Artists redefine role

There are no crosses in Makoto Fujimura’s paintings. No images of Jesus gazing into the distance, or serene scenes of churches in a snow-cloaked wood.

Fujimura’s abstract works speak to his evangelical Christian faith. But to find it takes some digging.

After the 2001 terrorist strikes on the World Trade Center, three blocks from Fujimura’s home, his work explored the power of fire to both destroy and purify – themes drawn from the Christian Gospels and Dante’s “The Divine Comedy.”

“I am a Christian,” says Fujimura, 46, who founded the nonprofit International Arts Movement to help bridge the gap between the religious and art communities. “I am also an artist and creative, and what I do is driven by my faith experience.

“But I am also a human being living in the 21st century, struggling with a lot of brokenness – my own, as well as the world’s. I don’t want to use the term ‘Christian’ to shield me away from the suffering or evil that I see, or to escape in some nice ghetto where everyone thinks the same.”

By making a name for himself in the secular art world, Fujimura has become a role model for creatively wired evangelicals. They believe that their churches have forsaken the visual arts for too long and that a renaissance has begun.

Evidence is mounting to support that view. Art galleries are opening in churches, prominent seminaries are investing in new centers exploring theology and the arts, and graduates from evangelical film schools are making Hollywood movies.

These artistic evangelicals, though still relatively small in number, are striving to be creators of culture rather than imitators, says Dick Staub, a Seattle-based radio talk show host and author of “The Culturally Savvy Christian: A Manifesto for Deepening Faith and Enriching Popular Culture In an Age of Christianity-Lite” (Jossey-Bass, 256 pages, $21.95).

There is a desire, he says, to avoid inventing a parallel arts universe with Christian knockoffs for Christian audiences.

“They want to make art that connects to everybody,” says Staub. “The call is first and foremost to make good art.”

Evangelical unease with the visual arts dates to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. Andy Crouch, editorial director for Christianity Today’s Christian Vision Project – which examines how evangelicals intersect with the broader culture – notes that Protestantism traces its origins to an era when noses were snapped off sculptures in a rejection of Catholic visual tradition.

Attitudes began to change in the 1960s and 1970s, when Christian theologian Francis Schaeffer and Dutch art historian Hans Rookmaaker challenged believers to emerge from their cocoons and engage the culture, including in the arts.

Now, Crouch says, those ideas are resonating with a younger generation of believers who live in an image-saturated culture. They sense a disconnect worshipping in churches bare of anything that’s visually arresting.

“The very parched nature of evangelical visual culture is making people who have grown up in this culture thirsty for beauty,” he says.

Increasingly, that ground is being explored on seminary campuses. One of the most ambitious examples is the Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., founded in 2001 and bankrolled by a $15 million donation from a Virginia couple who earned a fortune in information technology.

The center aspires to be an evangelical arts think tank, with five stand-alone institutes focused on worship and music; film and moving images; art and architecture; drama, journalism and creative writing; and preaching and the study of the “emerging church,” which incorporates painting, dance and other fine arts into worship.

“For too long, Christian art has implied pale imitation,” says Craig Detweiler, co-director of the center’s Reel Spirituality Institute. “We’re trying to get back to the days of the Renaissance, where the church was the patron of the finest art.”

For the past two years, students primarily from Christian colleges and universities have studied and interned at galleries and graphic-design firms through the New York Center for Art and Media Studies, a satellite of Bethel University in St. Paul, Minn.

“We are not trying to recruit missionaries into New York City or anything like that,” says James Romaine, an art historian and the center’s director. “We’re helping young artists grow and become the best artists they can be.”