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Seeing Protestant Icons: The Popular Reception of Visual Media in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

David Morgan
David Morgan*
Affiliation:
Christ College, Valparaiso University
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Extract

Although it is commonly asserted that Protestantism bears an intrinsic antagonism toward images, this claim is manifestly, contradicted by a long history of the production and use of images among Protestants the world over. At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, British organizations such as Hannah More’s Cheap Repository and the Religious Tract Society, and a host of tract and Sunday school societies formed in the United States, all made zealous use of illustrated tracts, handbills, broadsides, newspapers, magazines and books in order to address the disparity between the small number of evangelists and the vast number of those requiring evangelization. Founded in 1825, the American Tract Society invested unprecedented sums in materials and technology to illustrate its tracts and children’s literature and attracted the best wood engraver in the United States to do so. British and American tract producers explicitly felt that illustrations were a strong form of appeal to children and the semi-literate, such as immigrants and the poor. And they happily relied on images in urban settings to compete with secular advertisements and the rival trade of books and pamphlet sellers.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 42: Elite and Popular Religion , 2006 , pp. 406 - 428
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2006

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References

1 For a good introduction to this problem in the history of American Protestantism, see Promey, Sally M., ‘Pictorial Ambivalence and American Protestantism’, in Arthurs, Alberta and Wallach, Glenn, eds, Crossroads: Art and Religion in American Life (New York, 2001), 189–229.Google Scholar

2 Luther, Martin, Against the Heavenly Prophets in the Matter of Images and Sacraments (1525), in Luther’s Works, 55 vols (Philadelphia, PA, 1958), 40: 99.Google Scholar

3 On the visual culture of the American Tract Society, see Morgan, David, Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production (New York and Oxford, 1999), 43–120 Google Scholar, with a discussion of the Harper Bible at 61–4; and Gutjahr, Paul, An American Bible: a History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777–1880 (Stanford, CA, 1998), 70–6.Google Scholar

4 I have examined at length the iconography of mothers and absent fathers in Evangelical devotional materials in nineteenth-century America in The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley, CA, 2005), 191–210 Google Scholar. An instructive study of the domestic culture of nineteenth-century American Christianity is McDannell, Colleen, The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840–1900 (Bloomington, IN, 1986).Google Scholar

5 Rev. Adams, J. G., ‘The Little Daguerreotype’, in The Rose of Sharon: a Religious Souvenir for 1855, ed. Mrs Sawyer, C. M. (Boston, MA, 1855), 254 Google Scholar. For the daguerreotypes I have in mind, see Henisch, Heinz K. and Henisch, Bridget A., The Photographic Experience 1839–1914: Images and Attitudes (University Park, 1994), 179–82.Google Scholar

6 Harris, Neil, The Artist in American Society: the Formative Years, 1790–1860 (Chicago, IL, 1982), 28–53 Google Scholar, has provided an authoritative study of mid-century Protestant clergy and art treks to Europe.

7 Beecher, Henry Ward, Star Papers; or, Experience of Art and Nature (New York, 1855), 53.Google Scholar

8 Kurtz, Charles M., Christ Before Pilate: the Painting by Munkácsy (New York, 1887), 9.Google Scholar

9 Rev. Butler, William, from Zion’s Herald, Boston (March 30,1887)Google Scholar, excerpted in Kurtz, , Christ Before Pilate, 42.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., 42–3.

11 The New York Tribune (18 November 1886), in Kurtz, , Christ Before Pilate, 49.Google Scholar

12 From Beck’s Journal of Decorative Art, Boston (30 March 1887), in Kurtz, , Christ Before Pilate, 54 Google Scholar; Philadelphia North American (2 March 1887), in Kurtz, Christ Before Pilate, 55.

13 Kurtz, , Christ Before Pilate, 6.Google Scholar

14 Dr A. Guéneau de Mussy, ‘Study’, excerpted in Kurtz, , Christ Before Pilate, 19.Google Scholar

15 For further discussion, see Morgan, , Protestants and Pictures, 326–30.Google Scholar

16 Moore, R. Laurence, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York, 1994).Google Scholar

17 For a general history of the panorama in Europe and the United States, see Oettermann, Stephan, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. Schneider, Deborah Lucas (New York, 1997).Google Scholar

18 ‘The Apocalyptic Vision’, Chattanooga Daily Times (2 August 1880), excerpted in Comments on Arthur L. Butt’s Panorama (Charlotte, NC, c. 1898), 30.

19 Renn, J. J., Pastor, Methodist Episcopal Church, Salisbury, North Carolina, no date; excerpted in Comments, 12.Google Scholar

20 Brookhaven Ledger, 1881, repr. in Comments, 35.

21 ‘Exhibition’, Economist, Elizabeth City, North Carolina (14 June 1881), repr. in Comments, 41.

22 On the Passion play at Oberammergau, which was paradigmatic for many Americans since it received the most attention in travel literature from 1880 to the present, see Shapiro, James, Oberammergau: the Troubling Story of the World’s Most Famous Passion Play (New York, 2001).Google Scholar

23 A fine study of the relationship between the Passion play and early film is Musser, Charles, ‘Passions and the Passion Play: Theatre, Film, and Religion in America, 1800–1900’, Film History 5 (1993), 419–56.Google Scholar

24 These sorts of spaces have been examined in Kilde, Jeanne, When Church Became Theatre: the Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America (New York and Oxford, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Loveland, Anne C. and Wheeler, Otis B., From Meeting house to Megachurch: a Material and Cultural History (Columbia, MO, and London, 2003).Google Scholar

25 For the image in question, see Musser, , ‘Passions and the Passion Play’, 441 Google Scholar; for related imagery in the Oberammergau Passion play, see Holmes, Burton, Travelogues, 12 vols (New York, 1910), 7:176–208.Google Scholar

26 Reynolds, Herbert, ‘From Palette to Screen: the Tissot Bible as Sourcebook for From Manger to the Cross ’, in Cosandey, Roland, Gaudreault, André and Gunning, Tom, eds, Un Invention du Diable? Cinéma des Premiers Temps et Religion (Sainte-Foy, Switzerland, 1992), 275–310 Google Scholar, has noted that the 1912 film, From Manger to the Cross, constructed its scenes from individual illustrations of the Bible by the painter James Tissot.

27 Floyd, Pauline M., ‘Motion Picture Technique: a Few Pointers on the Art of Turning out Classics While You Wait’, Public Affairs (August 1924), excerpted in Graves, W. Brooke, ed., Readings in Public Opinion: its Formation and Control (New York, 1928), 351–6, at 352.Google Scholar

28 nMorgan, David, ed., Icons of American Protestantism: the Art of Warner Sallman (New Haven, CT, 1996), 38–44.Google Scholar

29 Boyer, Peter J., ‘The Jesus War: Mel Gibson’s Obsession’, The New Yorker 79 (15 Sept. 2003), 60.Google Scholar

30 The most cited discussion of this notion of the gaze is Mulvey, Laura’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16 (1975), 6–18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a helpful overview of the complex and extensive discussion of ‘the gaze’, see Daniel Chandler, ‘Notes on “The Gaze” ’, at www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/gaze/gaze.html (consulted 25 July 2005).

31 I have examined the Catholic aspects of Gibson, ’s film in ‘Catholic Visual Piety and The Passion of the Christ ’, in Plate, S. Brent, ed., Re- Viewing The Passion: Mel Gibson’s Film and its Critics (New York, 2004), 85—96 Google Scholar. For discussion of Protestant fascination with Catholic visual culture in nineteenth-century America, see Davis, John, ‘Protestant Envy’, in Morgan, David and Promey, Sally M., eds, The Visual Culture of American Religions (Berkeley, CA, 2001), 105–28.Google Scholar

32 Interview with the author, 1 July 2004. At one Evangelical website, www.thelife.com/experience/two.html, the claim is unabashed: ‘In The Passion of the Christ you saw love at it best… The picture of pure, passionate love is caught in the frame of Jesus loving you while hanging on the cross … Imagine asking Jesus, “How much do you love me?” He would stretch out His arms, with His nail-pierced hands, and say, “This much” ’ … Jesus was brutally beaten and killed because that is what it took for us to be forgiven of our sins. It was an enormous cost that He was willing to pay for you’ (consulted 20 August 2004). For similar commentary, see the Campus Crusade for Christ website and links at www.passionofchrist.com (consulted 20 August 2004).