(RNS) — Last week the official account of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security posted an image on X that went viral: a Thomas Kinkade painting titled “Morning Pledge,” accompanied by the words, “Protect the Homeland.”
The painting, like most of Kinkade’s art, is warm and sweet — as American as apple pie. Set on a rain-glazed morning on a small-town street lined by a white picket fence and 1950s automobiles, the focal point of the scene is an American flag. It rises up toward rosy morning skies as schoolchildren file toward their school past a church and surrounding homes —all with windows glowing with golden light from within.
In other times, this image and this message would be innocuous. A department of homeland security, like such departments anywhere, is expected to “protect the homeland” and to advocate doing so. But like everything these days, the most innocent-seeming messages seem to come with implications of a larger, darker theme. In the current context, “protecting the homeland” is laden with politics, posturing, cruel abuses and cases that have gone all the way to the Supreme Court and are yet being played out.
Screenshot of Homeland Security post on X
The post is a prime example of the far right’s “trolling” strategy, a “politics better understood as white nationalism rebranded for digital natives,” as one writer recently put it.
The strategy worked: The post received tens of thousands of responses, ranging from charges of antisemitism to calls for increased deportation to praise for white supremacy and accusations of Nazism.
How is it that such a cozy image can invoke such vicious and polarized responses? The problem is, at least in part, the problem inherent in sentimentality and its concentrated form, sentimentalism.
Sentimentality refers to an emotional response or attachment. Emotions are good, of course, but emotion apart from other values and measures such as truth, reason and context descends into sentimentalism. Sentimentalism indulges emotion for emotion’s own sake, and sentimental art is just that: an indulgence in emotion for emotion’s sake.
Sentimentalism easily becomes manipulation. At its worst, it is propaganda.
It’s not just art that can manipulate our emotions. Religion can, too. And the connection between evangelicalism and sentimentalism is not just a coincidence of history. Sentimentalism has greatly shaped the modern American imagination and, more specifically, the evangelical imagination. This is an argument I develop at length in my 2023 book, “The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis.”
In the book, I cite Kinkade, who identified as an evangelical Christian, as a prime example of sentimentalism within evangelicalism, as both a reflection of a longer history of evangelical sentimentalism and as a more recent purveyor of it. Of course, there’s no shortage of sentimental art in evangelical culture, or in the larger culture, for that matter. (Cheesy love songs or worship music, anyone?) But sentimentalism more generally has played an outsized role within evangelicalism, and within that culture Kinkade has played an outsized part, too.
Kinkade, who died in 2012, birthed one of the greatest evangelical empires of our day.
While Kinkade’s early art demonstrated the marks of a serious and original artist, he eventually churned out millions of works by employing artists and apprentices to mass produce works sold by mail order, in galleries, on the internet and in retail stores, reportedly earning at least $53 million between 1997 and 2005. He was described as “one of the most financially successful artists in the world.” It is estimated that reproductions of his work adorn 20 million homes.
He explained that his title as the “Painter of Light” and his cheery, light-filled idealized painting reflected his Christian beliefs, saying: “Light is what we’re attracted to. This world is very dark, but in heaven there is no darkness.” Kinkade found a natural human yearning for comfort, soothing and the sentimental, grew that appetite even more and turned it into a kingdom.
A taste for the sentimental is a taste for a distortion of reality, not reality. It is a taste for things that make us feel good, whether they reflect the truth or not. To be sure, a trinket here, a souvenir there, a lawn gnome over here or a kitschy mug over there entails no moral failure. But a life — and a culture — steeped in nostalgia for a vision of the past that never existed (or fervor for a future that includes only certain people) cannot but succumb eventually to lies and delusions.
Notably, by the time he died at age 54 of an accidental overdose, Kinkade faced lawsuits over fraud, an arrest for DUI and accusations of sexual misconduct. Two former staffers also alleged that he sometimes urinated in public.
One great purpose of art is to re-create some aspect of human experience. The purpose of sentimental art is to re-create — or even manufacture — emotional experience. Such an experience can be harmless and even good, such as when a sentimental item handed down by a family member helps preserve cherished memories of a loved one. But sentimentalism does harm when the emotions invoked erase or obscure objective reality.
We think of aesthetic taste as personal, and it is. But taste doesn’t emerge on its own out of nowhere. It is cultivated. And it is cultivated in culture.
The sentimentalism of the post by the Department of Homeland Security repeats the sentimentalism of the Kinkade painting by rendering a nostalgic vision of America that omits the excesses, failures, injustices and cruelties that exist in any era (though they make take different forms) — and making way for more of the same.
If someone wants to hang such a sentimental picture on the wall in their home, that’s their business. But when the American government traffics in distortions of reality — especially when it is an agency whose authority granted by Congress is manipulated and abused in ways that can violate our civil rights and liberties — that’s everyone’s business.