I remain grateful for this upbringing. Nonetheless, in the course of my own formation a number of evangelical attitudes and practices have left me uneasy, sometimes even angry or ashamed. Scholars such as Randall Balmer, James Davison Hunter, George Marsden and Mark Noll have thoughtfully chronicled the merits and demerits of this dynamic subculture, and traces of my own story abound in their various accounts. And here I note my intimate and ongoing affiliation with American evangelicalism to highlight this fact: the postwar evangelical subculture to which I belonged, in combination with the art world that I sought to enter, presented three nearly insurmountable barriers to my vocational pursuit of the visual arts.
The first of these was the absence of a mentor. By the age of seventeen, I had yet to meet one other Christian who maintained a regular studio practice, exhibited his or her work in a gallery, collected art or even visited art museums. The adult believers in my world were teachers, farmers, salesmen, tradesmen, business owners, health care providers and Christian ministers—men and some women who purposed to use their gifts and talents in service to God. I shared this desire, but beyond that the common ground of our faith seemed to erode. In fact, my decision to study art was inscrutable to my Christian elders and even to some of my peers. Perhaps more troubling, I lacked a ready apologetic (it seemed to me then that one needed to make one’s case for any endeavor that invited fraternization with “the world”) for how or what such an enterprise might contribute to the church and its mission.
The second barrier that I faced was my church’s disregard for the visual arts. This was manifested on two fronts: the church’s ignorance of art history—notably, Christian art—and its palpable disdain for modern art. Put differently, the posture of my Christian community toward art oscillated between ambivalence and hostility. While multiple factors contributed to this view, chief among them was the keen desire of conservative Protestants to remain separate from the “world.” Like their fundamentalist forebears, twentieth-century evangelicals regarded personal holiness as a hallmark of Christian maturity, and for many setting oneself apart from the world appeared to be a direct means to achieve this. If Christian character could be measured by the degree to which one kept one’s distance from worldly enterprises, then it made sense to shun temptations such as Hollywood and movie going, popular music and dancing, smoking and drinking.
In a similar vein, modern dance, contemporary fiction, jazz, painting, poetry and sculpture were also scorned, but with added vitriol since these ventures appeared more secular, elite and bizarre than their popular counterparts. Let me add that from the early 1940s onward, Protestant conservatives were not alone in taking offense at modernism and its provocateurs. Certainly the most vicious attacks against avant-garde artists during the Cold War came at the hands of Wisconsin US Senator Joseph McCarthy and the related investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), established in 1938. In the decade that followed, many actors, directors, painters, poets and screenwriters were accused of communist subversion, or blacklisted, and the careers of some were devastated. The larger point is this: where God and country was concerned, artists were often thought to be subversive, and on occasion this charge was warranted.
For those eager to build a case against modern and contemporary art, it is not difficult to locate artists or works of art that scoff at or belittle the kind of piety that conservative Christians cherish. Figures like Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, whom we will consider in chapter one, often served this purpose. In recent decades, controversial works like Robert Mapplethorpe’s (1946–1989) homoerotic photographs and Andres Serrano’s (b. 1950) Piss Christ accomplished the same. Experience confirms that “offensive” artists and their “transgressive” works can be leveraged to incite unparalleled moral rage. However, when nonpolitical art is politicized in this manner, almost without exception its actual content and meaning is passed over.
The third barrier that I encountered—one decidedly not contrived by my evangelical community—was the art world’s hostility to religious belief. This antagonism was fueled in equal parts by the church’s ignorance of art, its sense of moral superiority to so-called bohemian artists and the corresponding disdain of artists for the sanctimony and hypocrisy they associated with the church. While it can be demonstrated that a guarded openness to spirituality in the art world existed throughout the twentieth century, the tone and telos of the new community that I hoped to enter in the 1970s derived smug satisfaction from placing itself at far remove from the piety and politics of conservative Christianity.
This trio of barriers notwithstanding, in my late teens I swam against the current of my evangelical community to embrace the arts. The decision was aided, in no small part, by an eagerness to break free of the moral legalism that pervaded conservative Protestantism in the 1960s and 1970s, and it was surely abetted by the scintillating rise of the American counterculture. In fairness, my Christian community did not belittle this decision, and I enjoyed my parents’ support throughout college and graduate school. At the same time, pursuing the visual arts meant forgoing the affirmation that I might have enjoyed had I, say, entered seminary to prepare for the pastorate.
The conditions that I have described left me with a great deal to sort out. The art department and, later, the art academy where I studied were stimulating places. In both settings I gave myself to the work at hand and learned a great deal. But neither institution was a spiritual home. Moreover, the worry that my pursuit of art amounted to nothing more than a hobby or, worse still, a capitulation to carnal desire continued to dog me. But I pressed ahead hoping and praying that I had given myself to a holy calling.
Thus far, the opening pages of this introduction read like a memoir, an essay that might go on to explore the awkward convergence of my evangelical faith and my secular training in the visual arts. But developing that narrative is not my primary reason for writing. Rather, the personal experience I have rehearsed sets the stage for a more considered examination of the impasse between modern art and the evangelical church in America’s postwar period. Midway through the second decade of the twenty-first century, much of this schism remains—albeit in a variety of new guises.
I write fully persuaded that art, in its most exalted form, can be used by God to transform women and men, to extend his common grace to the world and to lead the church to worship. I believe with equal conviction that the content and character of contemporary art could gain the gravitas that it seeks if the artists who produce it were able to discover or recover the deep things of God. Throughout history and in everything from monumental Gothic cathedrals to diminutive prayer chapels, from vividly colored Fra Angelico frescoes to sepia-toned Rembrandt etchings, this pair of possibilities has been realized in stunning ways. From time to time instances of transcendence also surface in the contemporary secular arena. It seems to me a public monument such as Maya Lin’s much-acclaimed Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) confirms this.
Properly conceived, a vision for the visual arts wherein serious art and serious faith are woven into whole cloth is a glorious contemporary possibility. But for this goal to be realized, the obstacles, conundrums and heartbreak that have kept too many Christians from embracing a biblically and theologically robust understanding of the visual arts must be not only identified but also overcome.
As early as 1941, British essayist and mystery writer Dorothy Sayers observed, “They [art and religion] are now hopelessly at loggerheads. Artists, on the whole, get from the church no strong backbone of religious faith to direct and inspire their work. They are brought up, of course, on the same doctrinal pabulum as the common man, which is mostly vague and sloppy.”1 Likewise, twentieth-century American evangelicals mostly ignored visual art and mistrusted those who produced it. To underscore their reservations, they relied on shoddy biblical exegesis, false dichotomies and the anecdote of scandal. Consider this comment by Harold O. J. Brown: “People no longer become educated and acquire cultivation in order to appreciate music, literature, and art; what passes for such things floods in upon the young and immature, interfering with education and supplanting cultivated tastes with primitivism and decadence.”2
To sort out this impasse, chapter one sets the stage by describing two movements—one religious and the other secular—that gained zenith-like ascendancy in postwar American life and culture. The first of this pair is Protestant evangelicalism, a movement determined to “guard the gospel” from increasingly liberal interpretations of the Bible, the abandonment of traditional moral values and the rising tide of secular thought and practice.3 The second is the world of modern art, an enterprise substantially given to the radical renunciation of tradition or, as art historian Robert Hughes termed it, “the shock of the new.”4 If evangelicals labored to maintain the status quo and even to pine for halcyon days—idealizations of the New Testament church and the founding of Christian America, for instance—then modernists sought to distance themselves from what they regarded as conventional and, therefore, arcane notions of religion, politics, morality and aesthetics. Scholars and popularizers alike have gone on to sharpen the contrast between these movements as the basis for jury-rigging a “culture war.” But as we shall see, neither movement was monolithic with respect to its ideology or leadership, and, contrary to received opinion, one was hardly isolated from the other. Having employed a broad brush to compare and contrast the postwar development of these two movements, in the chapters that follow I examine these differences in greater detail.
Chapter two explores the meaning of our corporeal being with a particular focus on the time-honored yet controversial practice of drawing, painting and sculpting the nude. While it may be tempting to make the honor or dishonor of the unclothed body the sole focus of this inquiry, the greater significance of our embodiment must not be passed over. It is in and through our bodies that we locate ourselves in this world. The stakes are still higher for Christians, since a biblical understanding of spiritual life requires one to embrace one’s whole being and, not least, to account for instances of extreme physical pain and pleasure.
Chapter three considers the primacy of the human body’s five senses and the corresponding conceptions of piety that have caused Christians to mistrust them. It is not possible, of course, to ignore our sensate nature, and an attempt to do so minimizes our greater delight in the goodness of God’s creation. Rightly appropriated, these tactile, haptic encounters engage our imagination, which in turn leads us to wonder, worship and mystery—states of mind and being that seek, ironically perhaps, to transcend the very material conditions that sponsor them. Aesthetic experience fires the artist’s creativity and moves her toward action. To the degree that the evangelical church has either dismissed or forbidden these kinds of encounters, the artist becomes less a sanctuary for creativity and more the site of discouragement and defeat.
Chapter four wades into the bitter and long-standing dispute surrounding the use of images. This debate has two critical dimensions. First, thoroughgoing iconoclasts find themselves caught in the swirl of controversy surrounding the place and meaning of religious images, especially attempts to represent God. While evangelicals rightly abhor the production and use of idols, these same Christians increasingly call on a broad range of visual media to aid them in corporate worship. Further complicating the matter, a notable number of evangelicals have turned to Catholic, Orthodox and mainline Protestant traditions, which, in contrast to Protestant communities that hold fast to varying degrees of sixteenth-century iconoclasm, regard visual art as a source of spiritual solace and inspiration.
On the heels of this controversy is the fluid, charged and mostly oppositional relationship between word and icon, or text and image. Chapter five describes the manner in which the primacy of words and God’s Word within evangelicalism has often deepened the chasm that separates the verbal from the visual. It goes on to assess the impact of this pitched battle on the artist and the church. In our contemporary and thoroughly mediated world, corporations, politicians, marketing agencies and celebrities have long embraced both text and image as essential means to advance their respective agendas. It is therefore reasonable to ask which medium offers the most persuasive account of reality.
Having considered the practical outworking of verbal and visual communication, especially in reference to evangelicalism, in chapter six I move toward theoretical territory to explore what is frequently described as the postmodern challenge of language. In recent decades, some artists and philosophers have claimed that language is so porous and malleable that the possibility of constructing a coherent or meaning-filled metanarrative is disallowed. While one very modest chapter is surely not equal to the task of plumbing the depths of this discourse, the challenge of language and its deconstruction merits serious attention simply because it affects the whole of contemporary art, especially the art world’s penchant for irony and its corresponding disdain for sincerity, and the church’s confidence in the Bible, especially the manner in which the Bible is read and studied.
From time to time, heightened personal angst and social disequilibria stimulate extraordinary creativity. But unreconciled polarities can also be highly destructive. Here the tragic account of painters like Vincent van Gogh and Mark Rothko comes to the fore. It is well known that both men felt called to pursue painting as a primary means to communicate deeper spiritual realities. Tragically, in this quest each grew despondent and eventually took his own life in response to what they deemed their failure to realize this lofty goal.5 In a sense, the struggle that van Gogh and Rothko endured illustrates why the tensions outlined in chapters two through six beg for resolution. To that end, chapter seven advances an ambitious line of reasoning: our desire for rewarding aesthetic encounters reveals our deeper longing for a connection to something or someone Other. The most tangible evidence of this quest is our ongoing and unending pursuit of beauty or the beautiful.
Any serious embrace of beauty will face vigorous resistance from at least two quarters. First, the contemporary and mostly secular debate concerning beauty continues to generate considerable attention. Too frequently, beauty’s pleasures have been harnessed to dubious, debased and even oppressive ends. Because of this, some find invocations of the beautiful politically naive or aesthetically repugnant, and for those eager to embrace this negative critique, any positive reassessment of beauty will be a hard sell. Second, pragmatic-minded evangelicals will struggle to locate the relevance of a discourse that is so freighted with theory. But consider a typical contemporary evangelical Sunday service wherein worshipers earnestly sing praise choruses that extol “the beauty of the Lord.” What exactly do these repeated references to beauty (as well as to glory, majesty and awe) represent? These songs of praise and the abundant images that they summon are at least intended to be rich aesthetic encounters. Meanwhile, a somewhat different and growing quarter of the evangelical community is drawn to contemplative practices that are nothing less than meditations on the character of divine beauty.
Like her companions goodness and truth, beauty discloses order and transcendence and as such delivers meaning and connection. Some secular observers regard the recovery of beauty as an antidote to the vulgarity, violence and meaninglessness of Western culture. At the same time, many Christians realize or at least intuit that beauty has a higher, even ultimate, obligation to behold the glory of God. As colleague Gregory Wolfe puts it, “Beauty is the handmaiden of mystery.” Therefore, those who wish to affirm beauty’s virtue must rise to defend her.
When taken as a whole, chapters two through seven recast the collision of faith and art to reveal a third way, a great vista where biblical and theological reflection—especially the doctrines of creation and incarnation—become the wellspring of inspiration. It is in this place—what artist Makoto Fujimura refers to as the “third space”—that artists who are Christians can be released to fruitfully pursue their craft and vision.
The final chapter of this study offers counsel to all of us, but especially to believing artists, who hope to see a day when they, their churches and the culture in which they “live, move and have their being” begin to flourish. To that end I offer my thoughts regarding three more-practical concerns: culture, vocation and praxis.
I began this introduction describing three barriers that, in my late teens and early twenties, nearly caused me to abandon the visual arts. Nearly four decades have passed since I wrestled with that decision, and during those intervening years conditions in the church have changed. For instance, it is no longer difficult to find devout evangelicals seriously engaged with the visual arts and, with this, a growing number who believe that art is somehow important to the mission and program of the church. Many of today’s evangelicals—especially the rising generation and their more progressive elders—find the Christ-against-culture paradigm that once dominated American fundamentalism too severe and even bizarre. For much good and little ill, they no longer carry the depth of anxiety about worldliness that was part and parcel of the conservative mindset in previous generations. Rather, they have embraced a new spirit of freedom, one that earlier iterations of Christian legalism disallowed, and this, in several respects, is surely good news. Consequently, earlier signs of hostility or ambivalence toward the visual arts continue to subside.
But shifting attitudes toward Christian piety are not the sole cause of this new openness of evangelicals to the arts. A corresponding set of institutional commitments is also in play. For instance, in the last two decades the number and quality of visual art and design programs at Christian college and universities have increased significantly; a coterie of local gallery programs at schools and churches continues to grow; thoughtful articles and books about the visual arts make regular appearance in Christian publications and presses; a wide range of arts-related regional and national conferences are being held; and the presence of what might be best described as arts-oriented parachurch organizations continues to increase.
Support within the evangelical church for the visual arts is on the rise, and this gain should be celebrated. All the same, two elephants are left standing in the room, and, as the metaphor suggests, we dare not ignore them. The first of the pair is the current level of financial support for the visual arts within the evangelical community. It is meager at best and represents but a fraction of what these communities spend annually on musical worship and all the technology that is needed to support it. Indeed, institutional patronage for the visual arts in an evangelical church is highly unusual. Meanwhile, the quality of work on view in evangelical settings is often substandard since little attention is being paid to the training and credentials of either the artists who are invited to exhibit their work or to those who curate and install the exhibits.
The second elephant is the nature of the art world itself. In all of its brilliance and hubris, it will remain a marvelous yet disturbing enterprise. It is the art world. It is a world that advances a particular intellectual discourse and with this wields considerable cultural capital. The art world is particularly antagonist to Bible-believing Christians. That is, any nonironic embrace of religious belief—especially Christian belief—that bears traces of sentimentality, intolerance or fundamentalist conviction is considered toxic. And it follows that any artist who holds to such a confession will not be regarded as “serious.”
As my work on this project nears completion, neither the writing nor the research it represents is likely to drive either elephant from the room. What I do hope is that some portion of the bewildered head scratching and frenetic note taking that led me to tackle this project will equip others who remain eager, as am I, to make sense of the perplexing and frequently conflicted relationship of art to faith and faith to art. If some find that kind of encouragement from this effort, then these years of labor will have found their reward.