Religious art's religious (?) evocations

When is art religious? When is art religious art?

According to some recent reviews, the religiousness of art resides in its ability to put an audience in a particular emotional state, a state similar to that of a church service. Art is deemed religious, by these critics, because it has the power to move people in ways similar to how people are moved in a church.

One example of this: Morgan Meis, writing on the recent art installation "Aten Reign" at the Guggenheim in New York City, finds a link between art and church in the way the art turns observers into practitioners. Meis writes:

The direct connection between [James] Turrell’s art and the practices of Quaker worship are obvious.

So obvious, that I’d like to suggest that the best way to approach and interpret Turrell’s installation at the Guggenheim is to say it is a Quaker meeting. Observe, if you will, what happens when people enter the ground floor of the museum. They stop and look up. They see that the spirals of the Guggenheim have been transformed into a glowing light installation. They roam around for a minute or so looking up. Then they find a space to lie down on the floor. Generally, they stop talking. They watch the glowing lights and the luminescent egg. This silent watching goes on for many minutes. More than ten minutes. More than fifteen minutes for many people, and more than that for others.

In other words, James Turrell has managed to get people in New York City to lie on the floor silently meditating.

For his part, Turrell has been more hesitant on the "obvious" connection between his faith and his art. I share that hesitancy. It seems to me to be too easy to make too much of the connection.

In a 2003 interview Turrell said, "I’m not sure whether that has impacted my art-making, because my work is not about specific issues -- perhaps being a Quaker influences how I live my life and what I value. People tend to relate any work in light to the spiritual. I don’t think this is actually correct."

Meis persists, though. It's not the issues that make this art religious, it's the effect:

It doesn’t matter, in the end, whether the people who view 'Aten Reign' believe in Turrell's Quaker God. It is not even clear exactly what are Turrell's beliefs regarding this God. The point is to sit or lie down and submit to the light. If you allow yourself to stare at that light for a few minutes you will inevitably have some experience of meditation. You will enter a quieter, more contemplative space. The light will do its work.

Emotional efficacy is also cited as key to the religiousness of Robert Randolph's "sacred steel" music. This is another example. Randolph is quoted as saying in the Pittsuburgh Tribune-Review last week, that his music has an energy "that's kind of from my background, growing up in church, where music was like this big rock 'n' roll show. We were all singing and dancing. Everybody singing together and interacting and having the music bring about this joyous feeling."

The New York Times went to Randolph's church, a black Pentecostal church, in 2001. The reporter, Neil Strauss, also made note of the evocation of joy:

The loud, unmistakable sound of vintage rock 'n' roll blared one recent Sunday afternoon from the open windows of an unlikely location, the House of God, Which Is the Church of the Living God, the Pillar and Ground of the Truth Without Controversy Inc., in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.  

Inside, parishioners banged tambourines against their palms and hit drumsticks against church pews in perfect rhythm. Even the children joined in on toy tambourines and plastic drumsticks. In front of the long, narrow, wooden-floor room, just to the right of the pulpit, Robert Randolph sat alongside a large purple pedal steel guitar, fingers flying across the strings to tease out lead lines that sounded like John Lee Hooker and rickety rhythms reminiscent of Bo Diddley, two musicians whom he claims never to have heard.

According to Strauss, Randolph's music also had the effect outside of church of bringing people into a church-like experience, even if there were differences. The "churchgoers made noise to praise the Lord, the clubgoers to express their individuality and enthusiasm."

Are those experiences so radically different?

In a review of the latest album from Randolph and The Family, PopMatters critic Neil Kelly says this steel guitar music only makes sense as "the fury of true black gospel music," and that it's success is its ability to induce religious states in the not-church-going crowd.

"I've seen them live," Kelly writes.

The gospel-infused funky rock roots band that commandingly whips a crowd of drug-laced earth muffins and hopheads into some sort of a revivalist frenzy ... that’s the Family Band I’ve seen. If you haven’t witnessed the fury of true black gospel music (from ANY denomination) in the church house on any given Sunday morning in the South, then think of the effect James Brown had on Joliet Jake in The Blues Brothers .... This ability to move the crowd to that level of excitement is why Randolph’s name is frequently in huge font on the posters of the festivals he and the Family Band play. This is the bread and butter of what makes him a superstar.

The "frenzy" of the crowd, for Kelly, is religious, or religious-like, and that response makes the music religious, not in and of itself, but in its effect. In its evocation.

The emotional state of Randolph's audience is pretty markedly different than that of Turrell's. One wouldn't mistake the one audience for the other. Contemplation and meditation wouldn't easily exist in the same space as concert enthusiasm and a whipped-up crowd. But both of these responses are seen as "religious," for producing responses similar to those of their creators' respective religious traditions.

That biographical info might be key to these interpretations, though.

Unless all art, any art, is going to be judged religious for evoking emotions and moving audiences, it's hard to see how these emotions thus moved are specifically religious.

Interpreting Turrell via reference to Quaker practice makes sense because he's Quaker. But there are many art exhibits by many non-Quaker artists that cause similar reactions in the museum-going public. Randolph's music is certainly Pentecostal, and it's useful to think about it and talk about it in that context -- but that's a historical fact one couldn't deduce just from watching the audience. Many other concert crowds could be described in the same way as the crowds dancing and singing with Randolph, and if all of them are thought of as religious, then that's not really a meaningful description anymore.

People tend to relate certain works that evoke emotions to religion, but that doesn't seem right. They use the creator's biographical information to make claims that, while they're not wrong, seem to be too strong.

Visual art produces a response that's analogous to the response one gets at a Quaker meeting. Music in a secular space produces a response that's pretty similar to the response that the same music gets in a dedicated religious space. It's possible to make too much out of these similarities.

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Religiously unaffiliated now at 20%

One wonders: What happened in 1988?

A new survey, done by the University of Chicago and analyzed by sociologists from UC Berkeley and Duke, puts the religiously unaffiliated at 20 percent of the American population. Atheists, meanwhile, come in at about 3 percent, and don't seem to be growing.  

Elizabeth Drescrer writes:

The report makes clear that the trend away from affiliation with organized religion is not an indication of declining religious belief. They write that “conventional religious belief, typified by belief in God, remains very widespread—59 percent of Americans believe in God without any doubt,” adding that, “Atheism is barely growing,” with 1% in 1962 and 3% in 2012 indicating no belief in God.

Also interesting: even though we've now seen two decades of rapidly growing disaffiliation, the number of those raised outside of religious organizations is still very, very small. Only 8 percent say they were raised without religion. This could be connected to fact that people tend to get more religious when they have children. David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam point this out in American Grace. For each generation since the '60s, religious affiliation has increased at about the time that generation has children. 

For those who came of age in the '60s, for example, about 12 percent said they had no religious preference in the mid-'70s. By 1985, though, that number had dropped to about 8 percent. In fact, that generations' irreligion only rose again in the early 2000s, around the time their children came of age. By the end of the 2000s, the generation that came of age in the '60s was again as likely to profess no religious preference as they had been in the mid-'70s. That trend holds for each successive generation. For those who came of age in the 2000s, for example, irreligion spikes in the first few years of the millennium (possibly for historical reasons, rather than generational ones) to the point that 30 percent said they didn't have a religious preference. But then that number drops. By the late 2000s, 25 percent say they have no religious preference. They're still, of course, a lot less religious than previous generations, but it seems that even a lot of that 25 percent will raise their children with a religious preference. 

All the normal caveats about misinterpreting and over-interpreting this data from this new study apply. What we might be looking at, here, is the waning usefulness of the term "religion."

The question asked, specifically, was: "What is your religious preference? Is it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion, or no religion?" That's slightly different that the question asked by Pew, and the difference in the phrasing of the question could account for the difference in answers. 

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God and Mammon and religious liberty

You cannot serve both God and Mammon. At least, you can't if you're a corporation, according to the Obama administration's proposed new rules regarding what sort of organizations will be required to provide employees insurance coverage of contraceptives under Obamacare.

Previously, the Obama administration had allowed for an exemption to the contraceptives mandate that was fairly narrow. Groups were exempted only if they met four criteria: 1) their purpose was the "inculcation of religious values," 2) most of the employees shared that religion, 3) most of the people being served shared that religion, and 4) they were a non-profit organization. This defined the sort of organization the law was considering as "religious."

This definition of "religious" is the fundamental issue in a slew of lawsuits about the health care policy.

One of the main objections to this working definition was the way it deemed religious service groups to be not religious. A Catholic soup kitchen is not mainly about the "inculcation of religious values," nor does it primarily serve Catholics.

With these proposed changes to the rules, released last week, the administration acknowledges that "religion" can mean many things, and doesn't just describe houses of worship. In the proposal for new rules, it says:

The Departments agree that the exemption should not exclude group health plans of religious entities that would qualify for the exemption but for the fact that, for example, they provide charitable social services to persons of different religious faiths or employ persons of different religious faiths when running a parochial school. Indeed, this was never the Departments’ intention.

Therefore:

the Departments propose to amend the definition of religious employer ... by eliminating the first three prongs of the definition and clarifying the application of the fourth. Under this proposal, an employer that is organized and operates as a nonprofit entity and referred to in section 6033(a)(3)(A)(i) or (iii) of the Code would be considered a religious employer for purposes of the religious employer exemption.

In practice, what this would mean is that any non-profit organization can fill out a form stating their religious objections and identifying themselves as religious, and they thus opt-out of the mandate. They can then provide health insurance for their employees that fits with the requirements of their religion and the rules of Obamacare; other arrangements will be made to provide contraceptives for those employees who want it, arrangements that won't involve the religious employer.

This is designed to resolve a good many of the lawsuits while not requiring employees to be disadvantaged by their employers beliefs. Whether it will or not is an open question, I suppose, but that's the purpose of the new rules, to strike a balance between accommodating religious belief and not allowing religious practices to be imposed on or negatively affect those who don't believe. The administration says:

The proposed accommodations would provide such plan participants and beneficiaries contraceptive coverage without cost sharing while insulating their employers or institutions of higher education from contracting, arranging, paying, or referring for such coverage.

The way the balance is struck, here, is by broadening the legal definition of religious organization. Now, to be counted as religious organization, only two things are necessary: the group must considered itself to be and hold itself out to be religious, and there can't be any profit.

This means the lawsuits that have interested me most, which are about the religious rights of for-profit corporations, will go forward. This compromise specifically excludes them. Hobby Lobby, Inc., and other corporations with religious owners will still have to take their case to the courts to argue that corporations have religions and have the right to exercise them.

There have been a variety of responses to the proposed new rules. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops declined to comment for the Associated Press, and said they're studying the proposal. Law firms involved in the cases defending for-profit corporations that have religious objections to insurance plans covering employee's contraceptives have said this is "picking and choosing who is allowed to exercise faith," and that the government should create an exemption for any "moral decision," disregarding anything else. Other responses have been crazier. At National Review, one writer interprets the compromise as a "double dose of authoritarianism" designed to force Catholic nuns to have birth control coverage.

Here's a thought provoking question, though. Matthew Schmitz of First Things asks:

The Obama administration believes that conscientious objections to contraception should prevail in the non-profit sector, but not in for-profit corporations. Why? Do employees of non-profits need contraception less? Do the conscience claims of their leaders matter more? Why are tax-exempt organizations granted more rights than those which pay taxes?

To put it another way, why can't a corporation serve both God and Mammon? What is it about being for-profit that necessarily excludes an organization from being legally considered religious?

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