That period of transition from summer to autumn is always a busy time for me. Thus, the one-year anniversary of Make Art Good Again, in mid-September, slipped past with me barely noticing. Still, though I may be a bit late, I would like to commemorate the moment with a short and (potentially) slightly self-indulgent piece.
When I began this publication, I was not sure that once I finished my first five pieces I would have anything more to write about. I had the ideas for those long before I mustered the courage to publish them here. But I felt as though God told me that if I stewarded the ideas I had then He would provide new ones, for new articles, when the time came. And He did.
Those ideas have not always related as directly to art and entertainment as my original vision intended. Indeed, more and more, as of late, those ideas have revolved around mindsets I’ve observed in Christian and Conservative communities (and, quite often, where those two communities intersect). Sometimes these mindsets are on the right track, if not quite to their destination yet. Other times they are outright problematic (if I can be so bold as to use a term favored by the Left).
In one of my first few articles (it may have been the first one, now that I think on it) I gave the Cambridge Dictionary’s definition of “culture.” In that definition, it includes “beliefs” as part of what makes up a culture. Our beliefs - the ways we think, the biases we possess, and what we accept as true or false and right or wrong - shape the culture.
This publication was born out of my frustration with the way my “tribes” (Christians and Conservatives) interact with art and entertainment, both as artists and consumers. This frustration comes from my belief that if we want to keep our country, once we expel the Globalists, then we must have deep, cultural changes that will impact and influence the generations that follow us. We need to find ways to not only pass on the memories of what we have experienced, but also the new mindsets we are currently in the process of acquiring. We need future generations to understand not just what events happened, but also why we came to the conclusions we came to. Why we believe what we believe.
In other words, winning the Culture War is just as important as winning in the political and governmental arenas. Winning the Culture War is how we, and the generations that follow us, will maintain victory in those other areas.
I see art and entertainment as one of, if not the, most effective tools for doing just that. But we cannot wield that tool - at least not well - if we do not take it seriously, treat it with respect, and learn how to use it properly. Unfortunately, many Christians and Conservatives fail in all three respects. Again, both in how they consume and how they produce art and entertainment.
That is where Make Art Good Again came in. After years of watching first Christians and then Conservatives continually fumble the cultural ball, I couldn’t keep silent anymore. I couldn’t just make my own art and hope that someday Christian and Conservative communities would recognize and self-correct the mistakes they were making. Mistakes that seemed glaringly obvious to me. Mistakes that are almost entirely rooted in erroneous mindsets.
I won’t pretend that, to date, I’ve made a huge dent in those mindsets, but at the very least this has been a personally cathartic experience.
While I always knew politics would play a part in Make Art Good Again - Conservatives are part of my target audience, after all - I never wanted it to become a political commentary blog. There are plenty of people out there who do just that and who do it better than I would. However, over the last year, as I’ve written about the relationship of Conservatives and Christians to art and entertainment, I’ve come to recognize that many of the mindsets I see in that realm extend, in one way or another, to the entirety of the Cultural Battlefront. And not just the Culture, but every aspect of this non-kinetic war we are waging to wrest our world from the grasp of the Globalists.
This is not just a political battle. Or a cultural battle. It’s a war for our minds.
Art and entertainment constitute but one figurative battlefront within this war. Similar mindsets, which cause us to stumble when creating or consuming art, also cause us to stumble in other cultural and political areas. We need to break free of the programming that has long kept us ineffective. That has kept us caught up in ways of thinking that prevent us from seeing the bigger picture. That has kept us blaming the wrong people for the ills of our society. That has kept us thinking certain things are right or good because those people over there say those things are wrong or bad. That has kept us accepting easy, surface-level answers that make us complacent and feel like we’re superior to others.
I hope I do not sound arrogant. I do not mean to imply that I have all the answers. Indeed, many of my own mindsets have been challenged and have changed over the last few years. I expect that process to continue into the future. It’s a process we all have to go through if we wish to have lasting change, both in society at large as well as in our own individual lives.
In many ways, Make Art Good Again has been part of that process for me. Some of my articles have been born from ideas and thoughts that were, more or less, fully formed before I started writing them out. But other times, the writing process itself has helped me to examine and expand upon half-formed thoughts. It’s helped me to look at those thoughts from different angles, recognizing the flaws in my thinking that need to be discarded. Considering new ideas that had not previously occurred to me. Seeing connections in the world, in how people think and behave, that I would not have noticed otherwise.
And so, more and more, I have found myself branching out beyond writing only from the lens of art and entertainment. I don’t know where this next year will take this publication. But I will continue to steward the ideas that God gives and will see where that takes me. And I’m excited to have you all along for the ride.
I want to thank everyone who has read, liked, subscribed, and shared any of my writing, over this past year. Here’s to another year!