How Should Christians Approach Art and Fantasy?

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John Harris, it is another hot take from the truck.

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And I wanna talk about fantasy and whether or not Christians should engage in fantastical or fictional literature and films.

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And this might surprise some of you, but I have been in circles where this can be a little bit controversial and people have different opinions about this.

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I remember years ago, I was in a writer's club where one of the people who came actually chided everyone there for writing stories, some of which were fantastical, because he thought that you should only write stories that were about the

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Bible. That was the only piece of literature, I guess, that was acceptable. I've also run into people who think that allegories are okay, like C .S.

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Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, but something like Tolkien is not because it's not an allegory. So your fantasy must have a parallel in the real world or else it's unacceptable.

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And I think for Christian conservatives, especially and homeschoolers in particular, the writings of Lewis and Tolkien are very popular.

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There is a lot of fantasy and sometimes I think it can be good and sometimes I think it can be bad depending on the fantasy.

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And so I think there's good fantasy and there's bad fantasy. And so I wanna get into this. I wanna bring some biblical truth to bear on this and some just wisdom principles that I think can help guide us in thinking about this subject.

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So I wanna start here. I put out a tweet on Saturday night. Little did I know

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I would get the pushback I got, but it was an image that looked like it was from the 1950s. I pulled it from Facebook.

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I didn't look at it very closely. Someone on Facebook posted it. And it was a depiction of a downtown area from the 1950s with sports cars that were clean and women, young women in dresses and well put together.

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And there looked like a movie theater in the background. And all I posted was the world of our grandparents. Now, if you follow any of my stuff online, typically you'll know if I ever post an

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AI generated image, it's going to be for a meme or just as a joke or something.

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Usually if I'm talking about something historical, I post pictures, videos. They don't get as much traction for some reason.

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I posted this video of Britain, how it used to be and how it is now. And you can see the clean streets that used to be and the well put together people.

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And now it's like, what happened? What happened to London? But anyway, this happened to be an

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AI generated image. I didn't notice it at first, but someone pointed it out that I had posted this 1950s depiction, but it wasn't real.

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The streets too small. The signs aren't in English. So what's going on here? Like, and I chugged it off.

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I was like, whatever, that doesn't, who cares, right? Like this, cause I knew that it depicted whether it was an artist's painting like a

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Norman Rockwell painting or an AI generated image, it depicted something true about the world that our grandparents lived in.

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This is the world our grandparents lived in, in a sense. It's not that that scene never happened, but there are things in that picture and whether it was a painting from an artist or an

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AI generated image, there are things in that that are emphasized that are true about the world that my grandparents lived in.

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The streets were cleaner. The people were well put together. I can show you images of all these things that look very much like that image, right?

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But this morning, this was the cause for attacking the post. And one of the people so far that's attacked it that might have a maybe higher profile in Christianity is

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Mike Cosper from Christianity Today. And his issue was that this was a depiction that revealed a nostalgia for a world that never existed.

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So it's never existed, that world. And so I actually got into it a little bit with him and I actually argued, no, actually that world did exist on a certain level.

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Just like the writings of Lewis and Tolkien reflect something about the real world, this image actually reflects something about the real world.

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Now you can have AI generate an image that, images that reflect something that's totally fake. And I'll get into that in a moment. But typically if it's a photograph, the

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AI is going to, it's not creating anything from scratch. It's taking from pictures from that era and it's using patterns that exist.

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It's doing pattern recognition and then it's spitting out something using those patterns to generate a new image, but reflecting those patterns.

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And it's the same thing if it's a painting. I could tell AI to do a Hudson River School painting and it will look like a

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Thomas Cole painting, even though it's not. And it's amazing. And I actually, I enjoy sometimes just playing around with AI.

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I actually did a bunch of Thomas Cole prints and made them into videos. What would it look like if that world was in video?

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It was beautiful. But I know it's AI. I know what it is. But it's taking

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Thomas Cole and just moving the waterfall or the clouds or whatever. And I was like, oh, this is really cool.

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So, I mean, I like fooling around with that stuff. But anyway, I think many of us have probably already had this experience of you look at an image, it looks real until you notice the six fingers.

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AI is getting pretty good. And I think part of that is it is reflecting reality so well sometimes, depending on the inputs you give it.

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So, what does this mean? Why do I say all this? Well, I think the argument between Kasper and I fundamentally comes down to this.

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Can art, can someone even painting an image that's not real, it's from their mind, can it reflect something that is real?

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Is there, is the painting true or is it not true? And I would submit to you, my argument is

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I think the painting can be true on a certain level. I can say that the painting or the

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AI generated image is not true. And this goes for fantasies as well in its accurate depiction of a location.

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This location doesn't exist. This came from someone's mind, but it does reflect a template of many locations.

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And this gets into maybe platonic forms and so forth, but it's getting at a sequence that reflects a whole.

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In the 1950s, there was a typical pattern of streets being more clean and people being better dressed and cars looking more pretty, to be honest with you, instead of the bland kind of every car manufacturer spits out the same thing.

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It was a different world and different ideas went into all of this. And you know what?

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In some ways it was better. I'm not saying in every way, but in some ways it was better. It was preferable. And I think that's where nostalgia does come in.

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And I think it's legitimate. And this is the thing. I think this also is true of books like Lord of the

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Rings. Lord of the Rings reflects some very true things about the real world, that there is providence.

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The good wins out. That providence tends to use small things and that the good wins out despite the way that it might appear in the moment.

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And that the good things worth fighting for are often defenseless themselves, like women and children, but you need strong men to defend them.

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The shyer need a defense. There's a lot of things in that book that I think if you read the book or watch the films, if you do it rightly, and I think

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Tolkien intended for this, it teaches you something about the real world, not just Northern European and Anglo and Germanic fantasy, which it does.

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I mean, it really depicts these cultures in a certain sense, but it teaches you something deeply that's universal to all peoples and cultures too.

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And so it's beautiful in many ways, and I think that it's actually worthwhile.

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Now, Robert E. Lee had warned his son, I read this in a book years ago, that fantasy could be dangerous.

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He said he didn't want his book, his child, his son, I think it was, reading fantastical books because they would make him long for worlds that didn't exist.

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And there's actually a good caution in this. Fantasy can also express lies about the real world.

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It can give you a way of looking at the world that's not true. That's why I think there's good and there's bad fantasy. Bad fantasy can tell you things that aren't true.

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It can give you a world where there really is no good and evil. It can give you a story where there really is no sense of providence.

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It has everything else. It has the elves, it has the characters, it has the colors, it has the castles, but there's no rootedness.

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And you feel it when you're looking at it. It's the difference between the rings of power and Lord of the Rings. Rings of power is missing some kind of element.

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But what is it? It had the budget, it had the costumes, it had the characters, what is it? I couldn't get like 15 minutes into it because I knew it felt fake.

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I was like, of course it's fake, it's a fantasy. No, that's not what I meant. That's not what I meant. It was something else that felt fake at a more deep fundamental level.

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And Lord of the Rings had it and the rings of power didn't have it. And this is the struggle that all modern Hollywood films it seems like have, is they are starting out with an incorrect view of reality.

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And so this is then taken into their fantasy worlds that they create, where they flip everything generally.

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Like what you thought was evil is actually good. And what you thought was good was actually evil. And evil people are just misunderstood and you need to try to understand them.

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And everything's kind of gray. And they strip the nobility and the heroism and the hierarchy and the honor out of the whole thing, even though there's knights and castles and everything else.

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And you realize there's nothing fulfilling about this. I think of Jesus's parables.

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Jesus told stories, some of which did not actually occur in the real world. They were just templates. They were just stories that he would tell to lay alongside of a spiritual truth he was trying to convey.

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Stories about agriculture, stories about servants and masters, stories about weddings, stories about all kinds of things that were reflected in the real world, but it was a story that didn't actually take place.

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And I think that this is actually, and you can actually see this too in dreams, right? Dreams that God even inspired that symbolize something else.

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And that's what fantasy should do. Good fantasy should symbolize. And that's even, you could say the

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AI -generated image I posted was fantasy on a certain level, and it was, but it reflected something that was true.

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That's what good fantasy does. And that's why I never got into some of the,

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I think, over -the -top AI -generated images of, this is a muscle man who's totally unrealistic.

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No guy looks like this. This is the template for what you should be.

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It's so based. I never got into that, partially because I just look at it as, oh, it's a distortion, really.

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I mean, you could use it as a joke, right? But this is a distortion. Pornography is a distortion.

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It's actually a fantasy. It's a fantasy of what sex, what some people in their selfishness want sex to be.

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And this isn't a reflection of the way sex actually is. And so there are bad fantasies.

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There are evil things. But I do think it takes just a little bit of wisdom and discernment to tell the difference between good and bad fantasy.

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And if I were to say one last thing, maybe related to the AI -generated image, because I've seen this for a long time, and I was getting pushed back along these lines too, there's a lot of people out there, and I would say the more woke social justice types, who really despise the past.

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They despise tradition. They despise a world that they're convinced was purely evil or mostly evil, and where everything was sugarcoated.

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There is all this outward expression of cleanliness and order, but actually there was abuse going on behind the scenes and so forth.

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And I've always said, look, humans are humans. There's always gonna be sin. But it says something about a society when you have to hide it, when you're expected to dress in a clean, orderly way and carry yourself that way, and you don't litter.

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These are things that were high standards that we used to try to attain that we've now long since passed, and it's been detrimental for us.

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And so I actually think there is a lot of merit to looking to the past, looking to tradition, looking to societies that were more thoroughly

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Christian in the past than they are now. And there's actually a true and good kind of nostalgia to have.

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And obviously you don't wanna get into a position of believing a lie, like it wasn't perfect.

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Of course there was sin. Of course there were things that were covered up, but neither do you want to be so cynical about everything.

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Like there was nothing good in the past because you can only see this one thing, and that's what ideology does.

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I can only see this one thing. I can only see that there was abuse, and that's how I look at everything through this one thing.

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No, it was good to have clean streets. It was good to have cars that reflected creativity. They looked a little different than all the bland stuff today.

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It was good that women were more modest. It was good that people weren't littering as much.

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It was good that the movies on the big screen were cleaner. And I mean, there's so many things that were just good about that.

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Why can't you say it? Why can't, why is it wrong, right? And I think that's probably, that's what

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I'm seeing in most of the pushback I'm getting. That's more, I think, where it's coming from is that there's an assumption already that that all had to have been a fantasy because we know it must have been bad in the past because that's the progressive mindset.

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Things just keep getting better, and any nostalgia for the past is just longing for something that must not have really existed.

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Well, I got news for you. It did exist. There are good things from our past, and there are images, even paintings, even images that reflect a time that weren't photographs or film that reflect something good and true about it.

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And that's what good fantasy should do. That's what good fiction should do. So there's my two cents. I hope that was helpful for everyone.

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I know there's probably some people in the audience who are fans of various fantasies and science fiction, and that's how

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I think of it. That's why I will watch Lord of the Rings, and I'm careful about things like Star Wars, even for my kids when they're growing up.

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I'm gonna be careful of that. That reflects a distorted view of reality because it comes from an Eastern mindset, that there's this force, and the other's good and evil, but the force must be balanced.

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And that's, well, that's not reality, right? That's not the world that God actually created. So you gotta be careful with these things. And that's it.