Over the weekend I (re)watched V for Vendetta.

As I watched I was reminded that although the relentless noise of media can be used to numb people, good art can also jolt people out of their slumber.

This is of course why art and literature are among the first things to be censored in totalitarian regimes. The powers know artists are a threat, because they can make people see the world differently.  In the words of Evey, “Artists use lies to tell the truth.”

Through the power of story, moviegoers watching V for Vendetta find themselves sympathetic to the “terrorist” V, and opposed to a fictional government that is meant to be a parody of their own (nationalist, explicitly religious, homophobic, at war with Muslim extremists, etc.).

Similarly,  the film Avatar succeeded in subverting the ideology of whole theaters full of people, getting them to cheer against the side that was meant to represent their own military and economic exploitation of others. (On an artistic level I have mixed feelings about Avatar, but at that at least it was quite successful).

Now my point here is not to argue that the ideologies driving V for Vendetta or Avatar are correct, but rather to demonstrate the rather fascinating way such art forms can subvert the way we look at the world – often without us even realizing it at the time.

Which leads me to pose a question: how often does contemporary Christian art, film, or music serve to subversively jolt people out of their captivity to the story of empire?

If you would only need to change a few lines in most Christian films to make them indistinguishable from Hallmark channel specials, and replace “Jesus” with “baby” in  much of our music to make it light pop-ballads, are we really doing anything more than offering sanitized versions of cultural norms?

The Church needs art and artists, but we need to encourage those artists to challenge us like the prophets and poets of old, and to provoke our culture into seeing the world in a new light, the light of the Gospel.