Seven Thoughts on Evangelical Christianity’s Relationship with Poetry, as Occasioned by a Review of the Poetry of Advent
The following is adapted from a class on the poetry of Advent taught at Greentree Community Church:
- For the most part, Evangelicals read the Bible as historical narrative with an occasional sprinkling of moral proposition. But almost a third of the Bible is poetry. Poetry is not meant to be read the same way as prose, and when you try to do this, you cannot fully understand what you are reading. It follows that a reader who endeavors to know the Bible well would benefit from a little thinking about poetry.
- A very large portion of the art that deals directly with Biblical themes is about the nativity. Something about this event inspires artistic reflection, and I think it can also be said that there are truths about the nativity that may only be encountered through artistic reflection.
- Art communicates directly to all parts of us—mind, body, and spirit. This is why art is able to convey concepts in ways that other forms of communication cannot. Art is powerful because it can blow your mind, punch you in the face, and whisk you away to some ethereal plane all at the same time.
- Evangelicals have grown suspicious of art due in part to the fact that for the last several generations, one of the most popular subjects of art has been the negation and/or vilification of faith.
- Some of the most influential currents in current Evangelical culture distrust art precisely because it communicates directly to the body. For example, part of the reason Christians were so afraid of rock and roll was because they were afraid that an art form whose message connected so immediately and powerfully with the body without being mediated by the mind could be dangerous—just look at the uncontrollable, below the belt pulsations it produced in Elvis Presley. But this sort of dualistic perspective is absent from the Bible’s earliest depictions of the universe. Genesis describes the body as a product of the good creation, not the fall. If the body is not evil, then there is no need to fear that the inarticulate characteristics of art might awaken some latent evil in us.[1]
- The Evangelical marketing machine steers the faithful away from art. Evangelical Christians may well be one of the most accurately defined, aggressively targeted, and easily manipulated demographics ever. If you quizzed a handful of parishioners in any Evangelical congregation in America, I would bet that the majority of them would confess to having felt at some point or another a sense of spiritual duty—perhaps even bordering on moral obligation—to see The Passion, to read The Prayer of Jabez or the Left Behind series, or to consume some other “Christian” product. There’s no comparable sense of responsibility to “non-Christian” (not necessarily works by non-Christians or works that don’t deal with spiritual themes, but works that aren’t products of media outlets that are branded as “Christian”) books, movies, music, or whatever. It seems to me that a straight line can be drawn from the sale of indulgences in the Middle Ages to the therapeutic consumption of Christian pop culture today. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that there is no value in anything that this culture produces, but I would argue that it would do more for your soul to read Moby Dick than The Purpose Driven Life.
- People in general—not just Evangelical Christians—avoid art—particularly certain types of art, including poetry—because they think it’s confusing or complicated or boring. But enjoyment is one of the primary purposes of art. Good art is incredibly satisfying, but it does ask something from you. Enjoying a filet at a great steak house is different than grabbing a cheeseburger from the McDonald’s drive thru. Poetry, like all art, asks for a little bit of an investment. We can refuse the cost because we’re having a perfectly fine time making our mud pies, or we can ante up and enjoy a holiday at the sea.
[1] Poetry, like music, uses rhythm and sound to bypass the mind and directly engage the body and spirit. This is why someone like Robert Bly, intent on recovering a primordial wildness he believes to be sleeping in the collective memory of men, would look to poetry as tool of great value. As best as I can tell, Bly was suspicious of the formal elements of poetry early in his career because he viewed them as governors on poetry’s wilder capabilities. But as his career progressed, I think he came to understand that form often communicates the heart beat that the body and spirit recognize and respond to before the mind is even aware of what’s going on.
