Take a moment to imagine two trees. One is green and lush, offering shade. The other is a charred remnant of what was once a tree after a forest fire. Which of these is beautiful? How do you know which one is beautiful? Why does this matter?
If you are like most humans, you picked the living, green tree. And you knew it was beautiful because of the way you felt. The green tree filled you with joy and invited you to sit in its shade, while the remains of the burned tree filled you with grief and made you aware of your relationship to other living things.
Our innate ability to respond to beauty, or to its heartbreaking absence, is one of the most fundamental qualities human beings share. The living tree discloses the goodness of creation and the truth of our kinship. And, just as significantly, the dead tree reveals that something is very wrong and that it would be untruthful to not care about its death.
Millennia ago, ancient thinkers proposed that beauty served humans by pointing toward goodness and truth, what they called the universals. Clearly, most of the world’s people agree, creating beautiful temples, music, poetry, rituals.
For Christians, recognizing God as the source of all beauty became the motive for candlelight, music, sacred spaces, stained-glass windows, elaborate vestments, bells and colors to mark our liturgical seasons. Beauty lifted us toward the divine, helping us feel in the company of angels. As the depth of our religious affections show us — beauty as a marker for truth and goodness has served us well for thousands of years.
But what happens when the idea of the beautiful is used to hide injustice? Today, we’re witnessing a dangerous separation of beauty from truth and goodness. The current administration in Washington refers to a “big beautiful budget bill” and news media repeat it. Meant to appeal to our human sense that what is beautiful must also be good and true, this description has the explicit goal of keeping us from seeing that, among other things, the bill would strip supplemental food assistance from older adults and parents with young children unless they meet work requirements. The bill removes coverage from millions of needy persons on Medicaid, the single largest source of money for long-term care for the elderly. Instead, one of the costliest provisions in the bill dedicates tens of billions of dollars to complete the “big beautiful border wall” and to carry out a mass deportation agenda.
While the bill gives billions in tax cuts to the wealthiest, it would also charge desperate asylum-seeking families several thousand dollars just to apply. While removing most support from the poor, sick, elderly, children, science, mitigation of climate change and education, the bill would increase spending on weapons of war by $150 billion.
The appeal to things being beautiful, which are clearly the opposite in the suffering they will cause, is meant to manipulate our sensibilities and interfere with our ability to discern the good and the true, and, most importantly, to feel the beauty of God’s gaze upon our wounded world.
The shortest verse in all of Scripture is “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). That ability to weep is what unites us to each other, to God and to what is right and true. To see the world as it is and weep because of suffering is to realize that this is as far from beautiful as we can get and to want to right that wrong.
So, let me encourage you to be a rescuer of beauty and the superpower it gives us to choose to act justly. Pay attention and, every time you hear “beautiful” used in vain, ask yourself: Is this truly beautiful or actually its opposite? Where is the beauty of God pointing me, so I might be a bearer of truth and goodness to the world?
Cecilia González-Andrieu, Ph.D., is professor of Theology at Loyola Marymount University.
