Evangelicals and Art

Are Evangelical Christians clueless when it comes to art? Do they too often see art as just a mere tool with which to evangelize? I’m a conservative Lutheran, so I guess I would be considered an Evangelical. I have to agree that some Christians do seem to have a narrow view of art.

Mark Shea links to an essay on the Hollywood Jesus website: The Mythology of J. R. R. Tolkien. The essay is also given somewhat of a fisking by David Mills on Touchstone Magazine’s blog, Mere Comments*. That post and a follow up post also deal with how some Evangelicals view art. From the first Mills post:

I think this peculiar reading of Tolkien and his great book reflects what is, I am afraid, the traditional approach of American Evangelicals to these things: that stories are not really good or safe unless they are clearly propaganda in the old sense of the word, unless they are really illustrated sermons whose lessons can be put in propositions. This is the only sort of story they think “Christian.”

They are happy with The Narnia Chronicles because they can say “Aslan equals Jesus.” They are less happy with The Lord of the Rings because they cannot find nearly so obvious a Christ figure. You do find them saying “Frodo equals Jesus! Wait, I mean Gandalf equals Jesus! And Aragorn equals Jesus too!” but the range of possibilities usually defeats them. And Tolkien’s book does not give them any of the keys or hints that the book has an obvious and directly applicable Christian meaning they look for.

I have met intelligent Evangelicals, including some college professors, who distrusted all literature except Pilgrim’s Progress and its knock offs, because they could not easily find a “Christian” meaning in anything else. I have read and heard some tortured efforts by English profs at Evangelical colleges to prove that literature was good in itself, and they always wound up, in desperation perhaps, arguing for literature as an instrument, as a way of growing in knowledge in a fairly obvious way. This meant that if you had acquired the knowledge in another way, you did not need stories at all.

Is Mills being too harsh in his assessment? I don’t think he is. This same problem is the subject of the previously mentioned book Addicted to Mediocrity by Franky Schaeffer. Many Evangelical Christians do have a narrow, utilitarian view of art. If a work of art can’t be used as an evangelical tool, it isn’t considered useful. It may even be considered ungodly.

The point of Schaeffer’s book is that art glorifies God simply by expressing the beauty and truths of the world He created. It need not mention God directly or provide some neat allegory for Christian theology to be godly.

I think more Evangelicals are starting to understand this, but we still have a long way to go.

* The permalinks are not functioning on Mere Comments. The first post by Mills on this subject is entitled "THE EVIL TOLKIEN" and the second one is "ART AS INSTRUMENT."