Christ in Art

Thank the Lord

Monks in the charts, exorcisms on TV, a statue of Jesus sexually aroused ... Mark Lawson on why artists can't resist the lure of Christianity

Mark Lawson

Many visitors to two current London exhibitions - Byzantium at the Royal Academy, and the National Gallery's Renaissance Faces - will experience awe at the level of religious faith on display. Both contain numerous devotional portraits, reverently made by artists for whom God was both the subject and the object of their work. With the progressive decline of Christian practice in Britain, it would be tempting to think that this is what religious art has come to: secularists admiring the use of tempura and shadow in cracked and faded paintings of the Madonna.

But Christian iconography still has a powerful presence in contemporary culture: at a time when churches have almost no political power, in Britain at least, their rituals are widely drawn on for metaphors, music or plot lines. On Monday this week, the Priests - three serving Roman Catholic clergy from Northern Ireland, signed to Sony for £1m - released their first album, following top-selling monks from Spain into the classical charts. An incident in the life of Christ also provides the title and metaphorical structure for David Hare's play about the Labour Party, Gethsemane; while a struggle between Christ and Satan for the souls of contemporary Britons is the basis for BBC1's Thursday night drama, Apparitions. Recently, the Crown Prosecution Service blocked an attempted private prosecution over an art work depicting the sexuality of Jesus Christ, the latest skirmish in a debate over whether Christianity should be given a level of cultural and legal protection that, some feel, has been provided to Islam.

Of course, some of this visibility is predicated on the decline of faith. As church-going tails off, singing Catholic priests and monks attain an exoticism that increases their PR appeal. There's also an element of prurient fascination at the entry into the music business of men who have officially rejected its two main rewards: sex and money. No matter how profitable their music becomes, the Priests will do throughout the year what other pop stars consider doing only at Christmas: giving their royalties to charity.

In the case of the Priests, the performers and many of their likely audience are religious believers. But Gethsemane, at the National Theatre, is an illustration of the secular use of Christian symbols. Although critical debate about the play has centred on its efficiency as an analysis of current politics, Hare's script is most interesting as a work that plays with the history of faith.

Although he describes himself in interviews as an agnostic or atheist, Hare has frequently mined Christianity for symbols. In his play Racing Demon (1990), a fight between traditionalist and reforming Anglican clerics dramatised similar crises of faith in other British institutions: the Labour Party, the BBC. Another of his plays, The Secret Rapture, which explores what it might mean to be a "good" person, borrows its title from the phraseology of a nun's profession of faith, an image that was buried in the subtext of the play.

Gethsemane is a more explicit work, the dialogue referring several times to the gospel story in which Christ agonises over whether he is able to fulfil his mission. A climactic moment comes with the realisation by a central character, a disillusioned teacher who has given up her job, that she has misunderstood the meaning of what happened at Gethsemane.

In a spiritual twist not intended by the author, there has also been a fuss over whether Otto Fallon, the New Labour fundraiser played in the National production by Stanley Townsend, is a caricature of a Jewish money man. The objections of one London rabbi, who had heard accounts of the play rather than seen it, were the basis for newspaper reports asking whether the portrayal might be antisemitic.

In fact, Hare's script never specifies Fallon's origins, but an audience might conclude that Townsend employs mannerisms that can be seen as stereotypically Jewish. It is also possible that the audience was led in this direction, by similarities between Hare's character and Blairite financier Lord Levy: both made their fortunes in pop music.

But the row demonstrates where the levels of religious sensitivities in Britain lie now. "Antisemitism" remains the nuclear charge, from which a person's reputation struggles to recover, and for this reason should not have been used so sloppily, and without any evidence of intent, against Hare and the production. Nervousness over depictions of Judaism remains a necessary precaution in civilised societies because of the history of the Holocaust, an industrialisation of religious bigotry.

The debate most frequently raised by modern religious art, though, is whether such tact is applied unevenly. Emily Mapfuwa, the Christian who failed in her attempt to prosecute the Baltic in Gateshead for displaying a statue by Terence Koh of Christ with an erection, made a now common rhetorical point after the CPS killed her litigation: "I don't think the gallery would insult Muslims in this way, so why Christians?"

Certainly, it's unlikely that a peak-time BBC1 serial would play with the theology of Islam in as luridly exuberant a fashion as the new thriller Apparitions, with Martin Shaw as a Catholic priest chasing Satan from contemporary souls. A simple case can be made for this imbalance: outside of Northern Ireland, the discussion or dramatisation of Catholicism is unlikely to risk inciting violence by extremist believers or nonbelievers. Depiction of Islam, though, does raise this possibility.

Christianity, as well as being a safer subject, is also a rich one. The faith has become a cultural battleground because of a gulf between the astonishing boldness of the religion's central stories, and the pinched timidity of many of the people who have practised it. Its narrative elements - the fallen angel Lucifer becoming Satan, the birth to a virgin of the son of God, becoming man and dying on the cross - are, regardless of whether or not you believe them, intensely dramatic.

They also raise complex questions: whether, for example, the humanity of Christ included sexual arousal and expression; and whether the Satan of ancient Christian faith would remain at work today. The BBC's Apparitions continues a long tradition - most vividly expressed in the films The Omen and The Exorcist - of exploring the latter possibility in horror fiction. Creative attempts to engage with these mysteries have habitually been challenged by believers who seek to stifle debate, with the charge of "blasphemy" or, since its removal from the statute books, "outraging public decency".

This month's CPS decision over the Gateshead statue feels like a landmark ruling: it establishes a precedent that even an art work to which many believers would object can be shown, if proper warnings of the content are in place. The BBC took a similar position over the transmission of Jerry Springer: The Opera - although it must be thought unlikely that the Corporation would be as tough if a sustained Christian lobby were aimed at a programme now, post Ross/Brand.

Even as religious attitudes in Britain continue to polarise, Christian-inspired culture will continue to thrive, for agnostics to enjoy and worshippers to boycott. At a recent public appearance in London, the Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney read a new work, Lazarus, written during his recovery from a recent stroke. In it, the friends who had transported Heaney from the Irish boarding house in which his illness struck are compared with the bearers carrying the man raised from the dead by Jesus in the New Testament. Heaney, a long-lapsed Catholic, does not literally believe in the biblical miracle; nor, probably, did most of his audience. Yet, in this strange late phase of religious art, the metaphor was powerful to all.

It is 120 years since the death of Matthew Arnold, whose poem Dover Beach, in noting the "melancholy, long withdrawing roar" of the "sea of faith", became an anthem of agnosticism. But the iconography of Christianity stubbornly remains. For most consumers of art, these images are neutralised; even so, they retain a universality and power that will fill galleries and theatres in a country of emptying churches.