War Paint
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

Paint has at least three uses. First, it can be used to beautify. God has gifted countless men and women with the ability to take color to canvas and create a delight to the eyes, and a reflection of the glory of God. Second, paint can terrify. Whether it is the Indian warrior of old or the blue thunderbolt gracing the angry visage of William Wallace, this kind of paint, like other forms of art, is designed to elicit an emotional response. That response, however, isn't one of sublimity, but of terror and dread. And third, paint can also obscure. When we first moved into our house about six years ago we knew we had quite a bit of work to do. The previous owners weren't given to beautifying. When we moved in, and saw the house for the first time empty of furniture, we discovered that they had painted around some of their furniture. To fix the problems as best as we could, sometimes we painted to beautify. Sometimes we painted simply to cover over some ugly stuff.

The distinction between the first and the third use of paints might better be illustrated by that for which war paint is sometimes used as a euphemism, make-up. There is a great difference between the woman who uses the delicate arts to highlight her own beauty, and the woman who practices the indelicate art of painting over her own ugliness. The former invites you to see past the paint, while the latter warns you against looking too closely. From a distance the latter may look the more appealing. Up close it is only appalling.

Our goal, in part, with this column each issue is to get a close enough look at the culture around us to see that we are looking at the painted face of an aging trollop. We want to develop the ability to see past the paint and into the ugliness, such that we no longer want to look at all.

There is, perhaps, nothing more ugly than emptiness, vanity. In a world in which the transcendent is unreachable, all that is left is vanity. And so it must be covered, disguised, painted over. Sometimes the war paint is simply humor. If we are made to laugh enough, perhaps we won't notice that we aren't really laughing at anything. Sometimes the war paint is drama. Here the proximate, or the immanent is gussied up to look like something important. Whether or not Rocky wins the heavyweight championship is objectively as insignificant as whether or not Mike Tyson wins the heavyweight championship. Once, however, we have been convinced that it does matter, then we fall under the sway of the pomp and circumstance of the great battle.

We find the same thing in all the packaging of pop culture. Though the humor in it has been commented on so often that to mention it again is itself inane, there is a cultural sickness inherent in the great gap between the pictures of the food, and the food itself, whether the picture is on the cardboard box of the frozen food section, or in the menu at Shoney's. What are those pictures but the makeup that is designed to make machine made slop look like something Mom used to make? And what fools are we that we buy it, even though we know it's all smoke and mirrors?

The worst of it all, however, is when pop culture seeks not to cover ugliness with a faux beauty, but when it seeks to sell ugliness as beauty. Several times I heard professing Christian women doing the equivalent of a swoon as they described the book/movie The Bridges of Madison County. This was described as a love story. Instead it was the story of one woman's betrayal of her husband, and the man who helped her to do it. I would far rather see a movie in which the husband and wife take off their clothes on camera and behave there in public as they are to behave in private, than to see a married man express his undying love for someone not his wife, even if he is too pure to act on that love. Understand that it would be bad enough to not be outraged by this. We go far beyond this, and celebrate it. And the next step is we try to sanctify it, creating "Christian" romance novels and "Christian" soap operas.

The call to be separate from the world around us, to exit the folly of Vanity Fair that is the popular culture, then, is not a call to give up a bunch of goodies for the sake of the kingdom. When we encourage people to tune out, we are not bringing the call to pick up your cross. Instead we are offering an invitation to a feast, one in which the food is not only better than the picture, but better than it looks. When we ask you to turn off your TV, we are not suggesting that instead you should sit down with a book on quadratic equations, because such is good for the soul. Rather again we invite you to feast not only on wisdom, but on beauty, whether that beauty is in Calvin's Institutes, or in the poetry of John Donne, or in the voice of Iris DeMent. When you're turning your eye away from the one-eyed idol, you can see there instead the beauty of your wife, or your children, or your friends. We're suggesting that we ought to leave MacDonald's behind, and come to the feast of the King.

On the other hand, this is not only a choice between the beautiful and ugly. For the façade of pop culture is in fact war paint. When we are bogged down in pop culture we are not merely missing the real action, but we are being assaulted by the forces of darkness. They want us to live in an ugly world. For as we argued in the Vision column, beauty isn't just a gift from God, but is God Himself. Don't be fooled by the makeup. Pop culture is a dog, and one that needs to be put to sleep.