Article

Attention

Culture

14 February 2025

5 min read

Dispatches from the battlefield of imagination

The Age of Intellect has given way to the Age of Imagination.

Theodore Brun

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles.

A collage image shows a person holding their head, with a wash of warm colours over the scene.

Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Twenty years ago today, I crossed the threshold of the Christian faith. It was a baptism of fire in a more literal and mystical sense than I care to describe (or indeed would be able to). And unlike many, I really can point to a day and a time and a place.

That night, perhaps unlike CS Lewis, I was not quite “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” But I was certainly the most bewildered. ‘What have I let myself in for?’ I wondered as I walked away from that church on a dark, wet January night. I was certain that in crossing that threshold I had entered a new world. Even if it was true, as I believed – or as I now knew - I sensed that it was dangerous too. There was a wildness to what I had just witnessed that was both thrilling and disconcerting. And yet, after that encounter, I could no more have turned away from what I had discovered than stop the world turning. As the mathematician Blaise Pascal discovered in his own ‘night of fire’ – “certitude, certitude!” is a very precious gift, and one worth holding on to.

Twenty years later, the landscape of faith in this country looks very different to the one in which I stumbled my way over the line. (Or through the back of the wardrobe might be a better metaphor.)

Back then, in 2005, the War on Terror was raging. If religion was discussed at all, it was generally reckoned a pretty rotten sort of institution. A regrettable historical hangover, an inheritance bequeathed to us by our more credulous ancestors of which we were doing well to divest ourselves, albeit too slowly for some. In this brave, new secular world, it was an increasingly commonplace view that religion ruined everything; beside which, it wasn’t true anyway.

These were the days when a certain form of atheism was ebullient and on the march. The Four Horsemen of Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and Harris held the cultural conch for a time, and they weren’t letting go. The God Delusion came out in October 2006, quickly followed by God Is Not Great in early 2007. Religion (not sin) was the root of all evil. Reason^TMwas the exclusive intellectual property of the unreligious mind, untainted as it was by visions of that laughably silly Sky-Fairy in the heavens. The battlefield of apologetics was a much-contested landscape at the time. Truth was the prize - which both sides could at least agree upon - and many a debating hall was filled to bursting to watch each side’s sharpest minds slug it out.

God only knows how in such an intellectual atmosphere, I survived the shelling and carried through to the other side. But it’s telling that I had as my guide through the intellectual carnage, not voices of that age, but rather voices from further back in time. My old friend, CS Lewis, but also GK Chesterton, St Augustine, Dostoyevksy, and the potent words of the gospels to which they led me. Like wily old corporals, they saw me safe across No Man’s Land.

Even if I made it through, there’s no doubt it was the secularists who gained the cultural ground back then. That their intellectual case was unsound, it didn’t matter. Their propaganda was better – it was what people wanted to hear – and so Christianity was shoved out of the public square.

And now, two decades on, the war has moved into a very different theatre of operations. The Age of the Intellect has given way to the Age of Imagination as, unwittingly, the dry vacuum of secularism has sucked in contending spirits of another kind.

These days proponents and adversaries of the Christian faith jostle not in the dusty debating halls of our great universities, but on the battlefield of cultural consumption. Its topography formed of the movies we watch, the streaming channels we look at, the podcasts, music and media we endlessly gulp down.

Truth itself is no longer the prize, since the logical outworking of atheism’s ascendancy was to get what perhaps its proponents never bargained for: a post-truth age. What matters now is not so much what you believe, as what you attend to. The words and images which you consume. (Or which consume you.)

Walk the streets of any city and witness every passer-by glued to the screen nestled in their hand. Earphones clamped over their head. Distraction, saturation, enchantment: a cacophony of sound, a barrage of images overrunning the imagination to the point of madness. Until we have forgotten what it is like to sit patiently in silence with a still and empty mind. What it’s like to observe the world around us, to be available for the people around us.

But with what do we fill our imaginations now – that is the question? There lies the battle.

And so we find ourselves now moving through a world in which our capacity to create and consume is loaded with inestimably high stakes. It harkens back to Dostoyevsky’s famous line in The Brothers Karamazov: “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”

He’s right. Although the heart, the mind, the imagination cannot in any true sense be de-coupled from one another. (Is ‘soul’ a more encompassing word?)

And yet, of the two, the truly subversive combatant is God and not the devil. (Consider the Cross: the most subversive act in all reality.) It is God who is the invader here after all. He is the one taking back ground. His weapons are Truth, Beauty and Goodness. On the face of it, these are mild, even benign, abstractions. And yet in each is wrapped a potency as explosive as dynamite. Because with them, the spells that hold our imaginations captive can be broken. In an unguarded moment, He can slip through the enemy lines.

Witness the ear of culture’s recent harkening to the ancient truths and wisdom of our Judeo-Christian heritage. Nick Cave sings of a “Wild God” and to everyone’s surprise, people are starting to listen again. But he’s not the only one.

The inescapable wildness of God is that He cannot be contained; if His will is to break through, then He cannot be held back. As Mr. Beaver said of the lion Aslan, in answer to the fear: “Is he safe?”

“Who said anything about safe? ’Course, he isn’t safe. But he is good.”

As little image-bearers of this Creator, indeed as little creators in our turn, our creativity teeters on a knife-edge – it always has. An edge sharp enough to cleave heaven from hell. We’d do well to remember that. And that, being image-bearers of this wild God, no wonder we have a wildness of our own.

Yep. Twenty years has already been one heck of an adventure. But I suspect it has only just begun.

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Find out more and sign up

Article

Culture

Fashion

13 February 2025

6 min read

London Fashion Week: unstitching the tension between designers and religion

Why couture turns churches into runways.

Alexandra Kytka-Sharpe

Alexandra is a content producer at University of the Arts London.

Two models stride along a catwalk of a fashion show held in a church

Orgamea, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

During London Fashion Week, galleries, warehouses, halls and factories transform into runways to showcase designers’ newest collections. But sometimes they choose a venue that would otherwise be unexpected for an industry-insider event- one of London’s many churches.

In some ways, the Christian chapel is a natural runway – a crowd cut in two with all eyes on a procession down the central aisle. A church wedding might be the most literal analogy- with the bridesmaids and wedding party as the models on a runway showcasing their fine gowns. But the reasons why a designer might choose a Christian venue go beyond a convenient space.

A venue of smells, bells, fabrics and painting

The Christian Church has a rich history of materiality that other Western institutions would struggle to compete with. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the Church was the main proprietor of all artistic practice. Churches commissioned painters to beautify their walls and to illustrate biblical stories in the form of triptychs and altars. Textile workers embroidered intricate patterns onto clerical vestments, and metal workers and glass makers collaborated to craft stained glass windows. The Church and art were inseparable and for many, attending church was the only way you would see these human-crafted artistic wonders.

Church history and art history are so intertwined that even in the present day, it’s hard to be in the creative industries without some awareness of it.

That sense of materiality is a strong reference point for many who grew up attending more traditional Catholic, Anglican or Orthodox churches, but even for those whose experience with church might involve only the occasional tour of a beautiful church in Italy or Spain. Jean Paul Gaultier, a French haute couture designer, used Catholic iconography in his 2007 show at Paris Fashion week. Each model donned a halo crafted from materials ranging from the roses, metal, feathers, jewells, pearls, gold and yes- even stained glass. Some models carried what looked like hymnals, and a few were even wearing the image of Virgin Mary or Jesus printed onto a veil or fitted dress.

Andrew Bolton, curator of the 2017 exhibit Heavenly Bodies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said “what we call the Catholic imagination” has “engaged artists and designers and shaped their approach to creativity.” Regardless of personal belief, Bolton believes “Beauty has often been a bridge between believers and unbelievers.”

Beyond materiality, the history of Christianity has given us much of the language and concepts by which we think through some of life’s biggest questions. Even if you have never thought of yourself as religious, you will have come into contact with ideas of creation, sin, and redemption that come from the Christian Faith.

At a fashion show, the designer is Creator and his models walk across the runway to showcase his creations. The crowd may be just as religiously devoted to him as church goers are to their god. A church is the natural venue for a designer who thinks himself worthy of that kind of attention.

A church-made-runway is a symbol of designer as god- god of their own creations, their brand, and perhaps the future of fashion itself. By taking on religious iconography, designers become the centre of glory- at least for the 45 minute runtime of the show.

Sometimes, like Gaultier, they feel inspired by the church’s rich iconography. At other times, like McQueen- they are upset at a world created by people who take advantage of power and use religion against others.

Subverting religious ideas

But using the language of Christianity is often about more than co-opting it for a designer’s own glory. It’s often also about subverting the symbolism of religion - to make statements about the hypocrisy or limitations of religion on individuals.

One of the most famous shows at London Fashion Week was the 1996 Alexander McQueen Dante at Christ Church in Spitalfields, East London. Based on the Christian-inspired Dante’s Divine Comedy, the collection featured a combination of photographs taken during the Vietnam war, bold takes on men’s tailoring, and black crucifiction-adorned eye masks borrowed from the work of photographer Joel-Peter Witkin. According to McQueen, “religion has caused every war in the world, which is why I showed it in a church.” Other more recent shows at churches include Dilara Findikoglu's show in 2018 at St. Andrew’s Holborn which dressed models in devil-inspired costumes and Julien McDonald’s show at Southwark Cathedral in 2019 which was heavily criticised for bringing revealing clothes into a sacred space.

McQueen and other designers use their shows in churches to question its integrity. Many who have experienced hurt in the church or from Christians in their personal lives resonate with these fashion statements.

Fashion’s subversion of religious ideas cuts to a core tension many of us experience. I have always felt drawn to Christian ideas. I love the idea that God created humans in his image to “do his handiwork.” Such creativity has fueled human endeavours as famous as Michel Angelo’s Sistine Chapel and as ordinary as my personal wardrobe. And that a loving heavenly Father sacrificed himself to redeem the world and restore creation-it is an extraordinary thought.

At the same time, the history of the world, of Christians and of the church feels weighty. Christians have used religion to justify colonialism, racism, slavery, and a host of other atrocious acts of taking advantage over vulnerable people. In our personal lives, Christians we know may have acted in bad faith- as greedy, selfish and unkind in their dealings with others.

And so, Fashion often encapsulates this duality of having both awe and anger at the church.

But we also know that Fashion isn’t an answer to these problems either. Powerful people in the fashion industry deal with the same temptations of greed and power that others do. The industry is fraught with its own problems of hypocrisy, of doing harm to the women they praise, to the earth whose materials they use, and the vulnerable whose labour they exploit.

I work at an arts and fashion university, where I often see students creatively wrestle with ideas of life, death, faith and hope. Sometimes, like Gaultier, they feel inspired by the church’s rich iconography. At other times, like McQueen- they are upset at a world created by people who take advantage of power and use religion against others. It can be easy for those who come from faiths that are questioned in art to be outraged at this subversion- like many were with McQueen’s original show.

In the novel I am Asher Lev by Jewish rabbi Chaim Potok, a young Hasidic boy in 1950s Brooklyn grapples with the limitations of his religious community as he realises his passion for art. A key moment comes when he realises that there is a difference between the “good” and the “beautiful.” His mentor Jacob tells him,

“I do not sculpt and paint to make the world sacred. I sculpt and paint to give permanence to my feelings about how terrible the world truly is.”

An anthropologist by trade, I look at the work of Fashion designers who use and subvert Christian ideas as a culture grappling with faith in a post-religion world. Humans are unique in their ability to change culture through the things they make and the concepts that come out of them. As a Christian, that creativity, and that freedom to wrestle with life’s toughest questions, are both gifts from God.