Moralism Is Ruining Cultural Criticism
When I was growing up in a conservative evangelical community, one of the top priorities was to manage children’s consumption of art. The effort was based on a fairly straightforward aesthetic theory: Every artwork has a clear message, and consuming messages that conflict with Christianity will harm one’s faith. Helpfully, there was a song whose lyrics consisted precisely of this aesthetic theory: “Input Output.”
Input, output,
What goes in is what comes out.
Input, output,
That is what it’s all about.
Input, output,
Your mind is a computer whose
Input, output daily you must choose.
The search for the “inputs” of secular artwork sometimes took a paranoid form—such as the belief in subliminal messages recorded in reverse, or in isolated frames from where smoke allegedly forms the word . Most often,
