Given the strong religious tenor of the last two decades of culture wars and the expansion of the “new art history” into visual culture, it seemed to be only a matter of time before the scholarly field took on the artifacts of religion for the work of academic debate and interpretation. In the preface to their fine anthology, editors David Morgan and Sally M. Promey point to a relatively widespread lack of scholarly discussion of religious imagery by North American art historians and religious historians alike. While the former has seen the onslaught of ideology and belief as eclipsing aesthetic merit and individual achievement, the latter has used image as the secondary servant of the superior theological text. Moreover, the disjunction is class-based and institutional. The middle and upper classes set the standards for aesthetic hierarchies but not for religion. And those who practiced a faith’s rituals used a much wider set of visual materials than art allows in its categories. But the rubric of visual culture contains a directive to include discussion of “all visual forms” and an accompanying revelation of “the constructed character of cultural hierarchies and their historical enforcement” (xiii). When scholars take up these tasks and link them to recent preoccupations with the contexts of practice and reception, as well as to a recognition of the economic, social, political, and sacred power of visual images and artifacts, one can ask the anthology’s key question: “How does religion happen materially?” (xii and 16).

This central query, posed and elaborated upon by the editors in the Introduction, elevates artifacts from their roles as passive, illustrational, and reflective to interactive, participatory, and constitutive. These various commitments guide the anthology’s fourteen authors, who together represent the cultures of academia and museums in the fields of art history, religious studies, American material culture, American studies, history, English, and media studies. Dual-discipline designations and the range of work in the book suggest the interdisciplinary concerns of scholars and the project as a whole.

Multiple-author anthologies, now a mainstay of academic publishing, can vary widely according to the circumstances of collection, purpose, and funding. Many originate in thematically focused conference panels, in symposia, or in scholarly institutes designed to advance theoretical thinking and scholarship. Others supplement classroom survey texts with previously published articles. The Visual Culture of American Religions—the name of both the larger project and the anthology—received substantial support from the Luce Foundation and the Lilly Endowment to fulfill a set of ambitious goals related to scholarship, teaching, and museum outreach and dedicated to a process of collaboration for bringing these products together. The collection, which results from three scholarly seminars, exemplifies the characteristics of the good anthology: a balanced presentation of different subjects and media, clarity in conceptualization, and conversations between parts that build to an effective whole. I take each up in turn.

Given the book’s dual preoccupations with visual culture and religion, along with its American focus, one would expect this anthology to cover a range of media both high and low, to consider material in a number of faiths, and to survey at least the last two and a half centuries. Indeed, one essay takes on the full chronological sweep, six cover various points in the nineteenth-century, with a number reaching back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century precedents, and seven fall into the twentieth-century, three of which cover material from the last two decades. Virtually every medium or image type makes an appearance, if only glancingly, with the exception of film and websites (Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner turns up as an example of iconoclasm, while digital imaging is seen as affecting the look of recent Bible illustration). The list covers architecture, mural, easel, and panel painting, mosaic, portable painted altars, prints and illustration, sculpture and contemporary installation, television, postcards, metalwork, performance and demonstration, and the visual image embodied in the spoken word. While the editors acknowledge the lack of work on American Islam, Asian, or alternative religions, the anthology includes Protestant, Catholic, Native American, and Jewish faiths. More generic belief systems (including the hermetic tradition) are also offered, along with specifically civic rituals or representations with religious overtones (the iconography of George Washington, for example).

Overall, though all the articles can be described as case studies of religious visual culture, they attack the problem from different angles (and here I list the contributions). Five focus on an individual artist, monument, or work, drawing observations about an aspect of visual culture and religion from it. Thomas A. Tweed’s “America’s Church: Roman Catholicism and Civic Space in the Nation’s Capital” looks at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC; Gretchen T. Buggeln examines the rebuilding of a neighborhood church in “Architecture as Community Service: West Presbyterian Church in Wilmington, Delaware”; Erika Doss discusses a controversial contemporary work in “Robert Gober’s ‘Virgin’ Installation: Issues of Spirituality in Contemporary American Art”; David Bjelajac draws on Mount’s 1845 work Eel Spearing at Setauket in “William Sidney Mount and the Hermetic Tradition in American Art”; and Leigh E. Schmidt takes up Elihu Vedder’s simultaneous rejection of and longing for Christianity, seen in two versions of a provocative canvas in “Visualizing God’s Silence: Oracles, the Enlightenment, and Elihu Vedder’s Questioner of the Sphinx.”

Seven articles treat a body of one type of work, many of them elucidating mechanisms of production or reception. Morgan looks at relations between text and image, literacy and representation, in Protestant religious and educational images in “For Christ and the Republic: Protestant Illustration and the History of Literacy in Nineteenth-Century America”; John Davis explores the Protestant consumption of paintings and prints in “Catholic Envy: The Visual Culture of Protestant Desire”; Stewart M. Hoover takes on television programming and viewing in “Visual Religion in Media Culture”; Harvey Markowitz examines Lakota tribal painting before and after the movement of Native Americans to reservations in “From Presentation to Representation in Sioux Sun Dance Painting”; Claire Farago questions mass-media images in the remarkably heterogeneous New Mexican religious culture of the nineteenth century in “Transforming Images: New Mexican Santos between Theory and History”; Ellen Smith charts the production and consumption of Rosh Hashanah postcards in immigrant Jewish populations in “Greetings from Faith: Early-Twentieth-Century American Jewish New Year Postcards”; John M. Giggie turns to the image of the railroad and its meanings for African Americans in “‘When Jesus Handed Me a Ticket’: Images of Railroad Travel and Spiritual Transformations among African Americans, 1865–1917”; and Paul Gutjahr follows Bible illustration across two and a half centuries in “American Protestant Bible Illustration from Copper Plates to Computers.” At least three of these articles (by Morgan, Davis, and Hoover) incorporate another approach by beginning with a broad, general issue in religious culture and illuminating it with visual examples. And Promey adopts this method centrally in her essay, “The Public Displays of Religion.”

While obvious overlap and slippage occur whenever one describes such methodological strategies, an anthology’s topic becomes meaningful when conceptualized and introduced in ways that make sense of individual contributions. Morgan and Promey do this in three different ways, each of which augments the reading of the work. First, they build on visual culture’s guiding assumption that the power of images derives from the work they perform by designating four operations peculiar to the religious work of imagery: “communication, communion, commemoration, and imagination” (14). Communication suggests some form of vertical transaction between the human and the divine, such as petitions to a deity or intervention in the mechanisms of the natural world to benefit the human. Farago and Markowitz treat these petitions in their work on New Mexican culture and Sioux painting. Communion speaks to the horizontal work of religious institutional or community building through images. Such community work takes place at levels from global to local and among families, kinship groups, or denominations. Community identification occurs around buildings (Tweed and Buggeln), around holiday practices (Smith), in ritual or public performances (Morgan and Promey), or in identification with a common visual metaphor (Giggie). For commemoration, the third operation, the editors cite the obvious material practices of mourning, from gravestones in cemeteries to the more ephemeral roadside shrines that mark the site of fatal accidents. Anthology articles by Morgan, Gutjahr, Bjelajac, Tweed, and Promey move beyond commemoration to examine the visual shaping of memory, the inculcation of religious doctrines, and the formation of denominational identity. Here, images and rituals provide information and knowledge of traditions to new members of a religious community. Imagination, the fourth operation, cuts across both production (as a meaning-making act) and reception (as a meaning-making process of viewing and interpretation). Hoover, Davis, Bjelajac, and Giggie all take this up with home television viewing, interpreting Catholic artifacts from Protestant perspectives, digging for the hermetic meanings of images, or constructing the transformative meaning of the railroad. Finally, the editors turn to iconoclasm, a fifth operation different in kind from the previous four, but inextricable from a consideration of the power of images. Here, the articles by Doss and Schmidt bypass the limits of iconoclasm’s destructive implications to consider its politically and personally liberating potential—a strategy that challenges the transparency of the icon and the negatively powerful grip it may have on individuals or groups.

Apart from these operations, the book divides the articles into three thematic groupings. In Part 1, Promey, Morgan, Tweed, and Buggeln address issues of public identity, with buildings, art and performance in public spaces, and intersections between religious values and public-school instruction. In Part 2, Davis, Doss, Hoover, Markowitz, Bjelajac, and Farago, deal with the ways in which religious images and practices participate in the social construction of some segment of American life. In Part 3, Schmidt, Smith, Giggie, and Gutjahr examine the meeting of religious visual culture and the ways in which it interrogates, celebrates, or participates in the technologies of American modernity.

A final task of conceptualizing the anthology’s topic involves theory and method itself. By this point, books on visual culture, which seem to constitute a small industry, arise from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Authors write genealogies according to where they see the beginning and boundaries of the field; they also claim a variety of theorists as central and include a wide array of things traditionally called art along with every imaginable visual technology. In the introduction to their Visual Culture: The Reader (London: Sage Publications in association with the Open University, 1999), whose articles are far more focused on theoretical concerns and with photography, film, and advertising as key subjects, Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall see visual culture as a part of (British) cultural studies and assert, “Any study of the image conducted under the impact of cultural studies is indebted to semiotics” (3). By contrast, Promey and Morgan delineate another branch on the visual-culture tree, seeing it as “one genus of the species material culture” (15). Their claim about material culture has a clear history in both American studies and that part of American art history that has drawn from methods articulated by Jules Prown and others. J. T. W. Mitchell’s Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) also plays a key role in encouraging the participants of the anthology under review here to think about the pictorial and material specificity of their artifacts, which proves particularly important for escaping pictorial subservience to the preached or written religious text. Central to these editors’ and authors concerns are not only practices of looking and seeing, but also those of function, use, and mediation. The “stuff” that is discussed here is used quite consciously in the context of religious belief, and the authors’ commitment is to take “artifact, practice, and belief with equal seriousness” (17). In following that route the anthology promotes a set of tasks rather than a set of theories as such. It focuses on the things themselves, with only a couple of exceptions. As a result authors adapt structures and prose that are accessible to an educated general reader.

Given that mandate of accessibility, my final category for this anthology’s evaluation moves beyond editorial groupings to consider the quality of conversation between individual articles, and between those articles and anticipated readers. Since preferences are guided by teaching needs, relative scholarly investments in visual culture, and religious politics, and since I found something of interest in each piece, my own list of preferences seems unwarranted. Of greater interest is usefulness. Students of American Catholicism can discuss its northern European and Latino variants, its appearance in image and building, its visual appeal and controversy, and its contradictions for private practitioners and public worship by comparing the articles by Tweed, Davis, Doss, and Farago. In its theoretical metanarrative on hybrid identity-formation and mass image distribution, Farago’s article provides a fascinating foil to Markowitz’s historically and institutionally specific account of the emergence of Lakota Sun Painting in a post-reservation market economy. Both these articles might be grouped with Morgan’s, Smith’s, and Gutjahr’s for historians of consumer culture. The book will reach into a number of my own courses and stand as the key set of case studies that concludes my undergraduate- and master’s-level course in art historiography and methodology precisely to draw out the meanings of visual-culture studies.

Its editors note, “The Visual Culture of American Religions will have served its purpose if it helps demonstrate the importance of further study and suggests some key directions for future investigations” (24). Written well before September 11, 2001, its editors and authors could hardly have anticipated the urgency for understanding the visual in relation to religious politics. The list is long and growing. Shrines on kiosks and outside fire stations in New York are religious sites of mourning, commemoration, and memory. Firefighters, police, and rescue workers embody godlike attributes of moral virtue and heroic effort. Religious costume takes on multivalent meanings depending on where, by whom, and in what context it is worn. The head scarf in America, newly described, becomes a sign of our religious tolerance of a peaceful Islam or a marker for extra airport scrutiny. The burqa in a devastated Afghanistan symbolized the Taliban’s egregious repression of Afghan women, while costume and mobility restrictions on Saudi women are given a wide berth in the interests of oil supplies. Bumper stickers pair the American flag with the phrase “God Bless America,” which in its consistency of use has become our new national anthem and the closing to virtually any political speech. All are shaped by a host of visual media. All suggest a new consensus about the growing interpenetration of religion, daily life, and civic practices that belies the separation of church and state. This anthology provides the means for us to historicize and amplify our understanding of these trends and practices; its appearance is both timely and important.