At First Things, Joe Carter has written an excellent piece entitled “Thomas Kinkade’s Cottage Fantasy.” In the article, he highlights some of the early work by Thomas Kinkade – admirable in many ways – and contrasts it with his later work that gained him so much financial success. His describes the change in Kinkade’s work as a descent into sentimentality. 

 

Carter goes on to note:

 

Sentimentality…encourages us to “suspend judgment and reflection in order to indulge deliberately in emotion for its own sake.” Reflection reinforces and strengthens true emotions while exposing those feelings that are shallow and disingenuous. Sentimentalists, however, try to avoid this experience of reality and try to keep people from asking questions by giving them pleasing emotions they have not earned. The shameless manipulation of our emotions…is the ultimate act of cynicism.

 

Kinkade – so wildly popular among religious (especially evangelical) audiences – gives us a window into the danger of sentimentality to our understanding of the world and (much more) to our understanding of the gospel. Sentimental art, especially sentimental religious art, tells us that everything is alright. It tells us that we should be comfortable and comforted. 

 

It’s not that comfort is bad. But, comfort can be achieved in one of two ways – by hiding from difficult truths or by finding hope in the midst of difficult truths. When artwork, especially Christian artwork, offers us comfort without the cross – that is to say, without the difficult realities of sin, death, and the need for a subsitutionary sacrifice – it fools us into believing the lies that our lives are not really messed up, that what should come to us is easy, and that this life will just be fine. Little wonder, then, that the Christian gospel has slowly lost its grip in the Western world as it reaped the benefits of colonialism (in the 19^th century) and modern industrialism (in the 20^th century). 

 

By contrast, the gospel has always flourished where people cannot deny the harshness of reality. Even now in portions of Africa, South American, and Southeast Asia, the church is growing at an incredible rate. The contrast is strong because the gospel offers us a hope beyond the wildest dreams of the sentimentality. It plunges us into the difficult depths of reality, yet it raises us up in the beautiful expectation of a world that will be transformed – not into a sentimental cottage by the sea but to a Father’s mansion which is being prepared for us. Christian worship, at its best, denies sentimentality and yet points us forward. In the words of Charles Wesley:

 

Finish, then, Thy new creation;
Pure and spotless let us be.
Let us see Thy great salvation
Perfectly restored in Thee;
Changed from glory into glory,
Till in heaven we take our place,
Till we cast our crowns before Thee,
Lost in wonder, love, and praise. (from “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling”)