In one sense, Kinkade got lucky. He started working in the 1980s, as the modern Christian right took shape and sought to flex its muscles. We had always had our own colleges and radio stations and television programs, but it was no longer enough. Relevance is a kind of power, and we wanted to be cool. That was a problem the free market could solve. Abstinence needed to be sexy, somehow, which meant it needed a marketing campaign or, even better, some associated jewelry. We got graphic tees and pop music and romance novels. A good Christian must be a good consumer and wage culture war through purchasing power; the right product would not only guard a heart from Satan but spread the gospel to the world. Faith without works is dead.
Kinkade is not responsible for the materialism of the 1980s and 1990s, but he was a creature of the era. In Art for Everybody, we learn that he wanted “to eat”—he didn’t want to live and die impoverished like Van Gogh. His wife says that he sought to make his art “accessible” to families who couldn’t afford more sophisticated work. But what made his art so popular?
When the Christian rock band DC Talk released Jesus Freak in 1995, the group sold over 85,000 copies in its first week—a remarkable feat in Christian contemporary music at the time. The album owed its success in part to its lead single, a uniquely terrible song (it includes the lyrics “I saw a man with a tat on his big fat belly / It wiggled around like marmalade jelly”), which told Christians they would be persecuted for their faith. But Kinkade’s paintings showed Christians a world they had already won. They could look at one of his cottages and retreat into fantasy. American flags waft in the breeze, and nobody has any neighbors. When Kinkade did paint street scenes, the crowds appeared white. His imaginary 1950s, without immigration or the civil rights movement, was where millions of people wanted to live long before MAGA.
In the 2000s, a professor at my Evangelical college affirmed what I had already learned at home: Kinkade’s art was bad art, and culture did not have to be the enemy of faith. My Christian parents could tell you that musical proficiency is about more than technical skill; a good performance requires something of those who perform it and those who perceive it. You step outside yourself and return changed, and maybe that can please God, too. Now they have retired, that class was a long time ago, and Kinkade is winning the argument.