This is why the loss of religious certainty facilitated the birth of kitsch. Faith exalts the human heart, removing it from the marketplace, making it sacred and unexchangeable. Under the jurisdiction of religion, our deeper feelings are sacralized, so as to become raw material for the ethical life, the life lived in judgment. When faith declines, however, the sacred loses one of its most important forms of protection from marauders; the heart can now more easily be captured and put on sale. Some things—the human heart is one of them—can be bought and sold only if they are first denatured. The Christmas-card sentiments advertise what cannot be advertised without ceasing to be: hence the emotion that they offer is fake.
-Roger Scruton, Kitsch and the Modern Predicament
via Michael Brendan Dougherty
Every ceremony, every ritual, every public display of emotion can be kitsched—and inevitably will be kitsched, unless controlled by some severe critical discipline. (Think of the Disneyland versions of monarchical and state occasions that are rapidly replacing the old stately forms.) It is impossible to flee from kitsch by taking refuge in religion, when religion itself is kitsch. The "modernization" of the Roman Catholic Mass and the Anglican prayer book were really a "kitschification": and attempts at liturgical art are now poxed all over with the same disease. The day-to-day services of the Christian churches are embarrassing reminders of the fact that religion is losing its sublime godwardness and turning instead toward the world of fake sentiment.
So true. Here's the aesthetic argument against the LifeTeen barbarization of the liturgy and the priests who ride bicycles into the sanctuary during their homilies to "connect with the laity," by which they mean "audience." I suspect this is related to "ovation inflation," where nobody ever boos at a performance; the sentiment that one is a sophisticated and appreciative person is far more important than forming and then expressing one's sense of the aesthetic. Sentimentalists wouldn't be so bad, nor indeed sentimentalists, if it there were somebody there to shoot them every minute of their life.
Preachers and Sunday School teachers are conscious that some of the biblical imagery is not easily recognized: few people have ever tasted a pomegranate, or know what it is like to be a shepherd. Catholic preachers always make sure to clarify what the Gospel meant when it implies that Jesus had biological brothers.
I have yet to see somebody analyze from a local pulpit what Our Lord meant when he told us to become as little children. In many contemporary minds, the child is some sentimental bundle of joy who never sins, a true innocent. Some atheist propagandist, perhaps even a well-known one like Russell or Dawkins, seized on the exhortation to become little children, interpreting childhood in the sentimental sense that has become so widespread in the churches, and cited it as a reason that freethinking was for "adults," and religion for spoiled children. I am told by my betters that Our Lord meant us to imitate the humilty of the child, not his self-centeredness, acknowledging our weaknesses and failures and having a recognition that our desires have not yet reached maturity. Such a child sure wouldn't frivolously modify the divine liturgy, knowing that he does not and perhaps never could understand all its intricacies.
See also: Edward T. Oakes, Icons and Kitsch
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