Author’s Note: Greetings, everyone! I hope today’s post finds you well. After the Christmas holiday, my family and I vanished into the mountains of western North Carolina and entered “monk mode.” We returned last week, but I had to postpone my usual Friday post due to a visit to Urgent Care. All is well!
Not to worry, the Friday Unscripted Video sessions will return next week for paid subscribers. Why wasn’t there one this week? Because I’ve been preparing for The Black Barn Online Event.
The Black Barn Online Event
Tomorrow I am joining my friend and fellow writer Christie Purifoy for a Workshop on her Black Barn Online Community. Here are the details:
Where: Black Barn Online Community Workshop
When: Live Zoom 1 p.m. EST - The Zoom will be recorded, so you can watch it afterwards if you can’t join us live. If you join us live, this will be a great time for you to ask questions about beauty, The Beauty Chasers book, or anything covered in my workshop.
What: Beauty Chaser Workshop
Session 1 - Slow
Session 2 - See
Session 3 - Participate
Recapturing the Wonder of the Divine
Today’s article was part of a longer piece of writing that served as the impetus for my book The Beauty Chasers. I published a version of this article originally on The Gospel Coalition. I had just watched the Super Bowl LIV halftime show (2020) and was repulsed by its lewdness, especially because my daughters were watching.
The Superbowl halftime show reflects our culture's values. The entertainment our culture values seeks to annihilate beauty. And an attack on beauty is an attack on life itself.
Read the article with this background in mind. Then check out the Community Conversation questions and share your thoughts.
The Desecration of Beauty
The late Oxford writer and philosopher Roger Scruton said, “Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it does not matter.” He called our culture’s loss of beauty the “postmodern desecration.”1 Scruton chose “desecration” carefully. It’s a religious word that implies the spoiling of what is sacred.
After watching a segment of the Super Bowl LIV halftime show (2020), I couldn’t help but think about Scruton’s words a few years ago. Lewdness replaced loveliness; empowered self-expression supplanted beauty. I was appalled and embarrassed.
If you want a glimpse of the soul of America, the Super Bowl provides a cultural summary of what our country values most.
And yet, to some, the halftime show works as a glorious display of “artists” expressing themselves in culturally and artistically significant ways.
Is this the bar for art in our culture? How far we’ve fallen from the grip of the truly beautiful. What does it mean to be an artist in the 21st century? Is pop art really art? Where did pop culture come from, and why does it define our society in such a powerful way today?
These questions stirred in me after watching the halftime show. Whenever I observe a cultural trend, in this case, the desecration of beauty, I always ask myself where this way of thinking originates. And, much the same way that Carl Trueman was forced to rewind the pages of history to uncover how the modern self rose to prominence,2 I had to trace western thought to see where beauty was being banished and replaced with the self.
Indeed, I dug so deep for my original manuscript of The Beauty Chasers that I had to cut over 35,000 words. Don’t worry; I’m not pasting that content into this post. But I will say this. We all must understand at this point in our culture that there is an insidiousness at play—an intentional desecration of all that is sacred in this world.
Recently, N.S. Lyons wrote about the nihilism of our society and how it was foretold by C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien over 70 years ago.
This post is enormous in length, but it is worth reading if you have a spare hour or so because Lyons uses the works of Tolkien and Lewis to show how they foresaw the current disenchantment we find ourselves. You don’t have to agree with all that Lyons says. But I believe it’s time to talk straight about the powers at work behind our culture. Here’s a snippet from Lyons:
The disenchantment and demoralization of a world produced by the foolishly blinkered “debunkers” of the intelligentsia; the catastrophic corruption of genuine education; the inevitable collapse of dominating ideologies of pure materialist rationalism and progress into pure subjectivity and nihilism; the inherent connection between the loss of any objective value and the emergence of a perverse techno-state obsessively seeking first total control over humanity and then in the end the final abolition of humanity itself … Tolkien and Lewis foresaw all of the darkest winds that now gather in growing intensity today.
Short History of Desecration
How did we reach the point where naked self-expression (often quite literally) is the new artistic standard?
Before the Enlightenment, Scruton says, artists considered beauty sacred, and it served as the telos (goal) of their work. But beauty lost its sacred position for the artist and became definable by the person. We see this subjective turn in the words of David Hume, who in 1757 wrote an essay titled “Of the Standard of Taste”, from which we get the axiom, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”3
Beauty is not a quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.
One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible to beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others.4
Hume’s famous statement is consistent with the dominant rallying cry of the Enlightenment: freedom.
A few decades after Hume, German philosopher Immanuel Kant touted “enlightenment” as the process of growing up; to stop relying on the masters of old to dictate what we are to feel, think, love, and believe. “The public use of one’s reason,” Kant wrote, “must be free at all times, and this alone can bring enlightenment to mankind.”
Interestingly, the Enlightenment also coincided with a general decline of the arts in the church and in Christian patronage of art. As autonomy in art and philosophy grew, the church allowed its influence in these areas to wane.
One ramification of a world that throws off the shackles of authority in its quest for intellectual freedom is this: icons of power are treated with contempt—among them, God and his church.
Just as artists turned inward and defined beauty for themselves, philosophers championed the human will over a sovereign will. That is to say, if a will finds satisfaction within itself, then that is enough; a person's will is its own end. The will of an artist—whatever they want to express—becomes the only arbiter of artistic “meaning.”
In its abandonment of God as an absolute standard, relativism not only degrades morality; it also desecrates beauty.
Expression, Transgression, Empowerment
What’s left when beauty falls from something out there, beyond the self, to something originating within us? What’s left when we lose a transcendent concept of the beautiful? Simply the naked will asserting itself; subjective expression presenting itself as beautiful.
What’s left is “art” celebrated not for its inherent quality, meaning, or beauty but simply because it represents a point of view (especially an underrepresented or marginalized point of view). What’s left is not a value of craft but a value of creative transgression—thinking up new ways to push boundaries, upend convention, disturb, shock, and reinvent. What’s left is Lady Gaga and the exhausting need for constant novelty or Billie Eilish singing a sickly, goth version of “Yesterday” at the Oscars. What’s left is the empty provocation of Rupi Kaur’s “poetry” or Lars Von Trier’s sordid visual aesthetic.
Relativism not only degrades morality; it also desecrates beauty.
While shooting a cosmetic commercial, Taylor Swift said, “Unique and different is the next generation of beautiful.”5 For Swift and most of our modern culture, beauty is an iconoclastic rejection of any standard that came before or is presently asserted and an embrace of the utter freedom of the self to define beauty however one wishes. Again, it’s not just about disregarding moral norms—it’s about transgressing them, destroying them. Desecration.
That’s why any provocative display in pop culture is now championed as art. The more it ruffles feathers and makes people shake their heads or cover their children’s eyes, the better. The more it demolishes the supposedly oppressive old standards of beauty and replaces them with whatever the artist wants to do or say, the more “empowering” it is. And if anything has replaced beauty as the highest telos of art in today’s world, it is empowerment.
But this new world of desecrated beauty isn’t empowering. It rather imprisons our culture in an inescapable vortex of ceaseless, shrill, and ultimately unsolvable fights over whose expression matters most. But lost in the vortex is beauty itself—and a world without beauty is a terrifying place.
Path Back to Beauty
What are we to do? The world desperately needs someone to point the way back to beauty. It is not enough to lament beauty’s demise. Something must be done.
Writing about St. Francis of Assisi, G. K. Chesterton said it is the great paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it the most. Chesterton believed when a generation gets too worldly, it is up to the saint, or the church, to rebuke it. St. Francis embodied this cultural rebuke through the life he lived. The saint is “not what the people want, but rather what the people need,” Chesterton says; the saint is someone who runs incongruous with the modern world.6
It is not enough to lament beauty’s demise. Something must be done.
We need bold artisans and storytellers, entrepreneurs and CEOs, managers and homeschool parents—Christians from all walks of life who will bear witness to beauty in their everyday lives.
The path back to beauty can begin with the simple act of seeing. We can take a “marveling” walk to admire God’s creation and “collect unusual things” such as rocks or wildflowers. Walking this path should also include changing our perspective of beauty’s prominence in our theology. It is no mere consolation of our faith; it is foundational.
We can also cease the crass modernist tendency to build efficient black boxes and call them churches and give more thought to how beautiful architecture can inspire awe, signal grandeur, and teach humility. What might it look like for churches to employ artists in residence or commission a poet laureate, or sponsor a community art exhibition?
C. S. Lewis said, “Our business is to present that which is timeless in the particular language of our own age.” And he blazed a trail with a baptized imagination and beauty as his tools. We, too, should get down to business and point the world to true beauty again.
Community Conversation
How can the Church bring the virtue of beauty back into the cultural lexicon?
Is entertainment something Christians should seek to "redeem" (as is the common notion held by many Christians), or is it something we should not participate in or consume?
If the focus of art in today's world is self-expression, even transgression, then how does a Christian participate in art? What should be the Christian telos or goal for his or her artwork?
How do we talk to our youth about entertainment and the loss of beauty in it? Is it even worth talking about? If so, why?
Why do you think beauty has been banished by our culture and most of the advanced modern world?
You are more than welcome to copy this article, share it with your friends, family, or small group, and discuss it using the prompts above.
Post Script
In the coming weeks and months, I want to unpack more of what it means to live in a world of disenchantment and what we can, as Christians, do about it. If you’ve read my book, The Beauty Chasers: Recapturing the Wonder of the Divine, consider these posts as continuing the conversation.
If you haven’t picked up the book yet, check it out. It’s actually close to 25% off right now. If you’re into Book Clubs, stay tuned next week. I have a big, fun announcement to make.
Notes
Roger Scruton et al., “Beauty and Desecration,” City Journal, December 23, 2015, https://www.city-journal.org/html/beauty-and-desecration-13172.html. See also Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, Very short introductions 262 (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Carl R. Trueman and Rod Dreher, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2020).
David Hume, Selected Essays, ed. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar, 1st ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 136–137.
Ibid.
Swift was announced by the cosmetic company Cover Girl as the face of a new generation on December 14, 2010. See COVERGIRL, “Taylor Swift Announced as the Face of New COVERGIRL Cosmetic Line, NatureLuxe,” accessed September 13, 2021,
G. K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2002).
I think that the desecration of beauty also coincides with the desecration of truth. Everything has now become relevant. Perhaps this is part of what Pope Benedict XVI meant when he warned us about the dictatorship of relativism.