Sin and Art: In Praise of Moral Struggle
A Frodo's Notebook Staff Editorial
by Daniel Klotz - Redactor in Chief

After spending months studying "the next ruling class"--young people studying at one of America's most elite universities--writer/journalist David Brooks (whom I deeply respect and admire) concluded in the April 2001 cover article for the Atlantic Monthly:

Princeton doesn't hate America. It reflects America. And in most ways it reflects the best of America. After all, as people kept reminding me, these are some of the best and brightest young people our high schools have to offer. They have woven their way through the temptations of adolescence and have benefited from all the nurturing and instruction and opportunities with which the country has provided them. They are responsible. They are generous. They are bright. They are good-natured. But they live in a country that has lost, in its frenetic seeking after happiness and success, the language of sin and character-building through combat with sin. Evil is seen as something that can be cured with better education, or therapy, or Prozac. Instead of virtue we talk about accomplishment.

Brooks was right. As usual, he pegged his subjects and put a finger on a particular cultural pulse. As young people growing up in our postmodern world we do lack a sense of sin. On the whole, we don't view evil as something real.

Good art comes out of struggle. It is order born out of chaos and dwells within tensions. It is never a stretch to talk about creating a work of art as "birthing"--there is anxiety and pain and blood. Afterward comes joy and satisfaction inexpressible. All writers know what it is like to be on the verge of giving up, and yet to stick with it and finally finish a story, poem, or novel. How do I express what I cannot express? How do I use words to say more than words can say?

United States literature from the 1920s and 30s is rich and fantastic, largely because struggle is so evident, a historical reality for millions of people. Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, H.D., F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Steinbeck were all writing as the nation came out of the devastation of the first World War, fell into a financial Great Depression, and found itself pulled into World War II.

Yes, good art does come out of struggle, and that is worth our attention. But we should also pay attention to the types of struggles from which it arises. As an avid reader and an editor, I see lots of writing that results from conflicting feelings ("I love that guy but he's such a jerk"), social pressures ("My parents won't let me play hockey, and I can't do anything about it," "I wish people didn't care so much about wearing the right clothes"), and hurdles in the way of career and long-term goals ("I'm poor...how will I pay for college?," "My friend got busted for marijuana possession...now he's screwed").

What I rarely see, however, is art arising from moral struggle, particularly in the writing of young people. This is not the result of an age of enlightenment, or the triumph of secularism. It is a flaw, a thing to be mourned and corrected. As a reviewer in the New Yorker recently reminded, "It's not what we know but what we believe in that makes all the difference." He didn't mean it in a Chicken Soup for the Soul kind of way, either--it came as the conclusion to a serious critique of a book about a federal intelligence worker who had leaked thousands of pages of classified, incriminating documents to prominent news outlets.

The thing is, moral struggle isn't lame or unbelievable. We all know what St. Paul is saying when he writes in his letter to the Romans (part of the Christian New Testament), "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do ... I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do--this I keep on doing." No one can evade the charge to make art that arises from moral struggle by saying it doesn't make sense to an audience.

A recent poll in my campus's newspaper cited that 86% of students at Eastern University (where all the editors of Frodo's Notebook are undergraduates) believe it is a sin to be a practicing homosexual. That is a pretty unique statistic--at most secular colleges the percentage would be significantly smaller, and at most other Christian schools it would be even larger. The poll came as part of the paper's coverage of our theater department's spring production of The Laramie Project, a relatively new play about how a small city in Wyoming dealt with the vicious beating and murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard in 1998. I helped out with the technical side of the play, a rewarding and demanding experience that consumed all my time for two weeks. As I contemplated the campus response--we hoped to encourage conversation but wound up reinforcing a polarity ("God loves gays" vs. "God hates fags," to exaggerate)--I realized that the play hardly spoke to the conviction that homosexuality is a sin.

The play portrays the city and people of Laramie in the wake of the horrid crime, but it does not treat the murder as a different sort of crime. (If it does, it considers it as a "hate crime," not as the type of act that inherently raises the questions I'm about to articulate.) To people with a view that homosexuality is a sin, the play does not ask the logical questions that it should ask: Can we take judgment into our own hands? What is the proper way to deal with sinners, especially those who flaunt it in defiance of moral law and community norms?

I can understand the frustration of audience members who view homosexuality as a sin--why isn't there any struggle going on here? All sorts of other questions are raised and many other issues are wrestled with in The Laramie Project, but the moral questions that would seem logical to a person viewing homosexuality as a sin are never taken seriously.

When moral struggle goes out the window, when we don't conceive of ourselves or those around us as sinning (particularly vulnerable are those of us who are outspoken in our rejection of the straight jacket of ultraorthodoxy and fundamentalism), our lives begin to lose substance. The things that would occupy our thoughts the way a body occupies a room--that would be tossed around inside us--vacate us and we cease to be interesting, thinking, reflective people.

Last year I did an anthropological study of gay males in the New York City theater subculture (the majority of men in musical theater there are homosexual). The basic conclusion of the ethnography, drawing from a number of interviews and extensive observation, was that being a homosexual in New York is much the same as being a heterosexual elsewhere. Some guys turn promiscuous, some repeatedly make failed attempts at dating. Some are constantly sexual, others keep it a quiet aspect of their lives. In other words, their lives more or less parallel those of straight people. That is different from almost everywhere else in America, where homosexuality is either romanticized or, more often, demonized.

I can't think of anything more frustrating to a person who believes homosexuality to be a sin than this cultural state of affairs. To act like nothing's the matter!It would seem that thousands of people were living in ignorance of any higher moral code, their lives empty because they lack a particular moral struggle. The biggest problem a homosexual could have, such people think, would be not to struggle with his or her sexuality at all. How empty! To live in sin and never question it.

Personally, I tentatively believe that homosexuality is not a sin, but I believe that lot of other things are--things like promiscuity, self-destruction, lying, murdering, excessive pride. There is plenty of sin out there, ready for writers, theater makers, and other artists to take it on. We should have moral struggles going on in our art. This is not to say that art should moralize. Dealing with sin in the art we create can be subtle, true, and powerful. It usually comes through in the tone and in the thorough way it treats moral questions (though it rarely answers them fully). I would like to end with a poem by Denise Levertov, an American who died five years ago. Her poems give credence and care to both sin and to redemption. In this selection, she writes with compassion to a friend whose actions and attitude she views as sinful.

To One Steeped in Bitterness

Nail the rose
                        to your mind's door
like a rat, a thwarted chickenhawk.
Yes, it has had its day.

And the water
                        poured for you
which you disdain to drink,
yes, throw it away.

Yet the fierce rose
                               stole nothing
from your cooped heart,
nor plucked your timid eye;

and from inviolate rock
                                     the liquid light
was drawn, that's dusty now
and your lips dry.

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