Adjudicating Nudity: Evangelicalism and the Problem of Artistic Ambiguity

In the 1970s, faculty in the Art Department at Wheaton College (IL) engaged in a decade-long debate over the appropriateness of displaying artwork that featured the nude body in public campus exhibitions. Two studio art professors, Alva Steffler and Miriam Hunter, drove the discussion. Steffler felt Christians should embrace Biblical eroticism and explored this theme through his own abstract sculptures. Hunter, morally conservative and fearful of secularism’s threats to Christendom’s future, “literalized” artworks with nudity by denying multi-valent meaning and insisting on purely anatomical interpretations. I argue that this debate, which extended beyond the art department and engaged the broader campus community, reveals a fundamental tension between the nature of American evangelicalism and the visual arts: evangelicals crave certainty, but visual art inherently resists definitive meaning.