It's Hard to Say

It’s not easy to say what things mean. A good reading of the objects of popular culture requires an eye for objects and a taste for theory. It aims to locate things in a landscape that is simultaneously familiar and fresh. The study of material culture is especially challenging when the materials in question are religious things. In this case, interpreters must address the complex category of “religion” and acquaint themselves with a variety of particular and highly-defined traditions of doctrine and practice.

Colleen McDannell and Charles Reagan Wilson engage in this demanding practice and demonstrate that the effort pays notable dividends. Things and their associated rituals anchor interpretations of American “popular religion.” From McDannell and Wilson we learn that ordinary people—Protestants, Catholics, Southerners, women, and men—routinely practice religion outside of church, in the privacy of their bedrooms and parlors, and in the public spaces of football stadiums and fraternal lodges. We also learn that the beliefs and rituals of popular religion are frequently borrowed from traditional sources and edited to express regional, class, ethnic and gender convictions. The gender, economic and racial imprints of the larger culture are expressed in popular religion just as they are in the traditional churches. But popular religion is more heterodox than the Christian churches, and its mass appeal erodes doctrinal and ritual boundaries. McDannell and Wilson provide affectionate readings of the objects, architecture, and landscapes of popular religion and bring this complex and shape-shifting practice into vivid focus.

A specialist in Southern religion and culture, Wilson’s first exploration of popular religion—which he also calls “Southern civil religion”—was an analysis of the apotheosis of the Confederacy after the Civil War. In Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920, he argued that the myths, rituals, evangelists, and demons of Lost Cause religion provided white Southerners with a cohesive cultural identity in the wake of political defeat. ¹ In subsequent essays, Wilson extended his analysis of Southern popular religion into the contemporary period and emphasized the study of material culture. His latest volume, Judgment and Grace in Dixie, is a collection of these essays. He concludes that the South is still “God’s Project.” The civil rights movement has desacralized the memory of the Confederacy and its foundational doctrine of white supremacy, and now black and white Southerners struggle to establish a biracial South. Wilson argues that this vision is rooted evangelical Christianity—under God’s judgment and with God’s grace—and nourished in the icons and landscapes of Southern popular religion. The recent wave of church-burnings in the South offer a graphic reminder of Wilson’s accompanying caution: this biracial project is “still in the making.”

Popular and material culture studies is Colleen McDannell’s project. While Wilson promotes the South as a site for biracial renewal, McDannell advances the study of popular and material culture among scholars of religion. ² In her earlier The Christian Home in Victorian America, McDannell entered Anglo-Protestant and Irish-Catholic middle-class parlors to examine hearth rituals and patterns of domesticity that borrowed from and transformed ecclesiastical practices of the institutional churches. She showed how objects (especially the family bible) and domestic architecture (most memorably the “Christian home” designs of Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe) infused everyday lives with religious structure and significance. In addition to her conclusions about religion, gender, class, and ethnicity, McDannell discovered an ecumenicity of religious goods among Northern Protestants and Catholics, of which Protestant use of Marian icons and devotions is a notable instance.

Now, in Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America, McDannell extends her material cultural approach in several provocative directions. In a lavishly-produced volume that will find space on contemporary coffee tables, she showcases the materials of...