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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
I believe you, Fred. 😉
Agreed. All four Gospels tell about how He cleansed the Temple of people selling pigeons and changing money.
Years ago I visited Lourdes, not as a pilgrim but just a tourist. There was a street with nothing but souvenir shops. In one of them, you will never believe me, but hanging on the wall there was a toilet seat. On the left was a profile of JFK and on the right side of the seat looking back at him was a profile of the Pope. Not even kidding.
As one of my favorite memes goes: When you ask “What would Jesus do?” Remember one of the options is turning over tables and chasing people with a whip.
At least that’s in the realm of things I could actually accomplish, since turning water into wine is out.
I think, at least in America, this has also become a tribal issue. After all, which congregations tend to be the best at preserving the Church’s artistic heritage? Where I live (at least) they’re the churches who are most doctrinally liberal, most likely to be attended by members of the blue tribe.
There is a church-run choir school (not famous enough to be on Wikipedia’s list, but the same idea) close enough to where I live that I could, with a bit of sacrifice, send my kids there if they qualified. In many ways, that sounds like it could be heaven for kids coming from a family like mine — the kids get an excellent musical education, along with reputable academic instruction and religious instruction, too. What’s not to love?
Well, if you’re a member of the red tribe, what’s not to love is that the church running it is the Episcopal church. Yeah, that church, the one with a reputation for being chock-full of “queers and blasphemers”.
There are some socially-conservative congregations intensely dedicated to preserving Christian fine art, but they can be difficult to find, and, even when their intentions are excellent, their small size can cause them logistical difficulties. Many of the larger socially-conservative congregations are megachurches these days. It’s not impossible for megachurches to support the fine arts, and I know of one (way too far from me for weekly commute) that does, but dedication to such refinement is usually not what people think of when they think of megachurches.
Yes, that is part of it, but it is more complex of an issue with deeper roots, as I’m sure you well aware. It does often seem to manifest itself in the theologically liberal, liturgically conservative paradox. I am very tired of the “tribal” arguments, and increasingly find them not so convincing.
The quick version as I see it when you no longer believe in the God of the Bible and your theology follows political paths that no longer require Jesus, you need something to cling to…and that becomes hymns, art, traditions, architecture, music, etc.
If you have a low-church or hip-modernist church vibe and your focus is on a more orthodox belief and orthopraxis then all that “stuff” is seen as baggage that gets in the way of the gospel, of evangelism, of faithful living and charity/activism in your desire to keep the Gospel “fresh” or “relevant” because of a sincere desire to reach people where they are and bring them the good news.
I think both are stupidly short-sighted and not totally honest. The Calvinist and Methodist traditions have always had a deep distrust of the tools the church needs to pursue the arts, and for good historical reasons, if not necessarily theological ones, but the argument can be made. This is one place the Catholic church had us all beat on (in Protestant land), and the orthodox Episcoplains, now a rare beast in any form, but luckily the 1960’s rolled around and Vatican II’s misinterpretation let the guitars and polka masses flourish and the liberals kill off the faithful in the Protestant mainline so most churches of all stripes are now devoid of almost any real art or beauty, hooray. Also, some have tried to recapture this, but I think the ship has sailed. Since most talented artists are no longer in any meaningful way even culturally Christian, let alone believers the pool of talent has shrunk mightly and the offerings by Christians trying to inject modern art into the church, I’ve seen are just, awful. I think it is much more so to conserve that storehouse of treasure from the past and add the few tiny good pieces that exist a little at a time until the situation changes, if it ever does. Just as our hope isn’t in princes, horses or chariots, it isn’t in fugues, frescos or sonnets, but life and church are sure better with them than without.
I am likewise tired of tribal arguments, but I also find myself, against my own inclinations, finding them gradually more convincing as time goes on, rather than less.
There is more depth to these fractures than just who’s in your outgroup, but perhaps especially among those unaware of the depth, there is pressure to self-sort along roughly tribal lines.
Color me meh…I think there are other things going on that this whole tribal thing disguises and distorts and leads to a whole host of false premises. I used to be strong on tribe, but now, I think other things are a-brewing. And as I read that article I realized I had read it at least once before in the past.
a little grape juice, some yeast and time….
It really is a miracle.
I can turn time into wine without grape juice and yeast, I go to work, get paid, and buy wine that someone else made with grape juice and yeast. I just want to take the middleman out of it.
Are we sure that the Madonna in question isn’t the rock star?
Never fresher that you, Basil.
The Eastern Orthodox Churches are both very conservative and highly adorned. Their icons decorate their sanctuaries with many saints, as well as Jesus, the Apostles, and Mary.
Come the Episcopal Apocalypse, I shall seriously consider Orthodoxy.
I already am.
There was a movement several years back for some sort of reconciliation between Anglicans and Orthodox Christians. It didn’t get very far at the church government level, but some ties were formed. Western Rite Orthodoxy exists now, although parishes which practice it are scarcer than hen’s teeth. (There is one such parish I know of in my entire state — at the opposite end of the state!)
What is the difference?
I wouldn’t know where to begin. A thousand years since the divergence of the Catholic Church in the East and the West, plus 600 years on from the Anglican-Roman split, leads to a lot of difference.
I read up a little, and I have a better understanding. After the Big Split 600 years ago, the modern Western Orthodox is related to Eastern Orthodox.
You are right, complicated, as people often are.
Opposite as in Cairo or Rockford?
A good place to start on the differences is Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy by Father Stephen Damick, available as a book or ebook from Amazon, and available as a podcast. The differences can be astounding.
In the West, for example, it is almost universal to believe that Jesus Christ died to atone for humanity’s sins. The East believes that sins are atoned for through confession and absolution and that the cross and resurrection were about conquering death so that men need not die.
Fr. Damick is Orthodox, but does a creditable job of presenting the other traditions.
2 items: all of this so far has focused solely on Christian kitsch, but there is a wonderful (at least to me) book called “Judaikitsch” that offers chapters on DIY items of religious observance in the home that are fun and funny. I gave a copy to a Jewish friend who adored it.
Doubtless there is bad religious modern art out there, but also some marvelous examples of it. A couple of summers ago we visited the Basilica of Notre Dame in Montreal, where the Chapel of the Sacre Coueur contains a reredos that took my breath away. Clerestory windows focus sunlight onto the images in a most moving way. Maybe it’s a “you had to be there” experience, but it was one of the most affecting pieces of religious art that I have ever beheld.
For me it seems particularly fitting to use abstract art in Christianity, having been raised as a conservative Protestant. With its reaction against “Popishness” and “idolatrous” trappings, to the extent that Protestantism tolerated religious art at all, it seems that the more abstract the representation, the better.
Oh, pooh, pish, and be bothered! We were covering Judaism and Buddhism in the sixth comment.
Have you ever attended a Chrysostom Liturgy mass? I’ve read through it and look forward to seeing it performed.
Yes. It is amazing.
My husband is the fill-in pianist at church. He always makes it a point to play more quickly than the usual pianist, so we sound like we are alive.
A few years ago I was a newby member of a Lutheran congregation made up almost entirely of lifelong church members. The pace was relentless, with half the congregation plowing right from hymn number 258 to 773 and back to 190 without taking a breath, much less opening the hymn book. My guardian angel cued me in on using place markers in hymnal before things got really rolling.
I’m not sure what an Olympics of hymnody would be like, but I’m sure several of my friends there would make the finals.
By the way, Sisyphus, anybody entered you in a hypothetical Witty Ricochet Avatar contest? “That’s How I Roll” is a classic.
No, but since you mention it I could be a contender in a provocative new Intersectionality category seeing as how I am always on the wrong side of this redacted rock.
You’d be amazed at the number of ex-Episcopalians in Orthodoxy in America today. The patriarchs have made it very easy for Episcopalian priests to jump ship. And many of the non-ethnic-emphasis parishes (OCA and Antiochian especially, but also many Greek parishes) are upwards of 50% converts.