Matt Kleberg’s spiritual journey also began when he was a small child, after his father converted to Christianity at a Billy Graham revival. Raised in Texas, Kleberg eventually attended UVA and after graduating in 2008 stayed here in Charlottesville where he now thrives as a painter. Over a piece of pizza at the Downtown Christian’s, he spoke emphatically of how his dad grappled with the same seemingly irreconcilable contradictions my father had, and plunged into a similarly theological project. Instead of gravitating towards fundamentalism, though, “his faith became about asking questions,” Kleberg said. “So I wasn’t brought up to think that there was only this certain set of things that constituted a Christian life.”
That doesn’t mean the 27-year-old didn’t have his own struggles growing up Christian, especially in high school when most young people are trying to figure out who they are and what they believe about the world.
“I’d come to some kind of philosophical impasse and be like, ‘Oh shit.’ If it teeters this way, everything will be lost, but if it teeters this way we’re all good,” he said.
I felt like this, too, especially once I left Liberty University after my sophomore year and transferred to the University of Arkansas. A thousand miles from our family’s home in Culpeper, I found myself surrounded by secular culture, both in the classroom and out. As an English major, I still read the Bible daily but was increasingly attracted to literature, music, and film, primarily that of the 20th century—which let’s face it—pointed to an absence of God. The result was that I felt like an alien in two worlds. I still adhered to Christian principles of living—I didn’t drink, curse, or have sex, and even went to church on Sunday—while identifying with loner heroes like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye or Jack Nicholson’s character in Five Easy Pieces.
I went on like that for the next few years, not really balancing my beliefs with my tastes, more compartmentalizing them. At the same age, Kleberg was somehow moving past the black-and-white worldview of fundamentalism that trapped me and he was embracing the same type of uncertainty his father had.
“As I got older, I realized that leaving things with a question mark was O.K., not having to have answers for everything,” he said. “Doubt’s always been a big part of my faith.”
As a crowd dined on cheese and wine at a First Fridays event this March, Kleberg stood in between two of his outsized canvases mounted on the walls. Like most of his recent paintings, they address iconic themes of the American West: a cowboy on a horse or a group of ranchers standing in front of a pick-up. They’re not just straight-up renderings but contain an element of distortion that keeps the viewer off balance—maybe a cowboy’s face is muted or a Ford Mustang is partially framed by a strawberry shaped Matisse-like cut-out.
As we talked in his studio space a few days later, I gazed at an unfinished painting that depicted a cowboy holding two dead buzzards. Looking at Kleberg’s work, I saw nothing that would indicate the artist was a Christian. No signs of grace, redemption, sin, or guilt. If anything, the paintings exuded a sense of ambiguity.
“Good pieces of art end in a question mark more often than a period,” he told me.
I was puzzled. In my experience, a Christian artist expresses his beliefs in overt ways, in an almost dot to dot fashion, “more like a diagram than a piece of art,” Kleberg said. There is the forced literalism of Christian rock, for example, or “didactic cheesy kitsch”—as he called it—like Thomas Kinkade’s treacly depictions of God’s benevolent presence in everyday life.
Kleberg is working from an entirely different frame of reference.
“Christian art is afraid to be honest about the world, and afraid to acknowledge that things are fucked up,” he said. “We are marked by a sense of hope that God is making all things new, ultimately everything broken will be made straight. Instead of that being the impetus to gloss things over and make really pretty art, that’s freedom to tell it like it is and call a spade a spade.”
To get to this vantage point—a radical one in my experience—Kleberg told me he’d had to internalize his beliefs and come to terms with them, doubt and all.
“My faith shifted from something I had to do or become and it turned into something where I looked at myself honestly,” he said.
The theology isn’t unbroken ground, but it’s not consistent with the born-again virtues I was taught. For Kleberg, God is “mysterious,” ultimately unknowable. As Apostle Paul said, “now we look through a glass darkly.” The world is not black-and-white. Yet, if there is a God who loves his creation then he must be “merciful” enough to accept man’s sinful nature. “As a Christian, I would say that God responds to our need and intervenes himself,” Kleberg said. “The only way out from the human condition then is outside of ourselves.”
Believing in doubt
“At some point in that process, you’re confronted with the hard things that are realities in the world,” said Elizabeth Kleberg, Matt’s wife, who is also an artist-in-residence with New City Arts. Like me, the 25-year-old Elizabeth was raised in a religious household and attended the same type of church-run schools that I did.
“As Christian artists, we struggle with how to reconcile the harsh realities that we face in our real life with our faith and hope in why we’re here. Those things come into tension all the time,” she said.
I was immersed in a literal and Calvinist interpretation of the Bible. I was taught that Adam and Eve were the first human beings. Noah built an ark to survive the drowning of an immoral mankind. A prophet named Jonah was swallowed by a big fish and spit out three days later, and so on. Then, a man named Jesus who was actually the son of God died for our sins only to be resurrected and redeem the chosen from his seat at the right hand of his heavenly father.
At the time, my parents and many members of the Christian nation also saw public schools as an enemy, a place where secularism was recklessly inculcated. And so I attended church schools, run primarily by Virginia Baptists who embraced something I came to know as “legalism.” This meant that my education emphasized facing Jesus in the most minute details of life, like whether I wore a belt in my pants or the back of my hair touched my shirt collar. It also led to a similar focus on the dangers of popular culture. In eighth grade, for instance, my class examined the lyrics of Van Halen’s “Jump” and decided it was a song about suicide.
I remember a separate episode at my high school when an outside group performing at one of our assemblies played Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All” in which she sings the lines, “I never found anyone who fulfilled my needs/A lonely place to be/So I learned to depend on me.” After the group left, one of our administrators got up to refute the humanistic message of this song. We should and could always depend on Jesus.
This type of tension is as old as religion itself. As people try to rectify their faith with what they see in the world, it necessarily calls into question the guidelines religious institutions put in place to caulk over the apparent inconsistencies. For the seeker, the rulebook starts to look like what it is: a man-made attempt at oversimplification. That conflict is fundamental to the Christian narrative. It’s what caused Jesus to war with the Pharisees and Martin Luther to nail his theses on the door of the Wittenberg church. It’s also what drives artists.
Jesus, Luther, and Calvin all maintained that a personal relationship with God was more important than following the rules organized by their religious hierarchies. Following the story, that’s what got Jesus killed and led to the creation of Christianity, or, in the cases of Luther and Calvin, to the Reformation.
“Luther starts that process of internalization, that the only thing that matters is what’s inside of you,” Dean Dass told me. “Do you have a pure heart?”
Raised in a Lutheran church in Missouri, Dass is an art professor at UVA where he taught both Klebergs. He is also a celebrated printmaker and painter whose work has oscillated from the darkly abstract to light and almost literal.
As we sat at a table outside Para Coffee —with his copy of Harold Bloom’s Romanticism and Consciousness in between us—Dass told me the same type of thinking was taken to its logical extreme by the Romantics in the 1800s. That artistic movement placed an emphasis on the personal, leading to the established notion of the modern artist whose work is measured by whether that expression is an honest reflection of the self.
“It doesn’t occur to anybody that art can come from anywhere but inside—what I think and feel—that kind of subjectivity,” Dass said.
This conflicts with the notion that Christian art must necessarily carry an overt Christian message. Rather, it should honestly reflect what the artist feels inside him- or herself. So if you’re down and out, your art should reflect that. If you’re feeling happy, make a happy painting. If you want to praise Jesus in your art, then by all means, but it doesn’t always have to be fueled by a Christian narrative. Growing up, nobody ever told me that was an option.
“I think a Christian’s duty in whatever sphere they exist in is to be truthful and do their work faithfully,” Kleberg said. “If you’re a musician you don’t have to sing songs about Jonah and the whale, you should just make real good music. God is very mysterious. In the Bible, he shows up in bushes that are on fire, or he’s in clouds hovering over tents. To presume that as a Christian you can have all these answers about God and then teach people through your music or whatever is pretty presumptuous.”
That thinking also provides a way for Christians to approach art whether it’s made by a believer or not. “Artists make work according to their understanding and experience of the world,” Elizabeth said. “I wouldn’t make the same art because of my different experiences, but I would want to understand that work in terms of that artist’s experience.”