“Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth.”
~H.L. Mencken “The Libido for the Ugly”
A while ago I was thinking through some of the principles of modern architecture and what they reveal about our increasingly ugly, disposable, and disordered world. During that study, I came across Mencken’s “The Libido for the Ugly.” I read it and found the article fascinating, for several reasons. First, I did not realize it was a satirical piece and so it took me a few minutes to adjust my lens to read the article in the right frame of mind. Second, I was taken in by Mencken’s shrewd analysis and sharp criticisms of the ugliness he saw in America. He seemed to tap into something fundamental and his diagnosis had the ring of truth about it. Finally, what ultimately captured my attention and kept me riveted to the essay until the end, was my growing offense as Mencken ruthlessly excoriated the city I love.
Mencken’s article is his reflections following a train ride he took through Western Pennsylvania in the late 1920s. Mencken gets right to the heart of the matter and tells us,
On a winter day some years ago, coming out of Pittsburgh on one of the expresses of the Pennsylvania Railroad, I rolled eastward for an hour through the coal and steel towns of Westmoreland County. It was familiar ground; boy and man, I had been through it often before. But somehow, I had never quite sensed its appalling desolation. Here was the very heart of industrial America, the center of its most lucrative and characteristic activity, the boast and pride of the richest and grandest nation ever seen on earth—and here was a scene so dreadfully hideous, so intolerably bleak and forlorn that it reduced the whole aspiration of man to a macabre and depressing joke. Here was wealth beyond computation, almost beyond imagination—and here were human habitations so abominable that they would have disgraced a race of alley cats.
H.L. Mencken “The Libido for the Ugly”
Mencken wastes no time telling his audience what he saw and how bad it all looked. He is relentless in his assessment of the situation and offers this frank summary,
Nowhere on this earth, at home or abroad, have I seen anything to compare to the villages that huddle along the line of the Pennsylvania from the Pittsburgh yards to Greensburg. They are incomparable in color, and they are incomparable in design. They show grotesqueries of ugliness that, in retrospect, become almost diabolical.
H.L. Mencken “The Libido for the Ugly”
Pittsburgh is a city that has a lot of hometown pride. There is generational depth here, and loyalty, and most Pittsburghers feel about their city the way they feel about their mother. We simply will not tolerate someone criticizing our mother. (If you want a sense of the ethos of Pittsburgh, take a few minutes to go down the Pittsburgh Dad rabbit hole. Not all the jokes or references will be immediately recognizable, but you’ll capture the spirit of Pittsburgh in short order.) As a Pittsburgher I was offended to read someone talk about my hometown in this manner. I love this city, I’m proud of this city. I remember taking trips to the city when I was a child, going to Mt. Washington to look out over the city, and riding the incline. I remember when I got my driver’s license and the first time, I drove myself through the Fort Pitt tunnels at night into the city and I thought the city never looked more beautiful. Pittsburgh is my home, my hometown, and I love it. But as I sat with Mencken’s article and went online to look at some pictures of the landscape that Mencken would have seen during his train ride, I had to draw some honest conclusions. There was something objectively true about Mencken’s analysis. It wasn’t just his opinion because beauty is objective, and Mencken offers substantial facts and details. There was ugliness in the city of Pittsburgh, then as there is now. There is also real ugliness in America and the American church, and there are discernable reasons for such ugliness.
Passion Is the Driver
Mencken is perplexed as to how a community can get so ugly. The ugliness is so extreme to Mencken’s eye that there can be only one possible explanation. He concludes, “On certain levels of the American race, indeed, there seems to be a positive libido for the ugly, as on other and less Christian levels there is a libido for the beautiful.” This is the diagnosis, and I think Mencken is right. It is a love for the ugly that produces such ugliness, just as love for the good and the true produces beauty. This is a plausible explanation because love is a powerful motivator. Every Community is formed, held together, and made beautiful by passionate desire (libido). This is true of marriages, neighborhoods, and the church.
A loving marriage between a man and a wife is one in which each is passionate for the good of the other. Such a marriage is a beautiful one, objectively so. You will see the fruits of that passion as husband and wife serve each other and sacrifice for one another. You will see it in their fruitfulness and the beautiful children their union produces.
A neighborhood that is passionate about the common good and objectively true will also necessarily be beautiful. Brent Hull has written a wonderful little book called Building a Timeless House in an Instant Age in which he discusses the principles of form and beauty that informed craftsmanship for generations. Timeless homes were built following timeless truths and transcendent principles. Together, these homes created neighborhoods with character that amplified beauty and goodness in the world. These houses and their corresponding neighborhoods became beautiful signs of a community’s desire for a good life. Today, homes are built quickly and uniformly, revealing our modern passion for the large, the fast, easily replicable and disposable.
The church is also a community built on passion. It is formed, held together, and made beautiful, first and foremost, by God’s passion for his glory and his desire for his people. A local church receives God’s love and is made more beautiful as it passionately pursues God, his word, and his mission. A church is beautiful as it shares in love for one another and is willing to sacrifice for the good, the true, and the beautiful.
There is also a direct correlation between love and commitment. The greater the love the greater the commitment. A great love of God results in a great commitment to him and to his purposes in the world. A great love for our spouse produces greater commitment to our spouse. A great love for the church results in a greater commitment to the church. We also find that there is an inverse relationship between love and the cost of our commitment. The more we love the less costly it becomes and feels to us.
“Jacob loved Rachel. And he said, “I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel.” Laban said, “It is better that I give her to you than that I should give her to any other man; stay with me.” So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her.”
Genesis 29:18–20
I’ve observed that it’s always much easier to find time for the things I love. A healthy libido makes the work and time go easy. So, if you want to know what you love, you might ask where it is that you spend your time. And we must always be quick to ask, are the things I love beautiful in God’s eyes or ugly?
The Ugly Truth
The truth is our culture today has a healthy libido for the ugly. Many of us look through the streets of our neighborhoods where we can see a lot of physical beauty and material wealth. The community I live in is a gorgeous, historic Pittsburgh community, but I also see in my neighborhood a tremendous spiritual ugliness and spiritual poverty. No houses are falling off a cliff, but there are lives, marriages, institutions, and cultures that are ugly and dying. As Christians, we have to exhibit the courage to look past what is familiar to us, in our country, our towns our churches, and begin to name what is true—we have a libido for the ugly. Why is the neighborhood ugly? Sin is a likely answer that many of us would offer, and it’s a legitimate one, but I think there is another. In addition to sin, neighborhoods go ugly when the local church goes ugly.
Christians serve their neighborhoods best through the local church. There is a primacy to the local church that is irreducible. Communities are made beautiful through churches that are committed to the gospel and the truth of the scriptures and possess the courage to proclaim them and live by them. When a church substitutes the truth for “successful” alternatives, such as therapeutics, management practices, or relevance, then the church gets ugly fast. When a church goes ugly it also becomes impotent, and then it usually ceded its influence over a neighborhood to the government, to the parachurch, or the abstraction of “Christian witness.”
Once the church was considered the center of the community, but no longer. Now, when a neighborhood starts to fail, the first instinct of a community is to look to the state for help. We place our hope in welfare programs, government assistance, and candidate promises. Often the church comes to believe that neighborhood problems are just too big for the church to handle, but not for the government. Ugly churches have a small view of God and themselves. They’ve forgotten to ask, “How big is your God?”
When the church or the government fails to initiate change, Christians then start parachurch ministries. These ministries engage vulnerable communities such as the poor, the homeless, or the food insecure. Christians create “on-campus” ministries that intentionally establish themselves outside of the church so they can better “reach” our teenagers inside the government schools. We create all manner of parachurch ministries: 12-step programs to tackle addiction, counseling ministries for the depressed, and tutoring ministries for the underperforming. The parachurch displaces the local church, and the church slides down the hill like one of those old houses here in Pittsburgh. The whole scene is ugly.
And if we decline to participate in the parachurch, Christians can take comfort in knowing that they are witnesses to the gospel through their everyday, ordinary lives. It’s an aggregation strategy, with each individual Christian playing their part in the part of the world that God has placed them. There is real and legitimate power in being a witness for Christ, but when our witness gets individualized and has no relation to the whole, no connection to the center, no union with Christ through the church, then it becomes a dismemberment strategy, and it can get ugly fast.
The local church no longer occupies the center. That is particularly true of the evangelical church. Why? Because we have developed our own healthy libido for the ugly and vacated our strategic position. The ugly truth is that the local church has lost a sense of what is truly beautiful and abdicated the responsibility given to the church to make our neighborhoods beautiful. Lesslie Newbigin reminds us of this responsibility,
“I have come to feel that the primary reality of which we have to take account in seeking for a Christian impact on public life is the Christian congregation. How is it possible that the gospel should be credible, [beautiful] that people should come to believe that the power which has the last word in human affairs is represented by a man hanging on a cross? I am suggesting that the only answer, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it.”
Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society
Christian Faithfulness is Erotic
In Matthew 19, Jesus is debating with the Pharisees about marriage and divorce. Afterward, the disciples question Jesus about the propriety of marriage, and Jesus says something strange to them,
“Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”
Matthew 19:11–12
At the end of his lesson on marriage, Jesus has this enigmatic statement about eunuchs, which seems to come out of left field, but not if you’re thinking in the category of libido. Jesus talks about eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven; those who cut off natural desire for the things of this world so that passionate desire for and commitment to the Kingdom of God can grow strong. It is what C.S. Lewis was getting at when he said that the problem isn’t that our desires are too strong but too weak.
We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
According to Mencken, ours is a world that hates truth as much as it hates beauty. As a result, the world is truth and beauty starved. This creates opportunity for churches who are able to receive Christ’s word and understand. What we have before us is an opportunity to recover a passion for the truth and to show forth the beauty of holiness. And we, like eunuchs for the kingdom, must be willing to do whatever it takes in order to commit oursleves to this way of life. Do not be pleased with anyhting less.
Conclusion
What is needed is a strong desire for the things of God. The local church must return to a strong love and passionate desire for God that results in greater commitment to Him, to the truth of his word, and to one another. A courageous church that will hold fast to the truth is a beautiful thing in this ugly world. The local church and only the local church tcan offer such beauty. Ask yourself, how should the church best serve its community? What is the church’s mission? I keep coming back to this answer: the best and most beautiful thing we can offer this ugly world is a church that is passionate for Jesus, passionate for the truth of his word, passionately caring and loving each other as we keep our commitments to Him. If a libido for the local church fails, then the world gets uglier, and that’s the ugly truth.
The Parrhesians 