Like many people, I’ve run in several different circles at the same time for about as long as I can remember. I imagine this is true for most people.
There’s always been some amount of overlap between the various circles, but I’ve never felt like I belonged to any one group completely. This is not necessarily bad, but it has resulted in some sense of alienation. As a result I’ve always felt like an outsider. As a kid it was crushingly lonely at times, but I learned to deal with it. I suppose everyone faces this at one time or another.
Now, as an adult, that feeling is most acute when I try to talk about art around some people in my “church” circle. I get the smile and nod treatment. So few people seem to really “get” art anyway, so why should I expect Christians to have spent much time thinking about it either?
Honestly I haven’t really tried it the other way: talking to “art” people about Christianity. (Maybe I should.) I can’t say I’ve met any artists in the past ten years who were overtly antagonistic toward religion, much less Christianity, but I imagine a similar “smile and nod” response would be the most polite response I’d get. (I suspect their main eef would be with hypocritical attitudes among some Christians.) Most artists I know are far more open-minded than a lot of the Christians I know.
The Root of Conflict
But I think for me the biggest conflict may be the fact that Modern art is largely atheistic. Christianity is clearly monotheistic. I think that affects a lot of the dialogue (or lack thereof) between the two worlds. (And when some art is overtly Christian, it’s just bad.)
That said, I think there’s a lot of room for reconciliation between the two. Not all art is atheistic, and not all Christians are antagonistic to art.
Yet I think there is a fair bit ignorance on both sides regarding the other. Many Christians are simply ignorant of contemporary culture, failing to make any sort of assessment of it. Thus they have no idea what to do with art or how to look at art.
And contemporary (especially Modern art) tends toward so much ugliness that there is such a lack of a sense of hope or redemption that it alienates anyone who lives with that sort of hope.
Reconciliation
So how to reconcile the two? I think it is the job of the Christian artist to bring hope and redemption back to art after a century of despair.I’m not talking about a naive feel-good sense of sugar-coated “hope” in the vein of Thomas Kinkade, but acknowledging that yes, sometimes life does suck, but there is a healthy way out.
Paul, in2 Corinthians 4:8-11 (HCSB), may provide some encouragement:
We are pressured in every way but not crushed; we are perplexed but not in despair; we are persecuted but not abandoned; we are struck down but not destroyed. We always carry the death of Jesus in our body, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who live are always given over to death because of Jesus, so that Jesus’ life may also be revealed in our mortal flesh.This passage stands to be a good reminder for Christian artists of all stripes: the world is what it is, but it is our job to share redemption with a dying and corrupt world. It’s been that way since sin entered it, but since we have Jesus in us, we have life, and we are called to share it with the world.