Beauty forsaken: Reclaiming the church's forgotten weapon against secularism

Down the road from where I live, a Catholic church is in the process of being built. I’ve lost track of the times I’ve nearly driven off the road staring at it. The in-progress structure sits in a large clearing allowing unhindered sunlight to turn its vanilla walls to a rich honey gold. The spires seem to pierce the blue canvas above, as arched doorways beckon in ways its rectangular counterparts can’t seem to mirror.

I hear that phase two of the building process will see the importation of ancient stained glass windows and a bell for the tower that currently sits vacant.

I’m excited.

I'm maybe more excited than the church’s eventual congregants. You see, I am not Catholic. When those arched wooden doors finally swing open, I will not be one of the people who passes through them.

That’s no indictment on Catholics. It’s just ... well, I am what you call a low-church Protestant (born and raised Southern Baptist, if you care to know). And I’ve continued down this path my entire life without so much as a sideways glance in another direction.

My investment in this half-baked Catholic church, therefore, is a bit of a conundrum. Why am I so enamored with it? Obviously, I’ve seen pretty buildings before, but this feels different. Why?

I’ve been chewing on that question for some months now as the building nears completion.

After a good bit of earnest mulling, here’s my official hypothesis: My infatuation with this local Catholic church stems from having never meditated on the marriage of a place of God and a place of man-made beauty. Sure, I’ve seen Catholic churches before, but it’s always been in thoughtless passing. This will be the first one in my community, and it's the first one I have ever given genuine thought to. I drive past it twice a day, so how could I not?

By comparison, the churches I have attended over the years have been rich in internal beauty — the kind that’s harbored in the hearts of its faithful congregants and its steadfast leadership. I do not take that for granted. The pre-eminence of internal beauty is a hill I will die on. After all, the Messiah is described as having “nothing attractive about him, nothing that would draw us to him” (Isaiah 53:2). If his perfection did not require external appeal, certainly aesthetics in the church are not absolutely necessary.

Beauty is water for the parched, a fire for the cold, a sanctuary for the lost.

Even still, I can’t help but ask: Should it bother me that my brain has God and aesthetics on opposite sides of a Venn diagram, only intersecting when I stumble across the rare Christian artist on Instagram, for example?

Confession: That was a rhetorical question. It does bother me.

After all, God is the author of beauty, the great fountainhead of all we might call lovely. Even the greatest works of man are inferior imitations of his genius. If the artist manages to create something of true beauty, it is because he collaborated with the divine, whether he knows it or not.

If aesthetics belong to God, shouldn’t they have a place in all churches? Do they have something of value to offer?

Half a millennium ago, certain Reformers, specifically the ones who would forge the path for the low church’s “plain-Jane-ness,” said "no" to those questions, wrenched God and aesthetics apart, and charted a new trajectory that would eventually lead to the kind of church I’ve spent my entire life in: gospel-centered but bare-bones.

I wonder if maybe these Reformers (dare I say it?) threw the baby out with the bathwater.

To even attempt to answer this question, we have to first understand how we got here.

The genesis

The severance of God and aesthetics first began in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his "95 Theses" to the wall of a German church, igniting the Reformation and laying the foundation for the modern world.

Interestingly, though, Luther’s theses didn’t directly broach aesthetics. The artistry and craftsmanship associated with the Catholic Church was not an explicit issue for him.

Luther’s sole preoccupation was with the Catholic Church’s moral rot: the sale of indulgences, which turned forgiveness and salvation into cash grabs for the Church; the papacy’s heretical claims to be the gatekeepers of heaven; the intentional resewing of the veil that Christ’s sacrifice tore in the form of keeping scripture out of the hands of the laity; and most notably, the exploitation of the poor to fund artistic opulence.

On the latter, Luther was neither an advocate nor an opponent of the Renaissant art and architecture of which the Catholic Church was both a patron and a vocal enthusiast. The issue for Luther lay not in the art or architecture itself, but in the fact that the poor were being exploited to fund such lavish projects as the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica. He hated that people were starving (both literally and spiritually) while the papacy fattened itself in gilded churches.

It's a valid complaint.

But Luther never denounced aesthetics outright. In fact, a peek into some of his other works suggests that he was actually an advocate. Perhaps his take on aesthetics is best captured in his treatise "Against the Heavenly Prophets," in which he confessed, “I am not of the opinion that the gospel should destroy all the arts, as some superstitious folk believe. I would gladly see all the arts, especially music, in the service of Him who gave and created them.”

So if Luther was for “all the arts,” what spurred the divorce?

That is a complicated answer that remains in the fallout of the Reformation. Luther may have heated the metal, but it was a subset of more radical Reformers that forged the blade that would sever God and aesthetics — ultimately paving the way for what I am suggesting is excessive simplicity in the modern low church.

Cutting ties

Admittedly, this is a subject for books, not articles, and so I will attempt to give you the CliffNotes version.

When the Reformation began, Europe was in the height of the Renaissance, a period of art characterized by a return to the values and ideals of classical antiquity — the Greco-Roman era heralded as one of the greatest historical periods of artistic achievement. The Catholic Church, in many ways, was the queen in the chess game of the Renaissance. Not only did it steer art in a religious direction, but its deep pockets commissioned some of the movement’s prodigies, including the beloved trio: Michelangelo, Raphael, and da Vinci.

The result? Gorgeous artwork but malnourished denizens. Enter Luther.

However, as the Reformation caught fire and spread across Europe, other Reformers took Luther’s condemnation of the Catholic Church’s extravagance to draconian levels. Switzerland’s Ulrich Zwingli and France’s John Calvin, two of the most influential Reformers, brought iconoclasm, the rejection and destruction of religious images, to the movement. For both of these zealots, religious art, including architecture, was both distraction and idolatry. It was simply incompatible with the teaching of God’s word. Thus, statues were smashed, murals effaced, and churches stripped bare.

These Reformers created the roots of the modern low church, which, at best, views aesthetics with skepticism and, at worst, outright rejects them, typically with the exception of music.

It’s also worth noting that 30 years into the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution entered the picture with its obsession with reason, quantitative thought, and order. Without really meaning to, the movement widened the already growing gap between the divine and aesthetics. Where radical Reformers wrote off the arts as a distraction from doctrine, scientific thinkers, with their “nature as machine, not miracle” worldview, pushed the arts away from mysticism and toward something more human-centric.

Then, along came the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, Modernism, and Postmodernism — all of which pushed aesthetics further down paths of secularism and mechanization — and eventually culminated in the digital age, where we find ourselves now. It's an age where, to quote my dear friend and fellow writer Ren Miller, most of our architecture has “separated function from delight” and serves to “gridlock us into brutal ugliness,” while modern art, which society tends to elevate, “is characteristically flat ... excessively detached and often grotesque” (Duchamp’s urinal, anyone?).

Or in the words of my favorite critic of modernity, Paul Kingsnorth, “Exchange beauty for utility, roots for wings, the whole for the parts, lostness and wandering and stumbling for the straight march towards the goal ... now look at us.”

So we find ourselves in a world that is more machine than human, a world that is, by and large, ugly and getting uglier because what we are creating is a reflection of what our culture values, and what our culture values is an enemy of beauty.

Human beings are always in pursuit of beauty. They can’t help it. They are made in the image of him who is beauty.

Hear me out: One of the things that characterizes the West is mass consumerism. We like our stuff, and we want it fast and cheap. That mentality is an enemy of beauty. We live our lives at breakneck speed, working and grinding like cogs in a machine. That kind of living is an enemy of beauty. We’re obsessed with technological innovation — more screens, more access, and more speed. Such mania is an enemy of beauty.

We’re increasingly secular, wringing the divine out of society like it’s dirty water in need of purging. It's heartbreaking — and an enemy of beauty.

This is the world the modern church finds herself in.

Suddenly, my adoration of the pretty little Catholic church down the street makes sense. It’s a little sunspot among the drab office buildings, the shopping centers in their various shades of brown and gray, the competing gas stations, the construction zones where trees are being ripped up to make room for more retailers or another development of identical mansions.

Where the town seems to say, "What's next on the agenda?” the little golden church asks, “Are you tired? Need a rest?”

And it asks these things before it even opens, before internal beauty has a chance to take up residence.

But that’s what aesthetic appeal does. Beauty is water for the parched, a fire for the cold, a sanctuary for the lost. Why does it have this kind of effect on us? Because it speaks of him who is living water, everlasting warmth, home eternal.

I believe that outward beauty has a place in the church, not just because its origins are divine, but because it would make us different from the world that has grown so ghastly in its march toward “progress.”

Christians are called to be different from the world, are we not? I know that command is about our conduct, but might it also apply to the way the church looks? If our “city set on a hill" (Matthew 5:14) was half as beautiful on the outside as it should be on the inside, might we extend our reach? Might we appear as a refuge from the grim machinery of the world only to turn around and offer Jesus, the greatest refuge of all?

I think that we just might. Human beings are always in pursuit of beauty. They can’t help it. They are made in the image of him who is beauty.

Now, I’m not proposing a return to gilded altarpieces, extravagant frescos, and bronze statues. I do not think the church should look like a tourist attraction. But beauty doesn't need to be complicated.

A few weeks ago, a young ambitious man knocked on my door selling something (I forgot what). He told me that he starts with the homes that have wreathes on the door because those people tend to be the kindest.

And there it is in its simplest form.

Beauty beckons because it means something good lies there. Shouldn’t that be the business of the church?