The Ill-tuned Moral Discriminator
A much-needed corrective to the mainline evangelical church in America.
I’m continuing to enjoy Jared Wilson’s The Storied Life. As I was reading this past Saturday afternoon, I came across this helpful insight (see below) as he was discussing “Story as Liturgy.” In it, he points out something I’ve long pondered; namely, the over-active filter that the mainline evangelical church and Christian has when it comes to film, literature, and the arts.
I’m hoping it provides some good food-for-thought for you, as it did me.
Christians, in my estimation, are free to write about anything. It's not the subject matter that is off limits; it's certain ways of presenting that subject matter that may be. Christians should not be afraid to make the moral judgments the Scriptures enjoin them to make. There is such a thing as immoral art, though it is not immoral simply in the subject matter but in the approach to the subject matter.
A story is not what it is about; it's how it is about it.
The late Gordon-Conwell professor Richard F. Lovelace remarked,
This is the most serious factor limiting artistic creativity among Evangelicals today. The moral discriminator of the Evangelical community is so ill-tuned that it reacts against and casts out of the church nearly any creative expression which depicts life as freely as the Bible does. Evangelicals generally do not understand that what determines the edifying or corrosive power of a work of art is not the materials it uses and the actions it describes, but rather its moral outlook toward those materials and actions.
