UnChristian art

I've been re-reading Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners, which is filled with her essays on the craft of writing, and in particular, writing as a Christian. Her stories were notably violent, and filled with depraved characters. She constructed a milieu of fallen men in order to reveal the grace of God in a sin-stricken world. Nonetheless, she didn't sit well with many good Christians. She tells of receiving a letter from one of them, who:

"...informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read."

It's the same reason, I suppose, Christian-themed bookstores do such a booming business, offering music, movies, and stories free of the depravity that seems increasingly to define secular culture. O'Connor, however, rejected the notion that all depravity in fiction serves the same function. Her grotesque characters, she felt, illuminated the truly grotesque qualities of sinful man, as opposed to wooden characters who briefly struggle with sin that is not so embedded in their flesh that they can't come neatly and completely to Christ a hundred pages later. "I think that if her heart had been in the right place," O'Connor said of the complainant, "it would have been lifted up." In another essay in this volume, she writes almost by way of explanation:

"Catholic readers are constantly being offended and scandalized by novels that they don't have the fundamental equipment to read in the first place, and often these are works that are permeated with a Christian spirit."

It was criticism that could have easily extended to Protestants in her day, though not perhaps in ours, because it's far easier to immerse ourselves in sterilized entertainment. Starting with the assumption that what comes into our minds can infect what comes out of our mouths and hands, we seek to neither see nor hear evil.

Unfortunately, this instinct, in the realm of art, carries us toward artificial truth -- which is to say falsehood -- in the form of sentimentality and unreality. Following that line of reasoning leads me to conclude that many of the novels labeled as Christian are sinful, because they portray the world of God falsely, with dimensionless characters, unrealistic dialogue, and pat resolutions.

O'Connor said of the Christian writer:

"An affirmative vision cannot be demanded of him without limiting his freedom to observe what man has done with the things of God."

And observing what man has done with the things of God, it seems, is essential to understanding, in turn, what God has done with and for the likes of man. There is not redemption, in other words, without a fall, nor grace without sin. For O'Connor and other serious Christian writers, this reality led them to write books that would never be allowed on the shelves of a typical Christian bookstore.

This leads to an interesting possibility: that our local public library has more genuinely Christian literature -- which is to say books that tell a truer story of the fall of man and his redemption by Christ -- than most Christian booksellers.

If that conclusion is true, I wonder what it means for modern American Christian culture? Might our self-insulation -- intended to protect our hearts and minds -- actually be harmful? In my next post I'll explore the idea that Christianized art can undermine Christianity. In the meantime, I'm curious about your reactions. What ought Christian bookstores be selling, and where do you draw the line with what you read, listen to, and view?