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Suckers for Jesus! Or, Holy Kitsch!
I can’t call it “only in America,” because kitschy and silly, though harmless, religious trinkets seem to be a universal phenomenon. Still, there is something endearingly American about this online Christian storefront, selling Testamints, crucifix-shaped lollies, gourmet Scripture suckers, chocolate tulips (must be for the Calvinists), and little gummy Jesus “footsteps”: show that you walk in His footsteps by eating His feet!
“Take and eat… do this in remembrance of me.” In a religion based on the Eucharist, I suppose it’s not exactly blasphemous to consume Jesus in gummy form, though I doubt my grandmother would have agreed: she would have seen candy shaped like all or any part of Jesus as blasphemously irreverent, even if abstract religious symbols were commonplace in eats where she came from. Part of the wider Christian culture in America is to downplay aesthetic differences: high church or low, contemporary or old-fashioned, why argue adiaphora, huh? At the same time, aesthetics go to the heart of worship: whatever we think “worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness” means, it only seems fitting to give of our best (whatever that is) in acts of reverence. Religious kitsch occupies a funny place, not just strange, but amusing — and not just amusing to snobs who wish to disdain the rubes. The Babylon Bee, a favorite site of many of us here, often pokes fun at Christian kitsch, and it could hardly be said to disdain American Christians: it pokes fun at the kitsch because it’s run by American Christians.
What even counts as kitsch depends on your background. My grandmother, raised very Lutheran, had pretty exacting standards for what wasn’t kitschy. Were the sanctuary and music too contemporary and informal? Kitschy. Were they too ornate? Kitschy. Most religious statuary and paintings? Also kitschy. That she was Lutheran may have had less to do with her severe standards than the kind of Lutheran she was: she came from a place where Lutherans and “Papists” (Catholics) didn’t quite get along, and when she arrived in America, she was (mostly) eager to assimilate. More eager, she thought, than her Italian neighbors, who might plant a bathtub Madonna in the midst of their front lawn.
Modernist severity in religious art and architecture probably won’t strike many as kitschy, on the other hand. More likely inhuman and cold — and perhaps more wrapped up in the designer’s minimalist cleverness than wrapped up in divine adoration. I’ve seen beautifully minimalist worship spaces, quite effective at fostering an atmosphere of awe and reverence. And then I’ve seen… others. Minimalism minimizes, minimizing tackiness, too, if only because it leaves less stuff be tacky with. But some manage to do more with less, anyhow.
For a conservative Christian, I’m probably fonder of bad vestments and liturgical dance than I should be. Oh, most bad vestments are indeed eye-clawingly awful, and it evidently takes more skill, planning, and restraint than many churches have to offer dance as worship in a way that adds to, rather than distracts from, due reverence. But a little flamboyance in worship, a little excess exuberance? At least that’s better than chronic under-exuberance, or so I hope.
Garish vestments and incongruous prancing through the sanctuary aisles may aim a bit high to count as true kitsch, though. Kitsch ideally offers easy gratification, not sights so unbefitting you’re left uncomfortably shifting in your pew. That makes Christian candy, as opposed to higher-falutin’ efforts to make worship “fresh” and “relevant,” ideal as kitsch. As @skipsul wrote this Easter,
This year I was horrified to discover “The Jellybean Prayer,” which seeks to sell jellybeans in a cross-shaped tin by convincing you that by eating said beans in a certain flavor sequence, you are “praying” some misbegotten sugary missive to the divine. My eldest received one of these tins, noted that licorice (her favorite and mine), being black, was the sinful bean, leading her to quip “Mmmm … delicious licorice sin beans!”
On the one hand, I share Skip’s horror at this phenomenon. On the other hand, I look back on my Sunday-School days and ask, were the Sunday-School projects we did any less absurd? Some of them were, of course. But others were not, if less sugary.
I can’t remember the point behind stringing glitter-macaroni necklaces for Jesus, but I’m sure whoever had us do it thought there was one. The same grandma who found well over half the Christian world far too kitschy for her comfort was the grandma who took me to Sunday School, to a church whose aesthetics she could stand, and it was full of snobs. I don’t mean that in a mean way, just that the congregants, including Sunday-School teachers, tended to be fairly cultured and sophisticated, the kind who thought of themselves as shrinking from kitsch. And kitsch still was the driving force behind their offsprings’ Christian education.
Perhaps that’s inevitable. Children aren’t supposed to be sophisticated, and if Sunday School lessons made them more so, many parents would likely become alarmed. Sunday School’s where you go to learn to be good and stay innocent, and if kitsch helps with that, why look a kitsch horse in the mouth?
Though some of the candy on offer at this online shop is clearly marked for “Harvest” — that is, for Halloween fests minus the “satanic” fun, I’m guessing the main use of Christian candy is for children’s Christian education. Why else would you purchase “Fruit of the Spirit” fun packs, which repackage ordinary fruit gummies in a Jesus-happy wrapper? Or “Hooked on Jesus” gummy worms? And repackaging candy corns as “promise seeds” is really rather sweet. Tooth-rottingly sweet, in fact. The owl-shaped suckers and dice-shaped lollies I’m having more trouble figuring out. Are the dice… meant to represent casting lots for Jesus’ clothing? Heavens, that’s morbid. So is the “Palm and Cross Candy Fun Pack”, if it conveys the usual Holy Week message that the same crowd shouting hosannas on Sunday was the crowd crying, “Crucify him!” on Friday. I hadn’t thought of candy as a way to learn about my faith’s darker side, and now I’m wondering, does it work? (And does it come in dark chocolate?)
What’s your favorite religious kitsch? Love it? Love to hate it? Is harmless and really rather sweet, or does there come a point where it’s sacrilegious? Or should I say sacrilicious?
Published in Religion & Philosophy
Excuse me?
That makes perfect sense to me.
And before someone accuses me of sarcasm, let me give my assurance that I am completely serious.
@hankrhody, please check and see who is at Matt’s keyboard, please.
My own aesthetic preferences tend to be very smells-and-bells myself (church slang for arch-conservative). But…
You know how I mentioned my grandma taking me to a church which met her very rigorous aesthetic requirements, but still had kitsch in Sunday School, and maybe Sunday School kitsch was unavoidable?
A faith has to be made approachable before it can be lived out, which probably explains all the Sunday-School kitsch. It’s ultimately not in a faith’s interest if it’s so forbidding and unapproachable in its majesty that ordinary people get uneasy about entering it. And that may explain a lot of the kitsch.
It’s off topic, but Sunday school always had art projects, and it seemed often with sheep, and requisite cotton balls. (We never got candy at church, but we did have snack with juice and pretzels.)
I was playing pictionary with similarly trained adults, and one drew a sheep, and pointed into the sheep, and they won the clue when the other said, “cotton.”
I won’t be buying any kitschy-kandy. The only kitschy-art I ever had was a crewel needlepoint with Jesus as a shepherd.
The sheep was tufted with yarn, probably cotton. 😁
I’m at work, sorry.
A sheep tufted with cotton yarn? We’d better get @she in here to fix that for you!
I liked ringing the church bell. It was good activity for a few energetic boys. That and it would lift us off the ground.
At older English colleges, they have ringing societies to ring the changes on bells, changes being traditional permutations in the order the bells are rung. I don’t know if it keeps the college students religious, but it does keep the ones who join the ringing fairly regularly attending church.
My wife purchased a painting depicting a father praying over his child in bed. Behind the father were the silhouettes of an angel holding back a demonic spirit. It was well done – much nicer than you might gather from my brief description. We had it hanging in the bedroom for many years. I thought it was a nice reminder.
There are some things that seem to strike the right tone. Others, not so much. I have worn some “Christian” T-shirts in public that I really shouldn’t have. (These were usually end-of-the-season bargains an the Family Book Store. ) Not to say I will never wear a Christian- themed T-shirt, but I try to be more discerning now.
Must be a mutant. Still, better than a sheep with polyester yarn, I suppose . . . .
I disagree. Worship of the almighty divine creator of the universe is serious business and it should be treated as such. If it needs to be dumbed down some to make it accessible to small children, so be it. But it should never be so for anyone else.
I think when I was young and fierce and pretty new to anything resembling a grownup faith, I would have agreed with you. Now?…
Well, for one thing, not having any sort of a soft spot for kitsch makes it harder to have a soft spot for all the basically good, well-meaning people — who may be better Christians than myself — who find absolutely nothing wrong with it.
I don’t think finding kitsch a little bit endearing is the same as giving up aesthetic aspirations for worship, that it be transcendently beautiful whenever possible. Daily life, though, can put a strain on “possible”.
For example, if you’re ever been cooped up in Catholic hospital, they may have daily prayers announced on the PA system — and yeah, there’s something a little humorous and incongruous about that, even when the prayer itself is perfectly reverent. The bustle of hospital life, the indignities so many patients and staff might be going through right while the prayer is announced, the scratchiness of the loudspeaker sound… It all makes it a little kitschy, but not irreverent.
The problem with almost all modern praise songs is that a few might be pleasing sung at a proper tempo, but I’ve yet to hear a white congregation sing a hymn at anything other than staggering, death march speed. What a church full of Methodists or Southern Baptists can do to “Lord Of The Dance” is sad, and the adaptation of “Ode to Joy” into “Sing With All The Sons of Glory” is completely beyond their capacity. “Amazing Grace”, “Old Rugged Cross”, “Doxology”, and “Blessed Be the Tie That Binds” all still manage to sound good at funereal tempo, but the Easter standard, “He Lives” sounds more like “He’s On Life Support”.
Maybe I was lucky to be introduced to contemporary worship songs in college — college students are hyper enough to keep up good tempo!
I think a lot of the kitsch with Sunday School and summer Bible School has to do with two things: ease of creation, and ease of destruction. You generally want to use the craft to burn off kids’ energy, so you need something simple and easy enough that kids can do it, even with their bad motor skills. And considering apparently kids are so used to touch screens they have trouble with pencils, at least according to one click-bait article I’ve seen, the dexterity required really does have to be minimal. This also tends to dictate supplies that are rather durable or extremely cheap — macaroni, pipe cleaners, and other very kitschy materials.
Second, depending on how often one’s church does crafts for the kids, one could easily wind up with 50 different projects a year. Multiply that by 10 years or so of kids being in the “let’s have the kids make crafts!” age, and likely multiple children, and you can get a huge inventory of religiously-related stuff you never wanted. So you need something that isn’t so sacred, isn’t so holy, that parents are going feel guilty disposing of said projects once the projects’ meanings have been forgotten. Which as a kid, I started to notice happened about Tuesday after getting something on Sunday.
There’s probably also another factor of “it’s for kids; it can be crap” that infects seemingly all entertainments for kids unless one specifically works to avoid it, but there’s no reason religious stuff for kids should be that way. It’s just the path of least resistance.
Does music count? “Pharaoh Pharaoh! Ohhhh Baby, Let My People Go! Yeah-Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah!”
Again, I don’t know if it fits, but I was remembering the North Avenue Irregulars while reading this post.
Also, I like Velvet paintings.
Could have been wool. Honestly I hadn’t attended to it, since the kit came with accoutrements.
Definitely not cotton balls though. :)
@katebraestrup might say the loudspeaker hospital prayer is useful in maintaining our relationship with G-d; and supporting our mindset to make it through indignities and incongruous aspects of life, at home, work, hospital, or wherever we find ourselves.
[Kate’s sermon on prayer having fangs immediately followed the dance video.]
Very true. The incongruities do make it a bit amusing, though. Seeing the humor in these things is part of the whole process, I believe.
Sometimes laughter is the best medicine.
A merry heart does good like medicine.
Whatever it takes, right?
The beauty of religion is that you can repeatedly sell a product on time that you do not have to deliver until the purchaser is dead. All you have to do is increasing apply the pressure of guilt and regret to increase the payment over the amortization.
Our fill-in accompanist does that. “It’s a happy song, Phil-in. Play it faster!” But he never does.
Depends on the religion. There are very different approaches.
Yeah, but it works out to practically nothing over eternity.
I remember chocolate crosses at Easter as a kid, but other than eggs, jelly beans, bunnies and chicks, that was it. I’m with Fred – they take it too far nowadays.
Midget, I had the same experience – my family was Catholic but my aunt wanted me to choose, so I chose going to a Methodist church with my best friend. It was snobby as you said and one day I said forget it. Even as a kid, you pick up on hypocrisy. You can’t make racist statements and swear on Saturday and haul your kids to church on Sunday without them noticing something’s not right. So my uncle went to Mass and dropped me at the local Presbyterian Church for Sunday school and even Bible school in summer – I loved it. Then we’d have breakfast at the local diner after. Those are good memories. My aunt fell away, so that’s why he went alone.
Fred, your comment defending Jesus is as far away from the definition of atheist as you can get. I’m rooting for you…
Indeed!
What did creative and devout people do before plastic and mass production?