It’s when we create art — and create a better world — that we’re most like our Creator

By David McElroy · July 10, 2011

I took this picture just after sunset Saturday night near where I live in a suburb of Birmingham, Ala. The sky around me was so perfect — and the trees providing the frame so perfect — that I didn’t feel I was responsible for the art I was making. I felt more as though it was being handed to me on a silver platter. All I had to do was click the virtual shutter on my iPhone. When that happens, it feels like magic.

Most people who spend their lives concentrating on politics and power and governing philosophy don’t seem to spend much time thinking about the meaning of life. It’s all about rights and control and fighting someone else for supremacy. When I was much younger, I could understand that coolly rational way of looking at political discussions, but I’m way past that. For me to think it matters anymore, I have to have a reason why it matters insofar as living life. Experiencing such stunning beauty as I photographed last night — and playing a humble role in making it into art — helps make it all make sense to me. Please indulge me while I try to explain what I mean.

I have no desire for power over other people, so politics for that reason alone doesn’t interest me. I have trouble getting excited about tremendous wealth just to live a life of decadent luxury, so the thought of that bores me. I’m ultimately interested in power and money only if they can serve something I see as a higher purpose. My love of life and my love of beauty give me that purpose, because they give me an instinctive understanding of why I was placed here by “the all-wise Author of nature,” to use Adam Smith’s poetic title for God.

I love this life and all its aspects. Even with its hurts and low points and frustrations, life really is good. While we’re on this Earth, we experience most of that through our senses — sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste. It’s in these ways that we experience what the world has to offer us. For an atheist, that’s all there’s ever going to be, in his view, so it stops there. For those of us who are Christians (or those who are expecting an afterlife through whatever they believe in), that next life looms as terribly important. But if we don’t see this life — and this world — as important, we’re questioning why our Creator put us here.

For me, I feel closest to God when I’m creating something of beauty and meaning — in the world and in the lives of other people. God has many roles in the Bible, but the first and foremost was of Creator — creating the world around us and all the life that live in it, including me. I believe human beings are most like God when we create in our own small ways, but not just art in the grandiose sense of the word. We’re emulating God’s creative power when we invent things or build cities or lead people to a better life. In short, we are most like God when we take the raw material He has given us and create a better world. When we create a better world for ourselves and others to live in, we are creating a kind of art and beauty that’s impossible to put a value on.

As I thought tonight about the meaning of life and of creation, I thought about the most intense experiences I’ve had with my senses. I’m not going to take the time to detail all of mine — partly because they wouldn’t all be interesting to you and partly because they’re too intensely personal — but I found that it was quite clear with each one of them which experience in my life most represented that sense to me. I realized quickly that they were very intensely emotional experiences.

For sight, I identify the incredible natural beauty around me — such as in the picture I took Saturday night — as my most intense experiences. Sometimes it’s been sky or trees or flowers. Other times, it’s animals or even people. Yet other times, objects made by humans were a part of those artistic combinations. In those cases, even those seemed natural and perfect and heroic in ways that I can’t explain. For sound, I was torn between certain music and the sound of a particular woman’s voice. Somehow, they meshed together for me. For smell and touch, the same woman played the most emotional role. For taste, I surprised myself by realizing that the most intense memories were from decades ago, not from the foods that I treasure and enjoy today.

There are dozens of things I could have mentioned in each category. Your list would be different from mine. There aren’t any “right” answers. But there are certain conditions which need to be met for us to experience those things. Creating those conditions in the world is the only reason I’m interested in political ideas or governance at all.

I’m a creator. I’m an artist. Sometimes, I’m not sure what my medium is. Sometimes I’m not sure I’m any good at the art I try to make. But it’s only through trying to create — making things and failing and then trying again and experiencing the triumph and the humility of success — that I live out the life God has given me in a way that seems worthy of Him.

We inherited a very fallen world. In Christian terms, it’s a sinful world. In more generic terms that almost everyone can agree with at one time or another, it’s a world where evil plays a tremendous role. It’s a world where darkness is constantly pushing against the light to roll back the gains that humans have made as we’ve inched our way out of savagery. It’s by trying to make a better world — for ourselves and others — that we are part of the light and that we push the darkness back.

It’s always going to be an individual choice how people want to live their lives, and that’s as it should be. Some people will choose to live in ugliness — whether it’s literal, physical ugliness or inner ugliness that reflects the values of darkness — and others will choose something closer to the beauty and light that the world are sometimes capable of being. What I believe is that people have a tougher time making a positive choice when they live in an ugly world and where they don’t believe beautiful and good choices even exist.

I can’t change the whole world. I can’t make the entire world beautiful and clean and free. But maybe I can help show that it’s possible to build pockets where that’s true. And if enough people see that it’s possible, maybe they’ll choose to build their own beautiful parts of the world. Until they believe it’s possible, though, they’re going to keep living in the ugly and coercive world that they’re a part of.

For me, creating free cities and free enclaves is a step on the way toward creating a more beautiful world that brings us just a little closer to what God intended. God certainly doesn’t need us to do it for Him. But as we use the raw material and beauty and freedom He naturally gave us to create something better, we’re making ourselves better people and we’re learning some of the things He put us here to learn.

The modern evangelical church has seen art in a utilitarian way for too long. It’s time that Christians accepted their natural role as creators of art for its own sake — for the sake of emulating God. Part of that creative impulse needs to be to create beautiful and free places in which people can live better lives. Even though Franky Schaeffer didn’t have the notion of building free cities in mind when he wrote his book, I think what he says about art is also true of creating a better world. For Christians, I highly recommend Schaeffer’s 1981 book, “Addicted to Mediocrity: Contemporary Christians and the Arts.” It’s an indictment of how the church has abandoned the historic role it once had in creating and fostering creativity across a range of endeavors.

For me, there’s an obvious and intuitive leap that goes from the beauty I see in the picture I took Saturday night and what I want to create in the world around me. Explaining that — and the theological implications for me as a Christian — are much more complicated. If you’re not a Christian, you certainly won’t share my particular reasons for wanting to create a better world (or better pieces of the world), but that doesn’t mean that love of beauty and love of life can’t be inspirations for you, too.

Whether you share my inspiration or not, most people can agree that creating great art is something we should strive for. Creating a free and beautiful world — or even pockets of it to prove it can be done — is worth giving a lifetime to achieving.

You might find creativity or artistic impulses in yourself on a shelf of underused things in the metaphorical closet of your brain. You really need to pull it off of the shelf and see what it feels like to use it again — or even for the first time. It can change your life and bring you closer to the truth about God, however you understand Him.

If I ever forget why I want to create a better world, I look at a picture such as last night’s — or think about the touch or smell or sound of someone important — and it all makes sense to me. That sort of perfect beauty inspires me to want to create more beauty. It’s not easy, but it’s worth struggling to achieve.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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