The church I attended during most of my childhood and adolescence was ugly – an unattractiveness that derived not from neglect but from intention. The carpet was an orange-brown that the chairs exactly duplicated. The white, windowless walls were bare except for a wooden cross hanging behind the pulpit. It was a young church, and as the years passed, some women tried to soften its harshness. They arranged greenery near the pulpit. They convinced the elders to paint the walls a light blue. Eventually, they successfully petitioned for new chairs, even new carpet. But throughout this brightening, no one dared to propose – no one even thought to propose – introducing visual art into the church’s interior. No paintings, no sculptures, no stained glass windows were considered. This was, of course, a mode of faithfulness.

What my ugly church wanted to avoid was idolatry, a sin of unfaithfulness that runs throughout Christian history, sparking iconoclastic responses. It starts in scripture. When Moses sees the Israelites dancing around a golden calf, he smashes the tablets of the Ten Commandments and pulverizes their idol; they have already broken the second commandment prohibiting graven images. Several generations later, longing to bring Israel back to a purity of worship, King Josiah makes a covenant with the Lord and levels the local shrines. Even Jesus has his iconoclastic moments. He overturns the money-changers’ tables in the Temple, claiming they have turned a house of worship into a den of thieves, making money an idol like a golden calf. And he practiced the iconoclasm of rule-breaking, healing, and gleaning food on the Sabbath despite the Pharisees’ interpretation of such actions as dishonoring the commandments. Isaiah even prophesies the Messiah’s lack of beauty, declaring he has neither form nor comeliness that we should be drawn to him.

Dirck van Delen, Destruction of Icons in a Church, oil on panel, 1630. This painting depicts Beeldenstorm, or “attack on the images or statues,” a wave of iconoclasm in the summer of 1566 in which Protestants destroyed altarpieces, statues, and sacred vessels in countless churches throughout the Netherlands. Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

In post-biblical history, there were two famous periods of iconoclasm in Christianity: the Byzantine fight over images in the eighth and ninth centuries and the image-breaking of the Reformation era in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But Christian iconoclasm is not confined to these two moments. It runs throughout the tradition. Certain strands of desert monasticism worried about how images might infect the imagination. Evagrius Ponticus, for example, forbade even mental images in prayer lest they delude a person about the God who surpasses all imaginings. In the Middle Ages, Bernard of Clairvaux argued that abbey churches should use simple rather than precious materials for their liturgical items and that such churches should not be unduly adorned. John Calvin’s argument that the heart is a factory of idols provoked Christians across nations and centuries to strip their churches of images and art, and inspired the Puritans to wariness toward any aesthetic investments. In the past decade, some churches, together with many other types of public buildings and spaces, have experienced a new spate of iconoclasm as they reckoned with the racist legacies of their monuments. At my current academic home of Duke, the school removed a statue of Robert E. Lee from the chapel in 2017. Where he once stood, there is now an empty niche between President Thomas Jefferson and poet Sidney Lanier.

As the diversity of these examples suggests, iconoclasm can express a range of different impulses. Sometimes iconoclasm attempts to intervene in the worship of a false god, like Moses demolishing the golden calf. Sometimes iconoclasm responds to misrepresentations of the true God or corruptions in our worship of that God, like Jesus in the temple or King Josiah attacking the high places. Sometimes, as in Bernard of Clairvaux’s writing, iconoclasm wants to redirect our attention – to the God who transcends all human-made art, for example, or toward our brothers and sisters in need. Sometimes iconoclasm expresses a worry about sensual indulgence. And sometimes, iconoclasm wants to proclaim God’s omnipresence, the way God cannot be contained by any particular image, statue, or sacred place. This concern to preserve God’s transcendence inspired much of the furious removal of images from worshiping spaces during the Reformation. “If you’re God, then save yourself, but if you’re man, then bleed,” iconoclasts jeer while wrenching a crucifix from a church in Basel. The public performance of the image’s impotence is an anti-idolatry gesture meant to insist that God cannot be contained by artifacts.

Iconoclasm can have shared purposes with images; images can want what iconoclasts also want. An image might invite us to purify our hearts for worship – to redirect our attention to the God who is not defined by worldly wealth and hierarchy, or to our brother or sister in need. In his reimagining of the Holy Family’s flight through Egypt as that of present-day immigrants seeking refuge and in his 2020 pietà of a Black Madonna and Child entitled “Mama,” the artist Kelly Latimore wants, in his icons, to draw viewers’ attention to Christ’s presence in marginalized communities. In various images, he presents Christ in the homeless: the nativity amidst the rubble of Gaza, the Holy Family in a tent city. His work is not without controversy. A group of students at The Catholic University of America petitioned to have “Mama” removed from the law school chapel where it hung, calling it “disrespectful and sacrilegious.” Before the university responded, the icon was stolen.

Who is the iconoclast here? The ones arguing that Lattimore’s art ought to be removed? Lattimore, for challenging conventional imaginations about a religious image? What does it mean that both camps want to see viewers’ attention directed to Christ? The fidelity sought by image-makers and iconoclasts is bound together in complex ways. Sometimes the iconoclast redirects attention from blasphemy, like Moses smashing the golden calf or Duke Chapel removing Robert E. Lee from its statuary. But sometimes the iconoclast herself blasphemes by mistaking holiness or the critique of blasphemy for blasphemy itself. Perhaps we might see those attacking Lattimore’s images in that way. The struggle to be faithful can be marked with sin and error, and in their mutual struggles, the image-lover and the image-breaker can be closer than they may seem.

The interiors of the churches where I have chosen to worship as an adult contrast starkly with the church of my youth. Images have, in the intervening years, become an important part of my spiritual life, and beauty is for me an important sign of divine presence. Yet I still find something to admire in the ugly church I once called home. Its austerity embodied hope for an undistracted form of worship, that the faithful might inhabit a singularity of devotion. Beauty and images are, I think, good things, but even good things – especially good things – can become idols for us. The very things that draw us to God can become the things that distract us, absorbing our attention and adoration for themselves rather than directing us on to the Lord.

My iconoclastic church was alive to that danger, vigilantly guarding against anything that might come between us and the Most High. I take my history in that community with me into the beautiful, image-laden worship spaces of the churches I now enter. Carrying with me the memory of the single wooden cross on those otherwise bare walls rising from an expanse of orange-brown carpet, I ask how, amidst my current life with images, I can honor this struggle for holy attention.