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The U.S. Congress is spoiling for another financial firefight over the controversial National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which some critics claim displays an anti-Christian, antifamily bias.

In July, the House voted 217 to 216 to dismantle the NEA after House Speaker Newt Gingrich proposed replacing the agency's nearly $100 million annual budget with block grants to the states. But a Senate panel approved a bill to finance the agency through 2002, with $105 million allotted for 1998. A full Senate vote is expected by October. NEA opponents say the federal agency is unconstitutional and controlled by a cultural elite that pushes offensive material at taxpayer expense. Backers claim it has advanced American culture, pointing to many successes, including a significant increase in the number of theaters and community centers since its founding in 1965.

Though its current budget represents less than 1 percent of total giving for the arts, both sides agree that the controversial agency's influence is vastly greater than its size.

The vote to restrict NEA funds came after an intensive lobbying effort by the Forest, Virginia-based Christian Action Network. CAN displayed 40 NEA works on the Capitol steps in May as part of a traveling exhibit, "A Graphic Picture Is Worth a Thousand Votes." U.S. Capitol police confiscated 17 pieces of art on the basis of obscenity.

CAN President Martin Mawyer calls the NEA "a federal agency of hate, trash, and antireligious bigotry."

"The vilest of the vile are often given NEA grants," Mawyer says, "people who never would make a living out of such nonsense if they weren't on the public dole."

Mawyer says the NEA is an affront to morality. "You have to wonder at the logic of a system that says that people must be forced to pay for art that deliberately sets out to mock them and offend their sensibilities."

CONTROVERSIAL TRACK RECORD: The NEA has attracted controversy because agency funds have supported works such as Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, exhibits such as Robert Mapplethorpe's homoerotic photography, and an event last year at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. During the Walker show, an HIV-positive man sliced another man's back with razor blades and soaked the blood in towels that he sent on clotheslines over the horrified audience.

In the past three years, New York film distributor Women Make Movies, Inc. has received $112,700 for producing films with explicit lesbian sex scenes and sadomasochistic violence.

NEA chair Jane Alexander says grants are selected through the advice of a panel of artists. "If you look at the record of the endowment, only 45 of 112,000 grants have caused problems," says Alexander, a Hollywood actress before she assumed the NEA helm in 1993. A year earlier, President Bush fired John Frohnmayer after the NEA chair repeatedly clashed with Christian conservatives over sexually explicit and blasphemous arts.

"It's not just a couple of bad grants, it's an attitude," says Bob Knight, director of cultural affairs for the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. "She's not about to set down any standards."

But Christian artists such as Ed Knippers of Arlington, Virginia, believe Christians must engage in the arts on a deeper level if they want their arguments to be taken seriously.

"As Christians, we have not only denied the place for art, but we've put it in the Devil's camp," Knippers says.

David Johnson of Minneapolis, membership chair of Christians in the Visual Arts, believes that the NEA should continue, at least for the near future.

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October 6 1997, Vol. 41, No. 11