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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
It’s just logic. If you accept the Nicene Creed, then you should be humble before the Creator of the Universe.
Jesus Christ is the son of the creator of the universe, not some buddy you have a beer with. He should be treated with the appropriate reverence.
Not so fast. I would have agreed with you a few years ago, but there is something most people don’t consider in all of this.
I was brought up with the new-fangled music (in the 80s and 90s), but I prefer older and older music as I get older. As in, 18th-century or older, usually. A little while ago, though, I realized that a lot of the “contemporary” music we sang when I was a kid was closer to scripture than many of the classical hymns (and don’t even get me started on the Gospel genre). That is, some of those newer songs were actually very old-fashioned, in that they were just passages of scripture set to music. I still like the older hymns better, as music, but I’m not so quick to dismiss the new-fangley stuff.
Granted, I’m talking about songs from a few decades ago. I don’t even know what they’re singing in the bleeding-edge churches these days.
Could it be related to the Owlegories TV show? My kids watched the first couple episodes the other day (they’re on Amazon Prime Video now) and they’re not bad.
Yes, and no. Yes, you should be humble before God and Jesus. But Jesus is also human, and was known to sit down with his followers and have some wine. He loves the world (fallen though it may be) and would be just fine with us wanting to enjoy a beer with him. As long as it’s not done disrespectfully, I think he’s just fine with a bit of kitsch too, the way a parent will love the silly art projects their kids make.
I’m sure he’d be fine with it. But one should remember that he’s the son of God and treat him with the appropriate reverence.
Can you choose between Old Testamints and New Testamints? And are the Old Testamints fresh?
Fred, I generally never agree with you. I find your comments off-putting, and your posts needlessly provocative in the main, and I think you rarely get the matter straight. I can’t tell if you are sincere or not many times (from what others tell me, who are both more generous of spirit and who have also meet you in person or gotten to know you through other means, you are a kind and sincere person, but for years your writing style has grated on me). But God, in His infinite wisdom has chosen to smack me upside the head via your comments on this post today. Because, boy-howdy, have you hit the nail in this thread, and you the atheist. The only place I think that you’ve gone a little astray here is that a believers relationship with the Son of God is two-fold, both/and – he is Jesus the Jewish carpenter and Christ the anointed Son of God, eternal, not made, a person of the Trinity. That is a balance we as humans cannot comprehend. He empties himself to be a servant, friend of sinners, and as a result of this divine humility we become co-heirs of God’s Kingdom, yet he is exalted to sit on the throne of David, the Lamb that is crowned in glory and coming to be Judge and ruler in the new heaven and new earth.
You have articulated in your comments one of my biggest beefs with modern Christianity. I think it is the modern over-emphasis (since the late 18th century at least) on the humility and humanity of Christ at the expense of his Divinity that has lead to much of the failure of the Christian Church.
The Christian must always strive with the aid of the Holy Ghost to maintain the right balance in our understanding of who Christ is in the fullness of his Divinity and Humanity, and that is one of the key jobs of the Church and it’s clerical leaders. Losing sight of the nature of God is the first step toward heresy, indifference, or hypocrisy.
It took an atheist, libertarian, anarcho-whatever you are to preach the truth, and I’m glad of it. Please forgive me, and God bless you.
I think one of the things we’ve not mentioned in this discussion is the danger that kitschy (and non-kitschy) religious artifacts have for some people. They can become a sentimental substitute for the real practices or beliefs in a religious tradition. My grandmother was raised in a home that had issues with honesty and hypocrisy and though raised within a conservative Protestant tradition abandoned it for all practical purposes when she married my Catholic grandfather. She was the only relative in the family that really had much religious kitsch in her home, and mostly pictures, paint by number, prints, some small porcelain statuary. It helped her maintain an emotional attachment to the sentiments of her childhood faith and upbringing, like the several Bibles that sat unread throughout her home. While she was not a “bad” person by most metrics she wrecked some lives emotionally in her time. One of the things that warped her view of life was that she could not distinguish between her emotional attachment to the church of her childhood and what being a Christian meant, the kitsch only worsened this problem and as she aged, the kitsch grew and morphed. Finally, as she neared death she admitted she had never read the Bible, so I helped her through the process. It was painful and I’m not sure what she ever really understood. It was difficult because of what had happened and the hurt she had caused through the years with myself and others. It was also difficult because I was torn by my own guilt and anger issues over the hurts that spread like a vine through the family. I’m sure I failed her sinfully in many, many ways and my own hypocrisy deepened things. Only later did I realize that the kitsch was both a tool for her to hang onto a thread of the truth of Christianity (at it and her best) but it was also a severe hindrance to her.
Since then I’ve known several types of people who enjoy religious kitsch. Those with no aesthetic skills who use it as a natural outlet for a true and living faith, they don’t bother me. Especially the home-made variety, and crafts for wee ones. Having managed a Christian bookstore for a time, I can say that other people who enjoy kitsch have not been helped by it. The cynical, the superstitious, and the sentimental all used it as a crutch of sorts, at best, or at worst as a replacement for a real faith or even as a tool to mock the Christian faith. God is bigger than all of this, of course, and those who come to use it as part of a living faith, I don’t begrudge; but I don’t think the church should in anyway endorse it by using it or giving it out, even to children. I don’t think Christians should promote it or profit from it.
One thing I appreciate about several old hymns is that they’re very clever versifications of Biblical passages into modern-language rhyme and meter. This is an art form in itself, and helps make the gist of these passages easier to remember. In addition, psalmistry — by which I mean taking after the Psalmist and writing devotional poetry of your own — is not a closed art form. Nothing we write will be canon in the way Biblical passages are, but it would be strange for us not to take the example of Biblical figures and compose our own psalms, canticles, and so forth, too.
Several contemporary worship songs are very clever settings of verbatim modern-language translations of the Bible, as you say. That is especially helpful for remembering passages exactly as they appear in our Bibles.
Very few of us will ever write good-quality devotional poetry. In fact, devotional poetry, like hospital poetry, has a reputation for that special kind of cringey awfulness born of earnestness unguided by skill. It’s difficult to write devotional verse that isn’t kitsch.
Still, the exercise of writing it, even if it’s best kept a strict secret between the writer and God (say, in a prayer journal) does make it easier to understand the good stuff as a reader, including the poetry of the Bible.
I’m pretty sure that back in the day you couldn’t do Sunday School or VBS without elbow macaroni. But maybe that’s because I was raised Baptist.
Possibly. But could it also be that elbow macaroni in Sunday School is one of the True Signs of the Church Universal?
I know of no denomination that’s immune so long as elbow macaroni is cheap and plentiful.
There once were denominations that frowned on such innocent crafts. I belonged to a mainline Presbyterian church, ultra-liberal, of course, for many years, where using any sort of food—macaroni, flour (for homemade Play-Doh), veggies for paint-stamping art—was discouraged. Because there are hungry people in the world. Who will never benefit from our earnestness. But we’ll know how virtuous we are.
At the heart of kitsch is the desire to find ways to be helped in our contact with God. The problem of people finding a way to express their devotion to God, and the desire to put a limitation on God, these are in tension with the desire for beauty and self-expression. Then, of course, there are the commercial and emotional components.
It seems that each religious tradition within Christianity has it’s own dangers and temptations as we try to live out what it means to follow a God who we can not see, touch, or hear – and I’m excluding on purpose a discussion of things like communion or the Eucharist or prayer – those are not the same things; so each tradition has its own version of kitsch. Afterall, we have no photo of Jesus of Nazareth, no man may see the face of God and live, blessed are those who have believed but not seen.
Where does that leave us in our desires to know God, each tradition has developed practices to assist us, it is when they become debased or are pursued by the less skilled that kitsch may occur, but I think the commercial aspect is a necessary component.
I think there needs to be a line between the two, one is folk-religious art and the other is mass-produced kitsch, though in practical usage they can seem the same. There should be a fine distinction between them.
Google Mexican religious folk art for example…
…which of these is folk-art, a true pious expression of faith, and which is kitsch?
That is astounding. Oh, I believe you, but having visited many ultra-liberal churches in my time for one reason or another, these kiddie crafts are pretty common there, too.
It does remind me of a story, though. Some environmental scientists I knew set up a bird-themed church booth once at an ecology fair. The kiddie craft on offer was rolling pine cones in peanut butter, then bird seed, to make little bird feeders. At least one parent visiting the booth became immensely offended upon discovering the peanut butter on use was the cheapest kind, filled with partially-hydrogenated oils and corn syrup — and accused the church of trying to poison the local birds!
Could have made an interesting headline: “Environmental Scientists from Top School Poison Local Birds for Jesus”
I think you are seeing, but not seeing. “…cringey awfulness born of earnestness unguided by skill” is the thing here. There are good poets and lyricists who do it, but they are far outnumbered by the bad. But this is true in all forms of poetry/lyric writing. If one throws a stone, one hits a wannabe poet, but few of them have ever studied poetry. It would be like someone declaring himself an ebonist when he had never looked to see how cabinets were joined together. If every other person thought being an ebonist was sexy and declared themselves so, we would not have a high regard for the trade.
This is true, but…
Sure, lotsa amateur poetry, no matter the subject, is bad, especially when it’s heartfelt and written without the least bit of distance from the feeling inspiring it. But as @ericcook and @fredcole have said, worship is ideally a weighty matter — like the weighty matters of life and death, health and suffering, that people so often confront in hospital.
Someone in the throes of erotic passion, especially if he’s young, might consider his love (or lust) the most weighty matter ever. Still, we expect love and lust to contain a lot of folly, and so writing awful poetry about love simply isn’t as unbefitting as writing awful poetry about God, or life, death, and suffering.
Moreover, I think the guy I quoted here stumbled on another peculiar awfulness of both devotional and hospital poetry: many people (perhaps Americans especially) do feel an obligation to be pollyanaish about how they express themselves in medical or religious contexts, perhaps out of the fear that an absence of pollyanaism equals an absence of hope. Just like courage isn’t the absence of fear, but acting in spite of it, hope isn’t the absence of pessimism. But it’s very hard for writers generally — especially amateurs — to find socially-acceptable ways to express hope beyond absence of pessimism.
Right. Who would pay good money to buy a religious item created in the style of 7-year-old Sunday School.
We accept the creativity, devotion, and skill of a child for what it is, and what it represents, but we rightly expect more from adults than commercial kitsch.
@Arahant
You are a sage.
❤
?
Because of your comment about poetry, and a fear of showing lack of hope that causes Pollyanna poetry.
Ill only say, that like praying, poetry must be beneficial to the writer, even if it doesn’t meet literary quality standards.
Oh, wait, was that midge?
@Arahant@midgetfadedrattlesnake
You are a sage.
❤
I think Roger Scruton’s definition of kitsch is helpful here, although the religious aspect I think in some ways, some, complicates this discussion, “Kitsch is fake art, expressing fake emotions, whose purpose is to deceive the consumer into thinking he feels something deep and serious.” I think this is mostly correct. Although, sometimes I think the feelings come first, and for many religious believers are real and serious, but they do not have a framework to express it and they fail to have the courage to embrace art that makes them uncomfortable because it may threaten their belief in several ways (or in some cases they may not have knowledge of said art), as Midge noted above in regard to pain and suffering, and the result is they fall back on kitsch as a safety net.
This is why the failure of the Christian church to be a means of sponsorship and curatorship of great religious art is a modern tragedy (albeit a small-scale one).
Sometimes this is related to doctrinal issues, or financial ability, but in the modern era, it is indifference and lack of seriousness of purpose. The cost of exposing and celebrating great Christian art at least digitally is in the grasp of any pastor or church. Likewise, music, even if it can’t be produced at the congregational level.
Western European Churches have struggled with this fissure between art and faithful piety since the reformation and it is unfortunate that popular expressions and evangelism, as well as theology, have put odds between the finest art and the person in the pews, but there are at least some Biblical grounds for a theology that would see art as a dangerous distraction from the real purposes and means of the work of the kingdom of God.
You mean the sort of church that… <looks around nervously> the ladies have their hair uncovered?
Depends on which hair.
True, in ultraliberal parishes the ladies may wear shorts to church with unshaven legs….
Yes. That’s what I meant.
Well I suppose since it is the hair on the head that is expected to be covered, I supposed we can let this slide.
It’s been bothering me for long enough I have to say it: every time I get an alert for this post, I think the last two words are “Holy Kasich!”
Holy Kasich, Son of the Blessed Virgin Mailman?
I know that’s what people say about me. Don’t believe the hype. I’m actually a very unpleasant person.
Right. So to be blunt, you’d expect the Son of the Creator of the Universe to kind of be an arrogant jerk to people. Most people in his position probably would be. Instead he goes around preaching to sinners and washing people’s feet. He’s the son of God, but he’s humble. Which is all the more reason to exalt him and be humble ourselves.
The one thing he wouldn’t do is make a quick buck on an endless stream of tchotchkes with his name on them. You know, it’s one thing if it’s a genuine work of reverence, and maybe it goes to fund the work of God, it’s another if it’s just some cheap little tchotchke that somebody makes a buck off of.