Flannery O’Connor On The Need For Violent Critique
Occasionally a Christian friend or colleague will express frustration with the highly critical tone I often take here towards the Church. They ask why I can’t be more positive and affirming (for that is what good leaders do, or so they say). To them I offer the words of Flannery O’Connor:
The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock-to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
Unless we are willing to accept our artists as they are, the answer to the question, “Who speaks for America [or the Church?] today?” will have to be: the advertising agencies. They are entirely capable of showing us our unparalleled prosperity and our almost classless society, and no one has ever accused them of not being affirmative. Where the artist is still trusted, he will not be looked to for assurance. Those who believe that art proceeds from a healthy, and not from a diseased, faculty of the mind will take what he shows them as a revelation, not of what we ought to be but of what we are at a given time and under given circumstances; that is, as a limited revelation but revelation nevertheless.
Of course, there is an important function of leadership that offers “what we ought to be” as well, but often the difference between those who are angry with critique and those who offer it is that the former prefer the cheery optimism of advertising while the latter are serving up the prophetic unmasking inherent in art. There can be no vision without critique, no forgiving embrace without just exclusion, no joyous thanksgiving without grievous lament.
I don’t think I’m overstating the case when I say that for many in the Church today “leadership” is essentially conceived as a function of marketing. But in my view that is a betrayal of the leadership gift, which I think is a role more akin to art than advertising.
