Letter #107: Is That All They've Got?

Why They So Ugly?

Splash.

Wonderful essay. What a pleasure to read a scholar writing in the area of his scholarship as opposed to, say, dimwits pontificating from the depths of their dimwittery — which constitutes most of the defenses of and rationalizations for the repulsive meanness, sterility and morbidity of anti-Christian art. Whether it’s 1987’s Immersion with its crucifix sunk in urine or 1996’s Holy Virgin Mary with its Madonna smothered in dung and pornography, or the current drag queen Last Supper, what do we really get from these creations? Nothing but drawling pseudo-sophisticated disdain intended to silence criticism of the works’ adolescent puerility. Turn your eyes from this naughty boy mischief and look at Reubens’ Elevation of the Cross or Michelangelo’s Pieta or The Last Supper itself, and you think, “Why can’t the anti-Christians create something like that? Something of value?” I mean, if beauty and truth are relative, how come everything they do is so manifestly ugly and false?

You note the vitality of paganism in its time, which certainly includes the soul-stirring beauty of classical art. And yes, Christianity either subsumed what was true in pagan culture, or revealed its full Christian nature. But surely any worldview that has lifted a society to greatness — any worldview that has lifted a gathering of humans beyond animalistic barbarity — has at its heart one central proposition: there is something in the natural behaviors of man that is at odds with his morality.

What is that something? And what are we going to do about it? These are the questions from which cultural systems are made. And the problem the radical faces is that the system he is rebelling against is the very system that shaped the terms of his rebellion.

For example. Anti-Christians often object to the idea that Christ’s crucifixion was a sacrificial expiation of the sins of mankind. They ask: what kind of barbaric God demands a sacrifice for sin?

Well, I ask this: Where did all the sacrifices go? Not just the children and virgins and kings, but the doves, the pigs and the goats and so on. Why don’t we kill them anymore to propitiate the gods? Wherever Christianity took hold, sacrifices vanished. Why did we stop them? If it was the sacrifice of Christ that put an end to them, then maybe the barbaric need for his death wasn’t God’s but ours? Which is just another way of saying that his crucifixion was a sacrificial expiation of the sins of mankind. Sure, now you feel shocked by that process, but you didn’t feel that way when you were shouting out: “Give us Barabbas!”

Likewise your hatred of bigotry or your defense of women’s rights, or your belief in the centrality of love. Who taught you these things?  

We can’t go back to being pagans because we aren’t pagans anymore, and if the anti-Christians have something truer and more beautiful than Christianity, let’s see it — or is this garbage all they’ve got?

Love, Dad