From Icons to Funko Pops
How did we get here?
This post started off as a Tweet, but I realized that I didn’t have enough space to write what I wanted to say. I could have written a thread, but I think the algorithm isn’t showing threads like it used to.
The Enlightenment-driven secularization of society in the 18th and 19th centuries created a vacuum in the religious needs of man. Make no mistake, we need religion. Of course, the true reason we need religion is because God created us to be in union with Him and it is through religion that man can be in union with God in this fallen world. If (ironically) we want to relativize this argument and rely only on empirical data (an unfortunate consequence of the Enlightenment in itself), all you have to do is look at human history - Every single human society has “developed” “a” “religion.”
Religion, mind you, is not the same thing as a belief in God. It is possible for someone to believe in God or gods and not follow a religion. But you can also believe in food but not eat, see how much good that does you. The “spiritual but not religious” phenomenon is a fundamentally modern phenomenon and is not what I am referring to when I am referring to “religion.” If I must use a relativized definition for religion, I will use the definition provided by Fr. Stephen De Young in the Lord of Spirits podcast:
Religion is a way of being in the world that encompasses all levels of reality and expresses itself in practices.
But back to the vacuum. The religious vacuum left by Enlightened secularization necessarily had to be “filled.” And necessarily anything that is not religious cannot fill the gap left by religion - If religion is the method in which we come into communion with the Most High, nothing but divinely revealed religion can fill that space. But the 18th and 19th century Europeans tried. They tried by using possibly the next-best thing: Art.
Art is a result of the creative spirt of man, that spirit we have by virtue of being made in the image of the Creator, and using that virtue creates something that participates in Beauty, an Uncreated Energy of God, that is, God Himself. The religion which was deemed to be a dark, superstition by the Enlighten philosophes was put away but the subtle shadows remained. Art in the 18th and 19th centuries became sacralized, the artists became the high priests of European society. As historian Timothy C.W. Blanning points out in his book The Romantic Revolution: A History, Europeans of the Romantic era in the shadow of the Enlightenment made pilgrimages to locations related to their favorite creators and even fictional stories, called people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau a “prophet” and “saint,” and Romantic hero Beethoven’s funeral eulogy did not once mention God but invoked Art in the same rhetorical language as God.
Art gives man the opportunity to contemplate the transcendental, possibly the closest experience man can have to the drawing effects of religion without religion itself. But it must necessarily fall short of the mark.
Art was never strong enough to hold society together like religion once held it together. It could not hold back the tide of nihilism and atomism that the Industrial Revolution, the Darwinian Revolution, and the World Wars unleashed upon the world. It could not keep people’s spirits up. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
Art was sacralized and made a replacement for religion. In order to carry this task out, it tried to make itself as pretty as possible — Artists spoke about how “deep” their works were, unable to be understood by the “philistine public.” Art had to come from the artist’s heart, not simply through conventional artistic stylistic and technical rules. Art had to be made for art’s sake, not for the sake of some end. Art was the end, not a means. But when art failed to hold things together, art was made profound.
Trying to use art to find meaning is pointless, they said. The fact is there is no meaning, they said. Art began to fall from grace. It was torn down from its high place. but there was no return to religion and thus many continued to use art to fill in the gaps in their hearts even while the transcendental properties that were once deemed crucial to art fell away. Now we do not even worship the transcendental art, we worship art that is a means in itself but not an end. By definition, this is a consumer art - And make no mistake, nearly all art (even the good ones) are by definition consumer art when we are in a capitalist society.
Without many even realizing, our religious impulses have been hijacked by companies.
Woe to us! Now our communions are fandoms and our saints are fictional characters made to sell toys! Our scriptures are mass-produced Hollywood films engineered in a corporate writer’s room! We make pilgrimages to conventions and call authorial intent the “word of God!” The virtues that the tradition once sought to educate us have been replaced by the propositions propagated by marketing teams! Once we celebrated holy feast days and now we celebrate anniversaries of the founding of companies and speak “May the Fourth be with you!” The same people who sneer at the religious for pouring over encyclicals and Church councils will then themselves scoff at Spider-Man fans for not knowing about a minor character who appeared in an issue in 1989! Our icons are toys and funko pops!