The search for new guidance tends to be a non-rational process, one that works through our art and literature, and only later emerges in our treatises. Michelangelo shifted his focus from David triumphant to David readying himself for battle, and so helped make it possible for a morality of conscience to replace a morality of consequences. Luther's notion that an individual's relationship to God was more important that his institutional relationship to the Catholic Church would not have caught on (and might not have been thought of at all) if centuries of courtly romance literature had not stressed the superiority of individual love to social convention. Impressionist painters demonstrated that there was more to a scene than its literal detail, allowing us to have an increased awareness of the subjectivity of experience. Artists revision old symbols and writers retell old stories. They shift the emphasis, introduce new details, change the point of view. Most of these experiments come to nothing, but occasionally one takes hold and allows society to remake itself in a new image.
Americans today find themselves in unforeseen circumstances more frequently than perhaps any people in history. And so it is not surprising to find that our popular culture is filled with such experimentation. The recent genres of fantasy and science fiction, for example, are a virtual playground for new twists on religious ideas and mythic symbols. Unfortunately for the future of Christianity, very few of those ideas and symbols are Christian. Luke Skywalker succeeds by virtue of his rapport with the pantheistic Force, not his relationship to Jesus Christ. Evolutionary transcendence, not salvation after death, is mankind's destiny in Arthur Clarke's 2001 and Childhood's End. Fantasy novelists are finding that virtually any pagan pantheon is easier to write about than the Christian Trinity, and even such a heavily Christianized myth as the Arthurian cycle (even the quest for the Holy Grail!) has been reclaimed for paganism by Mary Stewart's Merlin trilogy and Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon.
In contemporary culture Christianity is represented almost entirely by its dark side. The Devil and the Antichrist still provide dramatic tension, but Christ and the Apostles do not. Where Judeo-Christian symbols are used, they are more likely to be portrayed negatively than positively. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example, the Ark of the Covenant symbolizes a wild, primitive force too dangerous for modern man, and Indiana Jones survives not through faith or virtue, but because he refuses to look when the Ark is opened. The Last Crusade ends similarly, as Jones survives by allowing the Holy Grail to be lost again.
The lack of positive Christian symbols in the popular culture has been recognized by fundamentalists for decades, and they typically have explained it by some external cause, such as media prejudice or the influence of the Devil. But these explanations become more and more implausible as time goes by. Christian organizations now have their own cable network, their own publishing houses, and their own universities. They have no lack of wealth with which to produce their own films and television series. But all these advances have made no dent on the problem, which is simply that Christian concepts fail to catch the popular imagination. Writers, artists, and film-makers choose to address the problems of our times in non-Christian terms because the myths and symbols of Christianity have become infertile.
Such infertility is the beginning of a vicious cycle. An infertile religion is attractive predominantly to those who are afraid of the changes they see around them, and yearn for the past rather than the future. Such people are threatened by any experimentation with the myths and symbols of their religion, and violently reject future-oriented believers who attempt to find new meaning. With each passing decade Christianity goes deeper into this cycle. Consider the uproar caused by the film adaptation of The Last Temptation of Christ. In this retelling, Satan offers Jesus the chance to throw off the burden of saving the world, and lead a comfortable but shallow life. The relevance of such a temptation to our well-fed lives is only too obvious, and Jesus' heroic decision to return to the cross can inspire us in a way that his refusal to turn stones into bread no longer can. The resulting firestorm of Christian protests sent an unfortunate message to future writers and filmmakers: When they consider the unresolved problems of modern life, they should look to other heroes for inspiration and leave Jesus alone.
In the days of the abolitionists Christianity was a leading force for social change. But now it can only react to change, and its reactions are typically late and inadequate. Whether the subject is the changing role of women, genetic engineering, artificially prolonging the lives of the terminally comatose, surrogate motherhood, or any of the other moral challenges that fill our lives and our literature, Christian leaders typically have little to say beyond "Go back." More and more Christianity becomes a religion of nostalgia, and it is increasingly difficult to imagine it giving birth to a vital, creative world view for a new generation.