Lack of a Protestant visual art culture

That’s not to say there aren’t any Protestant artists out there, in the expected sense of the word, but given Protestantism’s habit of refraining a lot from Catholicism that this led to curious consequences (or byproducts if you will). Considering that not a lot of Protestant churches, especially early on, aren’t wealthy enough to patronise the arts in addition to their disdain for visual imagery that it’s a habit that got picked up by the newly rich/nouveaux riches instead. One other side-effect, or perhaps two, is a stronger emphasis on both the written and spoken word instead.

That’s not to say both the Catholic and Orthodox churches lack devotional writers (including those who transcribe sermons) and Bible commentators of any sort, but the lack of any recognisably Protestant visual art tradition means that Protestantism would be disproportionately or heavily dominated by both Bible commentators and devotional writers. This could be from my experience where a lot of those online devotionals I encounter are done by Protestants, but this is also an interesting side-effect of Protestantism’s distrust of the visual arts.

So Protestantism is a subset of Christianity that’s heavily dominated by musicians and writers, not that they’re nonexistent in both Catholic and Orthodox churches. But when there’s so little mind given to the visual arts in Protestantism that it’s always going to be lopsided when both the spoken and written word are prioritised more there instead. To the point where visual art is practically kind of redundant in Protestant circles, the more I think about it.

Play to your own strengths and consciences

Given the profound Evangelical (and to a great extent, Protestant) aversion to visual imagery in worship, that visual arts will never be their strong suit especially if it’s something they’re socialised to dislike. So much so that not only is visual art forbidden in Protestant circles (in principle and to some extent, in practice), but also made effectively redundant by the strong emphasis on the word (both oral and written). So Protestants’ biggest strengths in the arts lie not in painting, sculpture and drawing but rather in writing sermons, devotionals, commentaries and nonfiction in general since they can’t do fiction well either.

That might be my opinion since I don’t really like CS Lewis and it’s baffling why he gets such a pass in Evangelical circles, you’ll never see people making pilgrimages to where CH Spurgeon was at the way they do with Lewis. Even though I feel CH Spurgeon, by the virtue of writing devotionals and sermons, is the more substantial of the two. If because things like prophecies, testimonies about heaven and hell, devotionals and sermons really get you into the meat of God’s message, the Bible and what he knows about how you feel and do at the moment.

Everything that has something to do with human nature, but in ways you wouldn’t be comfortable about regarding sin. I feel given the common Protestant apprehension towards visual imagery, to the point where Protestants are better off sticking to the oral and written word instead. That’s something they always excel at, given the word is something they prioritise far more often. Stick to devotionals, sermons, apologetics, commentaries and the like. Stick to what you’re good at and know what’s right.

Mad World

Since the Bible speaks about being in the world, but not of the world that in some regards Christianity is a pretty countercultural religion especially in this day and age. The Bible tends to be either negative or mixed about what the world celebrates, until you realise why Biblical writers and God are like this. They’re not entirely against certain things, maybe to a certain point and within reason. But at other times I feel what the Bible has to say may go against what many Christians do, love and believe.

Admittedly this depends on the church and country, but there are some places that do link dogs to witchcraft not helped by that the Bible mostly has a low opinion of dogs and that there’s this one verse that mentions both dogs and witches together. It seems like how the dominant culture (even the dominant Christian culture) treats children as a burden, beings needing to be harshly disciplined and scolded whereas dogs seem to get off easily.

But in light of dog predation and pathogenesis wiping out species that dogs would emerge as the bigger liability of the two, though that involves seeing dogs as what the Bible knew them as. Even if positive portrayals of dogs exist in the Bible and throughout Christianity, the evidence is mixed at best so the Biblical stance on dogs could be inconclusive at times if the Book of Tobit and even the story about Jezebel were taken into consideration. So the general attitude to dogs is also mixed depending on the locale and version of the Bible.

It’s even more mixed in extrabiblical beliefs where on one hand you have dogs linked to saints like St Francis of Assisi and Saint Dominic, but on the other hand they’re linked to witchcraft and the Devil himself not helped by that there’s one Bible verse that mentions both dogs and sorcerers together as said before. Admittedly this is the same with cats too when it comes to saints like Saint Gertrude and Saint Agatha, the latter who’s even said to turn into a cat herself.

(Coincidentally both animals get used in Christian monasteries the world over.)

Then we get to how Christians get accidentally complicit in someone’s vices or sins, especially if they themselves aren’t particularly aware of what they’re doing is wrong. Sort of like the thing about nudity in art, if it leads somebody to lust then avoid it. It’s this simple but that involves becoming more responsible with what one does, because they shouldn’t be a stumbling block to others. That involves being more careful with what they do, because it too could lead someone to sin. But one people will not be comfortable with.

Because this involves realising they’ve set up stumbling blocks for people, or aren’t aware of their actions leading others to sin. This is something those in the art community will not admit or realise in any way, because they are accidentally complicit in some way that they too need to bear the onus of their actions. I don’t think a lot of Christians, especially if they’re into the arts, seem deeply aware of how deeply entrenched perversion is into them. I guess a lot of it dovetails into the school of thinking that self-expression dominates them.

But when it dovetails with the satanic ‘my will be done’ thing, this is the real answer why perversion persists and grows in the arts. This is also likely the reason why so many artists are into the occult and the Devil, even if Christian artists do exist but they are a minority compared to these people. I don’t think Christian artists will comfortable with this, even if it makes itself evident with the numerous references to the Devil as well proliferating depictions of various paraphilias.

Then we get to Christians being really strict or harsh on children, perhaps far too harsh at times because I think deep down inside it’s their way of getting back at secularisation. But without knowing that it comes off as wanting to be better than everybody else, it’s a holier than thou mentality that alienates everybody and the likely reason why we have so many exvangelicals. I do get the feeling why Christians support spanking and harsh discipline is because they think it’s the right thing to do, but with seeing others as beneath them.

Children, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, everybody else who seem to be enemies of Evangelical Christianity; I feel a lot of Evangelicals (and Protestants in general) get far too proud of themselves, thinking they are better than everybody else. Ironically atheists might be humbler than them, in the sense of not knowing any better. The Bible emphasises the need to love one’s enemies, which is something Evangelicals fail to do so often. More often than not, they tend to be snarky and harsh towards everybody else.

They tend to be harsh on children, even though the Bible insists that they shouldn’t provoke children to anger. No wonder why so many of them quit Christianity because of those awful experiences, they shouldn’t be proud of themselves because they are ultimately human like everybody else. I feel Evangelicals have the need to seek an enemy, just so they can scold and chastise them a lot whilst mostly ignoring certain things the Bible also condemns.

No wonder why they condone spanking, sexism, sexual abuse, racism and other vices because they see nothing wrong with those, or at least see others as violating their standards and beliefs a lot. But then again the same principle holds for exvangelicals, who are evidently fed up with their every whim and hypocrisy. Then we get to another sin or vice that many Christians don’t seem particularly aware of, some may even condone it and it’s gluttony.

Part of the problem lies with how some Protestant churches tend to hold potlucks, which contributes to gluttony for some people but one they ought to be careful with. Then the other part is that Christians see nothing wrong with gluttony, they barely ever talk about and oppose the way they do with LGBT. If only they kept the same energy for gluttony, then that would mean gluttony got off easily out of all the seven deadly sins. This dovetails with the need for fasting in Christianity, but the problems lies with enabling gluttony in many ways.

Because Christians unwittingly enable certain things that God condemns, this is why Evangelicalism and the like have so many problems that could be solved by following God’s word.

Bibliography:

What should be the Christian perspective on nudity in art?

WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS ABOUT DOGS

What Does the Bible Say About Dogs?

Beware of dogs! The position and role of dogs in biblical discourse

An Elephant in the Room-Sized Post on Gluttony

Obesity in the Body of Christ

Unowned& Feral Dogs and Wildlife

The global impacts of domestic dogs on threatened vertebrates

Cats of Valaam (Russian)

THE DESERT LISTENS TO GOD (Russian)

Witchcraft and Devil Lore in the Channel Islands” (French and English)

COMMENT ÊTRE DÉLIVRÉ DES SORCIER(E)S EPISODE 7, DOCTEUR HENRI KPODAHI (French)

Discovery of Witches, by Thomas Potts

The Cat Saint

https://www.booksite.ru/fulltext/myt/hsr/uss/kih/9.htm (Russian)

The Witch turns into a Dog (Russian)

The witch turned into a black dog and milked the goats (Russian)

Free-ranging dogs as a potential threat to Iranian mammals

What Does The Bible Say About Spanking?

Epiphany About Something

I realised the other reason why Protestants like Jews so much isn’t just a matter of compatibility but that they’re the model minority, especially when you realise that so many of them distrust Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Hindus, Muslims and Taoists a lot. It’s like how so many Protestants, especially the ones I personally know, tend to be into Jews and Judaism a lot yet mistrust Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Taoism.

Even if they’re not any better either, I often see how Evangelicals routinely put down Catholics and Orthodox Christians a lot. They even put them in the same category as Hindus and Taoists, which says a lot about their racism when these denominations and faiths predominate anywhere east of Protestant (and Anglican) majority countries. Anywhere that’s east of Protestant-majority countries is ripe for missionary activity.

While it sounds like I’m against missionary activity, it’s kind of oddly coincidental that Evangelicals don’t seem to see Easterners as human the way they do with Jews. Because of Jews’ model minority status, it’s sometimes used as a wedge against anybody who aren’t Protestants yet aren’t Jewish either. Do you not realise how Zionism’s used to spite those who are commonly suspected of idolatry?

If Jews are really a model minority in Protestant circles, this has rather damning implications not just for Catholic, Orthodox, Taoist and Hindu communities but also for Jews themselves. It’s also possible Jews distrust Evangelicals because they don’t want to be pegged as the model minority for long, but that involves realising something. Jews have an elevated status in Protestantism that elides Africans and East Asians, the very people white Protestants have witnessed to.

It gets even more ironic when you realise that some aspects of Chinese culture are quite compatible with Christianity, such as respecting elders and female deference to male authority which are also central to Confucianism. It’s either a religion or a philosophy, but as a philosophy it lends itself well to Christian values and possibly why Christianity is exploding in numbers there. Same with South Korea when you think about it.

Meanwhile, Christianity has declined significantly in Israel since Jews returned and that Jews don’t see Messianic Jews as Jewish makes you wonder if the tendency to see Jews as honourary Protestants is linked to them being a model minority. If this is true, then it does explain a lot of things.

Kind of empty

While Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox churches might also have a degree of Philo-Semitism, it’s more deeply expressed among Protestants (especially if they’re Evangelical or Pentecostal). Not just because it’s about fulfilling biblical prophecy, but also because Protestantism’s short on some things. Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholicism are rich in lore about saints as well as having a good tradition of monasticism, I feel speaking as a Protestant, has a depth Protestantism lacks.

Protestantism, by contrast, has a habit of excising nearly every Catholic element as a way to protest against the Catholic Church but to the point of becoming rather empty for some churches. So empty that they often co-opt from Jews a lot, even if it’s something Jews dislike. Whether if it’s appropriating Jewish practices or reading Jewish literature, it’s pretty much filling in the gap left by years of ingrained anti-Catholicism. While I didn’t convert to Catholicism the way my sister did, Catholicism does seem deeper.

Deeper when it comes to lore regarding saints as well as the lives of monastics which appeal to me a lot more than Israel, so I think some of the problems with Protestantism and especially some churches is that they tend to be rather empty and shallow. Well, it seems some Protestants co-opt Jewish beliefs and practices in an effort to be closer to God, though Catholics and Orthodox believers have done the same with saints and monasticism (if they take the extra mile).

I still think in excising a lot of the things Roman Catholicism created in Western Christianity, it resulted in a much emptier and shallower Western Christianity. So empty and shallow, some Protestants appropriate from Judaism a lot to the detriment of actual Jews. If I were honest, I’m not that big into Israel. I actually find Turkey more interesting than Israel, it was even a Christian country at some point and Christian influence still lingers among some Muslim communities.

But Israel gets a pass due to its biblical association, though for some reason this doesn’t extent to Greece and Italy even though they too contribute a lot to Christianity’s evolution and get mentioned in the Bible as well. It’s a strange double standard that can be explained by how Greece and Rome as seen as bastions of idolatry, even though not all Greeks and Italians are like this. Israel, for all its faults, gets high priority among Pentecostals and Evangelicals.

In lieu of saint lore and monasticism, Protestants have prioritised Israel, Judaism and created their own subculture by ironically copying secular culture. While it’s true not everybody’s called to be celibate and Margery Kempe was not a nun despite being a mystic, even then it does come off as rather empty and shallow in a way Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy aren’t.

It gets weirder still that many Christians don’t bother learning or looking up on what Aramaic is, since it’s also spoken by Jesus and some portions of the Bible were written in that language. Likewise Christians don’t seem that interested in say Judeo-Spanish and Yiddish, which are also Jewish languages. Now I get why some Jews have an issue with Evangelical philo-Semitism, in the sense that Evangelicals are only into the more superficial aspects of Judaism.

The trappings, rather than the lived realities, along with how empty Protestantism is which drives the appropriation of Jewish practices but not learning the other Jewish languages like Aramaic and Yiddish for instance. It seems Protestant philo-Semitism is well-intentioned, but also empty when it comes to not looking hard enough for expressions of Christian mysticism prior to Protestantism (not just Hussites and Waldnesians but also Catholic mystics).

This proves my point about how empty Evangelical and Pentecostal faith can get when it comes to the actual depth and breadth of Christian history prior to Protestantism and after Judaism.

Girolamo Savonarola

Often called the first megachurch pastor, he pretty much ruled over Florence for a while and practically banned worldly items so much so that one artist who followed him did the same thing. There are some Protestant founders like Martin Luther who looked up to him fondly, given Savonarola also got into trouble with a pope and challenged the Catholic Church himself so much so that Savonarola’s a precursor to the Reformation years later.

For Luther it was a Medici pope who went against Biblical and Christian teachings, for Savonarola it’s a Borgia pope who did some of the same things and possibly worse. Savonarola also wrote confessions while he got persecuted by the pope at the time, pleading God for forgiveness. When it came to the Bonfire of the Vanities, this was when Savonarola got incenced by Florence’s worldliness that he and his followers have to do something about it.

So they burned worldly items and had one artist change his direction to please Savonarola. Then again the pope at the time fought Savonarola back and got him burnt at the stake. Savonarola may not have been a Protestant, but he did prefigure it in crucial ways. He was the first megachurch pastor who preached to thousands of people and got them into action. He also criticised the Catholic Church for becoming corrupt, which was shared by later Protestants.

Because of this, he inspired Martin Luther years later and he himself tried to reform the Catholic Church only to set up a different church and movement called Protestantism.

Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic?

The differences between Protestantism (barring the Anglicanism branch to some extent) and Roman Catholicism are stark where Protestantism bans the use of visual imagery whereas Catholicism flaunts or tolerates it, there’s not much room for saints in the formal sense in Protestantism whereas it exists in the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

The differences between Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholicism, to me, are that Eastern Orthodox doesn’t hold the Patriarch as infallible unlike the Catholic Church (at least most of the time to be fair to Catholics out there) and that Eastern Orthodox allows for married priests. Not to mention, Eastern Orthodox did encourage the vernacular.

Something like Church Slavonic which more or less begat the alphabet for many, if not all, Slavic languages (Poland, Slovakia and Czech Republic pledge allegiance to Catholicism and the use of Latin writing) whereas Latin’s the language the Catholic Church uses.

Protestantism also uses vernacular, but I’d say this goes the same for the Eastern Orthodox to some extent however uncertain as it is.

They have genuine relationships with God

I do think that God knows Jews, Catholics, Orthodox and even Muslims (especially if they’re influenced by Christianity) do have authentic relationships with him that bashing them would be unfair. Paul might be suspicious of Catholics for good reasons like molestation that he’d tell you about all the bad things Catholics do, but you know Catholics can be good people.

Same with Jews, Eastern Orthodox and other branches of Christianity that Paul has to come to terms with, if he were to get along with you he’d tell you to give up on all things Catholicism and similar to please him. But a genuine relationship with God usually knows no sect, anybody can have an authentic relationship with God whether if they’re Catholic or Protestant.

So I can’t berate Catholics anymore, especially when some of them do have authentic relationships with God that I can’t discriminate against them anymore.

Religious Rockism

To give you the idea, rockism tends to alleviate rock music and its functions and aesthetics over other musical genres even though ironically this isn’t so clear cut (choirs and broadway musicians are manufactured but not many people call them out for that, even if they don’t write their own songs either and have to rehearse a role to play as in passion plays). To be fair, there are Protestants like Billy Graham and CS Lewis who’re sympathetic to both Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

There’s in fact a branch of Catholicism a lot like Protestant Evangelicalism: Catholic Charismatic movement, and to be fairer still I do think that a good number of Catholics and Eastern Orthodox folks are legitimate Christians in their own right, being in a relationship with God and stuff just as there are nuns and monks who do live up to their vows of celibacy and holiness that it’s unfair to call them child abusers (as much as I think those abusers aren’t legitimate Christians and are power-hungry).

Whilst there are some Protestants sympathetic or fair to Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, some are fair to Muslims and Jews as well as just as there are Jews and Muslims sympathetic to Christians and Christianity, a good number of them tend to bash Catholics since the Early Modern Period, even if there were sympathisers before. Some even consider Girolamo Savonarola to be a proto-Protestant in the sense of wanting to reform the Catholic Church, much like Martin Luther did.

It’s still unfair to call Catholics and Eastern Orthodox as false Christians, for another matter it’s just as unfair to single out Muslims and Jews as I think some have sincere relationships with God that it’s practically discrimination.

Being fair to Catholics

I still think that even if there are stories of Catholic priest and nuns not being celibate, some of them legitimately are celibate and pious, even having a true relationship with God that it would be unfair to generalise all Catholics, Orthodox Christians and the like as such.

Ironically enough, Protestantism started out as an attempt to change Catholicism from the inside out but since it that didn’t go well it became its own church. (There are some Protestant churches with some Catholic tendencies and some Evangelicals sympathetic to Catholicism.)

I myself do show an interest in Catholicism and the Orthodox Church, with regards to animals that I think many Evangelicals are missing out on that even if that does help bridge gaps. I still think some Catholics and Orthodox are legitimate Christians, like Evangelicals are.

So I can’t be prejudiced against Catholicism anymore, given my sympathies and interests.