THE AMERICAN POLITICAL news of the 1970s was two-fold: the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974 and, in 1976, the election to the presidency of Jimmy Carter, a Southern Democrat and evangelical Christian.
It was the “Year of the Evangelical,” reported Time magazine, and indeed, it was the conservative Protestant edge that won Carter the election. You had to know something was up when even Bob Dylan, the singer, and Eldridge Cleaver, the former Black Panther, both converted (for a time) to the evangelical faith.
Less noticed in this ferment was a turn in conservative Protestant thought about fine art, to include visual art, movies, and literature. The headwaters of this was a place called the L’Abri Fellowship in Switzerland, where many young American evangelicals circulated to hear the teachings of the theologian Francis Schaeffer (d. 1985), an America Presbyterian who set up shop in Europe.
His main idea was that Protestants—he was fairly sectarian in this respect—must take a “worldview,” that is, a Christian interpretation of the “whole man” and whole of his culture, including art.
Before now, Schaeffer argued, the orthodox Protestant instinct had been to reject worldly imagery and imagination as temptations and distraction from Christ, the Bible, and God on high. A correction was needed, he said, and that involved Christians (that is, Bible Protestants, since Roman Catholics had long embraced visual culture), to retake the arts.
Being a conservative Protestant, Schaeffer was also a Biblicist, and his arguments for a rennaissance in Christian art drew heavily on Bible texts, added to by the logic of how believers lived in the world today. His arguments are best known in the little book, Art and the Bible (1973).
Schaeffer begins by saying the Bible does not require a dichotomy between the body and the soul. While human “dominion” over the earth, posited in Genesis, had been corrupted by sin, pursuits such as science and art may repair some of that corruption.
The dictates of the Old Testament to not worship graven images remains valid, Schaeffer says, but there is a difference between veneration and creation: "To worship art is wrong, but to make art is not." To illustrated, he goes down a long list in which God told the Israelites, "thou shalt make. . . ."
These “art commandments” included design patterns in the temple and its furniture: cherubim of gold; cups like almond blossoms; garments with pomegranates, not red, but blue and purple; a throne of ivory. Indeed, there had to be artisans among the Israelites to make such objects. Thus, Old Testament culture was "filled with artwork," and the only conclusion could be that "God is interested in beauty." To worship such objects as talismans or magical (i.e. graven images) was simply their wrong use, meaning that art had a good and proper use.
Music and poetry, in wide use among the ancient Jews, were not an issue like imagery. Indeed, music and poetry often were expressed not to audiences, but in private meditation with God—as if the Lord enjoyed their beauty.
Schaeffer then moves to the topic of popular culture. He gave several justifications for not just high art, but Christian popular art as well: Creativity, and art for its own sake, both reflect God the Creator; visual art can be like poetry and prose, one realistic, the other abstract or imaginative; excellence is worthy, if the message is godly; art can change just as language has changed. In short, Christians in the twentieth-century should produce art for that century.
Although there is "no such thing as a godly style and an ungodly style," either may be judged by the content and message they carry. So Schaeffer is putting some limit on art by emphasizing the message it conveys, or intent of the artist, which is a whole other level of interpretation.
Preferably, the content should be about the brokenness of the world, hope of redemption, moral solutions, and transcendence. Thus, "Christians ought not to be frightened by fantasy and imagination." Think of the fantastical blue pomegranates. Imagination is part of Christian freedom, as long as the freedom is attributed to God.
By contrast, Sunday school art has been far too “romantic,” he says, and thus not challenging or giving full compass to creativity—and having no power to compete with the message of secular art.
Schaeffer finally recommends that Christian artists pursue a “wide and deep body of work,” for only such large oeuvres have a cultural impact. For non-artists, meanwhile, it is not wrong to think that “the Christian life is to be an artwork."
As one commentator has said, Schaeffer’s work was a “defense of artists to the church." It also "liberated an entire generation of artists." If that is so, it seems, that hoped-for new wave of Christian artists has not really stood out as specifically Christian. The “secular” art world is still so dominant.
Looking back, we can’t say that a movement of “Christian art” has swept over Western culture, and perhaps quite the opposite, given secular trends. Yet without the 1970s, and Schaeffer in particular, there may have been no philosophical basis for modern-day religion to make forays into the fine arts, often the modernist turf of anti-religious thinkers.
Today, there may be Christian artists with “wide and deep” bodies of work, though the public is not clear that the artist is a believer. The Catholic tradition has always recommended art. For orthodox Protestants, at least, there may have been an expansion since the 1970s. Perhaps many of our artists today are of that Christian conviction—yet most of the time, we never know.