The 'safe vs. good debate' heats up

Relapsed Catholic Kathy Shaidle has not only raised the ire of Protestants, she seems to have a number of Catholics incensed over this post and that one.

Some responses to her posts here led to a vintage tirade this morning about how people are missing the point.

Your obsession with making the world immaculately safe for your children is (ironically) ruining civil society by raising up a generation of risk averse, hyperallergic, conformist dimwits who've never been allowed to simply daydream or scrape their (heavily padded) kneecaps. We are living in a "Fun Toy Banned Because of Three Stupid Dead Kids" world. Aren't you satisfied yet?

For the millionth time: Make your own damn movies and music if you don't like Hollywood's. Stop boycotting and criticizing movies and books you'll never read anyway.

If you think of the cinema as nothing more than the source of 90 minutes or two hours of respite in the warm glow of (someone else's) fantasy; if it is nothing more to you than "a good story" (hopefully one with a cute dog and a happy ending and no swearing)...

You DO NOT deserve the movies. You are beneath them. Amuse yourselves with bingo or bake sales or some other intellectually undemanding pastime. If you can't understand the concept of the physical integrity of another person's creative work, an artifact that embodies a part of themselves in some metaphysical sense, that may even be touched with Spirit, whether you like it or understand it or not... oh, forget it. I'm guessing you bought the Thomas Kincaide that matched your couch, right?

Yes, yes, I know: raising children is the most important job in the whole wide world. When you present yourselves to God at the End of Days, you are getting straight into heaven, while I, the childless arrogant artiste, is going straight to hell, shouting out, "'Ode to a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of little old ladies" as I tumble into the sulfur.

On that we are all agreed.

Now: back slowly away from the moviola or I will kill you with my pudgy little hands.

Now, given the humorlessness of some of the people who prefer what is safe over what is good, (though granted there are books like Gilead by Marilynne Robinson that are both safe and good) I fear that some might think Kathy is actually making death threats.

She's joking folks!

But to the point she's making---there is a big difference if I as an artist decide to cut some scenes from a movie or a book for wider distribution and family viewing vs. having some third party do it without permission.

And the other point is this: what is perceived as safe may be far more pernicious than the odd profane word or graphic sex scene in a more theologically sound work of art.

"Christian art? Art is art; painting is painting; music is music; a story is a story. If it's bad art, it's bad religion, no matter how pious the subject."
—Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water

I think the Left Behind series is bad art and consequently bad religion, though perhaps many people find they're prompted to say the Sinner's Prayer after reading one of these books about the End Times. And maybe some of those people are genuinely repenting. God can even make a donkey speak if He has to in order to reach someone, but that doesn't make the donkey anything other than a donkey.

God chose a book with some pretty mediocre writing aimed at junior high school level readers to turn my life around, so I can't deny that He sometimes uses the strangest means as a Shepherd's crook to hook someone.

I think there is great art that is also good but unsafe in the sense that it is disquieting, haunting, challenging, upsetting and illusion-busting.

Flannery O'Connor falls into that category. This is from an interesting essay about her I found online this morning.

She was writing for an audience to whom the incarnation had little meaning, and yet her fiction repeatedly showed common people encountering the terror, mystery and beauty of the Word made flesh. She might have predicted that many of her readers would be mildly puzzled, if not completely confounded.

That fiction contained truth was the conviction she lived with every day. The fact that this truth was sometimes odd or uncomfortable or violent, that it led often to the grotesque, O’ Connor faced unflinchingly. Quoting Robert Fitzgerald, she wrote, "It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth" (p. 343). What could be stranger than a God who decides to suffer with us? What could be more uncomfortable or more violent than the cross? What could be more comically grotesque than an individual trying to escape his own identity as God’s child and in his rush out the temple door smacking straight into the incarnation?

I believe there is also bad art that is unsafe and great art that has great merit in terms of skill, vision of the artist and so on, but is inherently evil and decadent.

Unfortunately, too often a lack of discernment will push what is good, great and unsafe into the great but evil category. So often that happens to the best writers who are not received as the prophets they are in their own times.