What do Americans value?

In 2025, Gallup surveyed over 2,000 U.S. citizens, asking them to pick their three most important values from a list of 23 attributes. The results identified “family,” “freedom,” “health,” “integrity,” and “faith” as the top five American values. What was interesting was the least popular virtue. At the very bottom of the list, with a 1% value rating, was the attribute “beauty.”

A cultural passivity to beauty should make us pause — especially when more self-focused values like “wealth” and “achievement” rank higher on the importance scales. Not that these other values are trivial, but rather that beauty should hold more significance — especially for a believer.

After all, God is a designer.

Not only is he introduced as the divine creator in the first verse of Scripture, but we also see his aesthetic involvement in the ornate instructions for the temple, the specific ingredients for consecrated perfume, and the descriptions of the priestly garments. Word play, thematic openings and closings, plot twists, and detailed foreshadowing abound within the pages of the Bible. The heavens and earth are filled with colors, enjoyable foods, beautiful sounds, and other delightful things created for our appreciation and wonder.

Given God’s involvement and enjoyment of aesthetics, why does art, beauty, and creativity often feel like side notes? Pretty extras? Nice to have, but generally a waste of time? Or worse, a form of temptation. Something that appeals to our darker sides.

There are two main reasons why beauty and its manifestation in art feel like forgotten attributes. The first reason equates the power of beauty with temptation, while the second views aesthetics as non-essential. In this article, we’ll look at the allure of beauty and why we tend to associate it with worldliness. In the second, we’ll examine the belief (usually felt but never admitted) that beauty is impractical, or even a waste of time.

The first reason people downplay beauty is because the allure is strong. Beauty can feel “of the flesh,” which in turn feels like sin, and thus something to be avoided. Don’t beautiful things tempt our hearts down wrong paths and distract us from the essentials? After all, what about the lust of the eyes? Didn’t Jesus have “no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him”? Why does beauty feel like “temptation,” whereas plainness (dare I say ugly?) feels somehow closer to God? Like our minds are focused on the right things?

The problem isn’t beauty. The problem is what our hearts do with it.

Beauty is designed to inspire our hearts to the originator of beauty, but it can’t be the end itself. That’s why we have those warnings. Consider the lessons from the golden calf in Exodus 32 or the poetic fall of the king of Tyre in Ezekiel 28. We take beauty and corrupt it by making it the object of our desire instead of directing our affection to God. We exchange the “glory of the invisible God” for things that do not satisfy. The focus shifts from “look at God” to “look at me.”

Luci Shaw, poet and former writer-in-Residence at Regent College, articulates the issue: “Of course, it is sadly true that as with any gift of God, imagination and its enfleshment in art may be wrenched into something degraded and degrading. Because art speaks so powerfully to our inner beings and emotions, it carries with it a freight of inherent risk, a potential for evil as well as for good.”

The remedy is not to distance ourselves from God’s gift because of the potential for evil. What if a person disavowed food for fear of gluttony? Our aim should be to restore and promote its right use, not sit back in passivity for fear of misuse. More powerfully, humanity’s innate attraction to beauty is evidence of God’s image — we desire to make and find joy in creative expression.

Again, Shaw writes, “Yes. Beauty matters. It is important to God. He loves it! Why else would he shape and color fish, birds, insects, rocks, plants, and people with such rich diversity? … And beyond his primary creation of our vividly beautiful universe, with all its sounds and colors and smells and textures, God also seems to be interested in helping his people both create and appreciate beauty.”

Science bears this out. 

In 2016, a team of researchers wanted to see if “humans automatically exhibit preference for visual and moral beauty without explicit cognitive efforts.” In other words, is the human attraction to beauty a mental action or an innate impulse?

The team recruited undergraduate students at South China Normal University for a series of three experiments. In each test, the participant was shown a different image in each eye, forcing the brain to perceive one picture at a time. The team measured the length of time each person took to register one image versus the other, a term known as dominance duration. The technique allows for selectivity based on a subconsciously preferred image. 

The three experiments varied in scope. In Experiment 1, the test group was shown faces previously evaluated as either beautiful, average, or unattractive. Researchers looked at subconscious selectivity rates based on physical attractiveness levels. Experiment 2 examined subconscious selectivity based on moral beauty: whether there was any pattern between average faces paired with virtuous, neutral, or immoral actions. Experiment 3 mirrored Experiment 2, only that the researchers removed the option for immoral actions.

After crunching the numbers, the research team found there was a significant difference in dominance duration between the three levels of attractiveness, regardless of the gender of the participant or the gender of the face being viewed. Experiment 2 revealed that all viewers had a heightened awareness of faces matched with immoral actions, suggesting an innate response for self-preservation. When immoral actions were no longer a factor (Experiment 3), dominance duration favored virtuous character pairings. They write, “These findings suggest that the natural tendency toward beauty is not restricted to physical attractiveness, but also extends to positive social implications when an individual’s sense of security is not compromised.”

They conclude, “[O]ur findings provide novel and compelling evidence in revealing a universal natural tendency towards both facial and moral beauty that is unrelated to contextual demands and other cognitive factors (e.g. moral beliefs, or moral reasoning).”

The human impulse for beauty extends to our very soul. And beauty, rightly understood, is meant to delight us in God. Which brings us back to the first question. If the desire for beauty isn’t sinful, but rather a reflection of God’s heart, why do we overlook this attribute? Why is it at the bottom 1% of America’s value system? Why does it feel impractical or frivolous? We’ll examine this question and remedies for creative renewal in part two.