[Vision2020] Fighting Over God’s Image

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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September 26, 2012
Fighting Over God’s Image By EDWARD J. BLUM and PAUL HARVEY

THE murders of four Americans over an amateurish online video about
Muhammad, like the attempted murder of a Danish cartoonist who in 2005 had
depicted the prophet with a bomb in his turban, have left many Americans
confused, angry and fearful about the rage that some Muslims feel about
visual representations of their sacred figures.

The confusion stems, in part, from the ubiquity of sacred images in
American culture. God, Jesus, Moses, Buddha and other holy figures are
displayed in movies, cartoons and churches and on living room walls. We
place them on T-shirts and bumper stickers — and even tattoo them on our
skin.

But Americans have had their own history of conflict, some of it deadly,
over displays of the sacred. The path toward civil debate over such
representation is neither short nor easy.

The United States was settled, in part, by radical Protestant iconoclasts
from Britain who considered the creation and use of sacred imagery to be a
violation of the Second Commandment against graven images. The
anti-Catholic colonists at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay refused to put
images of Jesus in their churches and meetinghouses. They scratched out
crosses in books. In the early 1740s, English officials even marched on an
Indian community in western Connecticut, where they cross-examined Moravian
missionaries who reportedly had a book with “the picture of our Saviour in
it.”

The colonists feared Catholic infiltration from British-controlled Canada.
Shortly after the Boston Tea Party, a Connecticut pastor warned that if the
British succeeded, the colonists would have their Bibles taken from them
and be compelled to “pray to the Virgin Mary, worship images, believe the
doctrine of Purgatory, and the Pope’s infallibility.”

It was not only Protestants who opposed sacred imagery. In the Southwest,
Pueblo Indians who waged war against Spanish colonizers not only burned and
dismembered some crucifixes, but even defecated on them.

In the early Republic, many Americans avoided depicting Jesus or God in any
form. The painter Washington Alliston spoke for many artists of the 1810s
when he said, “I think his character too holy and sacred to be attempted by
the pencil.” A visiting Russian diplomat, Pavel Svinin, was amazed at the
prevalence of a different image: George Washington’s. “Every American
considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his home,”
he wrote, “just as we have images of God’s saints.”

Only in the late 19th century did images of God and Jesus become
commonplace in churches, Sunday school books, Bibles and homes. There were
many forces at work: steam printing presses; new canals and railroads; and,
not least, the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Catholics who
brought with them an array of crucifixes, Madonnas and busts of saints.
Protestants began producing their own images — often, to appeal to children
— and gradually became more comfortable with holy images. In the 20th
century, the United States began exporting such images, most notably Warner
Sallman’s 1941 “Head of Christ,” which is one of the most reproduced
images<http://www.warnersallman.com/collection/images/head-of-christ/>in
world history.

But there was also resistance. When Hollywood first started portraying
Jesus in films, one fundamentalist Christian fumed, “The picturing of the
life and sufferings of our Savior by these institutions falls nothing short
of blasphemy.” Vernon E. Jordan Jr., an African-American who was later
president of the National Urban League and an adviser to President Bill
Clinton, recalled that white audience members gasped when he played Jesus
as an undergraduate at DePauw University in Indiana in the 1950s.

In fact, race has been a constant source of conflict over American
depictions of Jesus. In Philadelphia in the 1930s, the black street
preacher F. S. Cherry stormed into African-American churches and pointed at
paintings or prints of white Christs, shouting, as one observer recounted,
“Who in the hell is this? Nobody knows! They say it is Jesus. That’s a
damned lie!”

During the civil rights era, black-power advocates and liberation
theologians excoriated white images of the sacred. A 1967 “Declaration of
Black Churchmen” demanded “the removal of all images which suggest that God
is white.” As racial violence enveloped Detroit that year, African-American
residents painted the white faces of Catholic icons black.

More recently, there have been uproars over the Nigerian-British painter
Chris Ofili’s “Holy Virgin Mary” and the New York artist and photographer
Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” Mr. Serrano’s image of Jesus on the
crucifix, submerged in the artist’s own urine, roused a crusade against the
National Endowment for the Arts in the late 1980s. Mr. Ofili’s painting of
a dark-skinned Madonna with photographs of vaginas surrounding her enraged
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. The mayor, who mistakenly claimed that elephant
dung was smeared on the image when it in fact was used at the base to hold
the painting up, tried to ban
it<http://blogs.artinfo.com/culturalaffairs/2012/09/12/after-attacks-in-egypt-and-libya-what-the-state-department-can-learn-from-the-art-world/>from
being displayed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, in 1999. (One upset
Christian smeared <http://artcrimes.net/holy-virgin-mary> white paint over
it.)

Images of the sacred haven’t caused mass violence in the United States, but
they have generated intense conflict. Our ability to sustain a culture
supersaturated with visual displays of the divine, largely without
violence, came only after massive technological change, centuries of
immigration and social movements that forced Americans to reckon with
differences of race, ethnicity and religion.

Edward J. Blum<http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/histweb/faculty_and_staff/faculty_bios/e_blum.htm>,
an associate professor of history at San Diego State University, and Paul
Harvey <http://paulharvey.org/about/>, a professor of history at the
University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, are the authors of “The Color of
Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America.”


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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