Culture counts

I note in passing two recent books which deal with the past and future of the relationship between religion and culture. Peter Conrad's Creation: Artists, Gods and Origins is reviewed by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books. David Martin reviews Rogers Scruton's Culture Counts for the TLS. Both reviews are in fact useful and important contributions in themselves.

Royal School of Church Music Fellowships

The Church Times of 25 January 2008 lists new fellowships of the Royal School of Church Music, to be presented in Liverpool Cathedral on 17 May. It's a measure of how far the stylistic range of church music has broadened over the past four to five decades that the fellows-elect include both leading figures in the Anglican choral tradition (Stephen Cleobury) and influential songwriters in a more contemporary/popular style (Graham Kendrick).

Kendrick is a particularly interesting choice, having been at the forefront of the contemporary Christian music scene in the 1970s and 1980s, but within his stylistic range has always sought to write contemporary hymns as well as choruses and worship songs with the rock/pop song's verse-chorus format. In addition, his career/ministry mirrors (and indeed has helped to shape) many aspects of the recent history of evangelical Christianity in Britain: a willingness to embrace and work with elements of youth and counter-cultures in the sixties and seventies; the growth of new sorts of Christian publishing and recording industry in the 1970s and 1980s in which evangelicals were disproportionately prominent (Kendrick has been a prolific producer of songbooks and worship collections); the resurgent confidence of evangelical Christianity in the 1980s (Kendrick's 'Marches for Jesus' arguably capture this mood better than almost anything else in the period); the broadening of the evangelical movement in the 1990s (reflected in several Kendrick re-workings of traditional hymns); a corresponding 'mainstreaming' of evangelicalism since the 1980s (Kendrick's 'The Servant King', 'Shine Jesus Shine' and others were amongst the first of their kind to make their way into the new generation of denominational hymnals created in the 1990s and subsequently - although by no means the first to be written in a popular style). Perhaps we should not be surprised at the number of parallels here given Pete Ward's comment that the heart of charismatic-influenced evangelical experience is to be found in music and singing.

The reading cure

I note a recent piece by Blake Morrison on bibliotherapy, in which he makes a number of passing comments on the impact of the Holocaust on the idea that great art could make 'better people' (concentration camp guards being fans of Goethe and so on.) I note the similarity with John Carey's recent What Good are the Arts ? (see a Guardian review and Observer article), but wonder whether there isn't a subtler story to be written about this.

I realise that Morrison is compressing here as part of the background to his main argument. I do wonder, though, whether this supposed causal link between knowledge of this aspect of the Holocaust and wider attitudes to art has not come about by the gradual metamorphosis of a convenient illustration ("Not all art lovers are good people - see these examples") into an active cause ("Knowledge of the concentration camps made (or should have made) such a belief impossible".) I suspect that just such an understanding of the power of art persisted, in the full knowledge of these crimes. We need a fuller historical account of understandings of the nature of art, in which to place the impact of the Holocaust.

The History Man

A most stimulating reflection by David Lodge on Malcolm Bradbury's 1975 novel, carried in the Guardian. Lodge argues that a novel that was a critique of left-wing radicalism from a liberal humanist perspective was subsequently appropriated and (in Bradbury's view) misused by the Thatcherite right as evidence of danger in the universities.

Lodge notes the reaction of 'moralists' to the sexual content of the novel. I wonder, though, whether there was any wider reaction than this amongst Christian commentators. To what degree (if any) was the novel taken as evidence of secularisation ? It seems to me that it might have on the one hand been mistaken as propaganda for the views of Howard Kirk, but on the other hand been welcomed as a diagnosis of a problem.

From measurement to judgement

Culture secretary James Purnell has been widely reported as signalling a new approach in the funding of the arts, as laid out in a review by Sir Brian McMaster, to be published this week. It is trailed as marking a shift away from the pursuit of audience targets towards judgement of worth, and a focus on "excellence." (See an interview in Saturday's Guardian.) One of McMaster's former colleagues at the Arts Council, Paddy Masefield, has described the views expressed as "elitist and now out-of-touch and ageist".

Historically, what I think is interesting is how we got to this point. In the very early wartime and post-war days, the Arts Council, and its predecessor CEMA, would have made no bones about the primacy of 'excellence', and would have had no qualms about who should adjudicate. We knew what art was, and who was good at it. For religious commentators, this consensus was founded on the enduring core of 'Christian civilisation', although many thought it under threat even then. With the enormous diversification in artistic activity since then, there would seem to have been a catastrophic loss of confidence in the criteria by which 'excellence' might be judged. That story, of the disintegration of an integral idea of culture, is one that is yet to be written.
It remains to be seen how easy it is now to recover that confidence in our judgement. (For what it's worth, I think it high time that the word "elitist" be gracefully retired. It now serves no useful non-polemical purpose.)