Of all of his work, the most well-known was his 1980 installation, Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death, in which Jafa went undercover into the Southern Territory, and covertly replaced every Bible in ten Mississippi Delta churches with decoy Bibles in which the statement “Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death” was printed at intervals into the text.† Upon discovery, each of these churches burned the errant Bibles in a public ceremony, events that Jafa, still embedded and disguised, photographed: religious extremists burning what appears to be their own text.
