Weep for Bad Religious Art
FEW things so damage the rights of God in the world than bad religious art.
Images of Jesus that are sentimental and portray Him with as much sublimity as a fitness instructor or rock star are extremely offensive. They are outright lies. Better no image of Jesus than an image that is profane or too-human.
Protestantist groups have long specialized in tawdry representations of this kind. But then the ‘Catholic Church that hates the Catholic Church’ now reigning from Rome does the same. The fact that many Protestants are guilty of vulgar sentimentality is nothing new, but that an institution claiming to be the Catholic Church, which has inspired so much beauty and transcendence in art, should produce an almost daily landslide of imagery inspired by the ethics of advertising and secular humanitarianism rather than supernatural grace is a fact so astonishing as to be difficult to absorb.
Sentimentality in religion is a serious fault. (So is superficiality — and the two are related.) The sentimental person forgets or is incapable of understanding that many people don’t share this gushiness or love of the sweet and cute. A person focused on his own good feelings is a person estranged from the truth of the human condition.
The spiritual world is all too invisible. People engrossed in the visible world have a hard time feeling for it. A great artist can interest them in the sublime by his capacity to convey other-worldliness.
It is possible to find truth in religion by following the trail of great art. A simple and truthful person can look at an image of a cathedral built many years ago and an image of a recent “Catholic” building and realize that these come from two irreconcilable belief systems. He doesn’t need a course in theology because these two buildings are visual manifestations of theological doctrines.






