Sacred Art Has a Generational Gap, but Artists Can Close It

Sacred art needs to say something to this generation other than, “here are cherubs on clouds,” dreamy harpists, lifelike furry fruits, and people looking pious, virgin women in flowing robes with halos, God as an old man with a beard sitting in the sky. When people think about sacred art, they go straight to the Renaissance and Baroque periods, where it all began, Catholic art.

No, Gen Z don’t want to see the unachievable ideal. Catholic saints are just as unhelpful as AI models. They want grunge, but also crave something real, beautiful, and hopeful.

They want us as artists to acknowledge the mundane and the brutal, and to claim it as unjust, so they have a reason to hate existence, and both hate and love that the change for the world is in their hands.

But at the same time, let’s give them a middle ground. No more painterly saintly figures or rageful art for social and political action. Somewhere between Guercino and Basquiat, today’s artists need to create for the spiritual encounter of goodness.

Beneath Gen Z's stubborn, dreamless, anaesthetised hearts, we must stir a vision of passion and experiential beauty that makes every breath for them an excitement to breathe. For these children have never inhaled air fragranced by the legacy of God’s wonders. They are like those of the Exodus story, surviving out of Egypt in the desert, thinking the stories of old have no relevance, no truth, no reality and that miracles are fiction, that the supernatural is out of reach. It is all the end, when in fact the divine is in their reach and eternity is theirs to know, if they want it.

Beyond quick dopamine hits, TikTok viral videos, AI art, Gen Z’s hearts still have, as the writer in Ecclesiastes says, “eternity set in the human heart.”

So as a contemporary sacred artists,

let us make art that speaks to the piece of eternity in everyone.