Why Protestants Suck at Art

Mislocation, mislocation, mislocation.

The soul of Man must quicken to creation./Out of the formless stone, when the artist united himself with/stone, Spring always new forms of life, from the soul of man that is/joined to the soul of stone;/Out of the meaningless practical shapes of all that is living or/lifeless/Joined with the artistʹs eye, new life, new form, new colour.

-T. S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock

Below is an old pop song by Paul Simon, a Jew raised in New York, which makes use of Christian language and images to communicate its meaning.

I know a man 
He came from my home town 
He wore his passion for his woman 
Like a thorny crown 

He said Delores 
I live in fear

There's a double entendre on "passion", there’s the thorny crown, and Delores should make you think of the via dolorosa, which was the road Jesus walked to the cross. The path and passion are the reason many Catholic women are named Dolores, pains. In fact, if you meet a hispanic woman with a masculine name, it will almost always be christological. My favorite is Amparo, which means shelter, protection.

There’s nothing particularly Christian about this song, which is less of a meditation and more of a melancholy observation, to wit, that life passes and that’s sad. The lyrics are bracketed by an Ecclesiastes-like God’s-ways-are-higher observation. It is not for man who walketh to direct his own steps. In order to reinforce this message, the first verse of the song uses language that will keep us in mind of God, so that we don’t forget that God makes his plan.

The song is not Christian, and neither is Simon. He simply makes use of the language.

As Martin Copenhaver observed, “Paul Simon isn’t religious, but the voice he heard in his sleep seems to be.”

I was an anachronism as a teenager. My favorite musician was Paul Simon. Graceland took me down a solo Simon and then a Simon & Garfunkel rabbit trail, which led me eventually to my favorite genre as a teen: modern folk music. Tom Rush, Woody Guthrie, The Chad Mitchell Trio, Joan Baez…I devoured it all, from the fruity to the fulfilling, and pushing through them, I discovered more of the deep and rich English folk culture that I had so connected to through Tolkien. The many versions, through the centuries, of the song Matty Groves, which I first heard on a Joan Baez record, were a favorite subject.

Before this passion developed, I had already discovered the joy of English Christian civilization through books. My favorite volumes as a 14-year-old were Churchill’s History of the English-speaking Peoples. But Paul Simon kicked off a parallel musical journey. I was thrilled when Rhythm of the Saints came out, half for its lyricism, half for the fact that it was inspired by Brazil and used Brazilian musicians (🇧🇷 the other half of my heritage).

Is Matty Groves Christian? Itis a tragic tale of adultery, deceit, murder, and honor. The only thing that might point to a Christian theme is that the initial seduction takes place in a church.

I loved murder ballads. My favorite is still Wind and Rain (check out Gillian Welch’s version here). The dark sister murders the fair one because the miller’s son chooses the fair, but that’s just the beginning: half of the song is spent in macabre description of how a passing fiddler makes a fiddle out of the murdered sister’s skeleton (he made a fiddle peg of her long finger bone, he strung his fiddle bow with her long yella hair, etc.).

Speaking of macabre, I just showed a couple of my kids Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Is that grotesque film, set during the Black Death of Europe, a Christian work? Are the medieval pantomimes and morality plays it apes, equally macabre, Christian works?

Why would I talk about “discovering the joy of English Christian civilization” while bringing in Matty Groves and Joan Baez, of all people?

Does that not make sense to you? That’s because Christians mislocate their conception of what art is, what Christian art is. And alas, they do so, or began to do so, for a shameful reason.

Art either glorifies God or does not. Similarly, but not identically, art is either offered up to God as vivid sacrifice, or it is not. Neither of these, I would argue, define what “Christian art” is.

The word Christian is primarily a word used to describe an ethnos, a people or nation. Perhaps we could call Christians a macroethnos, but we are an identifiable people, whether as a whole or in our subgroups (Hungary, Canada, Brazil; Pentecostals, Presbyterians, Copts). Pagans and heathens alike can point to the Christians over yonder. This is to say, “Christian” is a civilizational word. There is Muslim civilization, there is Hindu civilization, Buddhist, even, and in Salt Lake City, there is Mormon civilization. Visit; it’s real. There are a myriad of tiny such ones around the world. To get back to the point…mirabile visu and hold the phone, there is Christian civilization.

An ethnos have¹ a common language and common symbols.

That, more than anything, is what makes art Christian: the use of Christian language and symbols. Christian civilization has been guilty of many sins, as Christians have been; it has been guilty of much bad art, but Christian art it was, even when it was trying to move away from that language and those symbols. I think of the southern Renaissance, which was dumb and needs to be given less space in Christian education circles. Its very name is a reference to its effort to move past Christianity to something ostensibly better, much like the subsequent Enlightenment. But I digress. To echo Hermann Hesse, let me return from history and make my point.

The “shameful reason” I alluded to earlier is the following:

Protestants are embarrassed to use Christian language, images, and symbols in their art. Not even ashamed…embarrassed, which is way more adolescent. They talk about doing things for God’s glory, but they won’t talk to other Christians, whether present or future. And as we know, this commandment we have, that he that loveth God love also his brother.

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This article is entitled Why Protestants Suck at Art. I have heard many theories proffered over the years for why this might be so, from within and without: we’re not liturgical enough, we prohibit images, we’re gnostic, we’re bourgeois, we’re capitalists, we’re grumpy.

Some of these land a bit, but I hope I have convinced you of the root cause: we don’t believe we’re a separate people with a common culture. We may affirm biblical, confessional, and catechetical formulations about being a new race, and new humanity, but we don’t live like it.

Why am I picking on Protestants only? What about all the ugly Catholics, like Andres Serrano of Piss Christ fame?

First, because the lack of enthusiasm for the arts among Protestants is widely bemoaned by their artists (unless they’re novelists), and not without cause. Many readers will have already asked themselves why Protestants suck at art; it actually contributes to leading some across the Tiber. Here I offer a non-theological answer which I hope will illuminate and encourage. Secondly, and not unrelatedly, because Catholics don’t have the problem of being ashamed of their dialect. We do. We’d rather be silent than produce something strangers laugh at. No wonder Catholics often look at us the way Calabrians look at Brooklynites. We’re posers who can’t even say capocollo, and our cousins embarrass us by liking Footprints in the Sand or saying gabagool. Some of us would prefer not claim our inheritance at all. Third and most of all, because I am a Protestant, and I love it, but we’ve been sh****ng the bed for at least a hundred years now. That other Christians are doing the same is not as urgent or distressing for me as the fact that I’m in this bed right here, right now, as are my children, my wife, my friends, and my church.

I believe that one of the contributing factors to Catholic success in the art world is that they’re not as desperate as we to find or please an audience. Sure, they would like that, but they have people back home, they belong to somebody. They have the confidence of young men whose mammas love them.

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Artists inevitably work within a culture’s context. We are told that our Christian language and culture is poor, and we believe it. We use the language of Homer, of Horace, of Rumi, of Rousseau, of Whitman, of Nietzsche, of anybody but those who built up our tongue painstakingly over centuries.

An embarrassment to use the language of the Bible, of past Christians, of current Christians, is a low down shame. Embarrassment to do work for the Church, no matter how artistically philistine Protestant churches may be, is a low down dirty shame.

It’s one thing for an artist to mock CCM for being lame and bad², it’s another to mock CCM for not being the world’s art. Such artists end up measuring their success by what non-Christians say it is, and that’s a low down even dirtier shame.

Who are we going to talk to, you ask. This may not be our civilization any more.

No matter. We build a new one. With each other, talking to each other. No Babel, no Babylon, but a City of God. Artists! We need one language, our language. Use it. Teach it. Expand it.

In the words of T. S. Eliot, Protestant³ and author of Christianity and Culture⁴.

Thus your fathers were made
Fellow citizens of the saints, of the household of God, being built  
upon the foundation
Of apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself the chief cornerstone.
But you, have you built well, that you now sit helpless in a
ruined house?
...

Your building not fitly framed together, you sit ashamed and
wonder whether and how you may be builded together for a
habitation of God in the Spirit, the Spirit which moved on
the face of the waters like a lantern set on the back of a 
tortoise.
And some say: ʺHow can we love our neighbour? For love must  
be made real in act, as desire unites with desired; we have only  
our labour to give and our labour is not required.
We wait on corners, with nothing to bring but the songs we can  
sing which nobody wants to hear sung;
Waiting to be flung in the end, on a heap less useful than dung.ʺ 
You, have you built well, have you forgotten the cornerstone?  
Talking of right relations of men, but not of relations of men  
to God.
...

ʺOur citizenship is in Heavenʺ; yes, but that is the model and  
type for your citizenship upon earth.
...

It is hard for those who have never known persecution,
And who have never known a Christian,
To believe these tales of Christian persecution.
It is hard for those who live near a Bank
To doubt the security of their money.
It is hard for those who live near a Police Station
To believe in the triumph of violence.
Do you think that the Faith has conquered the World
And that lions no longer need keepers?  
Do you need to be told that whatever has been, can still be?
...

But our King did well at Acre.  
And in spite of all the dishonour,  
The broken standards, the broken lives,  
The broken faith in one place or another,  
There was something left that was more than the tales  
Of old men on winter evenings.  
Only the faith could have done what was good of it.  
Whole faith of a few,  
Part faith of many.  
Not avarice, lechery, treachery,  
Envy, sloth, gluttony, jealousy, pride:  
It was not these that made the Crusades,  
But these that unmade them.
   
Remember the faith that took men from home  
At the call of a wandering preacher.  
Our age is an age of moderate virtue  
And of moderate vice  
When men will not lay down the Cross  
Because they will never assume it.  
Yet nothing is impossible, nothing,  
To men of faith and conviction.  
Let us therefore make perfect our will.  
О God, help us.
...

The soul of Man must quicken to creation.  
Out of the formless stone, when the artist united himself with  
  stone,
Spring always new forms of life, from the soul of man that is
  joined to the soul of stone;  
Out of the meaningless practical shapes of all that is living or
  lifeless
Joined with the artistʹs eye, new life, new form, new colour.  
Out of the sea of sound the life of music,
Out of the slimy mud of words, out of the sleet and hail of verbal  
  imprecisions,
Approximate thoughts and feelings, words that have taken the
  place of thoughts and feelings,  
There spring the perfect order of speech, and the beauty of
  incantation.
Lord, shall we not bring these gifts to Your service?  
Shall we not bring to Your service all our powers  
For life, for dignity, grace and order.  
And intellectual pleasures of the senses?  
The Lord who created must wish us to create
And employ our creation again in His service  
Which is already His service in creating.  
For Man is joined spirit and body,  
And therefore must serve as spirit and body.  
Visible and invisible, two worlds meet in Man;  
Visible and invisible must meet in His Temple;  
You must not deny the body.
...

You have seen the house built, you have seen it adorned  
By one who came in the night, it is now dedicated to God.  
It is now a visible church, one more light set on a hill  
In a world confused and dark and disturbed by portents of fear.  
And what shall we say of the future? Is one church all we can  
  build?
Or shall the Visible Church go on to conquer the World?

Back to our initial pop song. There’s Paul Simon’s character, a man who wears his passion for his woman like a thorny crown. There’s that character, made into a type of Christ, loaded with meaning about men and women, about the Church and her redemptor, about passion and sacrifice. We might argue that the character is overloaded, especially as the song ends up rather purposively going nowhere. Regardless, loaded he is, bearing an image of Christ.

The song is not made by a Christian, nor is it offered to the True God as a sacrifice. It isn’t Christian. But it does use something that Christian art of necessity will use: Christian language and Christian semiotics. Worst of all for us⁵, it uses it without embarrassment.

A stranger and alien uses our tongue. Good, perhaps he will join us and find God⁶. Meanwhile, we refuse to speak our tongue.

So here we are, embarrassed of our inheritance, not using our language and striving to use someone else’s. This is most cringe, not because you’re using a foreign tongue to glorify God, but because you refuse to use your native tongue. You call “native” into question. You say you were adopted, declared, that it’s judicial. I’ll grant you that, then: you’re not a native speaker. But the fact that you were adopted into heavenly citizenship shouldn’t make you act like you’re not actually heavenly. Instead, you should be studying and embracing the language of heaven, which is the language of the saints, even now. Speak our tongue.

This is not a call for more poem, plays, or paintings about the Passion. This is not even a call for the use of types of the Passion. It is a plea that you be unashamed of the Passion in your work. Talk to us first. Employ your native tongue, our native tongue. Do not seek the approval of the world. You’ll be amazed how the weight of shame lifts off you, how your art soars, and how even strangers understand you.

We have the Holy Spirit of Pentecost. Fear not, you will be understood.

1. I’ll use a plural conjugation for a collective singular and I’ll brook no criticism.

2. It is.

3. If your instinct is to debate this, perfect: this article is for you.

4. Also a poet you may have heard of.

5. Worst of all, because by uses like this one, we are condemned for our exposed embarrassment.

6. I hold out hope for two of my favorite Jews, Paul Simon and Leonard Cohen. Yes, I know Cohen is dead.