Artless Christianity

In my last post, I raised the possibility that modern, self-professedly Christian books, movies, and songs are in fact less faithfully Christian than art which would not be deemed appropriate for Christian bookstores. Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, for example, would be considered by many to be sacrilegious. Leif Enger's Peace Like a River, a New York Times bestseller, doesn't follow the formula of lost but not terribly wicked people finding Christ, and godless atheists getting what they deserve. "Sling Blade's" profanity alone would keep it from most Christian stores' movie shelves, though you'll likely be able to purchase the dreadful "Left Behind" movie.

Good art, in short, is excluded from the Christian domain if it depicts depravity, while terrible art is included so long as it is explicitly Christian and purges itself of realism.

I want to acknowledge that there is plenty of bad secular art as well. For every "Omega Code," there are twenty "Superbad"s. This may be part of the impetus for self-consciously Christian modern art, in fact. But bad secular art and bad Christian art are wicked, I contend, for the same reason: they do not reflect Truth.

I wrote last time that I wondered if there might be some harmful consequences to bad Christian art. I can think of a couple:

First, bad Christian art denudes our aesthetic sense. A benefit of a very fine book, movie, or song is that it either helps us see truths about the world that we have not seen before, or it articulates -- if only indirectly -- a truth we have always known, but could never put our finger on.

Bad books, movies, and songs, on the other hand -- ones afflicted with clichéd imagery or lyrics, or characters who don't behave and speak like genuine people -- have a dulling effect on our vision. They flatten the world and drain it of color, working violence on God's creation.

Second, bad Christian art cripples our compassionate imagination. When the bad guys practically have signs in a novel or movie labeling them as such, and the soon-to-be saved characters are similarly cordoned off, we lose sight of the wickedness that inhabits saints, and the despair that inhabits the hearts of the lost.

Instead, we have our natural tribal mentality bolstered, that pernicious instinct that prompts us to think in terms of God's saints on the one hand, and hell-bound heathens on the other, which is always accompanied by the delusion that we can spot them easily.

I'm still thinking this through, and so I'm wondering, what do you like about the art you enjoy, and what do you dislike about the art you avoid? What art, in any form, do you look back on as having the most edifying effect on you?