The surprising role of religion in contemporary art

Jonathan Anderson is the Eugene and Jan Peterson Associate Professor of Theology and the Arts at Regent College in Vancouver. Anderson is trained as an artist, art critic and theologian. In his recent book, The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art (2025), Anderson addresses a strange phenomenon: even though religion was present in modern art, it was “under-interpreted, or uninterpretable” in art criticism and history, making religion “invisible.”

Maaike VanderMeer: In interviews, you’ve said that there has been a shift in art history to include religion in the art conversation again. Can you talk more about that?

Jonathan Anderson: There’s significantly renewed interest these days in spirituality, religion and theology, and a lot of writing has emerged in the art academy exploring these topics. But it is also a confusing conversation. 

The histories of modern and contemporary art were written with a strong secularization theory built into them. Modernism was understood to be enacting and exemplifying a social liberation from religion. That theory has fallen apart in recent decades, and there’s a growing dissatisfaction with any closed-system way of talking about human being in the world that simply brackets out religion.

Over the past 17 years or so, I have been reading anything and everything aimed at saying something about spirituality and religion in contemporary art, trying to make sense of the central concerns driving the various approaches to these topics. It became increasingly clear to me that there are at least four different kinds of questions – four interpretive “horizons,” as I began to call them – shaping discussions of religion in contemporary art: an anthropological, political, spiritual and theological horizon.     

I distinguish these not to keep them apart but because each of these questions has an integrity of its own that’s irreducible to the others, and because each seems to describe an important vein within the different ways people are discussing these topics. 

When pursued within an anthropological horizon, questions about the interrelations of art and religion are principally focused on understanding how social worlds are formed and sustained.

When seen within a political horizon, the interrelations of art and religion sensitize us to how power is structured. 

Those working within a spiritual horizon see in art a potential for fostering reconnection and re-enchantment in the context of modern disconnection and disenchantment.

And finally, within a theological horizon, the questions of art and religion require attention to the theological conceptualities in play throughout art history and, indeed, to how the question of God is a live question in contemporary art.

Four horizons of interpretation

Anderson sees the role of religion in contemporary and modern art through these four horizons:

Anthropological: How social worlds are formed and sustained.
Political: How power is structured.
Spiritual: How art has the potential for fostering reconnection and re-enchantment.
Theological: How the question of God is a live question.

VanderMeer: I wanted to ask more about your use of the word horizon – where did it come from?

Anderson: From phenomenology generally, but I adapted it specifically from Hans-Georg Gadamer. Gadamer uses the term to speak about the ways an artwork always addresses viewers within a particular “hermeneutical situation” that causes the artwork to stand forth with a particular kind of intelligibility. To have an interpretive “horizon” is to be situated in the world within some kind of encircling sense of the world, within which things have dimension, history and meaningful relatedness to other things. But the world is so dense and so complex that we’re all always living within multiple hermeneutical horizons. Gadamer speaks about the ways careful understanding requires acquiring a horizon of inquiry adequate to the phenomena being experienced and the questions being asked. It’s in this sense that I use the term “horizon” to refer to multiple ways in which “religion” is intelligible in contemporary art.

In theory, different horizons need not be mutually exclusive: human life is simultaneously social, political, spiritual and theological. But to the extent each horizon is encompassing, there are strong temptations to reduce all other horizons into the one you believe offers the most fundamental sense of life, in the sense that all meaning could be rendered as fundamentally a question of social formations, power dynamics, divine being, and so on. In distinguishing them, I want to say, no, there’s an integrity to each of these horizons that is irreducible to the others. I want to keep them open and encourage better dialogue between them without simply collapsing the theological into the political, for example, or vice versa.

VanderMeer: You talk about symbols in the modernist era as a way to read religion (like grids and crucifixes). Are people still largely interpreting symbols as religious or has that faith vocabulary been lost?

Anderson: There was a big exhibition in Düsseldorf, Germany in 2015 called The Problem of God. The premise was that although Christian faith had severely waned in Europe, religious imagery seemed increasingly common in contemporary art. The curator kept encountering it during studio visits with artists she respected, so she began asking: How can we be sensitive to what’s going on in the arts today if we don’t have robust ways of speaking about this? In this way, she framed The Problem of God mostly within an anthropological horizon, tracing the “afterlife” of Christianity as a kind of visual grammar in contemporary art, even without Christian belief. That’s very interesting, but I think these kinds of imageries and visual grammars have a deeper historical intelligence to them that continually opens “The Problem of God” into unresolved theological questioning.

VanderMeer: I went back to your artworks from the early 2000s, and the names of your paintings are getting towards some of these things: doubt, ontology and questioning.

Anderson: A lot of my paintings from that time are about the mystery of sayability. There’s a strange thing happening in the “ground” of those paintings. In each case, the ground pictured in the image is conflated with the material ground of the painting, the initial surface or colour the image is built on (see p. 1). This produces an oscillation between the pictorial structure of each image (in which the ground appears as a kind of absence) and the material structure of the painting (in which those absences are more physically present than the figures). That oscillation is, for me, a way of thinking about the mystery of language, representation and pictoriality.

A similar procedure also runs throughout my Constructions series, in which what appears to be the structural framing of a half-built house is in fact an elaborately unpainted omission in a landscape painting, showing the bare wooden panel on which the painting is constructed. This produces a strange situation in which the wooden figure in each landscape is materially equivalent to the wooden ground of the painting itself. So, the “dwelling place” in each painting is both an unfinished representation that discloses its own ground and a mostly-concealed ground that stands forth as a representational figure. That figure–ground thing is – I mean, I’m a mystic about that.

VanderMeer: That’s a very theological concept, “hidden in plain sight.”

Anderson: Yes, indeed. But it’s “hidden” not because I was trying to hide something, but because the concept operates at the level of visual and material structure rather than in symbols.

I know a lot of prominent artists who talk about these kinds of things in their studios. But it becomes more or less absent in the writing and teaching about their work, and it often doesn’t show up in their own artist talks or interviews. And I was finding that this is true not only of living artists but of many artists throughout modern art history. That problem is really what turned me from the studio to the writing desk.

To clarify, I don’t mean that modernism is full of religious belief, and art historians are simply ignoring or blocking it (occasionally that happens). More often, religion operates in modern and contemporary art as a matter of significant inner conflict. This conflictedness is often theologically substantive precisely in its conflicted form. There hasn’t been a very robust discussion of that.

What might it look like to attend to the theological dimensions and implications of contemporary artworks with as much sophistication and subtlety as we do their formal or political dimensions and implications?

CC‘s front page

“Art history as a discipline has become principally a discourse about power. In many respects, this is good and important,” says Anderson. “But this way of experiencing and thinking about art within a political horizon also has strong tendencies to reduce all things to itself.”

I mentioned that Christian Courier places art alongside news. For example, our recent Christmas front page – the nativity scene in a tent city – allows the theological question to actually subvert power.

Anderson responded, “Yes, this raises an important question: what might it look like to be highly sensitive to the political density of artworks in a way that also keeps a theological horizon genuinely open, neither allowing the theological ultimately to collapse into questions of power nor allowing the theological to be insulated from or naïve to those questions. The nativity is about gender, race, class, marginality and so on, but it’s also, centrally, about the love of God reconciling all things to itself. This is a politics that is alive only so long as it is also theologically alive.”