Protestants and Pictures

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.

Morgan argues that the use of technology in the creation of a visual culture of belief was not simply a capitulation to “mass culture” but in fact participated in its very creation. The transition from local and popular cultures to “modern” mass culture in the nineteenth century resulted in a loss of personal presence and concrete community. In response, the ATS and other voluntary conservative Christian organizations committed to the transmission of the gospel, attempted to reestablish personal presence and concrete community through illustrations, which “personalized” both the “sender” and “receiver.” Morgan also documents the appearance and popularity of the ATS’s Christian Almanac, which, like its tracts, made very effective use of visual rhetoric.

The appearance in 1843 of the Harper’s Illuminated Bible subsequently influenced visual imagery in both the ATS’s Almanac and its tracts. In addition to what Morgan calls the “plain style,” which intended to “instruct” by clearly and unambiguously subordinating itself to the text, the Illuminated Bible made use of an “ornamental” or “embellished” style, a more sophisticated and complex weaving of text and image that allowed freedom to expand and interpret the text in ways plain-style images did not, bringing the viewer-reader into the process of constituting meaning.

A subtle but persistent leitmotif in Morgan’s narrative is the multiple interrelationships between image and text. In chapter three Morgan explores the content of these visual images and in particular, how these images visualize the various “others”—slaves, Catholic immigrants, and American Indians, for example—which were pitted against the bulwark of Christian values: the middle-class American family. “All social problems,” Morgan observes, “were understood as a willful deviation from the prevailing order of the bourgeois family.” The visual rhetoric of these images communicated the emerging assumption that the transmission and reception of the gospel could occur and be preserved only within the middle class.

Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the visual culture of the Millerites and Adventists. In contrast to the “postmillennial impulse” of the evangelical benevolent societies, the intense premillennialism of the Millerites and Adventists led them to separate from the larger culture in general and Protestant orthodoxy more specifically. Morgan reveals how visual imagery—particularly in the “schematic” chart—participated in constructing and maintaining this separation.

The “aesthetic impulse of Millerite theology,” as Morgan calls it, was located in its use of images to clarify through visualization the complexities and obscurities of biblical prophecy. The Millerite-Adventist project was to demonstrate the clarity and limit the complexity and polysemy of the Scriptures—purposes for which the schematic chart was uniquely well-suited. With their assortment of multi-headed beasts, rams, and other wild apocalyptic images subdued and made orderly by the very mode of presentation, these charts offered potent visualizations of coherence. Sold at first exclusively to Adventist pastors and later to the public, they were among the principal weapons in the Millerite-Adventist struggle to fight through Protestant hegemony in order to reach the “true remnant.”

As he considers the period after the Millerite disappointment of 1843, Morgan identifies what could be called the “pictorial turn” that would change the course of the production and reception of mass-mediated visual imagery through the first decades of the twentieth century. This pictorial turn is evident in the Adventist response to Currier & Ives and other secular lithography firms that had been creating large editions of images (many of them religious) for a variety of purposes. The popularity of these images was due in part to their use of a pictorial naturalism akin to certain compositional and aesthetic values of fine art (as conceived of in the United States in the nineteenth century).

This new pictorialism contributed to a new public rhetoric for Adventism, shifting from a cognitive emphasis on the Law to an affective emphasis on one’s personal experience of Jesus. Morgan demonstrates this shift brilliantly through an analysis of Adventist James White’s lithograph, The Way of Life from Paradise Lost to Paradise Restored (1876), and Thomas Moran’s Christ, The Way of Life (1883), the latter begun by White but completed by Moran after White’s death. Moran’s image eliminates the schematic and didactic visual tone of White’s 1876 composition in favor of an experiential engagement with Jesus’ crucifixion communicated through pictorial naturalism.

The remaining chapters of Morgan’s narrative investigate the complex shift from “didactic” to “devotional” imagery in the cultural politics of persuasion. In chapters 6 and 7, for example, Morgan explores the role that “visual pedagogy” played in the Christian education of children. As was the case throughout the nineteenth century, the marriage of word and image circumvented the Protestant squeamishness with “icons.” In illustrated primers, the images functioned to confirm the accuracy of the text, evolving into what Morgan calls an “iconography of the sabbath school.” Here, “the purpose of the didactic image was to attract children to evangelical learning … to appeal to their parents, and to facilitate the memorization of information.”

For evangelicals, in other words, the image needed in some way to be “anchored” to a text. Images not thus anchored raised the specter of “idolatry,” the visual economy of a primitive society in which images evoked extreme emotional and passionate states, not the proper “cognition” required for receiving saving knowledge.

How did the shift from “didactic” to “devotional” image, from cognitive instruction to persuasive suggestion occur? Morgan does not see it simply as a shift from “conservative evangelicalism” to “liberal Protestantism.” The story is, once again, much more complex than that. Within the conservative evangelical community, Morgan locates one of the seeds of this shift in a homely source: the “chalk talk,” a teaching tool that received staggering attention in the pages of evangelical educational publications. “The efficacy of the illustrated talk,” Morgan observes, “consisted of a kind of performance in which the act of drawing exercised a spiritual enchantment on the viewer.” Thus, almost unawares, conservative evangelicals began to be come more interested in “persuasion,” “suggestion,” and other forms of the psychology of persuasion emerging in the wake of the development of advertising theory and practice.

Certainly liberal Protestantism was instrumental in the shift from the didactic to the suggestive as it focused more attention on the child’s character formation than on his or her spiritual conversion. In liberal Protestantism character formation was conceived metaphorically as an aesthetic process of artistically “molding souls.” But Morgan adds that progressive pedagogy and psychology influenced conservative as well as liberal Protestants in the use of fine art in religious character formation. In the second half of the nineteenth century, a strong conviction concerning the “moral significance of aesthetic refinement” underwrote a national revival of interest in and institutionalization of fine art as a “humanizing, reforming social force in the national task of shaping character.”

This interest in fine art and its moral dimension was evidenced most clearly in what Morgan calls “the quest for the authentic image of Jesus,” a preoccupation of the period from 1860 to 1900. Thanks to the proliferation of mechanically reproduced images of Jesus, many of them adapted from fine art, the viewer could participate directly in contemplation of and devotion to the face of Jesus without the mediation of a text. Such sustained visual encounters fostered a “personal relationship” with Jesus.

This quest for the authoritative image of Christ, Morgan notes, paralleled the scholarly quest for the historical Jesus then taking place on both sides of the Atlantic (a century and more before the quest in our own day). Far from simply “illustrating” these theological and historical explorations into the identity of Jesus, visual imagery actively participated in this project. The decisive technological breakthrough of the halftone screen in 1880s provided less expensive but much higher quality reproductions— reproductions that could function easily as autonomous devotional images seen through the moralistic lens of fine art. This breakthrough transformed American Protestant visual piety at the turn of the twentieth century.

Finally, in chapter 9, Morgan focuses on the liberal Protestant transformation of religious education, in which visual imagery—particularly the mechanical reproduction of fine art—played an increasingly important role. Established in 1903, the Religious Education Association (REA) took an active interest in the use of visual imagery in its progressive educational philosophy. To the liberal Protestant mind, if religious imagery was to be influential, it could only become so through the culturally respectable form of fine art—which, by virtue of its status as fine art, did not need didactic text to communicate its universal and transhistorical moral messsage.

Morgan’s study is not simply a study of “kitsch” or “popular imagery” that bears no relation to the study of fine art. It raises several important, if unexpected, issues for the study of the visual arts from a Christian perspective. Protestants and Pictures reveals evangelicals and other Protestant faith communities to be much less iconophobic than is often assumed by contemporary Christian scholars. Morgan shows that nineteenth-century American Protestants made aggressive and sophisticated use of visual imagery in their religious and cultural activities. His research conclusively establishes that far from being ignorant of the emergence of high art and high culture into the American cultural mainstream in the nineteenth century, American Protestants were, in many ways, responsible for this significant cultural turn, which was fueled by their belief that the fine arts could communicate, suggest, evoke, and otherwise participate in the process of character formation through the unique values of the aesthetic aura of fine art.

Although Morgan’s study ends in the 1920s, the liberal Protestant commitment to fine art continued through mid-century as more liberal Protestants sought to define themselves culturally and theologically over against fundamentalism and other forms of conservative evangelicalism. In the process, such popular artists as Warner Sallman and Norman Rockwell were mercilessly critiqued as kitsch, representing the worst of American culture and religion.

According to the recent research of art historian Sally Promey, liberal theologian Paul Tillich and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and son of a liberal Presbyterian minister, served on the board of the REA’s Department of Religious Art. Liberal Protestants participated willingly and actively with secular mid-century critics and intellectuals in defining an authentic American high culture against which kitsch was contrasted most disapprovingly. It appears that much contemporary discourse from the Christian community on the visual arts uncritically borrows this mid-century rhetoric rather than subjecting it to historical analysis.

Perhaps most important, Morgan lays waste to the assumption that works of fine art (however one defines it, a problem that is well beyond the scope of this review) possess an aura that popular visual imagery and illustrations lack, and the corollary assumption that the former need neither text nor context while the latter need both to anchor meaning and guide the viewer. Indeed, although Morgan himself does not explicitly come to this conclusion, the history of modern (and postmodern) high art shows that all visual imagery is in tended to function within and interact with texts and contexts.

One of the errors of the liberal Protestants of the early twentieth century was the assumption that texts and contexts were unimportant to the meaning (read: aura) of high art. In contrast, Morgan’s study reveals the conservative evangelical groups to be uniquely—if intuitively—attuned to the fact that con text is fundamental to a proper functioning of visual imagery and that it is necessary to manage context in some way in order to communicate effectively. This sensitivity to context and the recognition of how image and text re late and interact is not simply a consequence of “kitsch” and mass culture’s visual imagery; it is also clearly evident in the history of avant-garde art from the nineteenth century to the present. The emergence of the manifesto, the artist’s statement, and partisan art criticism as important genres in the development of modern art all point directly to the recognition that the visual image—whether it is a piece of fine art or of advertising—functions within and in relationship to texts and contexts.

For this reviewer, Protestants and Pictures raises the staggering possibility that nineteenth-century American conservative Protestants, compared to their more liberal brethren of the early twentieth century and their more “sophisticated” evangelical-Reformed great-grandchildren at the end of the twentieth century, demonstrated the more sophisticated use of visual imagery. We’ll be busy for a long time sorting out the implications of that.

Daniel A. Siedell is curator of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden and adjunct faculty in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.