Art Needs the Church

Church and art today are scarcely on speaking terms. Yet Christianity was once a great patron of all the arts, and artists in turn enriched the faith. To help end the separation, the National Council of Churches set up a Department of Worship and the Arts,* and last week the council sent all its member churches a statement described as "a study document." Main point: "The church should have a vanguard of men and women qualified to interpret the significance of contemporary art for the believer ... in terms of Christian criteria."

The church must also "challenge and expose the unexamined errors of our contemporaries in all that concerns their values, loyalties, way of life and assumptions in connection with the novels they read, the plays and films they see, the music they play and hear, the buildings in which they live, work and worship, the social symbols they revere, the dreams and fables, indeed the myths they feed upon."

The church must "reassume its ancient and proper responsibility and productivity with reference to all the arts," an undertaking that "it could well begin by purging its own arts [of the] insipid or precious or esoteric or sentimental."

The breach between the church and the arts can be healed. "The modern crisis has pushed the agnostic and the disaffected to new dimensions and new depths in such a way that they find relevance again in certain features of the Christian understanding of life. On the other hand . . . the church has begun to produce theologians and critics who have dealt authoritatively with culture and the arts, as well as artists of genuine stature . . . Religion has a depth which art needs lest it become tempted to estheticism. Religion, on the other hand, is expressed most profoundly through the forms which constitute the proper concern of art."

*Among its advisers: Performers Raymond Massey and Lillian Gish, Poets W. H. Auden and Marianne Moore, Conductors Charles Munch and Dimitri Mitropoulos, Painter Robert Motherwell.

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