Re-enchanting councils - and glum councillors

Local government could be a place of humanity and beauty more than lifeless language and procedures.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A marbles staircase rises on four sides of a chamber.

Glasgow City Chambers' staircase.

Michael D Beckwith, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

At the local level in politics, I have found there is a stereotype that persists more than that of the corrupt politician. It is the glum councillor, the pothole poser, or sometimes the councillor looking glum while pointing at potholes. These are the photos that turn up on election leaflets, and in local news, and there are lots of them here in Devon because potholes are numerous and huge.

When I was a district councillor, I tried to push back against this image – I would smile, avoid photos with potholes, share the good stuff found in the community alongside working to improve what wasn’t working. But, looking around the council chamber, it was hard to deny. Sometimes the glumness would slip into sleep; I’ve seen councillors prodded awake ahead of important votes that impact tens of thousands of people. That is not just glum councillor, that is irresponsible, disengaged councillor.

And though the responsibility lies with them, this never surprised me. In my four-year term, I too felt a disillusionment creep in. And I am perennially hopeful; my default is to see possibility. But four years in a context of budget cut after budget cut, endless bureaucracy, lifeless language, and an aversion to trying things differently, even I started to slump in my seat. I never fell asleep, but sometimes my soul did.

Author-farmer Wendell Berry – who speaks with much affection and wisdom about the importance and strength of local community – said that

“unlike the local community, the government and the economy cannot be served with affection, but only with professional zeal or professional boredom.”

I have seen that professional boredom in the language, in the sterile council chamber bare of life, where processes and procedures rule more than humanity; where passionate members of the public would attend meetings only to be told they couldn’t input because they hadn’t pre-registered; where a meeting that finished before the allocated time was seen as successful, regardless of content. I’m sure it should feel more hopeful, more vision-led, more life-giving to be involved in local decision-making – it should be about placemaking more than simply ticking boxes and balancing budgets.

There are, of course, councillors who care deeply, and there are councils where local decision-making is being reclaimed by to serve the local community, economy, identity – like the independent councillors elected onto the town council in Buckfastleigh in South Devon who made it more plain-speaking, more accessible and more engaged; and the Flatpack Democracy movement started in Frome Town Council that has sparked similar local ‘revolutions’. But I think there is something else needed, if local government is to replace lifelessness with hope and vision. Something more upstream of the how.

When the spirit of the age feels like cynicism more than delight, more than beauty, more than possibility, it impacts our relationships and the places that should thrive on good relationships like local government.

In his essay The Joys of Storytelling, Ben Okri says, “In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them...if we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.” I would often imagine a story of local government that makes space for enchantment. Former monk Thomas Moore speaks of reenchanting as a reawakening to the depth of soul that embraces us and the world. Councils, like lots of spaces, feel disenchanted. Perhaps much of our current disenchantment is symptomatic of our alienation from ourselves, from each other, and from our shared humanity – and from the belief that this shared state of being is strong enough to take the weight of our world, even as heavy as it feels now. When the spirit of the age feels like cynicism more than delight, more than beauty, more than possibility, it impacts our relationships and the places that should thrive on good relationships like local government. Everything dulls; we disconnect from our spirit-breathed humanity, we forget that we were pulled from the soil by a gardener God who made us to be with each other, surrounded by beauty and life.

In the book Faith, Hope and Carnage, the musician and writer Nick Cave says that the “luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can’t help it.”

Cave’s words echo Dostoevsky who wrote in The Idiot that ‘the world will be saved by beauty’, which in turn, echoes earlier sentiments from the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas who taught that God is truth, goodness and beauty. In the Bible, Jesus pointed again and again to these things too – in people, in creation, in God. They feel like good things to point the way now; more timeless and apolitical than any current ‘vision’ in government, more tangible than a distant government, more life-giving than purely balancing budgets as a goal. Of course, local government also needs better and more reliable funding, more efficient processes, passionate people, and lots more – but I think these things are more likely to come, in part, from a re-enchanted local government that draws on the “luminous and shocking beauty” of the everyday, and of local people and places. To start to make space for that re-enchantment, government could experiment with three things (which, more than funding, need people willing to try, to think beyond business-as-usual, to take existing resources and think about how they can be used even slightly differently).

It may not need to overcome death, but local government could embrace local people, their humanity, their aliveness.

First, it could move away from language that is detached from emotion and care and life. The word ‘enchant’ has its root in words – cantare means ‘to sing’ – Councils could aspire to make language beautiful more than bureaucratic, clear instead of obscure. It could invite local people into decision-making using life-giving and locally meaningful words and ideas, rather than excluding them with jargon and lifeless language. For this, we’d need the help of local storytellers, poets, writers, speakers – people who can wake us up with the power of words.

Second, local government could bring that “luminous beauty” into the space, rather than sealing conversations and processes away in characterless buildings. Meetings I’d go to were usually in bland rooms, with beige walls, nylon grey carpets, lukewarm coffee. Letting even some of the beauty of this world in – perhaps with colour, architecture, art; perhaps with stories and creativity and food; perhaps with some meetings outdoors in the beauty of the world – would, I think, breathe life into the space, and into relationships, and so into what becomes possible.

Lastly, re-enchanting local government must include re-humanising it, because humanity at its best is relationship and soul and care; it contains the same possibility that was present in Eden when all this was dreamed up. If, as Christians believe, humanity is made in God’s image, then God is endlessly creative; God is about the detail of our lives as well as world-shaking stories; God is about life – life that is so alive it overcomes death. It may not need to overcome death, but local government could embrace local people, their humanity, their aliveness; it could ask them to show up as themselves, with all their strengths and weaknesses, their ideas and hopes and fears, rather than shut them out because they cannot bend to inflexible meetings and procedures and language. It would not shy away from these things; it would use them to create new life and thriving places.

Re-enchanting local government could, I think, bring us closer to beauty, to the goodness of each other, to the truth of people and places. From there, I think it becomes possible to restore relationships, to imagine what government might be at its best, and to view it as a place-based way of knowing and actually serving people. I think it becomes easier from there to look downstream – to re-think processes, the voting system, and the rules of ‘business as usual’ – and perhaps even to fix potholes and the glumness that goes with them.

Article

Art

Belief

Culture

24 July 2025

5 min read

Critics and curators are missing this about contemporary artists

An interview with Jonathan Anderson

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A metak sculpture outlines an altar, stands on a beach.

Kris Martin, Altar.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, many modern artists engaged with religion in and through their work but art critics and art historians routinely overlooked or ignored those aspects of the work when writing about it. They did so because of a secularisation agenda that overrode reflection on key elements of the art that artists were creating.

In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture, Jonathan A. Anderson, together with William Dyrness, recovered some of the religious influences explored in the work of key modern artists by writing an alternative history of modern art. Now, with The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Anderson has addressed the central issue, which is the way in which art critics and historians have written about modern and contemporary art.

JE: What is it about this situation – that modern art has often wrestled with God, but critics and curators haven’t always shared that focus – that engages your interest and motivates you to write so compellingly about it?

JA: The more I have studied and circulated through the worlds of contemporary art (first as an artist, then as a critic), the more attentive I became to significant disconnects in the ways we talk and write about religion in modern and contemporary art. Many prominent artists working today and over the past century have been shaped by religious traditions, and their works are in serious dialogue with those traditions in various ways and from various perspectives. Their relationship to religion might be highly conflicted or nuanced—it often is—but it is a live issue in their work and one can talk with them about it in their studios or in informal settings. But when one moves to the critical writing and public discussions about these artists’ works, this aspect either disappears altogether or is discussed in ways that are clumsy, stifled, or shapeless.

The aim of a lot of my work is to understand in a non-superficial way why this has been the case, why there has been a recent resurgence of discussions of religion and spirituality, and how we might develop more substantive ways of thinking and speaking about these topics.

JE: What did you find most surprising as you undertook the research for both books?

JA: I am consistently surprised at how sprawling and dense this topic is. Once one begins rethinking ‘the strange place of religion’ in the histories of modern and contemporary, the more one finds that there is an enormous amount of material that deserves renewed investigation. Both books give a strong sense of this, but chapter three in my new book is especially full of sign-pointers toward items that require further exploration.

To give one concrete example, I found myself referring to several major curated group exhibitions that, in one way or another, significantly address topics of religion and spirituality in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. As I began to look more seriously at the history of such exhibitions, this curiosity swelled into a huge endeavour. Over the course of several years, I assembled a long list of exhibition catalogues and other documentation—the most comprehensive list of its kind that I’m aware of—which in turn helped me not only to recognize how prevalent interest in these topics has been but to think through the diversity of approaches. A version of this list is published in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art as an appendix, and the full, updated list is also available on my website. I hope it’s a valuable resource for others.

JE: Both books offer ideas and suggestions for constructive ways to understand, address and write about the relationship between art and religion going forward. In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture there is the idea of a charitable hermeneutic, while in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art you offer substantial new frameworks for discussing art and religion. Why is it important that the dialogue between art and religion finds paths to conversation rather than conflict?

JA: This is an important question. The public dialogue between contemporary art and religion has been relatively dysfunctional for much of the past century, often riddled with mutual antagonisms, melodramatic controversies, misunderstandings, and mutual unintelligibility. But art and religion are complex, vital domains of meaning that have continued to deeply shape each other up to the present and that have an enormous amount to ‘say’ to one another today, both critically and constructively. My own experience is that the more the participants in this conversation become attentive to and conversant in the other’s history, vernacular, and ways of thinking, the more highly constructive and mutually enriching the dialogue becomes.

I think this kind of dialogue has everything to do with cultivating mutual care and love of neighbour. The art world is a series of loosely connected communities full of people who are your and my neighbours. I happen to really care about these communities who make, exhibit, and talk about art, despite their problems. And the same might be said about various religious communities, who have their own problems and who often have more complicated interrelations with those art communities than is generally recognized. Wherever you’re coming from—the arts, the church, or otherwise—I’m interested in expanding dialogue oriented toward loving one’s neighbours, or even one’s enemies if that’s how it must be. At the most basic level, that means listening in a way that tries to discern others’ animating cares and concerns.

JE: Do you see any parallels or differences between the way the relationship between secularism and religion has played out in the world of art and the way the broader relationship between the two has been shaped in Western society in the same period?

JA: This is a fascinating but complicated question. For some people, the whole point of the artistic avant-garde was to enact and exemplify, in a highly concentrated way, the secularization of Western society. At the same time, however, it was also widely recognized that the arts have, in almost all places and times, been deeply interconnected with religion and spirituality, and this was, in some conflicted or repressed way, still likely the case for much of the avant-garde as well.

Secularization has meant the pressurizing and pluralizing of religious belief, sometimes corresponding to disaffiliation from traditional organizations, but this has relatively little to do with an eradication or obsolescence of religious belief. Indeed, any notion of what Rosalind Krauss memorably described as an ‘absolute rift’ between ‘the sacred’ and ‘the secular’ is really just shorthand for some kind of social conflict, because there’s not really any rational way to absolutize these as mutually exclusive. Whether acknowledged or not, religion still provides the metaphysical and ethical groundings of modern secularity, and modern secularity provides the social conditions for contemporary religion. In this context, distinctions between religiosity and irreligiosity are often ambiguous, running through each of us in unexpected and ever-changing ways (rather than simplistically separating us from each other). In my view, contemporary art is highly illuminating to these broader dynamics. Anyone who has spent any extended time in the worlds of modern and contemporary art knows that they are full of spiritual and theological struggle. To put it succinctly: contemporary art is not an art of unbelief and nonpractice but an art of conflicted, pressurized belief and practice, which is theologically significant if attended to as such.

The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Jonathan A. Anderson (Notre Dame Press)

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