Hyper-Low American Church Aesthetics

We are doing historical theology in the parking lot.

The strip mall church: often presented online as the ultimate symbol of American Christians dropping the ball somewhere along the historical timeline. Plastic signs and conference room vibes. You can post it next to a huge gothic cathedral and say something disparaging. Everyone loves that. The font on these particular windows even looks like a Nike ad: “Just do it.”

It writes itself. Look at this, then look at this medieval basilica. You can draw whatever conclusion you want: these people don’t care about aesthetics, relationship of beauty to the divine, maybe they mean well but their tradition has failed them. It’s a great box to stand on. It even looks like a box.

But is that really why it looks this way, and why this exists?

Maybe.

But perhaps there are other factors. Complex historical social material aesthetic conditions that led us here, to the Church of Eternal Life next to an H&R Block, and they both have the same linoleum floors.

Let’s go, to... the Amish.

I have mentioned that I live in a place with a variety of what they call “plain people”. Amish, some Mennonites, some Pentecostals, who do “the thing” where they all dress similarly. Here’s a scene that occurs in my life with relative frequency:

Did you know, some of these Amish and plain people have no buttons?

Some of the Mennonite men have no buttons on their clothes. I noticed this.

What a guy told me is that in some communities they have no visible buttons because it would start a kind of aesthetic arms race. One guy gets silver buttons, one guy gets brass buttons, now it’s a thing.

Now one person has engraved buttons, and now everyone is noticing the buttons and talking about them.

This is interesting, because this banning of buttons is kind of an anti-aesthetic maneuver. It’s chaining up the aesthetics to the maximum extent. But these people often look great. They at least don’t look bad.

It’s odd to ask what these people’s relationship to aesthetics is. They look good. All their stuff looks pretty nice, to me.

But is that incidental? It doesn’t seem like they sat down and decided what materials looked nice and chose wood and certain cloths for aesthetic reasons.

In fact, it kind of feels like the opposite. This is just what made sense for them to use at that time, either for practical reasons (availability, cost) and it got frozen in that modality due to an aversion to modern technology. Or, it just makes sense for them to use it.

It’s very aesthetic, but that’s because of the practicality of the materials. If these same people, with the same mentality today, started their whole operation anew, maybe they’d be using whatever materials normal people use today.

In a way, the strip mall church and this below image are similar:

I believe it’s universal to class the Mennonites as a form of Anabaptist. I would describe the Anabaptists as one of the main Christian wings with the largest aversion to partnering with any form of state power. That’s one reason why they got killed all over Europe, but were able to set up shop here, in the US.

Regardless of real “on paper” historical influences, the Anabaptist orientation towards state power definitely reverberated out into the nascent US consciousness, in my opinion. You can feel this deep in the American vibe: separation of church and state, government skepticism, and so on.

The core of this view is also generally pathologized online, at least in some circles I run in, so, although I do not necessarily subscribe to this, let’s take one second and hear it straight from one of them. It’s interesting to see how someone might make a spiritual case for completely avoiding any engagement with the state, even if we don’t agree.

This is David Bercot:

An analogy I got from him regarding this was, basically:

God, the kingdom of heaven, all that - is like white paint. It’s totally white. Evil, the devil - that’s like black paint.

Part of the operation of evil is that it doesn’t care how much white paint you add to it.

The devil is fine with you pouring as much white paint into the black paint as you want. Doesn’t matter. Go for it.

He just wants to get a drop of black paint into the white paint. Then, it’s no longer white. Then it’s over. No more white paint.

So, it’s kind of all or nothing.

This is how he depicts the Anabaptist view of engaging with state power. You can go in there and try and do all the good you want, and maybe will be able to, but ultimately, you’re going to get some of the black paint in your white paint. Then, it’s over. So, you just shouldn’t do that.

You may not feel this way, but it’s relevant, as that feeling towards the state, power, money, all that, really reverberates out into American Christianity. I think few American Christians would articulate it that way, but some of that is in the mix.

And, it’s related to this:

Because to get an indoor situation that looks like the below image, you need to partner with state power.

No one is a bigger fan of this than me. I’m an artist so: gold, the black and white pillars, I’m there. Let’s go. But this requires a lot of straight up brute force to obtain:

On the opposite end of the spectrum, one interesting case study for the American Christian aesthetic is a place called Cane Ridge in Kentucky. A movement started here called the Restoration Movement. Their whole thing was “just being Christian” and dissolving all denominations, charters, all that stuff. Check it (these were the most fitting images I could easily find):

It’s literally a cabin. And it looks nice, at least nicer than the Holiday Inn conference room vibes, because it’s a wooden cabin.

But, if something like that happened now... it probably would be in a strip mall or random semi-commercial building.

At the time, they didn’t have to worry about how it looked.

Because, at the time, there was no linoleum flooring or plastic walls. Everything just kind of looked nice, I guess.

All the above factors came together before cheap materials took on that Holiday Inn conference room feeling. So, the aversion to cheap materials wasn’t baked in. They had no real reason to build a fence around the modern plastic aesthetic, because it didn’t exist yet.

If all this coalesced now, maybe they would. Maybe there would be a rule like, “no gold, but also no plastic.” It’s interesting to think about what this would have resulted in.

I often see people post pictures of cheap looking church buildings online in a hostile or derogatory way, and it’s easy to frame it in terms of a denomination’s apathy or ignorance. It’s harder to grapple with it in terms of interlocking ideological, social, and historical factors that, like anything, are a result of their time.

Pizza Hut church:

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[1]. Footnote, related: If you’d like to read more about something related to this (Anabaptists, America, third position non-mainline Protestant groups), here’s a previous post.

[2]. My manager said I should plug ‘Babyology’, my second book, here. It has a comic about the Restoration Movement, and one about Menno Simons, who the Mennonites are named after. That’s linked here.