Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth for the Colson Center on John Stone Street. Earlier this year, police in Australia arrested two men for vandalizing a sacred indigenous site with graffiti. Spray-painted damage was over 30 feet wide and 6 feet high. A Facebook user reacted this way: quote, They've got some nasty, nasty juju coming their way for this disrespectful vandalism. ancestors know who they are.
Well, last month, Canterbury Cathedral received a similar graffiti treatment. This time, however, no one was arrested, since it was done by the permission of cathedral officials. According to the visual arts advisor and curator Jacqueline Cresswell, this graffiti, and I quote, is giving the marginalized community of Canterbury a voice within the cathedral, putting profound questions to God. And here I thought that's what the Psalms were all about. Canterbury is, of course, not just any other church building, even in Europe.
It's the church from which Christianity spread throughout England. In the 500s, after the pagan Anglo-Saxon tribes had overrun the older Celtic Christian regions, missionaries came to the barbarian kingdom of Kent in the southeast of England to share the gospel. their leader is known to history as Augustine of Canterbury. He converted King Ethelbert and built Canterbury Cathedral as the first church for the English. Millions of Christians came to faith through the missionary efforts that were first sparked at Canterbury.
It remains the mother church of a now very fractured worldwide Anglican communion. and the Church of England. The new spray paint installation stands in stark contrast to the ancient medieval graffiti that can still be seen barely on the walls of the crypt. The barely readable ancient sketchings point to Christ, his crucifixion, to the martyrs. According to one visitor, the new installation makes the beautiful cathedral resemble an underground car park.
Last year, reacting to the funeral of a transgender prostitute activist at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. Carl Truman introduced an essential thought category That is helpful for understanding this cultural moment, including this new graffiti project. Here's what he wrote: quote, Our age is not marked so much by disenchantment as it is by desecration. The culture's officer class is committed not merely to marginalizing that which previous generations considered sacred.
it is committed to its destruction. Disenchantment has passive connotations, a dull, impersonal, somewhat tedious but inevitable process. But desecration speaks to To the exaltation that active destruction of the holy involves. Truman is echoing here a scene from the C.S. Lewis novel, That Hideous Strength.
To be initiated into an evil conspiracy, the protagonist in that story is told to desecrate a crucifix. Though he's not a Christian, he still hesitates.
However, the conspirators insist that going against what's thought to be holy. is the only way forward. It was the sociologist Charles Taylor who described a trait of modernism as disenchantment. In other words, as the Western world lost its faith in God, it also necessarily had to reject the transcendent.
However, disenchantment cannot adequately describe the rejection of beauty and the commitment to transgression that has characterized so much of our modern culture. In his books, The God Who Is There and How Should We Then Live, Francis Schaefer predicted that the loss of Christian consensus would also make our lives and our worlds uglier. To illustrate this, Schaefer told how Igmar Bergman, when writing a film to portray the meaningless of life, was so troubled by a piece from Bach that was playing in the background. The order, beauty, and transcendence of this work by this Christian composer undermined the vision of chaos that he was trying to prove. In the same way, in a desecrated age like ours, beauty will be denied.
It will be mocked. It will be caricatured. For example, when young people harm or subvert or even mutilate their own bodies, they're not merely adopting a new style. They're desecrating what's sacred. Ironically and unwittingly, of course, to desecrate beauty is to presume that there's beauty to be desecrated.
The graffiti on the walls of Canterbury only shock because it's on those majestic walls in that majestic cathedral. In a 1798 essay, Johann Wolfgang van Goethe, Claimed this, quote: The highest demand made on an artist is this: that he may be true. to nature, study her, imitate her, and produce something that resembles her phenomena.
Well, in fact, Christians know that beauty has the potential to point to something even beyond nature. Beauty is a way to acknowledge and protect and celebrate what is in fact sacred. It's a way to point the world to the One. Who spoke all of nature? into existence.
For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. For a version of this commentary that you can download and share with others, go to breakpoint.org.
Hey, John Stone Street here. This is your official invite to join us at the 2026 Colson Center National Conference. It'll be held in Knoxville, Tennessee, May 29th to the 31st. Again, Knoxville, Tennessee, May 29th to the 31st. The theme this year is you are here.
You might remember those large, now largely empty buildings called shopping malls. You had all kinds of stores and you were trying to find the one you were looking for and you had to go to the map. Not only did you need to find the store, You needed to find that yellow arrow or the star that said you are here. Our culture today changes so fast and at such a profound civilizational level. And that, of course, is because we've abandoned the truth and we're reaping the consequences.
So, a conference like this is absolutely necessary to get the lay of the land to kind of figure out what's happening in culture and at what moment we're really in. If you've ever wondered if your faithfulness and obedience can make a difference in this civilizational moment that we're in, this is the conference for. For you.
So, join us at the Colson Center National Conference. You'll be hearing from fantastic speakers like the one and only Oz Guinness, the remarkable story of Chloe Cole, Abdu Murray, and many more that will be announced soon. If you register before November 29th, you can receive up to 50% off tickets. For more details and secure your spot for the Colson Center National Conference, May 29th through the 31st. Go to colsonconference.org.
That's colsonconference.org.
