American Piety

In America, the ultimate expression of democracy is to have an opinion, to make a statement, to author a sound bite. Yet, there's little space for more information in our culture. Our challenged attention spans won't allow us to digest more than a few words at once. We scan the headlines, glance at the photos. Integrating the two, image and text, offers the ultimate economy of time and space, a picture and a message as flat and frontal as a comic strip, as direct and obtrusive as a talk show. Rather than subordinating the image, as captions do, the text here shares the stage and challenges our expectations, often as counterpoint to the image. In a culture where you can say anything you want and little is heard, recognition is survival of the fittest pitch, the cleverest delivery, the most succinct phrasing—this, finally, is the art form of our times—the advertisement.

Maybe even religion has to become an advertisement if it hopes to hold our attention. In American Piety, subjects offer up their religious convictions—in their own words—to the world with the concision of sound bites and the steadfast urgency of the dispossessed. With the image of core religions tarnished and threatened, there is an opening for innumerable less well-known faiths to be heard and a need for mainstream believers to be understood. Here, religion borrows the format of the comic strip to make its pitch.