'Challenging' Art

Great works of art, we are told, are challenging. Yet they are only ever challenging in one way: in support of the liberal worldview. When we read Daniel Defoe's great novel Moll Flanders, it presents a largely alien social and moral order, especially regarding women, one that challenges modern beliefs. Yet this isn't why it is considered challenging. No, it is challenging, we are told, because it is proto-feminist, progressive for its time by depicting a strong and independent seventeenth-century woman.

'Forward-thinking', 'enlightened', 'subversive' -- propaganda terms abound in the attempt to rewrite history by re-depicting works of art in a radical light. A work is praised for being 'ahead of its time', at some early stage in an inevitable march forward. It is nonsense, of course, but this kind of progressivism has become the atheist's version of providence.

The Defoe novel that offers the most unambiguous 'challenge' to our age is Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe's discovery of the value of solitude, and the novel's very Christian introversion, presents a true alternative to the modern lifestyle. But Robinson Crusoe is so often relegated to the status of children's book, with all the best theological bits excised. It is neutered, sterilised, made inoffensive to modern readers. If they read the original novel they would discover an actual challenge to their beliefs, a world that no longer exists, a world they have prejudicially rejected as 'backwards'.