COMMENTARY : Power of Art Untapped by Most Churches

It’s unlikely that outgoing National Endowment for the Arts chairman John Frohnmayer has made many friends lately among his colleagues in the nation’s mainline churches and synagogues.

For example, in a farewell speech at the National Press Club last month, he criticized President Bush for caving in to conservative critics and the Religious Right, which has long sought to kill the endowment. But Frohnmayer also criticized the mainline churches for their silence throughout the long dispute over controversial works of art that led to his resignation.

“This is an issue entirely driven by fundamentalist religious groups, and I regret to tell you that mainline religion has not entered the field of this debate,” he said.

Frohnmayer, who leaves his post on May 1, is a leader of one of the churches he criticized. He is an elder, or ordained leader, of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and holds a degree in Christian ethics from the University of Chicago.

Beyond those credentials, his harsh accusations are basically correct.

With the exception of the United Church of Christ and People for the American Way, a non-religious group with roots in the religious as well as the secular community, the issue of arts and public funding has not been on the agenda of mainline religion.

There are a number of possible reasons.

First, it is likely that the fight over a couple of controversial, unsettling works of art could not command the attention of church bureaucrats and activists when such issues as the war in the Persian Gulf, racism, the fighting in El Salvador, the collapse of communism, AIDS, sexism and a host of other issues demanded attention.

Second, the specific works in question that led to Frohnmayer’s abrupt dismissal--Andres Serrano’s photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine, David Wojnarowicz’s depiction of Christ with a needle in his arm, Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photographs, and Ramona Lofton’s poem “Wild Thing,” which purports to detail the thoughts of one of the participants in the widely publicized rape and beating of a jogger in Central Park--can be deeply offensive to religious sensibilities and thus not easy to defend.

But Frohnmayer, specifically citing the Serrano and Wojnarowicz’s works noted, “Neither of these . . . has provoked theological debate about the nature of Christ taking on the sins of the world and the cross as a symbol of man’s inhumanity to the son of God.”

Interestingly, precisely the opposite happened with the release in 1988 of Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ.” While it may have been in part a marketing ploy to drum up interest and controversy for Scorsese’s interesting but tedious movie, the movie’s distributors made sure that a wide range of religious people--critics, leaders, theologians--saw the movie and debated its merits and demerits.

Third, and perhaps most important, religion is uncomfortable with the arts. There is no place in church bureaucracies for matters of art and culture. They are treated as non-essential ornaments, mere respites from the real world of politics.

The liturgical renewal that flowered in the 1960s has been tamed, cut off from the influences of the outside world of the pop and folk arts as it was then, and focused on internal and technical concerns--less with being informed by the world of art and more by liturgical rubrics.

In the same era, the brilliant “religion and literature movement” emerged in the seminaries, led by such perceptive critics as Nathan Scott, Amos Wilder and Walter J. Ong. But their interest in analyzing literature from a theological perspective has spawned few--and mostly marginalized--successors.

In this sense, the fundamentalists--however misguided in their attack on the National Endowment--may have it more right than the mainline churches in their understanding of the power of art. The ideas, in word and image, generated by the nation’s artists and cultural workers may be as important in defining the nation as congressional squabbles over this bill or that.