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Protestants and Pictures. The very title of David Morgan's book is bound to raise the eyebrows of the readership of Books & Culture. Surely pictures and Protestants have as much in common as do Athens and Jerusalem—or so we have assumed, given Calvinist iconoclasm and evangelical-fundamentalist iconophobia. American Protestants, so we are told, have not appreciated the theological and cultural value of the visual arts. And reflecting on why this is the case has set the agenda for a good deal of evangelical Christian scholarship on the visual arts.
But in Protestants and Pictures, Morgan turns this conventional wisdom upside down, showing that historians—evangelical or otherwise—have simply not looked in the right places. Protestants and Pictures shows us where to look. For those of us who are interested in—or perhaps even concerned to produce—Christian scholarship in the visual arts, Morgan's groundbreaking book has tremendous ramifications.
The study of visual culture, which lies at the heart of Morgan's study, suggests that far from simply illustrating ideas, philosophies, or "world-views," visual imagery participates in a unique and vital way in constructing and maintaining meaning. The student of visual culture denies that one can simply choose whether or not to engage visual culture. It envelops us. It pervades us. It is as inescapable as the very air we breathe. Moreover, because visual culture includes not only fine art but also popular, mass-produced images and objects, aesthetic experience is a much broader and more complex category than conceived of as "disinterested contemplation" of museum objects.
Morgan's first book, the edited volume Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman (Yale Univ. Press, 1996), focused on the artist responsible for the illustrations of Jesus that became an ubiquitous presence in the households of Protestant Christians throughout the United States in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Morgan followed that book with Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (Univ. of California Press, 1998).1
In Protestants and Pictures, Morgan's analytic scope takes in mass-produced visual imagery from the nineteenth century to the early twentieth. "This book," Morgan writes in the introduction, "is a history of Protestant visual culture and the power of images in the last phase of what Walter Benjamin called the age of mechanical reproduction." Morgan goes on to argue that the historical evidence of nineteenth and early twentieth century Protestant visual culture contradicts Benjamin's thesis, found in his widely read and oft-quoted essay, "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," that the advent of photographic reproduction destroyed the "aura" of the visual arts. While Benjamin and subsequent theorists regarded aura as inherent in fine art, Morgan shows that the genius of nineteenth-century American Protestant visual culture lay precisely in its ability to imbue mass-produced visual imagery with an aura.
For Morgan, the importance of this aura cannot be exaggerated. Far from being simply an aesthetic quality, the aura served to forge important social and even doctrinal relationships with those who received these images. The first two chapters of Protestants and Pictures chronicle the ways in which conservative Protestant communities during the Second Great Awakening used technology in order to communicate the gospel to a larger culture from which they had become increasingly disenfranchised. So, for example, such benevolent societies as the American Tract Society (ATS) amplified the persuasive power of benevolence through the visual rhetoric of tracts and illustrated Bibles in order to counteract their marginalization.
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