Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  Hymnody should be viewed as a genre of the fine arts and be added to the basic college curriculum. One of the most brilliant products of American creative imagination, hymnody has had a massive global impact through popular music. Wherever rock ’n’ roll is played, a shadow of its gospel roots remains. Rock, which emerged in the 1950s from urban black rhythm and blues of the late 1940s, had several sources, including percussive West African polyrhythms and British and Scots-Irish folk ballads. But a principal influence was the ecstatic, prophesying, body-shaking style of congregational singing in the camp meetings of religious revivalists from the late eighteenth century on. All gospel music, including Negro spirituals, descends from those extravaganzas, which drew thousands of people to open-air worship services in woods and groves.

  The most influential camp meeting occurred at Cane Ridge in Bourbon County, Kentucky, in 1804. For three days and well past midnight, a crowd estimated to be between twenty and thirty thousand sang and shouted with a great noise that was heard for miles around. Worshippers transported by extreme emotion jerked, writhed, fell to the ground in convulsions, or went catatonic. This Kentucky Revival, called the Second Great Awakening, spread through the inland regions of the South and eventually reached western Pennsylvania. But the movement never flourished in the North because of its harsher weather.

  Collections of gospel music for use in revivals were published to huge success throughout the nineteenth century—from Gospel Melodies (1821) and Spiritual Songs for Social Worship (1832) to Ira D. Sankey’s volumes of Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs (1875–91). A defining characteristic of such songs is their subjectivity—that is, their use of the first-person pronoun to assert an intimate relationship with Jesus—as in “Abide with Me,” “I Need Thee Every Hour,” “Jesus Loves Me,” “He Leadeth Me,” “I Love to Tell the Story,” or the rousing “Give Me That Old-Time Religion.” Out of this gospel tradition also came Negro spirituals, which would powerfully counter the degraded stereotypes of African-Americans circulated by minstrel shows. Spirituals began on the antebellum plantations, where Bible stories were ingeniously adapted to carry coded political messages, as in “Go Down, Moses,” a dream of liberation where Pharaoh represents the white slave-owner in collusion with American law. A major addition to the gospel repertory was Slave Songs of the United States, published in 1867. In the 1870s, an African-American choir, the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University in Tennessee, traveled the country performing Negro spirituals in a concert setting to help endow black educational institutions. The songs made a sensation, not only for their melodious beauty and religious fervor but for their residual African elements, such as bluesy flat notes and off-beats, the syncopation that would later surface in jazz.

  The brilliant folk hymns of nineteenth-century camp meetings were inherited by modern revivals, such as the Billy Graham Crusade. In popular music, the spasmodic undulations and ecstatic cries of camp-meeting worshippers were borrowed by performers like Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and the late, great James Brown, whose career began in gospel and who became the “godfather of soul” as well as of funk, reggae, and rap. Gospel music, passionate and histrionic, with its electrifying dynamics, is America’s grand opera. The omnipresence of gospel here partly explains the weakness of rock music composed in other nations—except where there has been direct influence by American rhythm and blues, as in Great Britain and Australia. The continuing impact of gospel music on young African-Americans in church may also account for the current greater vitality of hip-hop as opposed to hard rock, which has been in creative crisis for well over a decade.

  There was a second great confluence of religion with the arts in nineteenth-century America. The Bible, in its poetic and indeed Shakespearean King James translation rather than in today’s flat, pedestrian versions, had a huge formative influence on the language, imagery, symbolism, and allegory of such major writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville. The American literary renaissance was produced by the intersection of the nation’s residual Calvinism with British Romanticism, which was hostile to organized religion but which had transferred its concept of spirituality to nature. Pantheism helped inspire transcendentalism, which was suffused with aspects of Hinduism by Ralph Waldo Emerson (a refugee from strict Unitarianism). This view of nature, which saw God as immanent in creation, was spectacularly embodied in the nineteenth-century Hudson River School of landscape painting. In such works as Thomas Cole’s River in the Catskills or Frederic Church’s Niagara, these artists showed America’s mountains and monumental cataracts glowing with the numinous.

  Catholic immigration in the nineteenth century brought a radically different aesthetic to church architecture and decor. The typical American church had been in the Protestant plain style, white and rectangular with a steeple that formed the picturesque apex of countless villages—a design bequeathed by the British architects Sir Christopher Wren and James Gibbs. Originally, American churches were often simply a meeting house (a word still retained in Quaker practice). Also used for local government, the meeting house was a boxy space with exposed timbers and benches but no ornamentation—a template that was borrowed by town halls across the nation. Catholic taste was far more lavish. The influx of Irish immigrants in the 1830s and ’40s—which caused anti-Catholic violence (including the burning of churches in Philadelphia)—was soon registered in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, designed by James Renwick and constructed from 1850 to 1877. With its soaring spires, delicate stonework, and stained-glass windows, it exemplified the current Gothic Revival—a grand style that was also adopted by Episcopalian churches in America.

  Polish and Italian Catholics arrived en masse in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Eastern European parish churches followed the ornate Byzantine model. Italian-American churches, as was customary in the old country, installed a profusion of polychrome statuary. That flamboyant style continued until after World War Two, when the German branch of the Liturgical Movement for Catholic reform introduced a stripped-down modernist design, with concrete construction, open spaces, and little imagery except for abstract crucifixes. This development (blandly formulaic at its worst) resulted in a genteel Protestantizing of American Catholicism, which erased all traces of working-class ethnicity. When aging Catholic churches were renovated in the 1950s and ’60s, the saints’ statues were displaced or banished altogether. I mourn this loss, which has impoverished the cultural environment for young people: my interest in the arts was first kindled in childhood by the gorgeous stained-glass windows and theatrical statuary of my baptismal church, St. Antony of Padua in Endicott, New York. Perhaps America’s rising Hispanic population will restore the great imagistic style of Latin Catholicism.

  Though there was a long tradition of censorship in Roman Catholicism, typified by its voluminous Index Librorum Prohibitorum (“Index of Prohibited Books”), American Catholics made few attempts to influence public policy during the nineteenth century. That role was taken up with gusto by the Protestant-led temperance movement, which called for a ban on the public sale of alcohol—a long campaign that finally succeeded with the ratification in 1920 of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which began thirteen years of Prohibition. Major groups in the temperance movement, which included leading feminists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League, which was heavily financially subsidized by Methodists and Baptists. Episcopalians, in contrast, kept their distance from the temperance crusade.

  Catholic surveillance of American public life would come with the rise of Hollywood. At the start of the studio era, movies were still viewed as vulgar. In the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, there was a new rule-breaking energy and sexual adventurism in urban areas. Responding to audience demand, movies began pushing the limits with bare flesh and sexual innuendo. Small communities
across the U.S. felt they were being invaded by an alien cultural force. Resistance came from a collaboration between the Catholic Church and local Protestant women’s groups, speaking from the perspective of concerned mothers. There were tinges of anti-Semitism in this protest, because so many of Hollywood’s early producers and financiers were Jewish. A series of guidelines was instituted in moviemaking throughout the 1920s, but compliance remained uneven. The Motion Picture Production Code, written by a Jesuit priest, was adopted by Hollywood in 1930 but laxly enforced by the Hays Office. Finally, in 1933, a conference of U.S. bishops created the Catholic League of Decency (later renamed the National League of Decency) and threatened a nationwide boycott. Hollywood responded by appointing a tough Irish Catholic, Joseph Ignatius Breen, to administer the Code, which he did through the Breen Office for the next twenty years. The Code, which wasn’t officially abandoned until 1967, required scripts to follow a moral formula: crime had to be punished and marriage respected, with homosexuality and miscegenation forbidden.

  Though long disbanded, the Legion of Decency lingers on today in our lettered rating system for movies—G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17. The Legion attached descending grades of A, B, or C to each film released in the U.S. When I was a child, the group was still a formidable force. After Mass one Sunday, I was transfixed by the official list, posted in the church foyer, that showed the Legion of Decency had slapped a C on the 1956 film Baby Doll, meaning it was “Condemned” and that no Catholic could see it without pain of sin. The title, Baby Doll, seemed inscribed in smoking, red-hot letters from hell! The film, based on an over-the-top Tennessee Williams tale about Southern decadence, was being provocatively advertised by kiddy-porn images of blonde Carroll Baker lounging in a nightie and sucking her thumb. It was forty years before I finally had a chance to see Baby Doll on cable TV in the 1990s. It still retains its mythic, subversive significance for me. Indeed, Baby Doll is emblematic of the quarrel between religion and the arts in America.

  As avant-garde modernism triumphed in the first half of the twentieth century, it was only the movies that addressed or expressed the religious convictions of the mass audience. With few exceptions, most modern artists and intellectuals were agnostics or atheists, above all in Europe, where anti-clericalism has raged since the Enlightenment. In its search for ticket sales, Hollywood returned again and again to the spectacular Bible epic, one of my favorite genres. Cecil B. DeMille, for example, made The Ten Commandments twice, in 1923 as a silent film and then as a wide-screen Technicolor extravaganza released in 1956. The latter is regularly broadcast on religious holidays and remains a masterpiece of heroic narrative and archaeological re-creation of upper-class Egyptian life. The bestselling American religious novel of the nineteenth century was General Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, published in 1880 and widely imitated. Ben-Hur was also made into two films, the first a 1925 silent and the second yet another wide-screen masterpiece, released in 1959. The dynamic star of both The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur was Charlton Heston, who afterward became a conservative activist and president of the National Rifle Association.

  Because of the divergence between religion and the prestige fine arts in the twentieth century, overtly religious art became weaker and weaker. One of the most disseminated images of the twentieth century was Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ, a 1940 American oil painting inspired by Victorian precedents that showed a long-haired Jesus bathed in light and gazing raptly toward heaven. In his intriguing 1996 book, Icons of American Protestantism, David Morgan notes that Head of Christ was reproduced five hundred million times over the next four decades. The image was beloved among evangelicals but not mainline Protestants. Many critics, even believers, rejected the painting as sentimental kitsch and denounced its portrayal of Christ as “effeminate” as well as overly Nordic Caucasian. (Sallman was in fact the son of Scandinavian immigrants.) Head of Christ shows Jesus as the gentle, benevolent Good Shepherd—the forgiving friend with whom born-again Christians, such as President Jimmy Carter, claim to walk and talk.

  If there were few open conflicts in America between religion and the fine arts through most of the twentieth century, it was simply because the two realms rarely overlapped. But that uneasy truce ended with the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. Under the conservative presidencies of Ronald Reagan, whose goal was to reduce big government, there was close scrutiny of cultural agencies. Considerable impetus came from William Bennett, the new director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, whose budget he cut; when Bennett was appointed Secretary of Education, he was succeeded as director of the NEH by Lynne Cheney, wife of the future vice president, Richard B. Cheney. She targeted deconstruction on campus and liberal bias in government-funded public broadcasting programs. A focus of controversy soon became the National Endowment for the Arts, whose authorization was approved in 1964 by President Lyndon Johnson but which had to struggle for congressional funding from the start, with vehement opposition even to its creation coming from Strom Thurmond, the conservative senator from South Carolina.

  A variety of groups mobilized outside government in the 1980s to counter what was perceived as a moral degeneration in the media environment. These included Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, the Rev. Louis Sheldon’s Coalition for Traditional Values, and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition. In 1985, the Parents Music Resource Center, led by Tipper Gore (wife of then-Senator Al Gore of Tennessee), lobbied in Senate hearings for content labeling of popular music because of concerns about sex and violence. In 1985, evangelical Protestant organizations, led by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, and the Rev. Donald Wildmon, founder of the National Federation for Decency (renamed the American Family Association), allied with anti-pornography feminists (whom I strongly opposed) to pressure 7-Eleven and other national chains of convenience stores to ban the sale of Playboy and Penthouse magazines. That effort succeeded but may have been a pyrrhic victory insofar as it immediately stimulated the market for pornographic videos, introduced into homes by the then-new technology of the VCR. In 1988, Wildmon’s lobbying led to the introduction in the U.S. House of Representatives of a resolution (sponsored by conservative Southern California Congressman William E. Dannemeyer) calling for Universal Studios to cancel the release of Martin Scorsese’s “morally objectionable” film, The Last Temptation of Christ. The resolution was referred to committee and never reached the floor for a vote.

  Wildmon’s activities expanded to the fine arts when, in 1989, his group publicized an apparent example of blasphemy in an exhibition that had been partly funded (in the amount of $70,000) by the National Endowment for the Arts. The show had opened at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in conservative Senator Jesse Helms’ home state, and after a short tour closed in Richmond, Virginia. The point of contention was New York artist Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ—a five-foot-high blow-up of a misty photograph of a back-lit plastic crucifix immersed in a Plexiglas vat of the artist’s urine. Without that slangy and perhaps gratuitously confrontational title, of course, no one would have known how the photo’s golden glow had been produced. The outcry over Piss Christ began with local letters to the editor and spread to Congress, where New York Senator Alphonse D’Amato called Serrano’s photo “filth” and “garbage” and punctuated his remarks by tearing up the exhibit catalog and flinging the pieces to the Senate floor.

  Another bitter controversy broke out that year over an exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe’s openly gay and sadomasochistic photographs: this show was assembled by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and was partly funded (in the amount of $30,000) by the National Endowment for the Arts. There were no problems in Philadelphia, but negative publicity exploded just before the Mapplethorpe show was to open in Washington’s venerable Corcoran Gallery of Art, located only a block from the White House. The director preemptively canceled the exhibit, an arbitrary move that caused
outrage in the art world (she resigned under fire by the end of the year). The Mapplethorpe show was quickly taken by a local progressive venue, the Washington Project for the Arts, where it drew huge crowds. When it moved to the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, however, there were serious repercussions: police entered the gallery, and the director was charged with obscenity. He was put on trial but later acquitted by a jury.

  Political activism on the left was unusually intense in the 1980s because of the AIDS epidemic, which the Reagan administration was accused of having initially ignored. Mapplethorpe, who had died of AIDS at age 42 in 1989, was viewed as an apostle of sexual liberation. As an admirer of Mapplethorpe, I argued at the time that this was a sentimental misreading of his work, whose dark, punitive hierarchies were partly a residue of his childhood Catholicism. Another seething ex-Catholic, Madonna, was also challenging taboos at the time: in 1989, her music video for “Like a Prayer,” which showed her receiving the stigmata, making love to the animated statue of a black saint, and dancing in her slip in front of a field of burning crosses, caused Pepsi-Cola to cancel her $5 million endorsement contract.