Reluctant Alliance

The following is a short excerpt from a chapter in a new book, Crossroads: Art and Religion in American Life (see "Digest" entry, page 36). The complete essay examines the history of art and religion in this country from the debates of eighteenth-century philosophers through the attitudes of contemporary artists. This excerpt describes only the first few phases in the relationship between the two. It is published here with permission of the author, Neil Harris, and of the Henry Luce Foundation.

Art and religion have occupied spasmodically uncomfortable roles in the drama that is American civilization. These complex sets of practices, beliefs, and institutions have moved along very different trajectories, occupying very different positions today than at our national inception. Artists and collectors, infant industries at the nation's birth, feeble compared with their European counterparts — poorly organized, meagerly trained, provincial in scope — have emerged two centuries later as a cosmopolitan multimedia museum and tourist-sensitive empire, competing successfully around the world in almost every area of expression. Institutionalized religion, primarily Protestant in the founding states of the Union, a fundamental shaper of republican values (as well as an occasional antagonist), its ministers a string of opinion leaders and mind trainers, has developed into a bewilderingly diverse and politically diffuse array of congregants, vast in numbers and, when energized, politically influential, but far distant from the central status it once enjoyed in American life.

Despite these differing stories, today's art and religious communities exhibit some striking parallels, containing in their midst outspoken outsiders, scornful of much that surrounds them and capable of providing transcendent standards by which to measure the progress (or devolution) of civil society. Materialism, triumphal scientism, political compromise, status seeking, big government, and social conformity have variously served as targets of their scorn. But despite some common adversaries, religion and the arts have, more often than not, been reluctant allies, rarely drawn together in cooperative acts of discovery. Theirs has been an extremely occasional and generally unfulfilled coalition. The bases for this tradition of mutual suspicion or indifference deserve attention. They are linked to many of the most fundamental features of American life. While casual or superficial gestures will do little to change the connection in the future, understanding why so much distance separates these two areas of American life should be helpful as a first step.

Eighteenth-Century Debates

Certainly the linkages between religion and the arts attracted relatively little attention for a good part of our history, and did not pique the interest of our early political philosophers. In significant ways, however, each realm could be seen as problematic to the commonweal. Configured quite differently in our formative era of political culture, what mattered most about them was their relationship to power, and their potential abuse by enemies of republicanism.

To several of America's eighteenth-century philosophers, organized religion, in many of its traditionally arranged and officially established institutional forms, comprised a plausible threat to a pluralistic civil order. Exclusive claims to truth could endanger popular sovereignty. History, as the patriots read and wrote it, was filled with instances of religious bigotry and heartbreaking violence, a storehouse of horrible examples that could be paraded at will. Pierre Bayle's Historical Dictionary, published in Rotterdam in 1696, and Voltaire's extensive commentaries were part of the European Enlightenment's literature of historical exposure so amply represented in the best American libraries.

To be sure, little of the radical anticlericalism erupting in France found expression in America. This was fundamentally and fervently Christian culture, confident that its declaration of independence and geographical expansion were fulfilling a divine mission. But there was the convenient target of the Roman Catholic Church and its popes, inquisitions, and Jesuit order. And there were also troubling concerns about the post-Reformation legacy of Protestant intolerance and the epidemics of enthusiasm generated by mass revivalism. “Do you think that a Protestant Popedom is annihilated in America?” John Adams, one of the most vigorous detectors of religious intolerance, asked Thomas Jefferson.1 Adams worried, particularly, about an alliance between the Presbyterians and the Methodists that might overwhelm the many other sects, whose diversity protected religious freedom.

The Constitutional provision forbidding the granting of special privileges, or anything else smacking of religious establishment, reflected convictions about the dangers of unchecked power as much as it did wariness about religious commitments. Joining any specific claims to divine authority with governmental control threatened religious choice. Thomas Jefferson, author of the renowned Statute of Religious Freedom enacted by his own state in 1786, also ensured that his new University of Virginia would have no sectarian ties and be fully under the control of the civil government. Jefferson himself would be charged with infidelity, but nothing that he did was incompatible with practicing Christianity; during the era of the American Revolution and the new republic, American leaders professed deep religious convictions to considerable popular satisfaction.2 Officially licensed sectarianism was the real problem.

There was no such legal concern about the arts, whose power over human minds and bodies was far more a theoretical than an actual threat to eighteenth-century colonials. Few Americans of that day had ever encountered the work of noted painters, sculptors, and architects. But a legacy of suspicion — about great expense, luxury, and mercenary skills — had been passed on during the iconoclastic years of the English Commonwealth and has been perpetuated by both theological and political theorists ever since.

A queasiness over extensive display, a lack of ease with gorgeous pageantry and elaborate ritual, all reflected this tradition. As religious instruments they were, of course, associated with Catholicism. In politics they could be said to epitomize the weakness of the human mind and its susceptibility to nonrational persuasion. To republican purists, ceremonies, costumes, and pomp represented an outmoded reliance upon sensory management, testimony to fallen man. They were indeed accepted under special circumstances — the flourishing Freemasons testified to that — but hedged round with controls. The etymology of the word propaganda itself testified to an intimate connection between power and creativity. The line between art and artifice was not easy to determine, particularly when art was pressed into the service of the state.

Nineteenth-Century Developments

Inevitably, of course, such suspicions, about both art and religion, were lessened by the practicalities of political life.

After the flurry of controversies produced by debates over disestablishment in the early part of the century, electoral campaigns, particularly on a national level, forced truly heterodox notions out of sight. Protestant clergymen and politicians worked amiably together on a range of issues including temperance, sabbatarianism, divorce law, and missionary diplomacy. Alexis de Tocqueville, the greatest commentator on nineteenth-century American institutions, insisted that the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marched in the same direction. Americans, he wrote, “combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.” And this, he went on, was good, for “what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity?”3 Fewer Americans now appeared to worry about the relationship between the state and institutionalized religion — when it was Protestant, that is. Controversy centered on the perceived threat of Roman Catholicism, whose growth revived older fears about the power of priests and prelates. In the nineteenth century, unlike the twentieth century, no endless series of cases studded the judicial calendar, defining the limits of public support for religion.4

A similar softening surrounded the status of art after fifty years of national independence. Despite older grumbling about the dangers of any alliance between art and government, it was parsimony rather than principle that determined the low level of public support for art. The opponents of Congressional subsidies of monuments, heroic statuary, and historical paintings to adorn the national capital based their arguments on economy. To convince them otherwise, artists like John Trumbull, Gilbert Stuart, and Horatio Greenough pointed to how patriotism and public education benefited through the representation of national history. Art, like oratory, could elaborate upon the great achievements of the past, and point the way to a more glorious future. “We have no king — no court,” explained one supporter of patriotic monuments. “We need something tangible to cling to.... We need the outward types.”5 Neither the chisel nor the pencil posed a threat to republican security.

Clergymen did not need to worry about the themes proposed by painters and sculptors. Most artists were breathless in their attachment to majority values and almost never raised disparaging voices. When critiques appeared, as in the landscape allegories of painters like Thomas Cole, who attacked American expansionism, insensate development, and materialism, they were rarely explicit and even more rarely imitated. Sentimental family genre, nationalistic scenery, pious veneration of great leaders, these were staple subjects for the painters, while idealized virtue and scriptural (or classical) history constituted a reservoir for the sculptors.

The intimate commingling of aesthetic and moral issues was strengthened (or demonstrated) by the popularity of John Ruskin's philosophy in midcentury America.6 Historians have pointed out how eagerly Americans unfamiliar or uneasy with artistic vocabularies welcomed the opportunity to discuss art in overtly moral terms. This was how Americans read Ruskin. Emphasis lay on the lessons that could be drawn from a particular work. And other commentators stressed the need for rapid and unencumbered recognition by the ordinary viewer. All this put a premium on directness, clarity, and simplicity, and militated against art that was too obscure or complex in character. Thus the sculptor, Robert Mills, insisted in the early nineteenth century that “in true art, there should be no themes difficult of interpretation,” while his colleague, Thomas Crawford, creator of the statue of freedom that stands atop the Capitol dome, declared that Americans “are not able to appreciate too refined and intricate allegorical representations.”7 Viewed in the most positive light, this liberating philosophy repudiated the complex, imitative, repetitive, and usually recondite system of references that had characterized public sculpture (and many paintings) for centuries. The call for art to be more inclusive and directly appealing had been a reform slogan for a long time before nineteenth-century American artists and critics had adopted it, although some — like Horatio Greenough — would dignify the cause with elevated and impassioned prose.

But viewed from another angle, stylistic simplicity might easily degenerate into reductionism, an insistence that artists avoid challenging the intelligence or education of their audience by invoking allusions that lay beyond their normal frame of reference. Such a philosophy armed moralists with licenses to create art criticism, allowing them — as opposed to artists — to set the terms of expression and evaluate the choice of subjects. If didactic intelligibility became the principal test for artistic success, then the best interpreters were, in fact, moralists and pedagogues.

Neil Harris is Preston and Sterling Morton Professor of American History at the University of Chicago, and studies the evolution of cultural institutions.

Notes
1 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, Quincy, May 18, 1817, Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams. New York: Clarion Books, 1971, p. 515. Adams was equally skeptical about the rule of the French philosophies.

2 For a recent commentary arguing that Jefferson changed his views about religion and public life during the 1790s and thereafter, and, like many prominent contemporaries, believed in the need to support its role, see James H. Hutson, Religion and the Founding of the American Republic. Washington: Library of Congress, 1998.

3 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. New York: Knopf, Everyman's Library, 1994, vol. I, pp. 306-307.

4 Although there were, certainly, efforts to create legislative endorsement of Christian practices. See Gaines M. Foster, “A Christian Nation: Signs of a Covenant,” John Bodnar, ed., Bonds of Affection: Americans Define their Patriotism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, pp. 120-138.

5 William Hoppin, Transactions of the American Art-Union, 3 (1846), p. 20.

6 This is best described in Roger B. Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840-1900. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967.

7 Mills, as quoted in H.M. Pierce Gallagher, Robert Mills, Architect of the Washington Monument, 1781-1855. New York: Columbia University Press, 1935, p. 105. Crawford, as quoted in Robert L. Gale, Thomas Crawford, American Sculptor. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964, pp. 109-110. Both of these quotations can be found in Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society New York: Braziller, 1966, pp. 189-190.