I’ve been noticing an attitude among some Christian creatives and fans as of late. If I could use an analogy to summarize it, it would be that Christian creatives should be like Christian baseball players, and less like artists. I’m not a fan of this idea, for several reasons.

Let me expand on the analogy first. There is no Christian aspect to baseball. Baseball is a game which has a set rulebook that everyone follows to achieve an end result.Those rules are amoral, although you could easily make comparisons between them and aspects of Christian faith in a general way. You could talk about the discipline of athletes as a model to follow for a disciplined spiritual life, for example. The rules themselves aren’t Christian though, and there is no redemptive or doctrinal aspect to the sport.

The way one shows Christianity in it has little to do with the sport itself though. Sure, they may cross themselves on occasion, or make small visible signs of the faith. Maybe they wear a cross lapel pin. Or to expand it to football, they might kneel in the endzone. But what they do isn’t Christian, in the sport, because the sport has no Christian content. Their witness, if any, is by being a moral Christian pursuing a secular aim.

I think this idea is increasingly being applied to Christian creatives, but it doesn’t fit us at all. Three reasons follow.

1. Sports encourages moral discipline: Art does not.

This is in general. The communal, disciplined, accountable focus of sports to me tends to attract the kind of Christian who can be a moral exemplar. Art however tend to attract outsiders, dreamers, and people who if anything do not or can not fulfill the role of squeaky clean public believer. Dostoyesky was addicted to gambling. Francis Thompson was addicted to opium. Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor were outsiders in the south. I’m not saying that every Christian artist has to be a moral failure, or morally questionable, but to be the kind of person who looks at society critically or views the world in a different way doesn’t make always for nice, moral people. There’s a saying: “Well adjusted people make bad art.” It’s true to a sense among believers, too.

2. It makes art pointless except as a way to show competency and witness.

The point is just that we get one of our own famous, and bask in the glow of their moral witness. What they actually do only matters insofar as they get awards, and get a public spotlight. C.S. Lewis and Tolkien are good examples of this.

Tolkien is more famous for being claimed as a Christian than any real Christian aspect to his work. There’s actually a lot to dislike about LOTR in a Christian sense: the utter absence of God or priests from any real action to fight Sauron, the burdening of those least likely to resist it, the horrible predestined fate of Gollum, and the focus on great men and the country verses the proletariat and the urban. But because he was Christian, we wind up not discussing these things over admiring how well one of us wrote and how famous he is. Lewis is a minor example of this too. If he were anyone else, The Great Divorce would never have been published. People would be shocked that even in an allegory, he talks about salvation after death and universalism. Or the neo-pagan aspect in That Hideous Strength, the summoning of the pagan past (sufficiently Christianized, but in a horrible phrase to describe Merlin, “good enough to be used but not too good”). But again, fame blinds us to that.

This isn’t a case of bad art being loved by the Christian market, like Thomas Kinkade. This is a case where all that matters is that we get our man in to receive critical acclaim. What they actually write, well…

3. Creatives can’t do this.

I am a sinner.

You all know me by now. I’m combative, a bit manic-depressive, prone to angry ideologies or retorts about the world, etc. All I like to do is art: I’m not a pastor or priest, and I don’t possess even a shred of holiness. As I grow older, if anything my Christian hope relies on God rescuing me, because really, I can’t do things on my own. You see yourself failing, with no illusions.

The idea that not only do I have to excel at my craft, but be a moral exemplar too, turns me off from writing Christian content. Partly because of the media climate. People, and yes other Christians too, get joy out of finding flaws and  hammering believers with them. I know people here didn’t like Mark Driscoll, but his example really opened my eyes to what public Christianity does to its thought leaders.

We’ve gone from a faith that presupposes us to be broken sinners in needing of rescue to one that demands our every work in public be perfect and beyond reproach. It’s more than the burden of excelling at our art; it becomes about us, our lives, and our ability as a role model. It becomes self-centered, where we must focus on ourselves. And to be honest, it’s not like even Christian baseball players do all that well at it. For football, remember Tim Tebow. As soon as he didn’t deliver, he was discarded, because you can’t be a moral exemplar when no one watches you.

That burden I don’t think creatives can bear. You wind up with art written by the morally perfect people, which is often as bad as you’d expect it to be. You wind up avoiding the Eye of Sauron whenever possible, by not identifying as a Christian creative.

It’s a double whammy. The Christians don’t seem to be okay with creatives making art solely to the Christian market, yet the heap some hard demands on anyone who tries to be more. The Christian artist tries to play Christian baseball, but more often than not fails. Amy Grant gets divorced, DC Talk gets brief radio airplay before returning home to Christians, people try and fail and if the failure is bad, disappear.

I don’t write this to offer solutions. I write this mostly to identify a nagging issue in my mind. I think Christians are starting to be okay with playing a secular game, so long as we have one or two superstars we can point to and cheer for. But for creatives, it’s not good.