Does Your Religious Sensibility Clash With Your Art?
What do you do when you feel it's selfish or frivolous to make art that isn't preachy?
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“Those who do not engage in the traditional arts might be wary of calling themselves artists. They might perceive creativity as something extraordinary or beyond their capabilities. A calling for the special few who are born with these gifts.
Fortunately, this is not the case.
Creativity is not a rare ability. It is not difficult to access. Creativity is a fundamental aspect of being human. It’s our birthright. And it’s for all of us.”
-Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being
The following post began its life as a social media exchange in the comments on a different reflection.
I then made it into its own social media post, and that got a lot of discussion, so I think there’s something here worth talking about.
This will mostly be a re-post of what I’ve already said on this topic elsewhere, though I’ve edited a bit and added a thought or two as I went through it again. The important thing here is to see this more as a conversation starter than a well-defined conclusion.
A Facebook friend of mine (who shall remain anonymous since he didn’t ask to have his name associated with all this) saw that I had posted something about artistic quality when it comes to this big argument people are having over the use of AI-generated images for things like the covers on indie books vs. hiring someone who looks like they took approximately three eighth grade art classes before doing the damn thing in Crayolas or MS Paint.
This FB friend happens to be an amateur filmmaker. He writes scripts, but also films and does color grading. I think it’s a great pursuit, and I like to encourage him to keep developing his craft. But he said he didn't think his stuff was going to ever be good enough for primetime. Worse, he said, he suffers from mental illness, and so he believes his work in film will only ever be a hobby, not a profession.
I told him that mental illness alone shouldn’t keep him from it. It’s not as though plenty of artists haven’t had mental illnesses. It’s practically synonymous. Van Gogh didn’t cut off his ear and give it to a prostitute for safekeeping because he was well. In fact, he didn’t remember the event at all. There are countless stories about tortured artists that attest to the fact that genius and madness often dance together through the act of creation.
More recently, I’ve discovered that researchers have found that art is supposed to be a pretty effective form of therapy. I told my friend to listen to Rick Rubin talk about putting the audience last when doing artistic work:
My FB friend came back with this:
I want to believe this. But my Catholic sensibilities war against it. I feel like it’s selfish of me just to make art for myself. I should be doing other things for other people instead of spending my free time on just myself. If that’s not art, then it should be something else. Unless I’m just too messed up to help people…
That response triggered something in me I hadn’t been fully aware of.
I've always felt like this, too. When I was young, I found that it was difficult to write science fiction that felt compatible with my religious beliefs and ideals. For the same reason that many religious folks immediately think UFOs or alien abductions must be “demons,” my soteriology could not find a way to admit of the existence of sentient extra terrestrials in a way that didn’t feel destructive to the idea of the unique, exclusive, human-centric understanding of Christ’s incarnation, passion, death, and resurrection.
But there was also this idea that my dream of writing science fiction was not "worthy." That I should be doing something more important than creating entertainment.
I have some idea where this came from.
I had an influential uncle who was very religious, and who I looked up to very much. When I was about 14, I was considering going to the Art Institute in Pittsburgh, which I had discovered through my junior high school art class. I was a gamer, and I liked the idea of getting into video game design. When I mentioned this to my uncle, he said that he thought I needed to do something more "worthwhile" with my life. I remember deflating. I'd been so excited.
But I respected him so much. I felt like I should listen.
I never seriously considered pursuing a career in art again after that conversation with my uncle. I just...dropped it, like all the air going out of a balloon. Over time, I kept getting these kinds of messages from different people. I was supposed to be a priest. I had God-given gifts that should be used in the service of my faith. I became increasingly convinced that it was my job to be an evangelist and apologist, not a guy who wrote space operas and cyberpunk novels.
And now here I am, considering returning to my first love at mid-life, and even having my former religion at arm’s length, the lingering notion that, "You should be doing something more important, more worthy, more useful..." keeps repeating in my head. I find that I prioritize everything else in my day over working on my book. If I’m due for a piece for this Substack, I do it first. If there are errands that need running, I do those. I keep putting the thing I want most, the thing that is actually deeply meaningful to me, all the way on the back burner. I save it for when I have literally nothing else to do, which rarely comes, and when it does, it’s often when I’m too tired to produce good work.
Yes, this is at least partially a manifestation of “Resistance.”
In fact, in The War of Art — his first book on the toxic, universal anti-creative force he calls “Resistance” — author and screenwriter Steven Pressfield takes note of the tension between religious or ideological fundamentalism and art:
The fundamentalist (or, more accurately, the beleaguered individual who comes to embrace fundamentalism) cannot stand freedom. He cannot find his way into the future, so he retreats to the past. He returns in imagination to the glory days of his race and seeks to reconstitute both them and himself in their purer, more virtuous light. He gets back to basics. To fundamentals.
Fundamentalism and art are mutually exclusive. There is no such thing as fundamentalist art. This does not mean that the fundamentalist is not creative. Rather, his creativity is inverted. He creates destruction. Even the structures he builds, his schools and networks of organization, are dedicated to annihilation, of his enemies and of himself.
[…]
To combat the call of sin, i.e., Resistance, the fundamentalist plunges either into action or into the study of sacred texts. He loses himself in these, much as the artist does in the process of creation. The difference is that while the one looks forward, hoping to create a better world, the other looks backward, seeking to return to a purer world from which he and all have fallen.
The humanist believes that humankind, as individuals, is called upon to co-create the world with God. This is why he values human life so highly. In his view, things do progress, life does evolve; each individual has value, at least potentially, in advancing this cause. The fundamentalist cannot conceive of this. In his society, dissent is not just crime but apostasy; it is heresy, transgression against God Himself.
I spent most of my life as a fundamentalist. A critic. A man advocating for a return to a purer, better way. A way I’m not sure every actually existed anywhere but in my imagination, or the imaginations of others.
It feels like a kind of apostasy to lay down my arms and stop fighting for…whatever it is I thought I was fighting for. A better world? A more ideologically correct society? A return to the very thing that failed to stop the human race’s stalwart march towards depravity in the first place?
Maybe that seems a bit tenuous of a basis to doubt myself, but the idea of writing fiction that’s fun, entertaining, and exciting still feels frivolous to me, like I’m abandoning the cause. Part of me knows this is a lie I was conditioned to believe, but I haven’t figured out quite how to shake it. It’s this nagging sense that I’m not using my writing talent appropriately if it isn’t for cultural analysis and critique. As though if I’m not on a crusade to tackle the evils of the world in the hopes of making it a better place, I’m just wasting my time on foolishness.
Even though I want to write meaningful fiction that prompts reflection on serious issues (without being preachy).
Even though it’s not bad to provoke a sense of wonder and imagination.
Even though it’s not wrong to entertain.
It’s my personal equivalent to the trope of the young man who wants to become an actor or a musician when his parents groomed him to be a neurosurgeon. A voice in the back of my head is always clucking its tongue at me in disapproval, and I want to rip that tongue right out of its critical little (imaginary) face.
The truth is, I’ve only just become aware of this limiting belief quite recently. I’m not yet sure how to defeat it, but at least now I know that I have to face it.
Until I do, I don’t think I will ever do the best work I'm capable of.
What about you? What are your limiting beliefs? Where do they come from, and how have you learned to overcome them if you have?
I think your sensibilities now are more genuinely Catholic than they were before. Yes, you were a fundamentalist, and yes, thankfully you are free from that now!
Well really great works of arts convey moral truths without being preachy. I like those type of novels and also historical novels ("Gone with the Wind" and "Desiree", "Tale of Two Cities"). I want heavy themes, so I tend to choose authors who write heavy themed-work. Take Tolstoy. Or the Bronte sisters ("Jane Eyre", "Wuthering Heights"). Who can put down "Jane Eyre"? Read Charles Dickens' novels.
It's really hard to write literature that good--that can be seen for just being a great story, but also conveying moral truths if one is open to them. So aim for that. First, read the greats. Russian lit is a good place to start (Dostoyeski, Tolstoy, Chekov, Pasternak).
You could pass my idea for a miniseries based on the Kristin Lavrensdatter trilogy to your amateur friend. It needs a screenplay. Then to be pitched to the filmakers that are producing "films with Christian ethics" (e.g., "Sound of Freedom," "Cabrini," "Nefarious". )
Why not write a novel based on a saint's life? LIke who? Hm, how about "My Spirit Rejoices" by Elizabeth Liseur? What an incredible, totally improbable story.
https://www.amazon.com/My-Spirit-Rejoices-Christian-Unbelief/dp/0918477409
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1772491.My_Spirit_Rejoices
And it's a TRUE story! So, write a novel, screen play, or a miniseries, based on the life of Elisabeth Liseur and her husband and pitch it to the film makers above. Or pass this suggestion on to your screen-play-writing friend.
Here's a slice of Liv Ullman's production of the first of the three novels in the trilogy. She stopped there (book one, "The Bridal Wreath"). Isn't it fabulous? This set of novellas is obliquely autobiographical to Sigrid Undset's life, which is what makes it so interesting (how she grafts her life, centuries later, unto this set of novels):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg8Lhy6hn7U
I would like Martin Scorsese to make either or both of these movies/miniseries. He would be perfect! He has shown up at a church I occassionally attend (Old St. Paddy's in NYC on Prince and Mott), but I could never get near him to suggest the Sigrid Undset work to him because he gets mobbed at such gatherings and I'm a not involved with cinematography except as a fan of "the good stuff".