ANOTHER "COME TO JESUS" MOMENT. I have a little cold and was not wont to post, but Kia Pienso has pointed out to me a new essay by Camille Paglia which has lifted my spirits somewhat.

The thing is hard to synopsize, but let me say that toward the beginning Paglia writes:

A primary arena for the conservative-liberal wars has been the arts.

Sometime later:

I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion.

Then:

Hymnody should be viewed as a genre of the fine arts and be added to the basic college curriculum.

The salutary effect of sacred song on the "the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism" is hinted at in this description of what to unsympathetic readers may appear an outbreak of mass hysteria:

The most influential camp meeting occurred at Cane Ridge in Bourbon County, Kentucky, in 1804. For three days and well past midnight, a crowd estimated to be between twenty and thirty thousand sang and shouted with a great noise that was heard for miles around. Worshippers transported by extreme emotion jerked, writhed, fell to the ground in convulsions or went catatonic. This Kentucky Revival, called the Second Great Awakening, spread through the inland regions of the South and eventually reached western Pennsylvania.

(I pause here to add crucial emphasis, which Paglia's famously logorrheic style denies, to the punchline:)

But the movement never flourished in the North because of its harsher weather.

The 6,425-word essay covers a lot of ground, but we might say the key to it is Paglia's account of the attacks on Chris Olfili's The Holy Virgin Mary when it was shown at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. Paglia blames this lunacy not on the people who made the attacks, but to the "the total failure of curatorial support" by the Brooklyn Museum, who presumably erred in failing to properly instruct a no doubt receptive Mayor Giuliani in African fertility symbology.

The whole thing pretty much goes like that. Examples of religious violence and absurdity are given, and the arts community gets the blame for being insufficiently acquainted with the Bible. While the little jihads are mostly described in coolly descriptive language, the irreligious artists and arts supporters are subjected to the kind of editorial attacks ("Supporters of the arts who gleefully cheer when a religious symbol is maltreated act as if that response authenticates their avant-garde credentials") that are sure make this essay, like many of Paglia's public explosions, a treasure trove for conservative quote trawlers, who will rejoice that somebody in the Academy is talking their language.