Bad Art

In Which The New Religion of Pride Fails To Make Beautiful Content

As we all know, the day after tomorrow will begin the celebration of America’s new civic religion—Pride. It wasn’t always thus. June used to be an ordinary month, mostly, for me, occupied by family birthdays and anniversaries. My grandparents were married in June. My mother and several cousins were born over the meandering days. And many of us came to expect that the peonies would bloom and the iris. But this is a new time, and anniversaries and birthdays are no longer the main event. Also, the peonies bloomed three weeks early, so the desolation of mid-summer, the long hot days where everything is too parched to produce buds, will be upon us before we are ready.

pride month propaganda

But also, we must endure the very bad art and the very bad spirituality. For, don’t we all remember those awful days when mainstream Evangelicals produced movies, pictures, and merch that was, for most of America, cringe? What sorts of “art” or rather, propaganda, did American Christians churn out? Well, besides Thomas Kincaid, endless badly rhymed Bible story board books for toddlers, little booklets of three or four week Bible thoughts, and, the ultimate, movies like Fireproof, there wasn’t a lot for you to buy if you really did love Jesus. You could go the other way and order an icon from Monastery Icons. You could kind of lean into some of the Roman Catholic kitsch and get a Mary or Jesus, hands delicately spread and sacred heart shining forth, but if you wanted something really beautiful you probably had to make it yourself.

I’m not too old to remember the many long and thoughtful blog posts and discussions about how kitschy propaganda isn’t art. It mimics art by appealing to the emotions, but because The Message is more central than the beauty, in the end, it is abandoned. If you thought Christian messaging was less than sublime, now we may turn our attention to Pride Month, which will certainly make you long for the good old days of the Left Behind series.

I had the misfortune of being in a hotel room this last weekend with a large TV that, late at night after a long evening of worship and fellowship, my dear husband and I flicked on as we cashed out on the minorly comfortable sofa for a few minutes. And up popped something called We’re Here produced by HBO. It seems to have been around for a while—I think we caught something from season four—and, well, you don’t need to watch more than a few minutes to see how there is no art, there is only religious propaganda. Major on the religion and the propaganda.

Basically, a group of drag queens goes from town to town, digging out the people who feel dissatisfied with their gender identity, manufacturing some fake anxiety about being persecuted and pushed out, and then putting on a drag show that turns out to be a sort of quasi conversion moment of self-acceptance with a backdrop of mediocre come to your true self music.

Speaking of conversion moments, TEC has declared a revival. Apparently, this isn’t even the first one. There was a revival last year too, though no one, of course, heard about it. All one needs for a movement of the Spirit upon the earth is to make a declaration and website, and hire some up-and-coming musicians. This offering of musicality amused me a great deal:

I don’t know how many of you ran in Evangelical and Baptist circles through the 80s and 90s but one of the most glorious things was the way a piano player could riff her way through a hymn on a Sunday morning. I had a dorm mother who could thunder like nobody’s business over “How Great Thou Art” and “It Is Well With My Soul.” And the great thing about those hymns is that they are about something—God mainly—and have satisfying chord progressions. I don’t want to be mean or anything, but “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” unless it is sung by the master himself, is not a very good song. And to play it like it is something deeply meaningful and special, in a church no less, is ridiculous. It is just as bad—scratch that, it is worse than the heavy-handed acting of Kirk Cameron in a Christian movie. [Matt objects to me being mean about Mr. Cameron and would like me to point out that he’s doing a lot better at life than Alyssa Milano, his erstwhile co-host.]

Here is another person featured in the “revival”:

This one breaks my heart because I’ve been to Taizé and, well, the music there is beautiful. It is restrained. It is haunting. It does console the beleaguered human spirit. And it is well executed. This, on the other hand, is none of those things.

Honestly, I feel bad for the Episcopal Church and the Methodists and all the efforts to be relevant and get attention for the same old tired thing. All these people don’t mean to be bad. None of us do. The thing is, the Gospel of Jesus is beautiful. It is the order at the back of all beauty. It is the meaning that sustains and governs the cosmos. It should be the source of every speck of perfection and joy we experience.

So anyway, have a nice day!