Joan of Arc Writes in from the Culture Wars

Typical insipid church art. Anglican.

This article is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it is absolutely correct in pointing out that Catholics and the right must not ignore the culture. That is the one sure way to lose the culture wars. Moreover, while Christian morality is now a hard sell, the appeal to beauty is the ace we hold in the new evangelization that is so desperately needed in Europe and North America.

In any case, the creation of beauty is our religious duty. And we have indeed not been doing it. Judge is spot on to point out that the recent art we have been getting in Church—the new hymns, the words of the vernacular mass, the redesigned altars, the stylized banners—has been insipid.

But if Judge is right that religion cannot do without art, I think he is wrong to believe that art can do without religion. He is wrong to claim that, since the two parted ways, modern and postmodern art has been doing any better than religion. It has not been incredibly “inspired and dynamic” over the last fifty years. Judge may be too young to know better, but it has not. It has been in a dead stall. Even pop music and pop art, after a brief flowering, has been moribund since the 1960s. Art cannot survive with nothing to say.

He is very right about one thing: “We need our own Rolling Stone magazine. We need an online journal devoted to exploring and explaining popular culture.” This is indeed the needful thing today. We need a lifeline for young Catholics of an intellectual and an artistic bent.

Insipid art from "Rainbow Cathedral."

Because right now, they are trapped in hostile territory.

It's a chicken-egg problem. There are surely a large number of artists who are secretly Catholic; but they know that, if they come out publicly, or make this too clear in their art, they are sacrificing their career. All of the money comes from government grants, and these are doled out by bureaucrats who are themselves highly politicized and leftist.