“Separating the art from the artist” is a classic interminable debate. Salvador Dalí was a fascist (when he wasn’t a communist–some people just want to be weird). Ezra Pound was a fascist, Heidegger was Nazi-curious, and then there are all the Stalinists and Maoists in self-consciously avant garde communities of the early (and middle-, and late-) 20th century.  

Bringing spirituality into it adds more layers of complexity, because while we like to think that righteous people are better able to produce more inspiring art, it runs into a lot of examples where very fallen people have created great art, literature, and music. 

While highly fictionalized (Salieri was actually a good guy), the masterful cinematic depiction of this struggle is the multi-Academy Award winning movie Amadeus, where Mozart’s rival comes to despise God out of resentment for not giving him, the devoted, sacrificing Christian, the divine gift of musical inspiration that was given to the crass, foppish, irreverent Mozart. 

Half of John Donne’s corpus is considered some of the greatest metaphysical, religious poetry ever written, and the other half is him trying to get women to sleep with him. 

Moving to the Latter-day Saint space, it was tragic when it was discovered that Sterling Van Wagenen, the founder of the Sundance Film Festival who later went on to direct the latest Endowment film, was convicted of child sexual abuse. The thing is…I actually thought his Endowment film was by far the most artistically and spiritually powerful of that genre. 

Dramatically moving the goalposts, while we might want to think that the added spirit we have as Latter-day Saints through the Gift of the Holy Ghost can give us an edge in the artistic realm, ironically perhaps the most recognizable pieces of Latter-day Saint-themed art that adorn our temples and chapels were created by non-members. Seventh-day Adventist Harry Anderson created the iconic depiction of Christ descending from the clouds. And then even more poignantly, the statue of the Angel Moroni that tops the Salt Lake Temple and was the pattern for all subsequent Angel Moroni’s was created by a child of ex-members from Springville, Utah. When he was asked to create the statue Cyrus Edwin Dallin had by then converted to Unitarianism and declined, but later changed his mind and very ecumenically stated that “My angel Moroni brought me nearer to God than anything I ever did.”  (Sidebar, kudos to early Church leaders for being open-minded enough to outsource artistic work to devout Christians of other faiths). 

So how? This isn’t going to be a hot take for the kind of people who read bloggernacle material, but the common belief that you have to qualify for the spirit through your own merits is wrong. You see this a lot in the mission field. If you don’t do X,Y, or Z and do the five steps of blah blah, then you won’t have the spirit. To some extent this is true, especially for people who aren’t even searching for the spirit. I doubt Hugh Hefner could produce spiritually profound issue of the Ensign even if he tried.   

Still, with a little more life experience you learn that the spirit goes where it listeth. It strikes when you’re in the pit of sinful despair like Alma, it strikes after you just swore at your kids. It can’t be coerced (although it can be influenced) by behaviors, tokenism, or rituals, and God sometimes grants His inspiration to people of good intent who are seeking for it even if they don’t check all the boxes (or even some major ones).*

---

*To be clear, some may interpret this as me downplaying the severity of Van Wagenen’s crime or its effects on his victims when that’s not my intent at all. The only point I’m making is that even if you do one of the most horrendous things possible, God doesn’t automatically extirpate the artistic gifts you were given. That’s just an empirical fact. What we do with their art is a whole other, complicated issue that I don’t address here. For example, the Vatican has ordered the removal of the art of Marko Rupnik, a priest who almost certainly abused dozens of women. But on the other hand, should we never screen Triumph of the Will the piece of Nazi propaganda that was cinematographically/technically revolutionary for its time? Again, it’s a complicated issue that I’m not going to try to resolve here.