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David Morgan, Religion in Plain View: Public Aesthetics of American Display, by SALLY M. PROMEY., Sociology of Religion, Volume 86, Issue 2, Summer 2025, Pages 276–278, https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/sraf002
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The result of many years of study and travel, Religion in Plain View conducts a road trip across the American landscape from the nineteenth century to the present, from New Haven to Hawai’i. The author has examined the material utterances of American Christianity through the lens of her camera and assembled what she has seen into a fascinating, sprawling, and ambitious book. A scholar of American religious history, Sally Promey has focused her attention on the space and the material culture of display, but she offers a particular way of understanding display. The heart of her project is to show how public display constructs a view of space, place, and national narrative that serves the prevailing ideology of White Christianity, and Protestant White Christianity in particular. She begins by carefully specifying core definitions of the nomenclature she will use to structure the entire book. “American” history, by which Promey means European Christian colonial history and its national legacy, “has produced a particular aesthetic of display and established its dominance on and across the land” (p.13). To examine the history of display and its impact on the national imaginary, Promey weaves an account around key terms: testimonial aesthetics, material establishment, and heritage fabrication. Each of these names a successive chapter, but the book opens with an extended reflection on public display and American religion.
