Of this year’s Emmy-nominated television shows, my husband and I have watched all of The Crown, a fair bit of Abbott Elementary, and a couple episodes of Only Murders in the Building. We used to have a Hulu subscription, so we watched the first season of The Bear and several seasons of What We Do in the Shadows. (We’ve since canceled our subscription, so regrettably, no Reservation Dogs.)
Ask me what I liked or disliked about any of these shows, and I can tell you: the dialogue, the sets, the costumes, the pacing. But you might not agree with my verdicts. I find What We Do in the Shadows, a show about vampires living on Staten Island, extraordinarily funny. Laugh-out-loud funny. But Ted Lasso, a show about a soccer team? Three years ago, it took the Emmys by storm. I have friends who love it. But I watched, and I’m sorry … Ted Lasso just isn’t for me.
Taste. As the saying goes, there’s no accounting for it—but Christians are certainly inclined to try. We’re told to turn our thoughts to “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable” (Phil. 4:8). So which paintings and novels and TV shows qualify?
I think this is the wrong question to ask. As CT’s culture editor, I often encounter writers trying to discuss their favorite pop albums or hit summer movies this way. Don’t worry, they argue, this is actually Christian! Or at least it has Christian themes. The film mentions gardens and water and wine. The song touches on love and hope in ways that resonate with Scripture. It’s okay for Christians to like this show because it’s not just good TV. It’s true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and admirable.
This kind of analysis usually falls flat. It tends to feel like a stretch—silly at best, disingenuous at worst. And yet, I understand the appeal. We don’t want the works of art we love to run counter to the claims of our faith. We want to follow Paul’s injunction to “set our minds on things above,” so we go looking for loftiness in sitcoms and pop songs (Col. 3:2). We fear returning to a reflexive fundamentalism that sees “worldly” music, literature, or cinema as inherently dangerous.
Truth is, the best music, literature, and cinema do reference our faith, in a way. These works tell stories, and Christianity tells the grand story underneath them all. Insofar as works of art tell the truth about human nature and the world in which we live, we’ll be able to find those threads of connection—even if only as simple as “sin is real.”
The gospel of Jesus makes sense of sacrifice and typifies love, and distinguishes life from death. Now, as in the beginning, there is the Word, undergirding comedy and tragedy, absurdity and futility, suffering and joy. In that sense, every artwork is that Athenian altar of Acts 17, inscribed to a too-often unknown God.
But whether a television show gets us thinking about what’s noble and pure often has less to do with the show itself and more to do with us as viewers. For Paul, the altar to the unknown God was the basis for a sermon pointing to the God he knew in Christ Jesus. Yet for thousands of Athenians who’d passed it day in and day out for decades, it made no such connection.
Rephrasing my earlier question, then: Which paintings and novels and TV shows qualify for me?
Which pieces of art can move each of us—with our unique aesthetic sensibilities, our God-given proclivities for particular jokes, our besetting sins—to reflect on what’s admirable and right?
Posing the question this way doesn’t disregard the guidelines in Philippians 4:8. Some films or songs or texts—such as those with wildly gratuitous violence or pornographic sexuality—will never help any of us meditate on things above. Art isn’t like meat sacrificed to idols (1 Cor. 8:4–8); it’s not all neutral for the Christian. Not everything is on the table.
Yet this approach does allow for personality, flexibility, and yes, taste. I reveled in the award-winning show Breaking Bad and its companion, Better Call Saul. Those series are violent, but they didn’t tempt me to wrath. I spent the days after each episode meditating on good intentions and underlying motives and how susceptible we are to faulty explanations of our own behavior.
But Baby Reindeer I couldn’t stomach. Its portrayal of human brokenness aligned with my understanding of sin-corrupted reality. But the show’s depictions of sexual violence made me queasy; they stuck with me too long after I’d turned off the TV. The show felt dark; it made me feel dark. I decided not to finish the series.
The reverse may have been true for a different believer: yes to Baby Reindeer, no to Breaking Bad. In that sense, art is like that idol-sacrificed meat: A stumbling block for one of us won’t be for the other (1 Cor. 8:9–13).
This makes the task of the Christian critic at once more difficult and more interesting. Our job is not to justify our taste in culture but to explain what we see from a vantage point oriented to Christ. Not, This art is actually kinda Christian, but rather, Here’s what I realized as a Christian encountering this art.
We needn’t try to force cultural artifacts into a set of parameters they were never meant to meet, grading on a curve so our favorites get a pass. Instead, we come to those artifacts as changed people, minds renewed, and see what there is to see.
This is not how most of us think about taste today, whether we are Christians or not, but it harkens to an older tradition. Once, philosophers thought of taste not in terms of “what band you like, what books you read, what clothes you wear,” writer Kyle Chayka explained in a recent interview with the critic Ezra Klein. They understood it rather “as a more fundamental human experience, like a moral capacity, a way of judging what’s around you and evaluating what’s good and … almost making it part of yourself.”
Developing taste like that will require confidence, born of sanctification and informed by the Spirit, about what is good and worthy of our attention. It will require humility, too, about our own capacity to see rightly, our self-flattering accounts of what we like and dislike, and the fact that our minds could always change, perhaps from the benefit of another believer’s view.
This is how I hope my own taste will come to operate as a Christian culture critic: as a bellwether for the admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy. As an aid to my faith. As a means of encountering God in a brushstroke, a laugh line, a well-written truth.
Kate Lucky is senior editor of culture and engagement at Christianity Today.
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