Arion
A primary arena for the conservative-liberal wars has been the arts. While leading conservative voices defend the traditional Anglo-American literary canon, which has been under challenge and in flux for forty years, American conservatives on the whole, outside of the New Criterion magazine, have shown little interest in the arts, except to promulgate a didactic theory of art as moral improvement that was discarded with the Victorian era at the birth of modernism. Liberals, on the other hand, have been too content with the high visibility of the arts in metropolitan centers, which comprise only a fraction of America. Furthermore, liberals have been complacent about the viability of secular humanism as a sustaining creed for the young. And liberals have done little to reverse the scandalous decline in urban public education or to protest the crazed system of our grotesquely overpriced, cafeteria-style higher education, which for thirty years was infested by sterile and now fading poststructuralism and postmodernism. The state of the humanities in the US can be measured by present achievement: would anyone seriously argue that the fine arts or even popular culture is enjoying a period of high originality and creativity? American genius currently resides in technology and design. The younger generation, with its mastery of video games and its facility for ever-evolving gadgetry like video cell phones and iPods, has massively shifted to the Web for information and entertainment.
I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion. Let me make my premises clear: I am a professed atheist and a pro-choice libertarian Democrat. But based on my college experiences in the 1960s, when interest in Hinduism and Buddhism was intense, I have been calling for nearly two decades for massive educational reform that would put the study of comparative religion at the center of the university curriculum. Though I shared the exasperation of my generation with the moralism and prudery of organized religion, I view each world religion, including Judeo-Christianity and Islam, as a complex symbol system, a metaphysical lens through which we can see the vastness and sublimity of the universe. Knowledge of the Bible, one of the West's foundational texts, is dangerously waning among aspiring young artists and writers. When a society becomes all-consumed in the provincial minutiae of partisan politics (as has happened in the US over the past twenty years), all perspective is lost. Great art can be made out of love for religion as well as rebellion against it. But a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy.
The position of the fine arts in America has rarely been secure. This is a practical, commercial nation where the arts have often been seen as wasteful, frivolous, or unmanly. In Europe, the arts are heavily subsidized by the government because art literally embodies the history of the people and the nation, whose roots are pre-modern and in some cases ancient. Even in the old Soviet Union, the Communist regime supported classical ballet. America is relatively young, and it has never had an aristocracy—the elite class that typically commissions the fine arts and dictates taste. In Europe, the Catholic Church was also a major patron of the arts from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation. Partly because of the omnipresent Greco-Roman heritage, furthermore, continental European attitudes toward nudity in art are far more relaxed. In Europe, voluptuous nudes in painting and sculpture and on public buildings, fountains, and bridges are a mundane fact of life.
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The Puritans who arrived in New England in the early seventeenth century brought with them the Calvinist hostility or indifference to the visual arts. A motivating principle of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation was its correction of Roman Catholicism's heavy use of images in medieval churches—in statues, paintings, and stained-glass windows. The Protestant reformers reasserted the Ten Commandments' ban on graven images, idolatrous objects that seduce the soul away from the immaterial divine. The Puritans, a separatist sect that seceded from the too–Catholic Church of England, followed the Reformation imperative of putting the Bible at the center of their faith. Through direct study of the Bible, made possible by Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, believers opened a personal dialogue with God. This focus on text and close reading helped inspire the American literary tradition. Both poetry and prose, in the form of diaries, were stimulated by the Puritan practice of introspection: a Puritan had to constantly scrutinize his or her conscience and look for God's hand in the common and uncommon events of life. Oratory, embodied in Sunday sermons, was very strong. Literary historian Perry Miller identified the jeremiad or hellfire sermon as an innately American form, the most famous example of which is Jonathan Edwards' sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which was delivered in Connecticut in 1741 during the religious revival called the Great Awakening. This enthusiastic style of denunciation and call to repentance can still be heard on evangelical television programs, and it is echoed in the fulminations of politically conservative talk radio (which I have been listening to with alternating admiration and consternation for over fifteen years).
The visual arts, on the other hand, were neglected and suppressed under the Puritans. The Puritan suspicion of ornamentation is symbolized in the sober black dress of the Pilgrim Fathers depicted every year in the Thanksgiving decorations of American schools and shops. The Puritans' attitude toward art was conditioned by utilitarian principles of frugality and propriety: art had no inherent purpose except as entertainment, a distraction from duty and ethical action. The Puritans did appreciate beauty in nature, which was “read” like a book for signs of God's providence. The social environment in England from which the Puritans had emigrated to America (either directly or indirectly via the Netherlands ) was overtly iconoclastic. Destruction of church art was massive during the Reformation in Switzerland and Germany as well as England, where destruction of churches, priories, and abbeys followed Henry VIII's severance of the English church from control by the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the 1530s. Crowds smashed medieval stained-glass windows and intricately carved wooden altar screens and decapitated the statues of saints carved on church facades. Walls were whitewashed to cover sacred murals. Politically incited damage to churches was even more severe during the English Civil Wars (1642–51), when Puritan soldiers dispatched by Parliament attacked even the cathedral at Canterbury, which Richard Culmer, Cromwell's general and the leader of the ravagers, called “a stable for idols.” Puritan iconoclasm was a pointed contrast to the image mania of the contemporary Counter-Reformation, the Vatican's campaign to defeat Protestantism that would fill Southern Europe with grandiose Baroque art.
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The Protestant reformers were bitterly split, however, over the issue of music in church. Luther encouraged the composition of new hymns and was the author of a famous one—“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” (“Ein' Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott”). In contrast, John Calvin, the father of American Puritanism, maintained that only the word of God should be heard in church; hence songs had to strictly follow the biblical psalms. Like his fellow reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, Calvin opposed the use of organs or any instruments in church: organs were systematically destroyed by Protestant radicals. Furthermore, Calvin condemned the complex polyphonic music endorsed by the more artistic Luther. Calvin rejected harmony or part-singing, so that the Holy Scripture could be heard with perfect clarity. Thus the American style of Protestant church song, based on Calvin's principles, was simple, slow, serious, and cast in unaccompanied unison. That intense, focused group sound has descended through the centuries and can be heard in the majestic hymns that have been adopted as stirring anthems by American civil rights groups, such as “Amazing Grace” and “We Shall Overcome.”
The Quakers, who were pivotal to the abolitionist movement against slavery, were even more restrictive about such matters: they frowned on music altogether, even at home, because they believed it encouraged thoughtlessness and frivolity. But the German and Dutch who emigrated to America from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries held the more expansive Lutheran view of church music. The German influence was especially strong in Philadelphia, to which German Pietists imported a church organ in 1694. By the start of the nineteenth century, hymn writing exploded in America. Over the next hundred years, hymns of tremendous quality poured out from both men and women writers. In many cases, they were simply lyrics—pure poetry that was attached to old melodies. A famous example from the Civil War is Julia Ward Howe's “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which Howe wrote overnight in a fever of inspiration after visiting a Union Army camp near Washington, where she heard the soldiers singing “John Brown's Body,” a tribute to the executed abolitionist rebel. Several other songs would become political hymns to the nation, such as “My Country 'Tis of Thee,” written in 1832 by a Baptist minister, Samuel Francis Smith, and “America the Beautiful,” a lyric written by Katharine Lee Bates, a native of Massachusetts whose father was a Congregationalist pastor. Bates saw the Rockies for the first time when she taught here at Colorado College in 1893. She wrote “America the Beautiful” after a wagon trip to the top of Pike's Peak. When it was published in 1899, it became instantly famous and has often been described as America's true national anthem. The huge nineteenth-century corpus of Protestant songs became part of common American culture for people of all faiths—thus the tragic power of that final scene on the sinking Titanic in 1912, when the ship's band struck up the hymn, “Nearer My God to Thee.”
Hymnody should be viewed as a genre of the fine arts and be added to the basic college curriculum. One of the most brilliant products of American creative imagination, hymnody has had a massive global impact through popular music. Wherever rock 'n' roll is played, a shadow of its gospel roots remains. Rock, which emerged in the 1950s from urban black rhythm and blues of the late 1940s, had several sources, including percussive West African polyrhythms and British and Scots-Irish folk ballads. But a principal influence was the ecstatic, prophesying, body-shaking style of congregational singing in the camp meetings of religious revivalists from the late eighteenth century on. All gospel music, including Negro spirituals, descends from those extravaganzas, which drew thousands of people to open-air worship services in woods and groves.
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The brilliant folk hymns of nineteenth-century camp meetings were inherited by modern revivals, such as the Billy Graham Crusade. In popular music, the spasmodic undulations and ecstatic cries of camp-meeting worshippers were borrowed by performers like Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and the late, great James Brown, whose career began in gospel and who became the “godfather of soul” as well as of funk, reggae, and rap. Gospel music, passionate and histrionic, with its electrifying dynamics, is America 's grand opera. The omnipresence of gospel here partly explains the weakness of rock music composed in other nations—except where there has been direct influence by American rhythm and blues, as in Great Britain and Australia. The continuing impact of gospel music on young African Americans in church may also account for the current greater vitality of hip hop as opposed to hard rock, which has been in creative crisis for well over a decade.
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Catholic immigration in the nineteenth century brought a radically different aesthetic to church architecture and decor. The typical American church had been in the Protestant plain style, white and rectangular with a steeple that formed the picturesque apex of countless villages—a design bequeathed by the British architects Sir Christopher Wren and James Gibbs. Originally, American churches were often simply a meeting house (a word still retained in Quaker practice). Also used for local government, the meeting house was a boxy space with exposed timbers and benches but no ornamentation—a template that was borrowed by town halls across the nation. Catholic taste was far more lavish. The influx of Irish immigrants in the 1830s and '40s—which caused anti-Catholic violence (including the burning of churches in Philadelphia)—was soon registered in New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral, designed by James Renwick and constructed from 1850 to 1877. With its soaring spires, delicate stonework, and stained-glass windows, it exemplified the current Gothic Revival—a grand style that was also adopted by Episcopalian churches in America.
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Catholic surveillance of American public life would come with the rise of Hollywood. At the start of the studio era, movies were still viewed as vulgar. In the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, there was a new rule-breaking energy and sexual adventurism in urban areas. Responding to audience demand, movies began pushing the limits with bare flesh and sexual innuendo. Small communities across the US felt they were being invaded by an alien cultural force. Resistance came from a collaboration between the Catholic Church and local Protestant women's groups, speaking from the perspective of concerned mothers. There were tinges of anti-Semitism in this protest, because so many of Hollywood's early producers and financiers were Jewish. A series of guidelines was instituted in moviemaking throughout the 1920s, but compliance remained uneven. The Motion Picture Production Code, written by a Jesuit priest, was adopted by Hollywood in 1930 but laxly enforced by the Hays Office. Finally, in 1933, a conference of US bishops created the Catholic League of Decency (later renamed the National League of Decency) and threatened a nationwide boycott. Hollywood responded by appointing a tough Irish Catholic, Joseph Ignatius Breen, to administer the Code, which he did through the Breen Office for the next twenty years. The Code, which wasn't officially abandoned until 1967, required scripts to follow a moral formula: crime had to be punished and marriage respected, with homosexuality and miscegenation forbidden.
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As avant-garde modernism triumphed in the first half of the twentieth century, it was only the movies that addressed or expressed the religious convictions of the mass audience. With few exceptions, most modern artists and intellectuals were agnostics or atheists, above all in Europe, where anti-clericalism has raged since the Enlightenment. In its search for ticket sales, Hollywood returned again and again to the spectacular bible epic, one of my favorite genres. Cecil B. DeMille, for example, made The Ten Commandments twice, in 1923 as a silent film and then as a wide-screen Technicolor extravaganza released in 1956. The latter is regularly broadcast on religious holidays and remains a masterpiece of heroic narrative and archaeological recreation of upper-class Egyptian life. The best-selling American religious novel of the nineteenth century was General Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, published in 1880 and widely imitated. Ben-Hur was also made into two films, the first a 1925 silent and the second yet another wide-screen masterpiece, released in 1959. The dynamic star of both The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur was Charlton Heston, who afterward became a conservative activist and president of the National Rifle Association.
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To fully appreciate world art, one must learn how to respond to religious expression in all its forms. Art began as religion in prehistory. It does not require belief to be moved by a sacred shrine, icon, or scripture. Hence art lovers, even when as citizens they stoutly defend democratic institutions against religious intrusion, should always speak with respect of religion. Conservatives, on the other hand, need to expand their parched and narrow view of culture. Every vibrant civilization welcomes and nurtures the arts.
Progressives must start recognizing the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism and reexamine the way that liberalism too often now automatically defines human aspiration and human happiness in reductively economic terms. If conservatives are serious about educational standards, they must support the teaching of art history in primary school—which means conservatives have to get over their phobia about the nude, which has been a symbol of Western art and Western individualism and freedom since the Greeks invented democracy. Without compromise, we are heading for a soulless future. But when set against the vast historical panorama, religion and art—whether in marriage or divorce—can reinvigorate American culture. (more)
