Secular and religious schlock: Separated at birth.
As much as I’d like to puzzle over why evangelical Christianity does so well by putting out mediocre pop culture products to compete with the larger world—why do people take the imitations over the real thing?—the answer seems obvious enough to me. Could it be that Christian pop culture really isn’t significantly worse than the steady drumbeat of mediocre product put out by the secular entertainment industry? I mean, you look at the pop culture ripped off described in this article and the resounding realization is that it’s not like Christians are really going to make the products more mediocre as a rule.
At a Christian retail show Radosh attends, there are rip-off trinkets of every kind—a Christian version of My Little Pony and the mood ring and the boardwalk T-shirt (”Friends don’t let friends go to hell”). There is Christian Harlequin and Christian chick lit and Bibleman, hero of spiritual warfare. There are Christian raves and Christian rappers and Christian techno, which is somehow more Christian even though there are no words. There are Christian comedians who put on a Christian version of Punk’d, called Prank 3:16.
And if they are more mediocre, then they’re closer to the baseline of mediocrity that defines the initial products, a mediocrity that is central to profitability. Mediocre pop culture and fundamentalist Christianity are a perfect marriage, because the dimwittery of America that finds thinking and developing tastes too hard—the people who would have liked Creed, Christian messages or not—is fundamentalist Christianity’s audience.
I have a response piece up at RH Reality Check to Matt Taibbi’s article about John Hagee’s church, and it’s clear to me that as odd as the megachurches are—especially when they have speaking in tongues and demon explusion, as Hagee’s church does—they also gain popularity from having a really good grasp of the American middlebrow mediocrity culture that maximizes audiences so easily. The Rush Hour movies, American Idol albums, dinner at Chili’s, and embracing your inner child at Hagee’s church all inhabit that area of of mindless posing as engagement that marks this culture. Christian pop culture isn’t odd, but the most natural thing in the world. It’s something that I really realized after going to karaoke a few times where someone inevitably sings the Carrie Underwood song “Jesus Take The Wheel“. Is this mainstream schlock or Christian schlock? Both, and the two are firmly intertwined and not as easily separated as this article implies they can be.
57 Responses to “Because mediocrity and Jesus rule”
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There’s nothing at all mediocre about the Chili’s Southern Smokehouse Bacon Burger.
Sturgeon’s Law . . .
The problem isn’t new, Amanda, and was
recognized over 80 years ago:
I work in a CD factory that has contracts with a lot of Christian music companies. I always have a perverse sort of enjoyment when it comes to opening the booklets that go in the CDs and reading the thank-yous — the artists rarely thank their relatives, spouses, children, agents, and fellow musicians without first spending half of their alloted space thanking God. I just always equate Christian music now with bad lyrics, awful tunes, making my job that much harder — the components for their CDs are usually terribly designed and the stickers they send us have crappy adhesive and are on the roll the wrong way, so … *shrugs* — and thanking the Lord before they bother to thank anyone who actually helped them make the album. (For some reason, I have a lot more respect for the artists who thank the people involved and THEN thank God. You want to thank Jesus? Fine. How about first thanking your mom for schlepping your ass to the studio bright and early or your agent for bending over ass-backwards to get you a recording contract? Come on.)
I particularly find the younger Christian artists intriguing — not the older teens and ones in their twenties, but, for example, the CDs we make occasionally that feature preteens singing candy-sweet knockoffs of innocuous pop music. Seriously? You need to filter the unseemly secular moral decay of the equivalent of Disney productions?
I will never forget the time I was going out for dinner in Oklahoma City (hey, business trip, all right?) and I saw a very large lady with her hair in curlers and a bright red T-shirt that said “Jesus Got ‘R Done”. Yes, Jesus and Larry the Cable Guy. That’s a worthwhile pairup to put on a T-shirt….
When i was little my father had a 3-D Jesus on the wall. From one angle it was a portrait, from another angle it was a crucifiction scene. It seriously creeped me out as a child, but i would love to find it and hang it up now.
The christian entertainment scene is all about the path of the performer than the actual talent or lack of.
If the performer has a cool testimoney, then it sells in the christian entertainment ecosystem.
Menken is hilarious, but I think, a bit too tough on the philistines. Those who buy mediocrity aren’t feeling delight so much as acceptance; they know you need music for your youth group event, or wallpaper, or what have you, and so they pick something that will fill that role unobtrusively. Good art is obtrusive, it makes you pay attention; mediocre art is much more suitable to the background, as ornament. And art=ornament to most people who have regular jobs and regular lives. It fills the blank walls and awkward pauses in conversation.
Kitsch is actually a little too outrageous to be simply mediocre, which is why weeping Jesi and velvet Elvises tend to be scorned by actual middle-class types as “tacky.” It’s too visceral, too sentimental, and therefore somewhat embarrassing. It’s all about class, of course; working class Catholic taste is not the same as middle class Protestant, but neither would be acceptable to Menken.
Actually, you could make the point that the crudest types of art, the Virgin Mary calendars and pimped out Toyotas, have more genuine artistic feeling in them than the tasteful print of 19th century pastoral scenes that Martha Stewart would prefer.
I personally have a serious love for the wacky homemade over-the-top Christmas lights, because I think for many Americans, it’s the only true artisting outpouring they allow themselves to have.
This comment on being poor and living in a subculture was brought to you by ‘Anal Bleaching’ which is sooo sophisticated.
Feh, try having taste and discretion when you are well below the poverty line. It takes money and time to gain discrimination. Oh, the poor have neither.
Next you’ll be wondering why you can’t find good help these days and that the Negroes are soo uppity.
Can an atheist be self-righteous? Snobbery certainly comes through on this essay.
Sure you can mock them for their Velvet Jesuses and crappy God pop and country music, but out of Christianity came a lot of excellent works of art, too, like Handel’s “Messiah” and Michelangelo’s Pieta.
well by definition *popular taste* is always mediocre taste–it has nothing to do with money and everything to do with the fact that what is possessed by the majority can’t be elite. That which is elite or high class must, by definition, be limited. Things are “high status” that are expensive or associated with the upper class. When the lower classes adopt those standards and tastes (if they can) the upper classes simply move on and abandon them and start new fads or draw on new aesthetics to distinguish themselves from the proles. By definition something that appeals to the masses *like a popular religion which must include everyone in order to prosletize* will always be falling behind the tastes and aesthetic of the upper class because the upper class is running as fast as it can to reject the aesthetic appropriated by the masses. So we have a continual movement–when machine made goods are scarce the upper class and the lower class wants them and the lower class has to make do with handmade. when machine made goods become cheap and easily accessible then the upper class moves on to the “arts and crafts” movement and handmade/unique items leaving the lower class to enjoy (temporarily) their access to the mass produced and modern dyes and colors.
this has nothign to do with america, per se, or with religion.
aimai
On a very basic level the biggest reason that Christian knockoffs of popular culture exist is so that Christian kids can enjoy pop culture without going to hell. Some of this pressure comes from parents who will ban anything secular but automatically green light anything that identifies itself as “Christian.” Christian hardcore music is a prime example of this. Another form of pressure is self-imposed, with the kids wanting to make sure that they are not turned away from Christ by involving themselves in worldly things rather than godly things.
Anyway, none of this is new. Look at Pearl Jam’s album cover for Vitalogy compared to DC Talk’s Jesus Freak that came out the following year.
I think you’ve got the argument reversed. Love of Christianity is the cause of mediocrity, not the other way round. Christianity is a religion that admires, nay demands, mediocrity. Don’t get above yourself, stay in your place, obey authority unquestioningly… the list goes on. Sure, you meet a few actual Christians here and there, and many of those people are quite extraordinary, but modern American Christianity has next to nothing to do with the spirit of the gospels.
And the only reason you get so much good Christian art from previous centuries is that prevailing taste demanded that art express faith. Oh, and the bishops had all the cash.
What the heck is the ‘anal bleaching’ thing about, anyway?
Nope - everyone in 19th C. Italy, from the countess to the street sweeper, loved opera, which made its way to the poorest by street singers and such. Opera was more affordable in the cheap seats, also. Some 500,000 people lined the streets for Verdi’s burial, partly because he became the symbol of Italy to the world (and of the Risorgimento), partly because everyone knew his music in a day before recordings.
Some American pop music has been recognized as classic.
People just settle for less. And newness is a virtue for the majority of both well off and poorer Americans. Church music - I liked the old Lutheran, Wesleyan, and 19th-20th C Anglican hymnody. Most congregants could sing them. Ditto classic hymns, spirituals, Gospel in the black sacred music tradition. But modern Christian pop music, congregational and solo - gaaaah! Yet you find the Christian pop everywhere in the white-dominant congregations of every economic composition (the black congregations have better sense).
Time was, the two books found in every home were the Bible and a complete Shakespeare. People amused themselves and others by reading aloud. Now - gaaaah - “Left Behind”!
It’s not the relative lack of time and money that prevent the poor (and the rich!) from developing a taste for higher culture - it’s television.
I once had a design major tell me that my apartment could really be fantastic if it had only thing: a plant, or maybe an aquarium. It would give “movement” and “life” to the room. This is what I think of when I think of the culture of the middle class: spending money for bullshit and poor aesthetic reasons.
My dream is to live in a cabin I’ve built out in the middle of Montana–me, my deerhound, and a library and decent bed and chair. I don’t understand the need for decorative things. It always turns out so hideously, and you know that someone somewhere was fucked over labor-wise to produce it.
The fact that a culture prefers its religious icons mass-produced says an infinite amount about its economy and its religion. That is, they suck.
Van Gogh didn’t sell any paintings in his life but something sold. If only Van Gogh had done Napoleon on velvet he could have been wealthy.
Opera was a middle-class entertainment, though. Of course “middle class” meant something different (more exclusive) in the nineteenth century, but I don’t think it was particularly thought of as high art in its time. Verdi’s operas are in the vernacular of the day (I can only assume, not speaking Italian), the tunes are extremely catchy, and the plots are simple and, well, melodramatic, to the point of being a little absurd for people who aren’t used to the form.
Now operas are very expensive to put on, and Verdi’s operas are 150+ years old and sung in a language most North Americans don’t speak. Surtitles have made the form more accessible, and the Met’s satellite broadcasts are bringing down the price, but it still feels a little like comparing apples and oranges to me.
It’s hard to imagine what books middle-class people would have if books were as expensive as they once were. Really there have been so many changes in technology, in people’s attitudes towards education (and self-education), and a lot of mediocre nineteenth-century art has faded into obscurity. (I must say, though, that some of the Victorian artifacts in the V&A are, by my lights, unbelievably hideous. They might as well be the inspiration for those pastel weeping Jesus paintings.)
Religious themes are represented countless times in some of history’s greatest fine art, as well is in music, literature, etc. Why should religion not also find a place among schlock?
Elitist — Shocked, shocked I am to find dreck in christian pop culture
Christian pop culture is worse because, like almost all porn, it does not innovate but copies; thus, it is second hand schlock. It imitates the original pop cultural icon and simply puts Jesus in it - Christ lunchbox, apostle superfriends, whatever. Even the Left Behind novels — which sold over 10M copies — were mainly based upon pop culturally conspiracy theories from the 1950s. The most original and interesting thing about conservative evangelical christianity is its theology, but being conservative christians they insist they have no theology and that the idea that they do is inherently un-christian.
OK, so where does one classify “Jesus Drop-Kick Me Through The Goalposts of Life”? Or “You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma”?
Sometimes I think that C&W is Nashville’s equivalent of Scotland and haggis upon the unsuspecting American people.
Behold and Repent, all ye who look upon!
It is the Second Coming of the Disco Ball, as promised us lo these many months past.
If that be crap in the OP, truly this must be Art!
Repent, ye who are content to listen to crappy music! Accept the Digital Disco Ball and become Insufferable Music Snobs, all!
[/rant-snark]
Some things, like when they co-opt other people’s advertising slogans and make them all Jesusy, just seems dishonest and lazy. That’s irritating.
The tone of the rest of your comment suggests to me that you think Amanda is a proponent of anal bleaching. Am I mistaken?
Dear god please tell me I’m mistaken.
NancyP: I read a biography of Beethoven that claimed at one point in Vienna’s history, one could whistle the beginning of a popular string quartet and be answered back by someone down the street, so to speak.
I was showing an old book of church songs to a cousin who pointed out to me that the music was arranged for shape-note singing, which my great-grandmother did when she was in church.
Mencken, paradoxically, saved his venom for poor whites or ‘lintheads’, as he called them in his diary. He even stated that their aesthetic taste as being worse than that of his African-American neighbors, remarking that the latter would at least grow flowers and fix up a place once they moved into it.
The fact that a culture prefers its religious icons mass-produced says an infinite amount about its economy and its religion. That is, they suck.
Substitute cultural for religious, and you have the situation my college girlfriend was ‘in’, as her grandmother let her know that anything less than a Hallmark card sent to her would be seen as an insult, unforgivable, of course.
I’m surprised Amanda, who hails from the bible belt, hasn’t pointed out the obvious: these are evangelicals. The world is a very scary place for them, filled with demons and temptation. What adolescent isn’t going to be thankful for the opportunity to listen to pop music and read romance novels, which is allowable when they’re “Christian”? Yeah, those Christian youth rallies are tacky, but when else are kids going to be allowed by their parents to travel to a different city, hang out with a bunch of teenagers, and go to a concert?
Taste, however, knows no income level. Good taste is cultural. You can find working class families with good taste, and you can find people with money spending it on Wyland paintings, McMansions and anal bleaching. The tackiness found in American evangelical subcultures is a symptom of the subculture itself– this is, of course, a religion with no indigenous artistic tradition, so American evangelicalism working from a weak, local substrate of its surrounding culture.
I remember going to mass in high school and there being a sheet, full front and back, of “if your child likes nine inch nails, then have them listen to (shitty Christian rock sound-ish alike).” It made me so mad.
Dark Avenger, Amazing Grace gave a pretty interesting history of shape-note and how hymns took shape in the olden days of colonialism.
I guess…is there a difference b/w Christian music and gospel music? I really like gospel music, but anything I’ve heard that’s contemporary and classified as such kind of sucks.
You know, honestly, this was all covered more succinctly in the King of the Hill episode when Bobby got involved with a sk8er youth group–Hank talked him out of wearing “Satan Sucks” t-shirts and singing whiteboy Christian rap so that “God wouldn’t become a phase you grow out of.”
Damn, that’s a great show.
1. I too don’t get the anal bleaching stuff. somebody wanna enlighten..?
2. “Could it be that Christian pop culture really isn’t significantly worse than the steady drumbeat of mediocre product put out by the secular entertainment industry?”
Think, taking a fax and making a photocopy of it. Crappy quality only gets crappier when copied.
AHA! So you must be one of those TEXAS elitists I keep hearing about… drinking your latté, driving your Volvo pickup truck…
… actually this caricature isn’t going so well. Maybe some trolls could help out? Should cartoon straw-Amanda be accused of eating some vegan BBQ? It’s so hard to keep up with the conservative memes.
Felagund has it right concerning the religious works of the great masters. When the church is the source of the majority of commissions, the majority of the work will be religious. About the only female nudes they could paint were Mary Magdalen or Susannah and the Elders.
Contra Aimai, elite art isn’t only about the taste of the socioeconomic elites. In most times there has been art produced only for the cognoscenti, i.e. other artists and the educated few. Chamber music tends to fall into that category and did even in Mozart’s time. You have to be pretty dedicated to sit through an evening of viola quintets, and Vienna’s upper crust mostly wasn’t.
Why is most Christian pop culture crap? Sturgeon’s Law: most of everything is crap. Now why is it that that 10% of good only seems to be coming from secular culture nowadays? There are several reasons, but I think one of them is that pretty much all intellectually respectable people now are secular: they may not be atheists but they certainly don’t think about religion most of the time. The only people who produce explicitly Christian pop culture never have to compete on with the best parts of pop culture.
As a tangent from that, lattes are so non-elitist that Lewis Black’s End of the Universe (a Starbucks across the street from another Starbucks) is in Houston.
Can the “latte liberal” bullshit end yet?
have you ever seen the average british houshold? they look like they live in a trash heap; too much cheap tchtotkis & eyesore furniture.
since most of america descends from that stock, im saying it might be genetic predisposition :p
bluebonnet: japanese are just as bad, so there goes that theory.
Sturgeons Law: is anybody WILLING to wade through 100% of Christian ‘Rock’ to determine IF there actually is a 10% non-crap component? ….{crickets}… I thought not.
OTOH, I find most of Amanda’s musical choices execrable , so this is all rather “YMMV”.
@pablo at #6:
My grandmother had that exact same picture, or at least one that sounds very similar to your description. I have no idea who took it when we moved everything out of her house, however. Probably my aunt. It sat right over the rotary-dial telephone she had for years and years that shared a party line with us until sometime in my late teens.
British houses are full of cheap stuff and knick knacks? Huh? Honey, I lived in Philly for 5 years before coming back to the UK and seriously I have to disagree. Come on, now!
I was unaware a Carrie Underwood CD was significantly cheaper than a Sleater-Kinney one. The condescending belief that “the poor” by definition have worse taste is far more elitist or snobby than anything I could come up with. It’s especially laughable to push that line in America, where most innovative genre-changing and pushing has come from your broker sections of society.
Mixing us a defense of mediocre corporate culture that blands out anything interesting that could give people ideas with a populist stance is a Republican maneuver. The big corporations who shovel this shit are perfectly fine at defending themselves, thank you very much, and don’t need ordinary people with a phony concern for “the poor” to do it for them. Wal-Mart is not “the poor”. Some people who shop at Wal-Mart are, and pretty much everyone who gets abused by their employment practices is.
I like latte okay, but mostly drink regular coffee. My real love is for Diet Coke
In Latin, don’t “christian” and “cretin” mean the same thing?
While secular pop culture is mostly crap, occasionally, some creative person comes along and is able to make something lasting, interesting or meaningful out of the muck and make it transcend the regular cruddiness. Christian pop culture is incapable of doing this. It took me a long time to figure out why– Christian pop culture and art exists for one reason: to proselytize. It’s creators are trying to sell the audience a package of easy answers to hard questions. That’s it. They aren’t really trying to entertain or evoke emotions or create art for arts sake, like pop culture. They aren’t trying to tell the best story possible because int heir eyes, nothing can beet the Bible. So they subordinate every creative impulse to reflect back on the Bible. They have only one source of inspiration whereas pop culture draws from everything else around it.
I have several friends who are deeply involved in religion (mostly liberal Christianity) and culture (fashion, performing arts, music, and painting), but they are throughly repulsed by the so-called “Christian” art.
I think the desire for, or willingness to accept, mediocre, dull art is part of the same impulse that draws people to fundamentalism. Both cater to predictability, acceptance, and spoon-fed simplicity. You want art? Try uncomplicated chords, predictable lyrics, identical imagery, and mass produced buildings. Want religion? Try an unambiguous doctrine that declares that everyone like you is good and everyone else sucks donkey balls.
Also Christian pop is much worse than secular art for the same reason that Soviet-era official art sucked. Both are approved for their ideological content rather than any artistic merit. And both live (or lived) in a protected market, free from any competition. Secular artists inspired by Christian themes (for example U2) do fine because they care about art first and save much of their message for press conferences on debt relief.
Ketih, I will never categorically exclude even proselytizing art from being potentially genius. Many great artists were interested in glorifying god above all else, including Bach and Milton.
But I do think the megachurch superbland culture that Christian pop fits into—as well as most secular stuff—wears mediocrity as a badge of honor. It’s fucking weird is what it is. And it has nothing to do with poverty. Those megachurches are aimed squarely at middle class America that’s got money to tithe. The craziest megachurches I’ve heard of tend to set up shop in affluent suburbs.
Fred Clark of slacktivist had the definitive take on this issue of the problem of evangelical art:
(boldface mine, italics in the original)I have coworkers who have signed me up to receive mailings from their mega-church. This church takes secular pop culture and makes an attempt to blend it with church teachings. They take something like the latest U2 album, or the Spiderman movies blend them into elaborate sermons complete with stage props and special effects. It’s all part of keeping the people, especially the younger set, entertained enough in the church and giving money.
Of course the tithes they give go mainly for their own entertainment and not to the needy of their community. I also wonder if they bother to pay for usage of trademarked products.
Bad art has always been with us. It only has a tendency not to die with the zeitgeist that produced it, so, the older something is, the less likely it will be bad art.
Still, defining what makes art “bad” can keep critics awake till sunrise and then some. Especially after a few drinks.
What I remember after a lot of drinks and sunrises:
Much of what we consider taste is a habit of seeing, as as such a matter of class, not wealth. Genuine non-conformity can break out of this, because one criterium for schlock is a high level of conformity. So, religious or political art will be bad to the degree that the movement demands or encourages conformity. (Socialist realism, anyone?)
A second marker of bad art is lack of authenticity, or a lack of congruence between shape and meaning. The cause of this might be lack of skill on the side of the artist, or a fading (or change) of meaning in the general culture where the art comes from and is seen. Contemporary Christian art suffers from that, too, for reasons too long to go into for now. Lack of authenticity might also come from people not being who (or what) they think they are. This might be stronger in the US than in other places, not sure about it.
Contemporary western christianity seems to have a lot of the traits that make bad art more likely: A tendency to a narrow worldview, a high emphasis on conformity, a distrust of competence, and a self-image that tends to diverge from reality. Plus, a built-in audience, and good marketing tools (which sets them apart from other subcultures suffering from the same schlock-producing dynamics).
Sorry if I’m incoherent. My inner art critic is not quite awake that early in the day.
Could it be that Christian pop culture really isn’t significantly worse than the steady drumbeat of mediocre product put out by the secular entertainment industry?
Being culturally Christian, it seems much worse to me. Howlingly bad, blatantly commercial, plain careless or dishonest christian art is a desecration. God deserves nothing less than the best worship you can give him. If Jesus lunchboxes and Christian rock are your best, than you are to be pitied. If you feel that quality doesn’t matter, you blaspheme.
To be fair, a lot of this is what you get when any subculture produces media outside its particular field; the truly successful examples get adopted into the mainstream, leaving only the mediocre as representative of the genre.
I’m not a follower of punk, but growing up in Orange County in the 90s it was around me, and there were several times I was shocked to find out that Popular Group was actually Christian-identified, or at least started out that way (e.g., MxPx). For music I do follow, there are bands I’ve liked (e.g., Eddie from Ohio, Over the Rhine) that have strong Christian elements.
Other elements are just the result of a different aesthetic that, while associated with Christianity, isn’t specific to it - a velvet painting of Elvis isn’t any better than one of Jesus.
Olivia: having spent reeeeally long times waiting for approval from license partners, I’m going to have to say that it’s profoundly unlikely that they are getting permission to use anything. It’s also, in general, very expensive.
They might be hoping that it falls under fair use, which, esp if it’s something they broadcast on a screen at the service as part of a show is probably pretty unlikely. But they are remarkably unlikely to get called out on it, and it’s not exactly good publicity for copyright holders to chase after stuff like that.
It wouldn’t kill any of you above posters to actually read the book being discussed in the article. Daniel Radosh finds a great diversity of Christian pop-culture, most of which is indeed crap, some of which is infuriating and offensive, but some of it is good and ambiguous art. He also raises the question of what separate the kitschy tchotchkes from say, the Mezuzahs outside of Jewish doors (less tacky, but the intent is the same.)
Art springs up everywhere, even through Soviet and Nazi dictates (I am Cuba, for example.) Even in the Slate article linked, the Christian “Punk’d” had a joke more daring than I’ve ever seen on the original show, or at a million smug comedy acts on the Lower East Side.
That said, the prospect that there’s a Christian Nick Hornby knock-off deeply horrifies me.
Mediocrity is pretty much inherent in anything mass-marketed, just because the thing that’s being marketed has to be predictable. Nothing mindbogglingly good, but also nothing mindbogglingly bad. When you think of how many delightful little hostels Holiday Inn drove out of business with its cookie-cutter rooms, everything in the same place, think of how many horribly green-sheeted fleabags it drove out of business as well…
Non-sucky Christian band: Danielson Famile.
Plus if you visited the Rapture Ready site, you’d see this horrifying image of “Jesus Junk:”
http://www.getraptureready.com/blog/2008/04/hey-little-girl-want-some-test.php
Bobby Bare wrote and recorded “Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goalposts of Life” as a joke. His intention was parody — of course, it definitely turned out to be one of those cases where Poe’s Law applies.
And shlock is everywhere. Americans may be more consumerist than some cultures, but we certainly don’t have a monopoly on questionable aesthetics.
If you go to Youtube and search for the group Second Chapter of Acts, you will find one of those examples of schlock that sort of transcends itself, at least in the older material (by 1985, it was pretty much solid schlock).
When a young teen trapped in the fundie mindset that non-Christian music was evil, I had to look very hard to find groups like this or be condemned to the hell that was Amy Grant. And their vocals and melodies are, to me, eerie and interesting; there are other fringey Christian groups out there that have the same effect, merging true belief with some really sort of dark and sad inflections. Much like country music, actually, in that it is a rather limited artform that can be transcended by contact with artistic truths about love, sadness, and confusion.
There seems to be a misapprehension: no one is saying there isn’t good art made by Christians. Just that there’s no such thing as good Christian Art (or Fill In The blank Art). It just has to have some artistic merit (whatever ill-defined criteria that might be), regardless of whatever message the artist is trying to convey.
Christianity has inspired some of the greatest art of the last 2 millennium. But Brahms and Mozart wrote their Requiem’s as art first, religious pieces second. And as all great art they expand the horizons of their audience.
The great travesty of the current evangelical contributions to culture is they are not designed to actual contribute to art or culture but to supplant it. This music, literature and art is designed to allow the evangelical community the allusion of participating in the world without ever leaving the small womb defined by their beliefs.
“the Carrie Underwood song “Jesus Take The Wheel“.
” Heh, every time I hear that damn song I scream, “STEER INTO THE SKID, YOU STUPID BITCH! STEER INTO THE SKID!!!!!”
I would expand that to include all institutional cultures whether corporate, religious, or governmental institutional centered “art”. As several other commenters have already commented, institutional centered art tends to not only be stale, but could easily become an unintentional parody of itself as shown by much of the Maoist centered artwork of the Cultural Revolution.
What’s more funny is that one’s socio-economic class has little actual correlation with good taste as shown by many upper/upper-middle class American college students who have embraced Cultural Revolution and Maoist art wholesale since the 60’s.
This was especially prevalent at my undergrad college where many of them had little understanding of why someone they considered to be so admirable was regarded by many who experienced the Cultural Revolution firsthand or had family who had regarded him with deep antipathy and the “revolution” as a serious waste for their society.