The Controversial Culture

"There was that amusing squall in a teapot recently about a Cranach Venus that London Transport refused to display on Underground platforms because the poster was deemed inappropriate". Paul Mc Cain.

So, it's finally happened.
The American Beauty Pageant, Miss America, has become the latest casualty to Political Correctness.

No more bikinis.
No more judging of contestants by their elegant physique.
No more deciding of who can enter on the basis of such 'secondary' matters as looks - that is prejudicial.

Adam's response to Eve in Eden is now politically incorrect.

The sumptuous descriptions of the beloved in the Song of Songs must remain appropriately muted, and Christians like messieurs Cranach and Bonnerotti depicting the nude, even in art, amounts to (to use the response of Roman Cardinals at the time) obscenity of the highest order.

The imposed puritanism of the Facebook generation, which demands "moral" externals (by keeping rules about not showing breasts or pubic regions) but, in practice, can become devices for all manner of terrorism and wickedness (the latest Hamas attacks were organized on Facebook) - is being imposed upon us, and we should reject it totally.

Creativity of the kind you are currently reading is about to be stifled by the EU's new Article 13 stipulation, which will make it illegal for blogs like this and sites like You Tube to reference or borrow for artistic purposes materials by others without paying huge fees, meaning that only large media corporations will be able to use such sources.

The "powers" of this world only wish to darken and cloud the true splendour and grace of what God freely bestows to express His goodness and nature, so that we can truly glimpse the majesty of the Godhead (Genesis 1:26).

To borrow from Michaelangelo, when his great work was being so crudely maligned by fools, we are not pagans - our world has been defined by Christ, by the Cross and the bodily resurrection of God's Son - and that is what should and must define our relationship to being made in God's image and likeness. It must inform our way of seeing ourselves, our art, and the world. To defame or demean what God has bestowed upon us is a dreadful folly, so whilst we may not personally find a particular form of social engagement and enrichment to our taste - beauty pageants for example - it speaks deeply concerning the ugliness of our times when such activities become the target of those who wish to sterilize and politicize such pleasures to creature a "purer" culture devoid both of God's natural gifts (aesthetics) but pushing a post-modernal 'rightness' that would have been entirely at home in various modern tyrannies.

The days we live in are becoming more and more polarized, and beauty, truth, viable recreational engagement with life, and other related essential good things, are the first casualties in this growing suppression of light in favor of a malignancy that is cruelly bland, mono-tonal and demeaningly dull in its goals.

If we can grasp the emptiness of the times, as Roger Scruton notes in his work on Beauty, it is because genuine art and truth point us to another way of understanding ourselves.

There is much more to say, but all of us need to take care that so-called "morality" does not become the device that kills us to all that God has made beautiful in its time that echoes the call of eternity He has placed within our hearts.