Christian Art Sucks [sort of]

Parts of this post are taken from a comment I made on this blog site.

Kate, the author of the above blog wrote a great musing on the state of contemporary Christian Art. She likened the depictions of Jesus seen in Christian "art" as, 'a holy, western, Paul Bunyan.' I too wryly smiled at the glowing Jesus remarks she made. I teach at a Christian College in Missouri and I often have these discussions with my students. Unfortunately I believe that the depth of commercial Christian Visual Art is reflective of the spiritual depth of the average Christian. It is so sanitary and safe, an oversentimentalized unattainable ideal, irrelevant to unchurched individuals. We live in an A-Christian society. I was raised in a church. I get the visual flannel-board vocabulary and understand its nuances, but what about a person unfamiliar with its symbols or stories? How are the images and safe topics that wouldn't be frowned upon in a church building going to connect with an individual without a similar frame of reference? Good art and that includes good Christian art speaks to all humanity and not just a narrow slice of an evangelical population.

This last Easter, Christianity Today asked me to submit a piece of work for an Evangelical approach to the Stations of the Cross. Mine was for the thirteenth station, Jesus is Laid in the Tomb. Viewers could leave comments, and [I will have to admit] that pieces that were not realistic were often viewed with disdain or downright accused of being anti-Christian. The opinions were extremely polar, either very positive or extremely negative. Few fell in the middle, but I was struck at the sheer ignorance and vehemence of a few of the negative comments, questioning ones faith because one was working in an abstract fashion.

Here is the piece that was on Christianity Today Online. Its title is, Pieces of the True Cross. A description will follow.



The body of Jesus is laid to rest in a borrowed tomb. His pierced corpse is hurriedly but lovingly cleaned and wrapped in a cloth and placed into the excavated hillside. There is no time to properly tend to the body. Evening is approaching and it will soon be time for the Sabbath. Flecks of glass, crumbling iron and splinters of wood help compose the now cold flesh of a man once alive, once whole. But He is now dead and broken, like us.

Time passes. Loving women return to tend to the body abandoned for the Sabbath. Time is decay’s friend, and in this knowledge brave women make their way to the tomb and are met with… a folded cloth, the sparkling glint of glass, some bits of oxidized metal and splintered fragments of the true cross.

There is beauty in the broken, discarded and unnoticed. At one time most of the objects in this work had a specific function or were an integral part of a natural process. Each comes to this piece with its own complex yet anonymous history. The fragments that make up the work reflect our own brokenness and secret pain. Rusted, dirty and shattered, our scars remind us that we are no longer whole.

Though the setting is the tomb, this piece is about the triumph of Christ’s resurrection. The newly perfected body, now gone, leaves behind the embedded fragments of his torture and death, a testimony to His, and through Him our, triumph.



If you don't get any of that by looking at the piece above, don't worry. Christians, like most individuals, just do not have a great education in Visual Art. That is not their fault, but nor should it be a hindrance in trying to understand and appreciate sophisticated and deep expressions of visual Christianity. After all, isn't that our witness and our evangelical gift? A gift given to we practitioners by the original and greatest Creator?

The fact is that if a particular visual expression doesn't "move" you, it doesn't mean that it won't have a profound effect on someone else. God uses a vast array of media to get our attention, to focus our eyes on Him; accidents, ecstatic events, still small voices, friends, strangers, visual art, praise songs, dance, theatre, music, plagues, famine, snakes, pillars of fire and columns of smoke and dirty innocuous-looking rabbis with a rabble of fishermen and tax collectors for companions.

In addition, I don't believe Christians should necessarily get outraged over secular art that is overtly anti-Christian. Chances are that the individuals creating the artwork have had a bad experience or two at the hands or lips of Christians.

"Christianity would be great if it weren't for the Christians," is something that I say at times and I know that I am referencing myself in this statement as well.

Can you, the reader, recall a time or two when you did not Do as Jesus Would Do?

We are all broken. I think too often we Christians tout our difference and separation from "those sinners." But we are sinners too. The only difference is that we are covered by a Divine Grace that many of "those sinners" don't even know about. To connect with them, they have to know that we are the same, but different. They have to know that we are broken too. The current mainstream Christian Visual Art is doing a WAY inadequate job of giving broken people anything to relate to.

Luckily there are MANY excellent Christian artists out there. CIVA [Christians in the Visual Arts] is a great organization that has many, but not all, great visual artists who are also Christian, and from many Christian traditions. [Civa.org] And there is hope. People of my generation are tired of phoneys and as our purchasing power increases, so will the offerings of the mainstream Christian Commercial outlets.

Thank you for indulging me, and I hope that you all keep an open mind to non-representational expressions of faith as well as realism, but that is a whole 'nuther post.

—RWC