Book Review

David Morgan, professor of art at Valparaiso University, makes a major contribution to our understanding of religion and American culture with his impressively researched and well-illustrated book, Protestants & Pictures. That the culture-shaping power of visual images overshadowed the written and spoken word in the second half of the twentieth century is a commonplace. Morgan demonstrates that a "mass-mediated visual culture" emerged in the early decades of the nineteenth century and "signaled the debut of the image as a primary avenue of cultural information and social meanings." Building on the commerce historian David Paul Nord's work, he shows how Second Great Awakening entrepreneurial religious leaders (exemplified by promoters of William Miller's Adventist movement) and institutions (notably the American Tract Society, ATS) who were committed to reaching a national market employed "visual rhetoric" to create "the religious grounding of modern mass culture." Morgan traces the development of that culture through 1920, effectively including the antebellum period and the first two decades of the twentieth century, periods that otherwise might seem worlds apart, in a multifaceted but coherent story line. He does not even mention, oddly, the advent of movies.

. . .