I grew up in a Christian tradition that highly valued truth and goodness but in which beauty had no intentional place—and certainly not as an “ultimate value” worthy of pursuit for its own sake. We would hear about the beauty of holiness. And the beauty of nature was to be praised because it was God’s handiwork, but the accoutrements of man-made beauty were seen to easily distract the church from its God-given mission. The pursuit of beauty—as I learned in my childhood experience as well as in my historical research—was associated with refinement, excess, and wealth. Leaders like David Lipscomb (1831–1917) spoke sharply against beautiful and expensive church buildings—and the well-to-do members who built them. The church, he believed, was “the especial legacy of God to the poor of the earth”; the rich—the usual patrons of the arts—tended to be the “great corrupters” of the church.

We also tended to read the Bible with a kind of flat-footed literalness that focused on facts and commands. In one of the most common formulations in denominational heritage, the gospel was facts to be believed, commands to be obeyed, and promises to be enjoyed. In this way of reading, one must push past the “highly-colored imagery” in Scripture and retain only the “real facts and unadorned doctrine.” The “poetic element” must be “rendered simple.”

"Where the Beauty Came From," by C. Leonard Allen