The Visual Culture of American Religions

by David Morgan (Editor)

Contemporary artists have often clashed with conservative American evangelicals in recent years, giving the impression that art and religion are fundamentally at odds. Yet historically, artistic images have played a profound role in American religious life. This superb collection of essays, with its unique assembly of images, challenges the apparent tension between religion and the arts by illustrating and investigating their long-standing and intriguing relationship from the early nineteenth century to the present day. The essays explore such varied topics as Sioux Sun Dance artifacts and paintings, American Jewish New Year postcards, the New Mexican santos tradition, roadside shrines, images of journey in African American pictorial traditions, the public display of religion, and the religious use of nineteenth-century technologies of mass reproduction.

Genres: Material Culture

427 pages, Hardcover

First published May 17, 2001

About the author

David Morgan is Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, with an additional appointment in Duke's Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies. Morgan served as the Chair in the Department of Religious Studies in Trinity College of Duke University from 2013-2016

Reviews

[Samuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Despite a wealth of evidence to show how much art and religion have shaped one another, historians of American art, with few notable exceptions, have been inattentive to the relationship between the two, often characterizing religion as captive to sectarian or ideological preoccupations, restrictive of creative individuality, and widely responsible for an inferior aesthetic. Similarly, historians of America have viewed art—and, even more broadly, the domain of the visual—as merely illustrative of ideas and experiences that are properly and principally expressed in texts” (xi).

“So far we have examined the power of images in terms of four, often overlapping, visual activities or accomplishments: communication, communion, commemoration, and imagination. Because images operate as vehicles of communication between the human and the divine, because they visualize the parameters of individual and communal identity, because they embody recollection, because they construct and posit worlds of meaning, they elicit a range of responses. In fact, images may be said to have power precisely because they elicit our response” (14).

“The study of the material aspects of religion, which include images as well as buildings, furniture, food, clothing, and anything that contributes to religion’s practice, affords scholars the opportunity to expand the range of evidence available for understanding religion as well as visual and material experience” (15).

What do images do? (1) manifest a public visible presence (and function) as both American public culture and national identity (2) participate in the social construction of reality—both in the meaning making by believers in everyday life and the corporate rituals of worship and civic cult (3) represent movements, innovations, and transformation of beliefs—American modernity. “In every case, the essays in this book pursue a critical analysis and interpretation of religious images, objects, and buildings embedded in the social practices of public and private life” (17).

“The visual culture of American religions has often been a place where social conflict and cultural contradiction have been manifest and in many cases where conflict has been negotiated“ (20). “Images, in other words, have often mediated two very different realms of meaning: the physical world of nature and the invisible domain beyond it” (20).

David Morgan and Sally Promey edit this collection of essays that make a case for visual evidences of religion to better convey the meaning of American religions. While they make no claims of being fully comprehensive in this volume--they omit studies on American manifestations of Islam, Asian religions, Orthodox Christianity, Mormonism, indigenous religions and noninstitutional religious forms as well as much new religious media (film and Internet)--they hope what is presented will start a broader dialogue and contribute to the growing field (23).

The essays give a good sampling of how religion and identity shape and are shaped in turn by art produced and commissioned by the religions and denominations that commission them. There are a lot of visuals (including a color photo insert section) that support the textual arguments in a fairly engaging and convincing manner.