In Religion in Plain View: Public Aesthetics of American Display, Sally M. Promey delivers a revelatory critique of public display in the United States, replete with over a hundred stunning photographs. In the reflection below, Promey discusses the concerns that motivated the project and discusses some surprises she encountered during her research. Some photographs from the cutting room floor here!

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Religion in Plain View is a project about the role of religion in the formation of the nation state. It is thus a project about world-making, about the ways the United States adopted and recalibrated an Anglo-Protestant imperial disposition, and then spatially replicated this posture in its monuments, markets, machines, technologies, rituals, and regulatory rubrics. The public display of religion parses differently in the United States than elsewhere. This difference accrues from American Constitutional nonestablishment in tandem with the settlement practices and patterns that shaped the Constitution and its spatial imperatives, imaginaries, and designs. Most succinctly stated, Religion in Plain View demonstrates two closely related assertions: the United States is decisively not a White Christian nation; and the United States is indeed a nation by White Protestant design.

In a newly colonizing and imperial moment (think Greenland, the Panama Canal, and Gaza), I’m afraid this book explains a lot. I did not set out to elucidate the outcome of the 2024 American presidential election, but it would appear that this is one of the things my book accomplishes.

I approach this blog post as an opportunity to share a few stories about how the book developed, and as an invitation to say things I’ve not already said in the book itself. I asked myself here: what were the biggest surprises along the way? In this moment, I have five answers.

The imperial imprint of Anglo-Protestant hegemony quite literally claims considerably more space than the ideals of American religious freedom and nonestablishment might suggest.

In 1994 when I began to think seriously about the public display of American religion(s), I initially imagined that I had embarked on an exploration of religious multiplicity, told from the ground up. At the start, I planned to write an at least mildly celebratory account of post-1965 American religious diversification in the wake of that year’s relaxation of religious and racial immigration restrictions. Early on, however, the evidence suggested that I was tugging on the wrong threads. My first clues to this were not simply numerical but also distinctly material and spatial. An array of disturbing historical actions, and their replications (official and unofficial), ceded the most consequential landshaping powers to White Protestant inflections. Again: not a White Christian nation, but a nation by White Protestant design.

Modern advertising and American Protestantism sustain a different relation and birth order than is usually described.

Most Americans do not tend to think of advertising as religious display. The former, so the argument generally goes, is secular, the latter sacred. But “secular” can only be asserted of space from which “religion” has been extracted; it follows that Western secularity is itself shaped by religion, sustains a gaping religion-shaped cavity at its center. In addition, for most who tend to think about the relationship of American capitalism to American religion, the focus lies elsewhere than in disposition, posture, and voice. Finally, these arguments tend to assume a unidirectional flow, where either capitalism or religion is the inaugurating party. Some have the world of business invading and infecting an otherwise “pure” religious space. Others have American religion taking chronological priority to inform American business. This pursuit of the egg from which the chicken hatched misconstrues both partners in the relationship, though there is more truth in the latter assertion. As far as modern American advertising (in particular) is concerned, Protestantism is the elder sibling, inventing many of the forms that advertising embraces. In the United States, Christian evangelism and commercial promotion are two sides of the same coin: a twinned disposition (past and present). Protestantism and advertising grew up together, and shared important features. This interactive connection informs a large portion of what Americans do and display; it haunts Western educational and legal practices too. It produces a postural armature of superiority and expertise. “Testimonial Aesthetics” is the name I have given this emplaced phenomenon of orientation and representation.

The US Highway System and other transit networks exert a special pull on American display.

Display in the United States is very often organized to address the highway or other transit networks. My book attends to the ways transportation organizes displayʻs designs and modes of address, displayʻs connections with people on the move in various exercises of consuming the land. Iʻve spent a lot of time on this nationʻs highways: I grew up in California and we traveled by car (and never any other means of transportation) to visit relatives in the Midwest. I recall tracking Burma Shave signage in the desert and noting oddball things sitting by the roadside (an oversized Magic 8 Ball, for instance, struck my six-year-old mind and stayed there).[1] In writing this book, I deliberately traveled other nationsʻ motorways to get a better sense of the peculiar shape of things here. I tracked American display’s inclination to incorporate and address technologies of transit as I encountered, for example, a transparent sound barrier in Columbus, Ohio, designed to grant the church behind it visibility from Highway I-71; St. Jude on a taco truck in Santa Barbara, California; a skywritten PRAY in New Orleans, Louisiana; and a JESUS IS COMING: REPENT BE SAVED message posted literally underfoot, in black letters on warning -sign yellow, on the sidewalk at JFK International, on my way to one of the airport’s principal parking garages.

“Material establishment” anchors American public display.

My years of work in Hawaiʻi, especially at Kawaiahaʻo Church, on Mauna Kea, and in Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, illuminated something I had already begun to suspect, tipping the balance from suspicion to conviction. The key event in this process of realization took place at the Hawaiʻi First Circuit Courthouse in Honolulu on the day of a 2014 burial rights hearing. A sculpture prominently displayed on the courthouse façade sealed the dealA large bronze relief sculpture of Queen regent Kaʻahumanu greeted entrants. The sculpture’s inscription reads:

As Pu’uhonua, she sheltered victim and wrongdoer;

As Kuhina Nui, she overturned the ancient Kapu system;

As convert, she adopted Christianity’s moral code as law.

As construed in this display, stated in its inscription, authorized by its position on the building, the art celebrates Kaʻahumanu for making Christianity Hawaiʻi’s moral law. This is a partial, heavily filtered representation of her biography. It excises from its narrative the warfare waged by Kaʻahumanu in pursuit of abolishing traditional rituals and lifeways. Months before the arrival of Protestant missionaries on Oʻahu, she initiated lethal violence against her own people in battles to disband the ʻaikapu. The history of Hawaiʻi’s “conversion” to Christianity is also far more complex. At the courthouse Kaʻahumanu’s image tells a stilted story. In this place she works for the Western state, binding Christianity to American law, privileging Christianity in American law, representing this twisted history as fact. The sculpture thus exemplifies the religious bias in spatial assertion that I name “material establishment.” All across the nation, in a range of landshaping practices, and despite the First Amendment’s assertions of nonestablishment, Christianity maintains material and spatial privilege under law.

Heritage fabrication anchors material establishment.

The United States of America is many things: among them it is a nation engineered, from the start, to manufacture racialized heritage. Heritage preserves some things and destroys others. Heritage fabrication has selectively curated a White Protestant design for the USA and perpetuated this design in matter and space, and thus in the literal and figurative infrastructures of the nation state. “American heritage” rests on a long history of denials, eradications, and displacements. Heritage fabrication is a specifically material metaphor of ideological production: the making of a fabric, a mesh, a tightly woven interconnected network that binds objects and their effects in the land (making land-marks). This maneuver also embeds preferential landshapes, forms, and boundaries of American social activity.

A 2019 United States Supreme Court case on religion’s public display demonstrated the increasingly substantial weight of official modes of heritage fabrication in materially establishing American religious norms. American Legion v. American Humanist Association upheld against an Establishment Clause challenge the prominent display of a 40-foot Latin cross along a major public traffic artery in Bladensburg, Maryland. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion pressed hard on the idea that heritage secures constitutionality. The prominence of heritage-based arguments in Alito’s reasoning prompted Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in his concurrence, to lean into Alito’s approach, suggestively labeling it a “history and tradition test,” an idea that has since gained further traction and currency.[2]

American Legion did not, however, invent Judicial preoccupation with history and tradition. An examination of Supreme Court rulings on nonestablishment over the past eighty years reveals a process at work to establish a strategically refined conception of American heritage as a constitutionally protected category. In the same Court case, Alito elaborated: Over time “religiously expressive monuments, symbols, and practices can become embedded features of a community’s landscape and identity.” “Familiarity itself,” he asserted, “can become a basis for preservation.”

“Familiarity itself” is a sorting mechanism; it makes things appear to belong or not to belong, to fit in or to stand out. Time and repetition produce familiarity, providing a threshold of comfort, affinity, intimacy, attachment. Social and cultural standardization contribute to assessments of familiarity. Familiarity pushed into cultural norm can fade from conscious view. Its expressive presence nevertheless makes an impression, gains traction, secures the landshapes of an American standard, deliberately innovated, managed, and preserved over time.

Alito’s opinion paired familiarity with heritage and wielded both in explicit response to increasing religious diversity: “As our society becomes more and more religiously diverse,” he wrote, “a community may preserve such monuments, symbols, and practices for the sake of their historical significance or their place in acommon cultural heritage.” Alito’s “such” in this quotation referred to the 40-foot public cross in question, naming it common, and thus purportedly shared, American cultural heritage.

By Alitoʻs measure, then, “familiarity” secures landed powers. For me personally, writing this book has been a process of consistently questioning the “familiar,” of wondering how a thing becomes “familiar,” of how it is that so very many very-long-present entities are never granted “familiarity,” of what conditions are necessary to bestow the degree of “familiarity” that secures building sites, zoning privileges, legal protections. Islam came early to America, for example, and certainly entered the geography that is now the continental United States in the first years of colonization. Despite these centuries of presence, Islam still largely registers in American political and cultural consciousness as unfamiliar, even foreign.

Check out more of Promey’s photographs of public display in America.

Display and Its Limits

Display as a mechanism of address has perfectly suited a nation on a mission. Display takes a position; its motivating forcefield radiates outward. My book describes the spatial aesthetics and religious capacities of display. It considers display’s geopolitical visuality, its landshapes, its affective energies, its cyclical commemorative tendencies, and the ways these incentivize ritualization of standards and canonized pasts. Display carries value, renders judgment, reinforces hierarchy, signifies aspiration. It labels acreage, maps territory, designates property, situates neighborhoods and transport systems. It inflects the circumstances of encounter, who gets seen, or not seen, and how and where.

Display has distinct limitations: it does not know how to behave when sacred spaces require privacy, when “vacant” space is nonetheless filled, when something “concealed” is where it is meant to be—an agency or animacy not awaiting discovery but already at home. Ironically, display is about concealment: it shows some things to not show others. The persistence of design in space lays down the gauntlet; it comes to stay. But this persistence, this stability also subjects the thing to examination, inviting conversation, re-vision, re-design.

At our best, we help one another to see things in new ways, we collaborate to imagine different futures, different possibilities, different worlds. We defamiliarize some things and seek to know others better, becoming re-acquainted from different angles and vantage points and valuations. This work fundamentally changes the landshapes that emerge before us, and with them the set of possibilities we can enact.

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[1] Magic 8 Ball is a fortune telling game invented in the 1940s and popular in the United States beginning in the 1950s. Its material presentation is an enlarged eight ball, a form adapted by its makers from a game of billiards or pool. The display I encountered magnified the ball’s size further still.

[2] American Legion v. American Humanist Association, 139 S.Ct. at 2067, 2092 (2019) (Kavanaugh, J., concurring).

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Sally M. Promey is professor of American studies and religious studies as well as the Caroline Washburn Professor of Religion and Visual Culture at Yale University, where she directs the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion. She is author or editor of several books, most recently Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice.

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