The Visual Culture of American Protestantism in the 19th Century

The study of Protestant visual culture requires a number of correctives since many scholars and Protestants themselves presume images have played no role in religious practice. This essay begins by identifying misleading assumptions, proposes the importance of a visual culture paradigm for the study of Protestantism, and then traces the history of image use among American Protestants over the course of the nineteenth century. The aim is to show how the traditional association of image and text, tasked to evangelization and education, evolved steadily toward pictorial imagery and sacred portraiture. Eventually, text was all but eliminated in these visual formats, which allowed imagery to focus on the personhood of Jesus, replacing the idea of image as information with image as formation.