What Flannery O’Connor Might Say to Christian Moviemakers, Musicians, and Artists

Many Christian artists (and audiences) today believe their job is to provide easily digestible answers for their audience. Again, this amounts to simply making the audience comfortable. In a particularly biting passage where she challenges the cultural cry for more soothing, comfortable art, O’Connor suggests that nobody speaks for the modern American more than the advertiser (“They are entirely capable of showing us our unparalleled prosperity and our almost classless society, and no one has ever accused them of not being affirmative” [“The Fiction Writer,” 34]).

But art is not a commercial exercise, boiled down to gains and losses. There is something indefinable in art, something that O’Connor calls mystery. By contrast to the spirit of the age and the misguided views of many of today’s Christians, O’Connor focused on the way that the Christian writer can use their prophetic sight and fundamental belief in mystery to keep from providing easy answers. She writes, “We Catholics are very much given to the Instant Answer. Fiction doesn’t have any. It leaves us, like Job, with a renewed sense of mystery” (“Catholic Novelists,” 184).

Similarly, in her article for Thrillist, Wilkinson writes:

The glaring problem with God’s Not Dead, and most other films made for and marketed at the “faith audience,” is that instead of exercising and challenging the imagination of their audience in ways that would make their audience better Christians, they shut down imagination and whisper sweet nothings into their ears instead.

How We Should Encourage Christian Artists

Take this example from last year. Sho Baraka is a devout Christian and rapper who writes frankly but excellently and out of a vision enriched by his Christian faith. Despite this, Baraka last year found himself deleted from LifeWay bookstores due to a line with a (nonprofane) word listeners objected to in his recent album The Narrative, the word penis:

I was an insecure boy who just thought he was a genius
But always pissed off, that’s because I thought with my penis

The context was that thinking with his penis was wrong. It was an acknowledgment and confession of past sin, not something viewed as positive. But as O’Connor points out, when all you have as a guide for what is good and what is bad in art is an overconsciousness of what you consider to be obscenity, well, you will miss the forest for the trees.

In another recent example, when another Christian rapper, Lecrae, began to speak out about Black Lives Matter and race from the perspective of faith, he found himself met by mobs of social media Christians who declared petulantly that they had lost all respect for him and would no longer attend his concerts, buy his albums, etc. Rather than allow an artist to challenge them, they dropped a label on him and refused to see or hear.

As a Christian church, we need to be guiding and helping shape our artists. But if all we have to judge art by are simplistic estimations of whether the art serves some utilitarian purpose through evangelism or conservative (or liberal) politics or whether the art falls beneath a certain threshold of words that make us uncomfortable, we will not have the ability to develop truly great artists.

So what should we do?