American Religious Liberalism

Three: Visible Liberalism: Liberal Protestant Taste Evangelism, 1850 and 1950

t h r e e Visible Liberalism Liberal Protestant Taste Evangelism, 1850 and 1950 Sa l ly M . P r o m e y It is tempting to posit a special relationship between liberal religion and visual culture—and especially between liberal religion and fine art. Liberalism comports well with certain prospects for art; the overlap between liberal theology and art theory, and between liberal theology and aesthetics, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is striking. Liberal religious authors, one af­ter another, assert affinities joining art to spirituality. The particular shape of the partnership , however, is heavily dependent on the specificities of the contexts in which conversations and connections take place. This chapter’s pages consider, first and most extensively, a range of key liberal figures of mid-­ nineteenth-­ century Protestantism in terms of their commitments to the visual arts. Having examined the shape of this engagement in the several decades around 1850, my narrative turns, by way of comparison, to the mid-­twentieth-­century liberal Protestant taste evangelism I have explored in the past.1 The moments that catch attention here are episodes in the spiritualization of art. In each instance proponents connected, in vari­ ous ways and degrees, to the institutional church advocated a sort of aesthetic spirituality, which they insisted was even more intensely available outside the church’s walls than within them. Religious liberalism has long had high expectations for art. Romanticism, from which Ameri­ can liberal thought in its Transcendentalist and Bushnell­ 76 Visible Liberalism 77 ian modes drew deeply, assigned both art and religion to the faculty of the imagination and emphasized the familial relationship by referring to the two as “sisters.”2 From the beginning, as it took shape, Protestant liberalism was “visible” in the sense that it explicitly articulated its connections to visual practices , to art, and to taste. In 1847 the Hartford Congregationalist pastor Horace Bushnell described Chris­ tian nurture as a process of moral and spiritual refinement , akin, one might justifiably argue (and he did), to the development of taste.3 Just a few years prior to the publication of his Discourses on Chris­ tian Nurture Bushnell wrote an essay defining taste as the capacity that “distinguishes the glorious and fair in all earthly things, and especially in their divinely constituted relation to truth and the life of the mind.” He continued, “The highest known example of taste is that of the Almighty, when he invents the forms, colors, and proportions, of this visible creation. . . . The whole fabric of creation is an exertion of taste.” The aim of the tasteful Christian, then, he argued, must be to discern the proximity of things to an ideal of beauty and truth designed by God as divine artist. Taste, as exercised, practiced, and ritually performed by humans, was similar to God’s taste in creation except that in humans it was “slowly cultivated and matured” and not at once “inherently complete,” as in Bushnell’s God. Human taste “is a power which goes to school, as we may say, to nature [i.e., to God’s creation], and by exercise on the forms of natural beauty, is waked into action.” Human taste, once awakened, Bushnell insisted, “is as truly original as the taste of God, and is one of the highest points of resemblance to him in [human] nature. . . . the forms it invents [i.e., the arts] . . . are all original, and are the offspring of the soul’s great liberty.” “In all the fine arts, in statuary, painting, [poetry,] music, gardening, landscape,” and dress, “the beauty created is a vehicle of truth and feeling.” The artist “fills your soul at once with the thronging images of truth—truths of the head, truths of the heart—all coming in visible shapes to be a spell upon you and fill you with their power.”4 Human taste, the ability to discern beauty and to exercise discretion in this respect, was a key constituent of liberal theology for Bushnell and his cohort and, for them, a key factor in humanity’s likeness to deity. In Bushnell’s rendering , taste was democratic in that anyone could cultivate it: taste was a “universal possibility,” open “to all.”5 Bushnell’s theology of Chris­tian nurture, dependent on a gradual process of moral and spiritual refinement, with the child imbibing much from familial surroundings and example, upped the ante for 78 Sally M. Promey religious uses...