Salt: It’s all in Good Taste. But whose good taste are we talking about?

I have strong ideas about what's in good taste. Maybe you do too. Maybe you like your home to look a certain way. You don't put just anything on your walls, you choose carefully. Maybe you think through what a balanced meal comprises but also how the taste and textures of the food works together. Maybe you also have ideas about what lyrics in worship songs should be like, not to mention the choice to use the same four chords over and over. No? Is that just me?

I'm excited about theological aesthetics. This field encompasses a broad range of ideas involving art and imagination and how that has an impact on theology. The question of taste came up with Frank Burch Brown's book Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Brown explains how our artistic taste finds Christian artistic expression and the theological implications therein. He ends his book with a description, not a critique, of Karen Blixen's short story, "Babette's Feast", which was turned into a film in the 1980s by Gabriel Axel. Brown does not comment on the nature of this film: good taste, bad taste or Christian taste. I suppose much of my current study is inspired by my response to this lack. Or at least to pick up where Brown leaves off. 

As I was reminded recently, systematic theology (of which food theology is a part) always returns to the relationship between God and humanity. We learn of God from the Bible. Do we find any mention of good taste in the Bible? Reading about good taste in the words of Jesus in the gospels is an exercise in some intense cultural soul-searching. Mark 9:49-50 (NLT) tells it one way: "Salt is good for seasoning. But if it loses its flavour, how do you make it salty again? You must have the qualities of salt among yourselves and live in peace with each other." Matthew 5:13 (NLT) tells it another: "You are the salt of the earth. But what good is salt if it has lost its flavour? Can you make it salty again? It will be thrown out and trampled underfoot as worthless."

What does Jesus mean? Are we talking about how the followers of Jesus could be “in good taste” to those around them? I’m not sure if any of those fishermen would rate as being “in good taste” to the synagogue elite. Or are we now talking about us as Jesus’ followers. We need to be “in good taste.” But what really does that mean? For context, in the passage from Matthew we find this comment about salt immediately following the Beatitudes, part of the Sermon on the Mount. This leads me to think of the virtue of being humble, persecuted, poor, and in mourning that Jesus upholds. Jesus, is this what it means to be in good taste?

I looked up who else has been writing about the good taste of salt in a Christian sense. Some of the titles I found very alarming. Alarming because it’s clear that a certain kind of behaviour that conforms to a particular conservative moral code, which has been culturally constructed in the name of Christ, and which may or not be actually concerned with the message of Christ, is the aim of these books. The message seems to be that those in good Christian taste are ONLY the ones who conform to a particular fundamentalist expression of Christian behaviour, complete with faulty understandings of what prophecy was meant for in the Bible and is meant for as we read it today.

To me, the message of Christ is interested in caring for the poor, the disadvantaged, those on the outskirts of “acceptable society.” Yes, this is a social reading of the gospel. The message of these books seems to be: fall in line with our conservative, patriarchal, nostalgic representation of what a Christian is and does. Don’t step out of line. Don’t associate with sinners. Read the Bible only in a literal sense. Pick and choose the verses you like and definitely use them without Biblical context. (No, I’m not opinionated.)

This is what got me thinking about salt. So I did a lot of reading. I looked into salt’s chemical and physical structure, how people have made it historically and today, which countries produce salt and how it is consumed. The themes that emerge here are that salt requires ingenuity and cooperation to produce and distribute. I read all the passages about salt in the Bible and discerned there are at least three themes: salt as a preservative, salt as a symbol for purity, salt as a means for revenge (e.g., aside from Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt, the Psalms reference conquering armies further punishing their foes by spreading salt in their fields, thereby rendering them sterile).

The collage I made after reading about salt

And this brings me back to Jesus’ words. Are we doing what salt does? Are we ingenious and cooperative? Are we agents preserving purity or revenge? Are we embodying the sermon on the mount? Because if we’re not in good taste, we’re worthless, only good for throwing away. Ouch Jesus. That hurts.

Teach me, Holy Spirit, what it means to be in good taste, in Jesus’ name.

How does this tie into art? As I was exploring theological aesthetics, I came across a volume by Paul Maltby called Christian Fundamentalism and the Culture of Disenchantment (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2013). Maltby is a non-American who came to the USA to study. He wrote the book, I think, to better understand American Christian fundamentalism, through a discussion of their visual art. Maltby helpfully identifies categories of this genre of art and gives a critique that outlines the underlying assumptions or beliefs of evangelical Christians in America. The gist is that most evangelical art, which is well-loved and bought and sold in great quantities, is to the postmodern outsider, kitsch. This is because evangelical art is entirely un-ironic, while irony is held by the postmodern art lover as a high virtue. Fundamentalist art espouses “compliant faith in a divine plan, supernatural solutions to earthly problems, and, more generally, a didactic and moralistic posture (evangelical art is all answers and no questions).” Further “evangelical doctrine offends the postmodern politics of radical democracy insofar as it generates regressive ideology, which promotes chauvinistic flag-waving, ethnocentric standards, and a patriarchal model of the family” (chapter 5, introduction). And here’s where I appreciate Maltby even more as an academic: he suggests that such art has the potential to expose the limitations of postmodern irony, and in particular its “deficit of spiritual meaning. After all, evangelical art has the resources to address the kinds of spiritual themes—salvation, piety, beatitude, transcendence, eternity—that our deeply antimetaphysical postmodern culture cannot accommodate.” (chapter 5, introduction). Food for thought.

My favourite example which relates in my mind to salt is an artwork by Ron DiCianni called “Policeman’s Prayer” (2002), which was also released under the title “Blessed are the Peacemakers” (2001). In case you missed it, that is one of the beatitudes, Matthew 5:9. The very thing that it seems to me Jesus calls "in good taste." The artwork features a white policeman, dressed in black uniform, who is inspired by the angel of a crusader. The angel-crusader’s flag wraps around the policeman and transforms into an American flag, draped over his shoulder. That DiCianni is a talented painter is not what is at stake.

I am deeply offended by this art. I realize that this art was made post 9-11 and pre-George Floyd, but that doesn’t change the fact that most people agree that the police force is not the ideal of peacemaking, something Maltby calls "astonishingly naïve." Maltby helpfully outlines some of my ire about the crusader: “DiCianni invokes the spirit of the Crusades…to suggest that policing is informed by Christian values. … the flag of the Crusades mutates into the United States’ flag, thereby implying that America is the successor to and embodiment of the crusading enterprise.” (chapter 5, Ron DiCianni section). Being a student of history, I have a very different view of what a crusader did, historically speaking, and it was not peace making or keeping. Maltby reminds us that a fundamentalist ideal is of Christ as warrior, which comes across loud and clear in this work.

This work highlights for me all of what I find frustrating in fundamentalism: a literal and limited education of Biblical topics and of history, an ethnocentric viewpoint, a chauvinistic nationalism, and a perpetuation of patriarchal norms. I would rather that the peacemaker in question is not a man but an “everywoman.” Maybe she is Lou, the director of a homeless community centre, or Sarah, the anxiety counsellor, or Andrea, the elementary school teacher, or Tina, the art therapist. And maybe she is not inspired by a ruthless, looting killer but instead by a dove symbolising the Holy Spirit. Hey, if fundamentalist art can give you all the answers and ask no questions of you, I can too. But that wouldn’t be art in good taste. At least not in my taste.     

And yet, fundamentalist Christians are my siblings in Christ. How can we bridge that gap? Surely we, as Christians, can communicate a Christian culture, including an art, without alienating the rest of the world?

Are we in good taste? Are we salty enough?

Teach me, Holy Spirit, what it means to be in good taste, in Jesus’ name.