Art Wednesday: Christian Art & Academia

The story of Christian art is a complicated one, and anyone trying to discover how it came to settle into such a low grade in our present day (although, any time you say this you have to provide a caveat that there are many Christians in every field who are thinking well about their art and producing wonderful work, but they are the exception rather than the rule) has to see it as a combination of many factors. Without a doubt, one key factor that brought us to where we are is Christianity's exile from academia.

To some this might seem like a non-sequitur. What does the world of academia have to do with Christian art? A lot. If you look at general cultural trends in history the pattern emerges that culture is created at the top, and trickles down to the general population. Postmodernism was a subject of philosophy papers 50 years before it was on MTV. In folklore the understanding used to be that the "lore" of the folk arose from the folk themselves, but that isn't the understanding anymore. Now it is believed that the lore, or culture, of a people flows out of a relatively smaller group of social elites and then diffuses into the general population. Wendell Berry, thinking about this from the slightly different angle, said that the country gives the city food and the city gives the country culture. It could be said that academia gives the world its mind.

I make this point to say that academia occupies a powerful post in any culture. There is a sense in which, the thoughts that the academics think, the culture will think. Academics carve out intellectual space which people can live and create in.

One of the reasons why we find little space for Christian art is that there is not space for it in the academy. Religion, as it is commonly portrayed, is seen to rub against the grain of what the academy is about at its most fundamental levels. Science and understanding is about objective fact, testable truth, and knowledge free from the superstition of religion. Religion is seen as undermining knowledge and inquiry, let alone creativity and art. This is an unfortunate mistaken notion.

Christianity has massive resources for careful thinking and careful artistry, but that will not be shown until Christians begin to think and create well. For this reason Christians in academia should be celebrated and supported rather than, as they often are, told to go into the "ministry." Christianity has resources within it to claim Christ's lordship over every inch of life, including the academy.

In this, as in any area of this broken world that we hope to redeem, the fallenness will only be beaten back by God's people entering a place incarnationally and serving it faithfully and creatively. If we hope to reach a culture, we have to go to where the culture is made. Then, perhaps, believers will learn to think well and apply it to their art (and every place God calls them) and the notion of Christian art will begin to change from a marketing scheme to something closer to a fountain of creativity mirroring the infinitely creative one in whose image we are made.