All things to all men
As I got older, the process of picking art apart for offending elements made less and less sense to me, and coincided not only with my own intellectual growth, but also with my father’s spiritual development. As he grew into his faith, his beliefs became more of a natural part of himself. This was in part due to the teachings of theologian Francis Schaeffer, who was particularly influential in the 1970s for arguing that Christians should engage with art.
So gradually and then fully, the Beatles made their way out of the box in the closet. By my teenage years, they took an exalted place in our house. Posters of them were all over our walls, their music rang out from the stereo in our living room and in the car. My father was also exposing me to filmmakers like David Lynch or painters like Pablo Picasso, great artists but people with worldviews that aggressively challenged Christian paradigms.
My father made this integration work, but I never could. Part of this was because my father already had experiences to draw on and reconcile, so he was able to work popular culture back into his life, whereas I was coming from the opposite end with literally no frame of reference. As a result, I always felt an inherent conflict, even a sense of guilt, between a devotion to the Bible and someone like the Beatles. I was torn by a dedication to my orthodox teachings and those espoused by the rock and roll gods. Jesus Christ battled John Lennon for my soul.
The struggle for my faith reached a peak about the same time as the Christian right wing’s war over government funding of the arts in the late 1990s. One of the more contentious moments of that struggle centered on Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” a photograph of a crucifix in a glass of urine. Catholics and Protestants were outraged and Congress even intervened. As recently as 2011, a print of the photograph was vandalized in an exhibition in France.
“That image is totally ethereal and beautiful,” Kleberg said. “There’s a part of me that wants to say that it’s just trying to ruffle my feathers as a Christian, but another part that says if art is about taking humble materials and transforming those into something that transcends them, then taking piss and creating something that mysterious is incredible.”
I had the opportunity to see a print of “Piss Christ” in a small gallery in D.C. in 1997 at the height of its controversy, and I was also awed by its overall beauty. At the time, I had just started working for a magazine called Gadfly, which my father had started in the belly of the Rutherford Institute. Originally devoted to exploring Christianity’s place in the arts, it gradually, under my helm, grew devoted to exploring the arts and culture of the times. Long gone were feature articles on the religion of U2, replaced with takes on the larger significance of the works of Lou Reed, Frank Zappa, Gore Vidal, William Burroughs, and other dedicated sinners.
Within the context of the magazine’s staff, though, debate raged. Not all of our staff was Christian, but those who were questioned whether we were glorifying the immoral. I wondered also, but was enjoying myself too much to change directions.
I loved these artists and they felt much more relevant and true to me than King David or Apostle Paul. Whereas much of my upbringing seemed mostly like a list of “don’ts,” these iconic auteurs presented a world of tantalizing possibility. It felt right in a way that my Christianity never had. I wanted to be like them, to live and breathe the arts in a way my rigid dogma would not allow.
At the same time, my religion was not easy to put aside. It was what had defined my identity for two decades. For a year or so, I struggled with what was an increasingly obvious realization. I didn’t fit inside my old belief system anymore, and at the age of 28 I abandoned it. John Lennon had finally won.
It’s a well-worn tale among Christians of my age. Older artists I spoke with like the 57-year-old Dass also left the church over similar struggles. “Orthodox Christianity just doesn’t feel right,” he said. “That’s what really turns people off, especially young people who just want to think for themselves and find their own identity.”
Finding your own identity can be a lonely process. As a young Christian trying to work in the arts I felt doubly alone—mocked by the secular world and reviled by the religious one. I can’t help but feel that my transition from orthodox Christian to whatever I am now would have been a whole lot smoother—maybe even different—if I’d had a support system.
Fifteen years later, New City Arts (NCA) aims to provide that exact type of succor. According to Lovett, the non-profit has an official mission of “fostering engagement with the arts in the greater Charlottesville area.” While her board is ecumenical (made up of representatives of a body of churches) and Lovett herself is Christian, “the art that we are attempting to support in the community and the art that we’re encouraging folks to make is excellent artwork on its own.”
This echoes Matt and Elizabeth Kleberg and that’s no coincidence. Founded four years ago, NCA—and by extension Lovett —have become the ringleaders of the Christian art movement in Charlottesville. Not by superimposing a Christian worldview wherever they can, but by encouraging art in a general sense. So while Elizabeth is one of its artists-in-residence, they have also sponsored atheists at their space in The Haven. There’s also the distinct possibility that you can or already have attended one of NCA’s events—maybe one of the regular exhibitions on First Fridays at the WVTF/Radio IQ gallery or at one of their forums as I did—and have no inkling a group of Christians is behind it.
At the same time, the organization offers some explicitly Christian programming, like the upcoming May 15 lecture by poet Christian Wiman “And I Was Alive: Faith in a Faithless Time.” Wiman is editor of Poetry magazine and his essays on faith have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker.
By reaching out to the broader community with content-neutral activities while concurrently providing programs tailored specifically for believers, NCA is trying to bridge the gap that has divided Christian artists from art’s mainstream since my father knelt down in the living room in Arkansas. Hopefully, as Lovett sees it, they will create an overall sense of community where artists and audience can all “come together,” as Lennon sang, and “break bread,” as the early church did in Acts.
In the 20th century, art’s incredible focus on the self resulted in a form of ego-centricism (think Picasso) that resulted in transcendental works produced by characters whose moral example left much to be desired. I think this has always been one of the profound tensions for the Christian artist. At its purest, Christianity is about selflessness, as taught through Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan or laid down in the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do to you. Will merging these two seemingly opposed notions pioneer a path for the modern artist—whether Christian or secular—to connect with popular culture in ways that they haven’t for decades? Can it even bring about change in society?
“The new model is collaborative,” said Dass who has found a way back to Christianity in recent years. “At a certain point in my career as an academic, everything was going well, I felt on top of everything, but it felt inadequate.”
The professor decided he needed to do more, and then found a church that had a strong sense of social justice (they built houses through Habitat, for example). “I thought that’s lived faith. That’s what I want to do,” he said.
Lived faith is what attracted Dass to NCA.
“They’re out in town, and they’re engaged,” he said. “NCA wants to work in the community and do something, to go from in here to out there and still feel like they’ve held onto some integrity and truth.”
One of the ways it engages the community is its presence in The Haven, where its studios occupy parts of the third and fourth floors. Since September, an NCA artist-in-residence (who asked not to be identified in this article) has used much of her time there to work with the homeless guests downstairs. At first, that meant getting to know the guests by volunteering in the kitchen and at the welcome desk, but it eventually led to teaching a two-hour weekly drawing class. It’s community building through the arts and Christianity in action, but the artist doesn’t identify as a Christian.
Back in the 1990s, I was unable to express my artistic self within my Christian context, and I simply gave up trying to resolve that conflict, because what I was pursuing creatively felt more real and good to me than what I was practicing under the constraints of conservative Christianity. It took almost a decade for me to find a group of Christians who operated outside of those restraints but shared many of the values they were designed to protect.
In 2010 (after a frustrating year of writing for C-VILLE Weekly about the homeless), I joined the staff of PACEM, our local revolving homeless shelter, which operates out of The Haven. The network of churches that feed and house the needy made me feel better about my old belief system than I had in years, maybe since I left the church for the sanctuary of art.
A haven within The Haven, New City Arts and the movement it is fostering plays a similar role for Christian artists, at least symbolically. That I can stumble into an art gallery and view work by the Klebergs, for example, or sit in Lee Park and listen to music pouring out of the Garage (a music venue affiliated with the Episcopal Church), and not be preached to is both refreshing and inspiring.
At the same time, I know that there are still young Christians out there going through what I did, afraid to go where their hearts and minds are telling them. If there’s one thing I’ve learned along my journey, which by the way continued to unfold as I wrote this article, it’s that you have to follow your faith to its darkest corners (in a way that I was hesitant to do for too long) if you want to find its bedrock. Only by burrowing deep inside will you discover who you really are and emerge pure in heart, capable of expressing to others in an honest way what you are about. That is the source of great art, whether it depicts Jesus or a man in a gutter with a needle in his arm (in Matt Kleberg’s words, “the dual glory and fuckedupness of the world”). It’s also the only baptism you really need. As Christ proclaimed, “The truth will set you free.”