Material Culture

Religion and Material Culture

Religious material culture includes artifacts texts, interior and exterior environments or landscapes, and architecture that expresses communal and individual belief, affiliation, or faith. Material culture in the historical and contemporary perspective of global religious traditions can be further delineated using sacred, decorative (or aesthetic), and more utilitarian categories. As with material culture, generally, artifacts that are specifically religious can be observed in paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, photography, books, foodways, clothing, bodily alterations and adornment, architecture, agriculture, [Page 759]town planning, furniture, furnishings, and even machines and devices. In a country such as the United States, where, for example, many variations of European Christianity are present, religious material culture encompasses diverse traditions. A brief survey may include seemingly disparate items such as a plaster statue of St. Joseph placed in a prominent location in a contemporary Catholic's kitchen because of a promise made to the saint to honor him if the family's former house was sold; a porcelain figure commemorating the Methodist founder John Wesley, found in a church library; a rural one-room church building of an Independent Baptist congregation in the South; the red door of an Episcopal church in Chicago; the printed sign of the American indigenous sect Father Divine's Peace Mission movement found in one of his Philadelphia hotels, summarizing the religious leader's “International Modest Code;” the cast-iron plates with biblical scenes or texts adorning the “picture stoves” of German colonists in 18th-century Pennsylvania; the plain-style furniture of 19th-century Shakers; a white clerical collar of a minister; the silver crucifix of a Roman Catholic nun; a lithographed reproduction of Warner Sallman's “Head of Christ” adorning the dining room of a Methodist couple; or the seven forms of fish that constitute the celebration of the Italian Christmas Eve tradition of the “Seven Fishes.”

Each culture and religious tradition articulates its own beliefs about the relationship between the sacred and the material. In terms of the world's historical religious traditions, images of deities that are a genre of religious material culture are approved in Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, but such iconography is forbidden in Judaism and Islam. Religious material culture can have multiple meanings, varying uses, and dramatic effects for coreligionists within contemporary pluralistic societies: Some contemporary Catholics may keep holy corners of saintly images, but it is not necessarily an expected practice; contemporary practitioners of earth-centered religions, such as Wicca and Neo-Paganism, will vary about exactly which objects they might choose to populate holy spaces in their domestic environments. Religious material culture evokes passionate responses to its misuse or perceived desecration by members of different religious traditions coexisting in the same space, country, or region. Significantly, religious objects, used in worship and venerated as sacred or sacramental in one community, might be treated as a mere commodity or even as a symbol of emotion, the spiritual, or moral hegemony by individuals with differing worldviews. One only has to look at contemporary online auction and shopping websites to find a lively contemporary trade in religious objects of all varieties, from pieces of the “true cross” on which Jesus died to jade representations of Gautama Buddha.

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