Fred gets to the heart of why so much “Christian” art is awful:

But a competing understanding has arisen in American evangelical Christianity. From this perspective, the primary duty of every Christian regardless of vocation is evangelism. Everything else is just a means to this end.

According to this view, then, the primary duty of the Christian plumber is to spread the gospel. After all, what doth it profit a customer if a Christian plumber fixes their sink, but leaves their immortal soul in disrepair? This doesn’t necessarily mean that such an evangelist-plumber will be incompetent at his trade. It’s possible he could still be an excellent, if somewhat annoying, plumber. But excellence — or even basic competence — is no longer his priority. And he certainly does not believe, as craftsmen of the Aquinastotelian tradition did, that incompetence is a sin.

In this view vocation is unimportant. The standards of your craft become secondary to your duties as a member of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. This is particularly problematic for the Christian artist, whose art is now made a means to an end, i.e., propaganda.

That is an interesting take, but I am not sure that it is accurate. Oh, I am sure that that reasoning is trotted out in public quite a bit, and I am sure that it is, at least on some level, sincere. But it doesn’t really explain why so much of this evangelical art is so bloody awful. In fact, the notion that everything you do should be part of “bringing the word” should encourage people to be excellent at their crafts, not bad at them. If I hire an evangelical plumber, for example, who spends a lot of time “brining the word” to me but ruined my plumbing, you can bet that his evangelicalism is going to fail. This is even truer for artists: if they cannot weave their message into the structure of the story and the fiber of their characters, then it is going to come across as heavy-handed and unconvincing. The only people who will read it or listen to it or watch it are people who are already convinced of its righteousness. Which makes it very poor fodder for evangelicalism.

Which is why I don’t think that the primary reason for the lack of quality in “Christian” art is the abandonment of vocation for evangelicalism. Effective evangelicalism requires that the vocation be exercised to its fullest. Doing otherwise means demonstrating that Christianity has adversely affected the very thing the evangelical is using to convince people that God can have a positive effect on their lives. It is counter-productive, to say the least, and, by now, some segment of the evangelical community would have figured that out.

So why does so much Christian art work neither as art nor as a tool for evangelism? Fred himself pointed to the answers, earlier. Most “Christian” art avoids metaphor, largely because of the challenge that metaphor represents to the notion that the Bible is the literal truth:

Evangelicals prefer their truth in simple, unambiguous propositions. The Gospels and Jesus’ parables — all that worrisome, polyvalent storytelling — just won’t do. Occasionally, but rarely, some brave soul will wade fearfully into the great pools of poetry, epic history or parable in the Bible, but only to reassure others that the biblical writers were all, like Aesop, simple fabulists and that really all such passages can be reduced to a propositional kernel of unthreatening, unambiguous, unremarkable truth. The Psalms are read as proverbs.

(The late Francis Schaeffer — whose influence on the last few decades of evangelical culture would be difficult to overstate — provided the pseudo-intellectual justification for this hatred of metaphor. He was famous for wearing knickers, for declaring that “all truth is propositional and all politics genital” and for condemning Soren Kierkegaard as the Antichrist. The fact that Schaeffer decried metaphor while simultaneously calling for greater Christian engagement in the arts is an example of what the Antichrist would’ve called irony– another forbidden literary device.)

Fiction in general is to be distrusted. A blatant allegory, like C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, is permissible, but any narrative that defies such a simple one-to-one replacement code interpretation is suspect. In any case, evangelicals vastly prefer Mere Christianity. Those few who have read, and understood, the rest of Lewis’ Narnia books have been scandalized by what they found there — from the Bacchanalia of Prince Caspian’s satire against legalism to The Last Battle’s blessedly expansive notion of grace.

It is no accident that the Left Behind novels are remarkably free of metaphor, of multi-leveled themes, or even of the kinds of visual details that might be taken to stand for something at a non-literal level. Artless art — explicit, monovalent, prosaic prose — is the only permissible form of storytelling.

This is true not only in the realm of fiction, but in music as well. Singer-songwriter Rich Mullins found great fortune and favor in the evangelical world when he penned the thuddingly blunt praise chorus “Our God is an awesome God.” His more thoughtful and musically interesting writing about the “Ragamuffin Gospel” wasn’t nearly as welcome. (I would say more about the world of “contemporary Christian music” but, alas, it’s too depressing.)

Metaphor, needless to say, is one of the most powerful artistic tools, and the abandonment of that tool is a strong declaration that the art being created in “Christian” entertainment companies is not meant for dissemination outside the evangelical community. And if it is not meant for dissemination outside of the community, then it can hardly be described as evangelical in nature.

It can, however, reinforce evangelicals’ beliefs about themselves and about the world around them. In the same post as above, Fred mentions the complete hammer-lock a few individuals have on deciding what is and what is not “Christian” entertainment:

The first problem with this idea is that the subcultural marketplace of American evangelicalism is not a free market.

Anything not produced by and for the profit of the barons and bishops of the subculture’s market-driven ecclesiology will be branded as dangerous, heretical and anathema. The latest album of shallow pop music from a “Christian label” record company is permissible. The latest offerings from U2 or from Buddy and Julie Miller — sales of which do nothing to enrich Word records or Creation concerts — are not. Left Behind, which enriches Thomas Nelson, has the official blessing of the gatekeepers of the kingdom. John Grisham’s preachy The Testament, is published by Random House and is therefore not officially sanctioned reading.

The gatekeepers of “Christian” entertainment are the ones green-lighting the drek. They know what makes them money, and it isn’t work that attempts to evangelize to the unbelievers. It is work that reflects evangelicals’ beliefs and prejudices back at them. That desire to have what they already believe confirmed to them is what drives “Christian” entertainment. And when you are telling people what they already want to hear, well, you don’t have to work too hard to convince people its good.