As a child, I started attending Sunday School in the mid-70s (Southern Baptist Convention). At the time, Broadman press was handling the Sunday School materials. Most every depiction of Bible characters (the classroom posters, etc.) were artistically rendered to a very high standard of realism for a children's class. Later on, many of us church kids got the beautifully illustrated Biblearn series of books (see above pic), with breathtaking art that was equivalent to what we would see in the Sunday School material.
Then. . .during the 90s and into the 2000s it all appeared to decline. Much of what I see now is "cartoon Jesus," equal to or less than the quality of something you'd see in a syndicated newspaper strip, or a "baby's 1st book," type of format. Very lazy.
My theory is that this decline in artwork helped facilitate and/or encourage an unrealistic perspective of the Bible as history. Children would psychologically "imprint" these cartoon characters into their minds, and then carried them right on into secular adulthood. Just to nail my point home further, there are many atheist and agnostic authors who have published books that are editorial satires of this exact sort of thing. They reflect their perspective on the church they were raised in. One of many examples is the Awkward Moments Children's Bible, by Horus Gilgamesh.
*cough* I'm not saying this is a direct cause of adult atheism, agnosticism, and "the nones," but I suspect it played a strong role in facilitating it.
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