A call to serenity for Christian artists

God uses both the storm and the still, small voice to get our attention.
What will we use to get the attention of a society grown too tolerant to the
shocking. (I instinctively bristle when some well-meaning soul tells me that
Christian stories shouldn't use this or that. However, this article takes a
different tack, and the pragmatist in me was nodding along as I read through
it. It's not that we can or can't use violence, it is that as used today,
it's just not very effective any more.)

http://www.relevantmagazine.com/culture/film/features/24754-why-christian-artists-should-not-use-violence

 Christian Artists Should (Not) Use
Violence<http://www.relevantmagazine.com/culture/film/features/24754-why-christian-artists-should-not-use-violence>
>  Alex Wilgus
>


>  [image: violence in art]
>
> How Christian artists can best use offensive content, and why they should
> think twice before they do.
>
> There is a frequent debate on the use of objectionable content in Christian
> art. The argument tends to go like this: “We need to protect our minds from
> gratuitous violence and sex” versus, “Art needs to be dangerous in order to
> be profound. One should not be judgmental of it.” Every once in a while
> there seems to be a new attack from one side or the other, but what is not
> commonly done is to try and figure out what violence in art is meant to do
> and if it is even effective in its work. I’m using the term “violence” in
> this article to describe a broad range of extreme material, including
> explicit sexuality and coarse language. Perhaps one could frame the debate
> on different grounds: instead of arguing whether it is moral to include
> violence in our art, let us first ask if it is original.
> Why Use Violence?
>
> Walker Percy’s article “Notes for a Novel About the End of the World” is a
> short treatise on the specific challenges that Christian creativity faces in
> the modern world. Though Percy deals with novelists in this text, his
> question applies to Christian artists of all disciplines: How does one
> write, play, sing, film, choreograph or sculpt the radical message of the
> Gospel to a world that is profoundly bored with Christianity and religious
> questions in general?
>
> “... He calls on every cunning, craft and guile he can muster from the
> darker regions of his soul. The fictional use of violence, shock, comedy,
> insult, the bizarre, are the everyday tools of his trade.”
>
> When the world’s religious identity slumbers, you hit them in the face.
> Percy’s favorite example is Flannery O’Connor’s use of the image of a death
> by drowning to represent baptism. Because to the common American, baptism is
> “already accepted but accepted by and large as a minor tribal rite somewhat
> secondary in importance to taking the kids to see Santa Claus.” Violence
> acts as a sharpener to help an important message stand out from the common
> run of things. This sort of extreme content is actually beneficial in
> preaching the message of the Gospel to those lulled to sleep by the siren
> song of modernity, which tells us to eat, spend, consume, fornicate and get
> on with our fellows without offending anybody, and everything will be all
> right. When asked why she went to such extremes in her stories, O’Connor
> responded that when an audience does not hold the same beliefs as you do,
> "then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing,
> you shout and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.”
>
> This provides us with an excellent definition for the role of violence in
> Christian art: violence is a tool that jolts complacent minds into a state
> of comprehension of religious themes. *Of Mice And Men* just wouldn’t have
> the same impact if Lennie didn’t accidentally kill his puppy, then Curley’s
> wife. Tolstoy wrote *War and Peace,* not “Peace and Peace.” For the
> Christian, violence is a tactic used to strike deep into the soul and bring
> people back to the foundations of humanity and morality.
> When Violence Stops Working
>
> But what happens when tactics stop working? What if there comes a time when
> violence is just not that shocking anymore? We don’t have to imagine it
> because that time, if ever, is now. Americans are fed on such a steady diet
> of extremity that we are no longer pushing the envelope—we are just sampling
> different flavors of irreverence. In the realm of cinema for example: there
> are fun, raunchy sex comedies (*No Strings Attached*), deep, independent
> dramas with uncomfortable sex scenes (*Blue Valentine*) and progressive
> dramedies with sexual dialogue (*The Kids Are All Right*). The same is
> true of physical violence. Not even Mel Gibson could top the latest string
> of “torture porn” films (*Hostel*, *Saw 1-7*), stylized *Grindhouse*flicks (
> *Machete*, *Planet Terror*, *Death Proof*, *Sin City*), and their more
> "high art" cousin: the Tarantino intellectual shoot-em-up (*Inglorious
> Basterds*). In March, Los Angeles will be leveled for the umpteenth time (
> *Battle: Los Angeles*) and the next epic romance will take place against a
> backdrop of global pandemic (*Perfect Sense*).
>
> The question isn't whether or not these films use violence responsibly. It
> is: How do you wake someone up to the madness of the human condition after
> sitting through *Kill Bill* and *Bruno*? One could argue any of these
> films use violence “well,” but it’s impossible to get away from the fact
> that everybody is doing it. Extreme content is a drop in the bucket these
> days, and it must escalate in order to break through the audience’s
> toughening skin. Once salt has lost its flavor, how can it become salty
> again?
> So, What Should Christians Do?
>
> Violence, once the weapon of the illumined artist to combat the forces of
> complacency, has become complacency itself. Like the tolerance a user builds
> against a drug, the modern media denizen is significantly less affected by
> extreme content than in Percy's and O’Connor’s eras. They were writing in
> times when people’s moral codes were more fixed, and generally all of
> America subscribed to some definition of homogeneity. This is no longer the
> case. They needed to be shaken up by the Gospel; we need to be calmed down
> by it. The siren song of modernity has become a pair of headphones, blaring
> counterculture over a 3G connection.
>
> The Lord spoke to Jonah in a storm, but he spoke to Elijah in a still,
> small voice. He used both violence and serenity to grasp the attention of
> His servants and tailored His messages to their situations. In like manner,
> Christian artists must take the pulse of their age and speak in a way people
> will hear them clearly. I will leave the question of just how to do this to
> artists themselves (all the while pointing enthusiastically to Makoto
> Fujimura’s “The Four Holy Gospels” illumination) and add a few thoughts.
>
> Whatever should be done, it is clear the Christian artist faces a peculiar
> enemy today: the expanding boredom of the modern age, which has the power to
> wash out even the severest expressions, and violence is its latest casualty.
> It is the constant duty of the Christian artist to outwit this amoebic
> tendency to consume and excrete, to make retail of riches. She must forge
> new paths of expression and restore old ones. When the world builds for
> itself a Tower of Babel, then she must paint a pile of rubble, and then when
> it is knocked down and the peoples wander in the refuse, she must paint a
> glittering city with jasper walls and foundations of precious stone.
>




Johne Cook
| http://raygunrevival.com | http://authorculture.blogspot.com |

*“I am not responsible for actions of the imaginary version of me you have
inside your head.”
Attributed to Teresa Nielsen Hayden*

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