My mouth went dry. My brain spun in circles. I just stood in the aisle and stared at the Baroque altar. Eventually, the Polish tour guide tapped me on the arm and asked me if I was okay. I explained to him that I had grown up as an Evangelical and had never seen anything so beautiful.
He shrugged slightly and said, with as much patience as he could muster, “You should really see a cathedral, because this is just a small parish church.”
I was born into a Southern family and raised in a Pentecostal denomination. Pretty much everyone was Evangelical in my hometown, though most were Baptist of one flavor or another. White-washed walls with a single wooden cross at the center. American flag on the right. Some made-up Christian flag thing on the left. Wooden podium in the middle. All of it on a raised platform called the “altar” for some reason I really couldn’t fathom. No sacrifices were ever offered there. Little bit of stained glass with strange patterns.
Seen one, you seen them all.
Nothing from that life had remotely prepared me for Europe. From my first full day in Poland as a University teacher, I was drawn to the churches. They were all Roman Catholic, and they were gorgeous. I had seen a few Catholic Churches in the United States, but nothing like this. Every neighborhood, even the tiniest villages, had beautiful buildings brimming with priceless works of art. Anyone could just walk in, take a seat, and be amazed.
Raised as I had been on Jack Chic tracts, I actually felt guilty at first. It was as if visiting gorgeous churches somehow meant letting God down. I am aware of how weird that sounds. I eventually got over that feeling. Wherever I roamed across Europe, the churches were always first on my list of places to visit.
Over time, I noticed that all the other good Evangelical Americans visiting Europe did the same thing.
Here they were, by the bus load, touring worship spaces loaded with religious art that their own denominations officially condemned as idolatry. When I talked to them around town, they would gush over the beautiful churches they had seen. Then they would get on planes and go back home to worship in churches that looked like community centers.
I soon realized that if Europe had been Southern Baptist, there wouldn’t be much reason to visit it. The old buildings were quaint and the castles kind of cool. But the real beauty was in the churches.
At the time I knew nothing about the Theology of the Incarnation and how that was related to icons in the Church. I just realized something was profoundly missing from the faith in which I had been reared. How much beauty would have gone uncreated if the Puritans had overrun the continent the way their spiritual descendants had America? How much of the culture we take for granted was inspired by that art?
The denomination I had grown up in had talked endlessly about preserving Western Civilization. I am not sure what the preachers meant by that. When I came face-to-face with some of the greatest achievements of Western Culture, they felt alien to me. I could understand the beauty on a rational level, but I envied the Europeans their deep sense of connection to the historic Christian Faith.
They felt the beauty in a way I simply could not, damaged as I was by the white-washed walls of my youth. I had been raised in a sensory deprivation chamber, then loosed unexpectedly in a swirl of pure color.
But holy images were hardly confined to the inside of Churches. In Eastern Europe, the town squares are dominated by images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the saints (particularly local ones), and the cross. While there were also kings, writers, various important civic leaders, and even mythological figures, the religious statues tended to dominate most public spaces.
For me as an American, the contrast could not have been starker. For us, visual representation of Jesus 
and the Saints are a rarity in public. Except at Christmas of course, when suddenly everyone embraces religious art with a passion. Crosses are sometimes in a public park or space as a war memorial, but most public art is Founding Fathers, generals on horseback, presidents, civic leaders, soldiers, fictional characters, explorers, maybe a few champions of the arts. These men, and some important women too, are at the heart of our national cult. Given the iconoclastic beliefs of our more important founding churches, it was probably always inevitable that Jesus would take a backseat in the public square to Washington and Lincoln.
We have four presidents on Mt. Rushmore. Poland has a 108-foot-tall statue of Jesus. Differing priorities are very apparent.
By the time I got back to America, after three years in Europe, my Evangelicalism had been badly damaged. I had seen the artistic beauty of the churches come alive during the chanting of the mass. I had been splashed with holy water on Easter. I had seen the majesty of the upraised Chalice, and I had begun to hunger after the Eucharist.
But I still was not looking in earnest to convert. I still hoped to find some satisfaction in an Evangelical Church, if nothing else for the sake of my parents. My nights were spent researching the historic Christian faith. Sunday mornings I attended pep rallies for Jesus with pop music and a fog machine. It was a situation that could not last indefinitely.
One windswept day in Washington, it all came to a head. I stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, looking at the symbolic enthronement of a secular president in a reconstructed pagan temple, and I finally cracked. My fellow Evangelicals would gladly support treating Lincoln as a deity on a throne, but they fiercely denounced historic Catholic Churches as being full of idols. Churches they would visit on tour in a minute if given half the chance. The discordant logic was finally too much.
Religious art had been destroying my Evangelicalism for years, and as I walked down the memorial steps, the destruction was complete. I needed the historic Christian faith, complete with its beauty and its chanting and its liturgy and its holy Eucharist. I could no longer be part of a faith, of a culture, that thought art honoring presidents was fine, but art honoring God was blasphemy.
It was a tough road, and it did not happen overnight, but I eventually found all that I had been seeking. Not in the Roman Catholic Church though, surprisingly, but in the Eastern Orthodox. That is a story for a different time.
Art is powerful. It shaped the destiny of my very soul. I am not alone in that regard. At this time of turmoil, we should all fully support the preservation of America’s public art. In truth, we need more of it. But as Christians, we need both civic and religious art to thrive. The Orthodox must share the beauty and the majesty of the Church’s art with the American nation. While Washington and Lincoln can inspire, they cannot save. Our people need to look upon the face of Him who can. We can show them that face not only in our actions, but also in the golden icons that adorn our temple walls and in the Eucharist on our altars.
Many Americans are searching for what the Orthodox Faith has to offer, even if they don’t know it themselves. I surely didn’t, and yet here I am 20 years on with my wife and five cradle Orthodox children. Beauty really can transform.
