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Welcome to breakpoint, a daily look at an ever changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stonestreet. Earlier this year, police in Australia arrested two men for vandalizing a sacred indigenous site with graffiti. Spray painted. Damage was over 30ft wide and 6ft high. Facebook user reacted this way. Quote, they've got some nasty, nasty juju coming their way for this disrespectful vandalism. Ancestors know who they are, end quote. Well, last month, Canterbury Cathedral received a similar graffiti treatment. This time, however, no one was arrested since it was done by the permission of cathedral officials. According to the visual arts advisor and curator Jacqueline Cresswell, this graffiti, and I quote, is giving the marginalized community of Canterbury a voice within the cathedral putting profound questions to God. And here I thought that's what the Psalms were all about. Canterbury is, of course, not just any other church building, even in Europe. It's the church from which Christianity spread throughout England. In the 500s, after the pagan Anglo Saxon tribes had overrun the older Celtic Christian regions, missionaries came to the barbarian kingdom of Kent in the southeast of England to share the gospel. Their leader is known to history as Augustine of Canterbury. He converted King Ethelbert and built Canterbury Cathedral as the first church for the English. The millions of Christians came to faith through the missionary efforts that were first sparked at Canterbury. It remains the mother church of a now very fractured worldwide Anglican communion and the Church of England. The new spray paint installation stands in stark contrast to the ancient medieval graffiti that can still be seen barely on the walls of the crypt. The barely readable ancient sketchings point to Christ, his crucifixion, to the martyrs. According to one visitor, the new installation makes the beautiful cathedral resemble an underground car park. Last year, reacting to the funeral of a transgender prostitute activist at St Patrick's Cathedral in New York City, Carl Truman introduced an essential thought category that is helpful for understanding this cultural moment, including this new graffiti project. Here's what he wrote. Our age is not marked so much by disenchantment as it is by desecration. The culture's officer class is committed not merely to marginalizing that which previous generations considered sacred. It is committed to its destruction. Disenchantment has passive connotations, a dull, impersonal, somewhat tedious, but inevitable process. But desecration speaks to the exaltation that active destruction of the holy involves. End quote. Truman is echoing here a scene from the C.S. lewis novel, that hideous strength to be initiated into an evil conspiracy. The protagonist in that story is is told to desecrate a crucifix. Though he's not a Christian, he still hesitates. However, the conspirators insist that going against what's thought to be holy is the only way forward. It was the sociologist Charles Taylor who described a trait of modernism as disenchantment. In other words, as the Western world lost its faith in God, it also necessarily had to reject the transcendent. However, disenchantment cannot adequately describe the rejection of beauty and the commitment to transgression that has characterized so much of our modern culture. In his books the God who Is There and How Should We Then Live? Francis Schaeffer predicted that the loss of Christian consensus would also make our lives and our worlds uglier. To illustrate this, Shaffer told how Igmar Bergman, when writing a film to portray the meaningless of life, was so troubled by a piece from Bach that was playing in the background. The order, beauty and transcendence of this work by this Christian composer undermined the vision of chaos that he was trying to prove. In the same way, in a desecrated age like ours, beauty will be denied. It will be mocked, it will be caricatured. For example, when young people harm or subvert or even mutilate their own bodies, they're not merely adopting a new style, they're desecrating what's sacred. Ironically and unwittingly, of course. To desecrate beauty is to presume that there's beauty to be desecrated. The graffiti on the walls of Canterbury only shock because it's on those majestic walls in that majestic cathedral. In a 1798 essay, Johann Wolfgang von Gutta claimed this quote, the highest demand made on an artist is this, that he may be true to nature, study her, imitate her, and produce something that resembles her phenomena well. In fact, Christians know that beauty has the potential to point to something even beyond nature. Beauty is a way to acknowledge and protect and celebrate what is in fact, sacred. It's a way to point the world to the one who spoke all of nature into existence. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stonestreet with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. For a version of this commentary that you can download and share with others, go to breakpoint.org.