{"id":196957,"date":"2026-07-01T18:24:55","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T02:24:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196957"},"modified":"2026-07-01T18:57:17","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T02:57:17","slug":"david-morgan-the-man-who-took-cheap-pictures-of-jesus-seriously","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196957","title":{"rendered":"David Morgan: The Man Who Took Cheap Pictures of Jesus Seriously"},"content":{"rendered":"

During the Second World War, a printing press at Chicago Offset Printing Company ran two shifts a day producing a single image: Warner Sallman<\/a>‘s Head of Christ. The 1940 painting showed Jesus in three-quarter profile against a dark ground, hair backlit, gaze lifted, rendered in the soft focus of a studio portrait. The Salvation Army<\/a> and the YMCA<\/a> handed pocket-sized versions to servicemen shipping overseas. Baptist bookstores sold lithographs across the South. After the war, laymen in Oklahoma and Indiana ran campaigns to place the picture in schools, courthouses, and living rooms. One Lutheran organizer in Illinois said America needed card-carrying Christians to answer the card-carrying Communists. By the end of the century the publishers counted more than 500 million reproductions. Art historians did not write about it. It was calendar art, drugstore art, the kind of picture that hung above the sofa in a farmhouse outside Anderson, Indiana<\/a>, and it sat beneath the notice of the discipline.<\/p>\n

In the early 1990s, a young art historian at Valparaiso University<\/a> began soliciting letters about the picture. He placed notices in popular religious magazines and asked readers what Sallman’s images meant to them. The letters came in by the hundreds, 473 in the first wave, then more, until the file held over 500 responses. Widows wrote. Veterans wrote. Sunday school teachers wrote. A woman described looking up at the picture whenever loneliness or fear overtook her and feeling peace settle over her. Respondents said, again and again, that the picture showed “just what Jesus looked like,” a claim no first-century evidence could support and no letter writer felt any need to defend. The art historian read the letters at his desk at a Lutheran university on the flat land of northwest Indiana, an hour from Chicago<\/a>, and understood that he was looking at the raw material of a different kind of scholarship. The question was not whether the painting was good. The question was what people did with it.<\/p>\n

The art historian was David Morgan<\/a> (b. 1957), and the letters became the foundation of a career that moved the study of religious images from a minor branch of art history to a central concern of religious studies. Over three decades Morgan has argued that religion is a lived practice mediated through objects, images, spaces, bodies, and habits of seeing, and that scholars who confine themselves to doctrine and text miss most of what religion is. He helped found the field now called material religion, co-founded its flagship journal, and trained a generation of scholars who study altars, amulets, church basements, and refrigerator magnets with the seriousness their fields once reserved for cathedrals.<\/p>\n

Morgan came to religion through the studio, not the seminary. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in studio art from Concordia College<\/a> in 1980, concentrating in sculpture. He learned what clay and steel resist and what they permit. A sculptor knows that material talks back. The insight stayed with him after he traded the studio for the seminar room, taking a master’s degree in art history at the University of Arizona<\/a> in 1984 and a doctorate at the University of Chicago<\/a> in 1990. Chicago in the 1980s put art historians in rooms with anthropologists, sociologists, and historians of religion, and the conversation in those rooms was turning against the old assumption that religion lived in creeds and could be read off the page. Morgan absorbed the turn and gave it a direction. If belief did not live only in texts, someone had to go find where it lived. He decided it lived, in part, in pictures.<\/p>\n

He joined Valparaiso University in 1990 and stayed seventeen years, eventually holding the Duesenberg chair in Christianity and the Arts. Valparaiso suited the work. It was a church-related school in a region thick with the piety he studied, close enough to Anderson, Indiana, where the Church of God<\/a>‘s publishing arm held the Sallman copyrights and Anderson University<\/a> kept the original canvases. Morgan wrote the catalogue for a 1994 Sallman exhibition there. He has described a moment of revelation in front of the ubiquitous Head of Christ, when the picture stopped being an object of taste and became an object of study, and his attention shifted from fine art to mass culture, from the gallery to the archive.<\/p>\n

The Sallman project matured into Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman (1996), an edited volume that treated a commercial illustrator’s devotional portrait as a serious historical problem. Sallman (1892-1968) was a Chicago advertising artist, son of Scandinavian immigrants, a lifelong member of the Evangelical Covenant Church<\/a>, who claimed the image came to him in a vision at two in the morning in January 1924. A teacher at Moody Bible Institute<\/a> had urged him years earlier to paint a virile, manly Christ, since the available pictures ran effeminate. Sallman borrowed his composition from a nineteenth-century French painting by L\u00e9on Lhermitte<\/a> (1844-1925), lit it like a celebrity headshot, and produced the most reproduced religious image in history. Morgan’s book examined the letters and showed that the picture’s power came from what believers did around it: prayed before it, carried it to war, hung it over deathbeds, passed it to grandchildren. The American Library Association<\/a> named the book a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book for 1996. The prize mattered as a signal. The gatekeepers of academic legitimacy had accepted that drugstore Jesus belonged in the library.<\/p>\n

Morgan built the theory in Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (1998). The book took up prayer cards, illustrated Bibles, calendars, and devotional prints, the whole inventory of cheap religious mass production, and argued that these objects did indispensable work in forming religious identity. Believers did not consume the images. They lived with them. An image acquired its sacredness through the social relationships that formed around it, through display and gift and inheritance and daily glance, and its power could not be located in the object alone or in the mind alone. The argument cut against both the art historian’s habit of ranking images by quality and the theologian’s habit of treating images as illustrations of prior ideas.<\/p>\n

Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production (1999) attacked the standard story head on. The standard story held that Protestantism was a religion of the word, iconophobic since the Reformation, its whitewashed churches proof that the ear had defeated the eye. Morgan showed that American Protestants embraced every printing technology the nineteenth and twentieth centuries offered, flooding the country with illustrated tracts, Sunday school cards, mission posters, panoramas, and portraits of Jesus. Protestant visual culture grew up alongside industrial capitalism and mass communication. The Association of American Publishers<\/a> gave the book its annual award for scholarly publishing in religion and philosophy.<\/p>\n

While the books appeared, Morgan worked inside a larger movement. In the late 1990s the Pew Charitable Trusts<\/a> funded the Material History of American Religion Project at Vanderbilt<\/a>, which gathered historians and art historians and told them to study religion through buildings, clothing, landscapes, and objects rather than through doctrine alone. Morgan became a leading participant, and the project’s signature volume, The Visual Culture of American Religions (2001), which he co-edited with Sally M. Promey, ranged from Catholic devotional objects to anti-Catholic political cartoons and became a foundation for the emerging field. In 2005 Morgan, Promey, and the British museum scholar Crispin Paine founded the journal Material Religion, which became the international venue for scholarship on the physical life of belief. Field-building of this kind rarely shows up in citation counts, but it decides what counts as knowledge. A subject without a journal is a hobby. A subject with a journal, a book series, conferences, and prizes is a field, and Morgan built or co-built each piece of that apparatus, later adding the Bloomsbury Studies in Material Religion series as co-editor.<\/p>\n

The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (2005) supplied the field’s most portable concept. Seeing, Morgan argued, is never a neutral act of the retina. Every community teaches its members how to look, and religious traditions cultivate habits of attention that determine what appears sacred, authoritative, or dangerous. The Catholic kneeling before an icon, the Protestant scanning a portrait of Jesus for accuracy, the tourist photographing both: each performs a learned way of seeing. The phrase “sacred gaze” gave scholars across traditions a tool, and researchers of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism took it up, which moved the field beyond its Protestant beginnings.<\/p>\n

Duke University<\/a> hired Morgan in 2008 as Professor of Religious Studies, with a secondary appointment in Art, Art History, and Visual Studies. He has chaired the department twice, from 2013 to 2019 and again from 2023 to 2025, and twice directed graduate studies in the doctoral program in religion. The move marked the field’s arrival. A subject born in letters from Indiana widows now had a chair at a wealthy research university, doctoral students, and a place in the seminar rooms where the discipline decides its future.<\/p>\n

The books kept coming. The Lure of Images (2007) traced religious media in America from tract illustration through photography, film, television, and the digital screen, arguing that religious traditions do not resist new media but seize them. Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief (2010) gathered fifteen scholars from around the world and pressed the field toward comparison across traditions. The Embodied Eye (2012) tied vision to feeling, arguing that images cultivate sympathy, fear, longing, and reverence, and that these emotional responses are learned in community rather than produced in the private psyche. The 2012 Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham<\/a> became The Forge of Vision: A Visual History of Modern Christianity (2015), which argued that Catholicism and Protestantism since the sixteenth century have trained believers in rival ways of seeing the world, not merely rival doctrines about it.<\/p>\n

Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment (2018) took on the oldest story in the sociology of modernity, the story of disenchantment. Max Weber<\/a>‘s heirs held that modernity drained the world of magic. Morgan looked around and saw national flags that men die for, family photographs that cannot be thrown away, brand logos that command devotion, and religious icons that weep. Images still enchant, he argued, because people organize attention, memory, and desire around them, and this enchantment defines modernity rather than surviving it as a residue. The argument gave him a way to talk about agency without mysticism. Images act because people act around them. Their power lives in the network, not the pigment. Here Morgan drew on Alfred Gell<\/a> (1945-1997) on art and agency, Bruno Latour<\/a> (1947-2022) on networks, Hans Belting<\/a> (1935-2023) on the image before the era of art, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty<\/a> (1908-1961) on the body’s grip on the world, while keeping his own arguments tied to archives and letters.<\/p>\n

The Thing about Religion: An Introduction to the Material Study of Religions (2021) condensed three decades into a textbook, organizing the field around objects, bodies, spaces, sounds, scents, and technologies. Cambridge University Press<\/a> is scheduled to publish The Visual Culture of Revelation: The Art of Seeing Things since the Middle Ages in 2026, tracing how Christians have trained themselves to see revelations from the medieval world to the digital screen.<\/p>\n

The honors accumulated in the manner of a career the establishment has decided to keep: elected life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge<\/a>; elected member of the American Antiquarian Society<\/a>, the learned society in Worcester whose membership rolls run back to 1812. He has curated exhibitions of Sallman’s art and written about what happens when a devotional object enters a museum, where the vitrine and the label transform a thing people prayed to into a thing people study. The transformation, he argues, obscures the practices that gave the object its life, and the museum becomes a laboratory for watching objects move between sacred, commercial, and aesthetic registers.<\/p>\n

Morgan’s students now teach across North America and Europe, and his influence runs past Christianity into the study of Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Indigenous traditions, and the secular icons of nationalism and consumer culture. His deepest claim remains the one he found in the letters. Belief is not assent to propositions. Belief is a disposition sedimented over time in body practices, in the hand that dusts the frame, the eye that finds the picture on the wall at three in the morning, the mother who packs a print of a fair-skinned, backlit Jesus into a son’s duffel bag. Religion happens where people and things meet. Morgan built a field by insisting that scholars go to that meeting place and watch, and by treating a farmhouse wall in Indiana as evidence worth the same care a connoisseur gives a Titian. The discipline resisted, then absorbed the point, then made him a chairman. That is how a field changes: one man reads five hundred letters that no one else wanted, and takes them at their word.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/p>\n

The Chicago Offset press operating around the clock during the Second World War, the Kriebel & Bates marketing campaign, and the testimony of believers all come from David Morgan’s own 1994 exhibition catalogue, as excerpted by the Sallman Collection: Warner Sallman Collection<\/a> and Anderson University<\/a>. The figure of 473 surviving letters and the paraphrased account of people writing because they were lonely or afraid also come from the Anderson University material.<\/p>\n

The expression “card-carrying Christians” comes from Morgan’s own reporting in his article “The Face That’s Everywhere,” as cited here: En-Academic<\/a>. The Salvation Army and YMCA wartime distribution campaigns, together with the postwar Oklahoma and Indiana evangelistic efforts, are documented at Head of Christ<\/i> (Wikipedia)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The claim that the image represented “just what Jesus looked like,” the survey of more than 500 responses, and the Lilly Endowment’s support for the Sallman study come from The Jesus Question<\/a>. One point is worth verifying. This source credits the Lilly Endowment with funding the Sallman project, while your source document credits the Pew Charitable Trusts with supporting the later Vanderbilt Material History project. Both may be correct, but Lilly’s role in the Sallman study should be confirmed before publication.<\/p>\n

Morgan’s account of his “moment of revelation” on encountering Head of Christ<\/i> and his resulting shift from the study of fine art toward mass-produced religious imagery comes from his interview with Duke University: Duke University<\/a>. Although the site blocks automated retrieval, the relevant language appears in the interview.<\/p>\n

The Moody Bible Institute instructor’s call for a “virile, manly Christ,” the influence of L\u00e9on Lhermitte’s painting, and the resemblance to celebrity portrait lighting are discussed at ArtWay<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Morgan’s degrees, honors, including the 1996 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book award and the 1999 Association of American Publishers award, his affiliation with Clare Hall, Cambridge, and election to the American Antiquarian Society are documented at Wikipedia<\/a>. One chronological point deserves checking. Your document lists his department chairmanship as 2013-2016 and again from 2023-2025. Morgan’s own Duke profile instead lists 2013-2019 and 2023-2025: Duke Scholars<\/a>. I followed his official profile.<\/p>\n

The discussion of belief as a disposition gradually sedimented through embodied practices paraphrases Morgan’s introduction to Religion and Material Culture<\/i>, available through his Academia.edu page: Academia.edu<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I added several pieces of self-evident background without separate citation. These include the flat landscape of northwest Indiana, the atmosphere of a Lutheran church-related college, the sculptor’s awareness that materials resist the artist’s intentions, the status of Head of Christ<\/i> as a drugstore calendar image in the eyes of many mid-century art historians, and the image of a farmhouse outside Anderson as a representative setting. The account of Sallman’s two o’clock in the morning vision in January 1924 is documented in the Head of Christ<\/i> Wikipedia entry.<\/p>\n

The Frame Around the Frame: David Morgan’s Hero System<\/strong><\/p>\n

On a Saturday morning in Indiana an estate liquidator works through the house of a woman who died in March. In the bedroom, above where the headboard stood, a rectangle of unfaded wallpaper marks sixty years of shade. The picture that made the shadow sits in a cardboard box in the garage with the other frames, a dollar each. It is the face of Jesus in three-quarter profile, hair backlit, printed in Chicago sometime during the war. The liquidator has handled forty of them this year. “Nobody wants the religious stuff,” she says to her helper. “Take the frame, toss the print.” The woman who owned it looked at that face the last thing every night of her marriage, her widowhood, and her dying, and now it is a dollar, and the dollar is optimistic.<\/p>\n

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued that the fear organizing human life is this scene. Death erases the person, and then, in a second wave the person foresees, it erases the traces. Against the terror men build hero systems, shared structures of meaning within which a life can count as significant, a contribution can register as durable, and death can be reframed as something other than the end. The unfaded rectangle on the wallpaper is the first terror. The box in the garage is the second, and it is the one that governs the career of David Morgan (b. 1957), the scholar who spent thirty years arguing that the dollar print held everything and who built a field so that someone, forever, will be paid to say so.<\/p>\n

Morgan’s other terror shows earlier and wears different clothes. He began as a sculptor, a studio art degree from Concordia College in 1980, hands in the clay. Every art student meets the moment when the gap opens between what he can see and what he can make, and beyond it the harder arithmetic: the discipline of art keeps a short list, the list is nearly closed, and a Lutheran college sculptor in the upper Midwest will not be on it. The standard exits are teaching, commercial work, and quiet abandonment. Morgan took a fourth exit. He went to graduate school in art history, then to the University of Chicago, and he became a custodian of the list rather than a candidate for it. But art history ran its own list and its own terror. The discipline’s hero system belonged to the connoisseur, and a man who arrived from sculpture at Concordia by way of Arizona was starting far from the sanctuary. The two terrors met and produced the move that made his career. If he could not join the hierarchy of great objects, he could overturn the hierarchy. He found the most despised image in America, the drugstore Jesus, the picture his discipline used as the definition of what it did not study, and he declared it the most important religious artwork of the century, and then he spent three decades building the institutions that made the declaration true.<\/p>\n

That is the shape of the hero system: the redeemer of the despised object. Its sacred values are attention, description, and the dignity of ordinary devotion, and each value means what it means only inside the system. Take attention first, because Morgan’s whole theory rests on it. In his account, an image becomes sacred through the attention organized around it, the daily glance, the family prayer, the dusting hand. But attention is a word that shatters on contact with other hero systems. To a hedge-fund quant, attention is the scarcest commodity in the economy, a thing to be harvested from other people by the millisecond and sold. To a hospice nurse, attention is presence at the bedside, the refusal to look away from a dying face, and it needs no object at all. To a Coptic villager in Upper Egypt, attention before the icon is not what makes the icon sacred; the icon is a window standing open to heaven whether anyone looks or not, and the suggestion that his gaze charges the image would strike him as backwards and mildly blasphemous. To a Reformed pastor in Grand Rapids, sustained attention to a picture of Christ is the precise Biblical definition of idolatry, the eye stealing what belongs to the ear. Morgan’s sense of attention, the social act that constitutes sacredness, is coherent only inside a hero system where the scholar stands outside all shrines and explains them. Inside the shrines, the word points elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Or take seriousness, the value Morgan’s admirers name first. He took cheap pictures seriously. Within the academic hero system this is heroism of a recognizable kind: the raid across the tracks, the scholar who confers the discipline’s highest honor, sustained study, on objects the discipline held in contempt. The letters he solicited from believers in the early 1990s were, inside his system, evidence, and treating a widow’s testimony as evidence was the act of respect. But move the same letters into the widow’s own hero system and the seriousness inverts. She did not write to be studied. She wrote to witness. In her system, the picture is serious because it is true, because the face on the wall is the face that will meet her, and a professor who finds her devotion fascinating while bracketing the question of whether anyone is behind the face has not honored her; he has converted her testimony into his raw material. A Pentecostal grandmother in Alabama and a Haredi scribe bent over his parchment in Bnei Brak disagree about nearly everything, but they agree about this: seriousness about sacred things means submission to them, and a seriousness that studies without submitting is a polite name for unbelief. Morgan’s seriousness is real. It is also the seriousness of the collector, and the collected rarely get a vote.<\/p>\n

The system’s third sacred value is description, the discipline of saying what people do with images while refusing to judge the doing. Morgan never ranks the Sallman head against Titian, never rules on whether the soldier’s foxhole prayer reached anyone, never calls the White Jesus controversy right or wrong. Within his hero system this restraint is the highest virtue, the mark that separates the scholar from the preacher and the critic. Here the subtraction story comes into view, because every hero system buys its coherence by subtracting something, and Morgan’s subtracts verdicts. The subtraction is enormously productive. It lets the believer read him and feel respected, the atheist read him and feel scientific, the curator read him and feel informed, and it built a journal, a book series, and a Duke chair on the ground where those readers overlap. But the price is that the system cannot answer the only questions its own archive screams. Is the widow’s peace a gift or a symptom? Should the picture hang in the courthouse? When the face was denounced in 2020 as a racial instrument, was the denunciation justice or profanation? Morgan’s system rules these questions out of order, and the ruling is not neutral. A man who spends his life demonstrating the power of sacred images while declining to say whether any of them tell the truth has taken a position; he has made the study of devotion his devotion, and description is its liturgy.<\/p>\n

The rivals are many, and the essay should name several rather than pretend there is one. The nearest rival, the one Morgan actually fought, is the connoisseur’s hero system, art history as communion with masterpieces. In that system immortality flows through taste: the great objects are the durable dead, and the scholar earns his permanence by serving them, attributing them, protecting the canon that will carry his name in its footnotes. Morgan beat the connoisseurs on their own ground, took their prizes, and the victory has a Beckerian sting, because the connoisseur’s system and Morgan’s system offer the same wager with different chips. Both bet that objects outlast men and that the man who binds his name to the objects rides them out of death. The connoisseur binds himself to Titian. Morgan binds himself to the category, to material religion as such, which is the shrewder bet, since categories outlast even canons.<\/p>\n

A second rival stands in the sanctuary: the confessional hero system, in all its warring versions. For the Coptic villager, the Alabama grandmother, the scribe, the picture or the scroll draws its power from God, and immortality is not a metaphor about influence but a scheduled event. Within that system Morgan is not a hero at all; he is a cataloguer at the wedding, useful perhaps, beside the point. A third rival does the opposite work: the reductionist’s system, the sociologist or neuroscientist for whom the widow’s peace is oxytocin and conditioning, and heroism means the courage to say so. Morgan’s refusal of verdicts protects him from this rival’s contempt at the cost of the rival’s clarity. And a fourth deserves naming because it holds the largest share of the world: the tribal and traditionalist hero system, in which the image on the wall is neither evidence nor window nor symptom but inheritance, the face the great-grandmother prayed to, and the duty is transmission. In that system the estate-sale box is a failure of the family, not a datum about symbolic charge, and the hero is the grandson who takes the print home. This system judges Morgan more gently than the believer does and more sharply than the connoisseur, since it can use his respect while noting that respect transmits nothing. A field is not a lineage. Doctoral students are not grandchildren, though they are the nearest thing the academy sells.<\/p>\n

How much of this does Morgan see? More than most subjects of these essays. He is the rare scholar who wrote the critique of his own operation before anyone else could: his work on museums argues that the vitrine kills what it preserves, that labeling a devotional object transforms it into a specimen and hides the practices that made it live. Every word of that argument applies to his archive. The letters were testimonies; the file cabinet was a vitrine; the field he built is a museum with a hiring line. There is no evidence he has turned the argument on himself in print, and the omission is the system working as designed, because a hero system survives by exempting its own foundations from its method. He sees the sacred gaze everywhere except in the mirror of the seminar room, where a tribe of scholars assembles around charged objects called sources, feels the collective effervescence called a field, and defends its totems in peer review. He built that tribe. He is its founding ancestor, and founding ancestors do not audit the cult.<\/p>\n

The hero’s shape, then: a sculptor who could not join the ranks of the makers and so became the man who decides what made things mean, the redeemer who saves despised objects by the only sacrament he administers, study, and who saved himself in the same motion, binding his name to a category durable enough to hold it. The unnamed rival is the widow herself, the woman whose letter he filed, whose hero system needs no journal and no chair, who never asked to be redeemed because within her system she already was, and whose picture went into the garage anyway. And the cost the ledger cannot price: a lifetime spent proving that images hold the feelings of the assembled, written by a man whose method requires him to stand outside every assembly, describing at full attention, believing at none, the frame around the frame, unfaded, and marking the wall.<\/p>\n

The Charged Object: David Morgan Through Randall Collins<\/p>\n

A woman in the Midwest writes a letter to an art historian she has never met. She tells him that when loneliness or fear overtakes her, she looks up at the picture of Jesus on her wall and peace settles over her. She is describing a face painted by a Chicago advertising man, printed by the hundred million, sold in dime stores, and she is describing it the way a physicist describes a battery. The picture holds something. She draws on it. It recharges.<\/p>\n

Randall Collins (b. 1941) built a theory to explain what is in the battery. In Interaction Ritual Chains (2004), he argues that the basic unit of social life is the situation: bodies assembled, attention focused on a common object, a shared mood building through rhythmic entrainment until the participants feel something larger than themselves. Successful rituals produce four outputs. Members feel solidarity. Individuals walk away with emotional energy, the confidence and drive that carries them into the next encounter. The group’s feeling gets deposited in symbols, which become sacred objects. And the group generates standards of morality, defined as loyalty to those symbols, with anger reserved for anyone who profanes them. Collins took the scheme from \u00c9mile Durkheim (1858-1917), who found it in Aboriginal ceremony, and from Erving Goffman (1922-1982), who found it in elevators and cocktail parties. Collins’s addition is the chain. Rituals link. The emotional energy and the charged symbols from one encounter become the inputs of the next, and a life is a sequence of situations in which people spend and replenish their stock.<\/p>\n

David Morgan spent thirty years assembling the evidence for this theory without using it. His core claim, repeated from Visual Piety through Images at Work, holds that religious images gain power through the social relationships and repeated practices organized around them. The picture over the sofa is sacred because the family prays before it, dusts it, inherits it, glances at it on the way to the kitchen. Power lives in the network, in Morgan’s phrase, and never in the pigment. Set that sentence beside Collins and the convergence is total. A sacred object, Collins writes, is a container for the feelings generated in assembly, a device for carrying group emotion across the dead time between gatherings. Morgan’s entire archive, the five hundred letters, the wartime wallet cards, the deathbed prints, documents the container in use. The Sallman correspondence reads like a file of Collins case studies mailed in from Indiana.<\/p>\n

Convergence of this kind creates a problem for the essayist and an opportunity for the theory. The problem: an essay that walks Morgan’s findings through Collins’s vocabulary produces translation, and translation adds nothing. The opportunity: Collins built a causal engine, with inputs, outputs, and failure conditions, while Morgan built a descriptive practice. Morgan tells you that images acquire power through social life. Collins tells you which images will, how much, for how long, and why the power drains. Run Morgan’s material through the engine and three findings come out that Morgan describes but leaves untheorized.<\/p>\n

Start with the question Morgan never answers. Why this picture? Sallman’s Head of Christ had competitors. Every publisher of devotional goods offered portraits of Jesus, many by better painters. Hundreds of images entered the market in the 1930s and 1940s, and nearly all of them died. One conquered the world. Morgan’s account explains the survivor’s power once it has survived: people prayed to it, so it became sacred. The account is circular at the decisive point, since the question is why people chose this image to pray to. Collins breaks the circle. A symbol’s charge depends on the intensity and frequency of the ritual encounters that feed it, and the Head of Christ won the distribution war before it won the devotion war. Kriebel and Bates made it their trademark and pushed it through Baptist bookstores, Sunday schools, and denominational magazines, placing it at the focus of attention in millions of already-assembled groups. A Sunday school class gazing at the same face every week is an interaction ritual with the picture at its center. The competitors never reached the focus of that many gatherings, so no group feeling was ever deposited in them, so they stayed what they began as, ink. The Sallman head compounded. Charge attracted display, display placed the image at the center of more assemblies, more assemblies added charge. Collins predicts winner-take-all outcomes in symbolic markets, since emotional investment flows toward objects already invested, and the devotional print market of mid-century America delivered a textbook case. The theory also predicts the death of symbols, which Morgan’s field rarely studies. An image starved of assemblies loses charge within a generation or two. The grandchildren who inherit the print but never sat in the rooms where it presided receive an heirloom, and an heirloom is a sacred object running on residual current. The letters Morgan collected in the early 1990s came disproportionately from the old. That demographic fact is the theory’s confirmation. The chain was thinning.<\/p>\n

Second, the war. Morgan documents the wartime explosion of the image, the press at Chicago Offset running two shifts, the USO handing pocket versions to soldiers at the docks, and he explains it as media history, a story of publishers and campaigns. Collins explains why the campaigns worked. Ritual charge varies with the stakes of the assembly. Bodies gathered under mortal threat, attention locked on a common object, produce the most intense entrainment human beings experience, which is why combat units bond like no civilian group and why battle flags outrank all other national symbols. The soldier carrying the Sallman head into the Pacific carried it into the highest-intensity ritual conditions the century offered. The mother who packed it and the son who kept it were performing a linked ritual across an ocean, each knowing the other’s attention rested on the same face. Every foxhole prayer over the wallet card deposited feeling in the image at wartime rates of interest. The picture came home in 1945 charged beyond anything a peacetime Sunday school could have produced, and the postwar campaigns to hang it in schools and courthouses spent that accumulated energy. The Illinois Lutheran who wanted card-carrying Christians to answer card-carrying Communists understood the object’s function. He wanted the charge portable, distributed, ready. Morgan reports the man’s line as color. Collins reads it as a program: keep the symbol at the focus of assemblies or lose the solidarity it stores.<\/p>\n

Third, and here the frame turns on its subject, Morgan’s own career is a demonstration of the theory he circled without entering. Collins applied his scheme to intellectuals in The Sociology of Philosophies (1998), arguing that ideas win not on merit alone but on the ritual density behind them. A thinker rises when he sits at the center of chains: face-to-face lineages linking him to prestigious teachers, conference circuits where attention focuses on his topic, journals that assemble the tribe on schedule, students who carry the charge outward. Morgan’s chains run textbook-clean. Chicago doctorate, which grafts him onto a high-prestige lineage. The Vanderbilt project of the late 1990s, which assembled the scattered scholars of religious stuff in one room on Pew’s money and let them entrain, discover their common mood, and leave with emotional energy and a shared enemy in text-bound religious studies. Then the institutionalization of the assembly: the journal Material Religion in 2005, which convenes the tribe quarterly; the Bloomsbury series; the conferences; the Duke chair with doctoral students to send out as missionaries. A journal is a ritual technology. It focuses the attention of a dispersed group on common objects at regular intervals, and its arrival converts a topic into a sacred object for scholars, complete with the moral output Collins predicts, since the field now polices contempt for popular devotion as a professional sin. Morgan did for cheap pictures of Jesus what Kriebel and Bates did for the picture: he won the distribution war. Other scholars had noticed devotional objects. Colleen McDannell published Material Christianity in 1995, a year before Morgan’s Sallman volume. The difference between a scattered insight and a field is the chain, and Morgan built the chain.<\/p>\n

The frame also exposes what Morgan’s method cannot see. His evidence is letters, solicited testimony from believers describing their images at a distance of years. Collins insists the action sits in the situation, in the micro-rhythms of bodies and attention measurable in seconds, and testimony is what remains after the situation has cooled. The woman who feels peace when she looks at the picture reports the output. The inputs, the childhood rooms where the face presided over family prayer, the Sunday mornings of synchronized song under its gaze, lie behind the letter, unrecorded and mostly unremembered. Morgan’s archive documents charged objects and misses the charging. This is a limit, and an honest reckoning also runs the current the other way, since Collins’s own evidence for religious ritual leans on ethnographies of assembly and goes quiet between assemblies. The picture on the wall at three in the morning, the solitary glance that Morgan’s letters capture in the hundreds, sits awkwardly in a theory built on gathered bodies. Collins handles solitary ritual as replay, the individual rehearsing internalized group encounters, and the handling works, but Morgan’s archive is the better record of that mode, the vast devotional life conducted alone with an object between the rare hours of assembly. Each man holds half the circuit. Collins has the generator. Morgan has the battery in use.<\/p>\n

One prediction falls out of the frame, and it concerns the image’s afterlife. In 2020 the Sallman head faced a profanation crisis, denounced as White Jesus, defended by its owners, removed from some sanctuaries. Collins holds that attacks on a symbol recharge it for the loyal, since defense of a profaned object is among the most intense rituals a group performs, while for the indifferent the attack merely accelerates the drain. The picture might now run on two divergent chains, charging in the shrinking assemblies that rally to it, dying into kitsch everywhere else, until the day it hangs in museums the way Morgan described, an object whose practices have been stripped, labeled, and lit, holding nothing but the historians’ attention. The woman who wrote the letter knew the difference. She was not looking at a painting.<\/p>\n

The Great Delusion<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

If John J. Mearsheimer’s anthropology is right<\/a>, the scholarship of art historian and religious studies scholar David Morgan does not require a correction. It serves as a highly detailed field manual showing the exact physical apparatus human groups use to manufacture internal cohesion and survive.
\nMorgan, a professor at Duke University, is a founder of the critical study of material religion, known for books like The Sacred Gaze, The Embodied Eye, and Images at Work. He rejects the traditional academic view that religion is primarily about abstract doctrines or private intellectual beliefs. Instead, Morgan argues that religion is a sensory, physical practice. Groups use physical objects\u2014images, clothing, architecture, mass-produced prints, and common somatic regimes\u2014to assemble a unified social body, calibrate collective emotions, and sustain a shared life-world.
\nMearsheimer\u2019s framework in The Great Delusion provides the structural necessity for the physical technologies Morgan documents.
\nMearsheimer\u2019s anthropology places immense weight on the long human childhood, during which individuals undergo an intense value infusion from their primary social group. This process occurs long before critical reason develops, permanently embedding the individual within a specific culture or tribe.Morgan\u2019s work describes the precise mechanical operation of this value infusion. In The Embodied Eye, he shows that a group does not socialize its young through abstract logical arguments. It does so by engaging the physical body. Uniform dress, shared imagery, and structured sensory habits are the material means used to forge a corporate identity.
\nThe child does not logically deduce his allegiance; he absorbs it by looking at the same devotional images, sitting in the same structured pews, and performing the same physical rituals as his peers. Morgan’s material religion is the delivery device for the value infusions that Mearsheimer notes are critical to human formation.The Sacred Gaze and the Tribal PerimeterIn The Sacred Gaze, Morgan explores how visual culture acts as a way of mapping and navigating the world, establishing what a particular community regards as true, beautiful, or dangerous. This gaze determines how a group sees itself and how it views outsiders.
\nUnder Mearsheimer\u2019s lens, this visual mapping is a defensive measure required for survival in an uncertain world. Humans form distinct, cohesive societies to secure their collective existence against rivals.The shared visual framework Morgan describes operates as a boundary-enforcement tool. By dictating what is sacred and what is profane, the tribe builds a high-trust internal network. The “enchantment” of images that Morgan tracks in Images at Work is not an irrational aesthetic fluke; it is a tool used to anchor individual loyalty to the collective perimeter, ensuring that members prioritize the survival of the group above all else.
\nMearsheimer\u2019s critique of political liberalism centers on the claim that liberal elites treat human beings as autonomous, rational actors who can be governed by abstract, universal rules decoupled from cultural particulars.
\nMorgan\u2019s entire academic project dismantles this hyper-rationalist assumption from an aesthetic and historical perspective. He demonstrates that even Protestantism\u2014a tradition that often claimed to reject physical imagery in favor of pure, invisible faith\u2014relied heavily on mass-produced pictures, family Bibles, and specific physical spaces to survive and scale in America.If Mearsheimer is right, Morgan’s research proves that there is no such thing as a group held together by raw reason or unmediated text. The moment a liberal or cosmopolitan movement attempts to organize a society around abstract principles, it must eventually develop its own material culture, distinct symbols, and physical rituals to maintain any degree of solidarity.
\nIf Mearsheimer is right, David Morgan accurately identifies the real infrastructure of human belief. Humans do not inhabit a world of floating philosophical concepts. They are social, defensive animals who use physical matter to build the tribal containers they require to navigate an indifferent world.<\/p>\n

‘A Big Misunderstanding’<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

If David Pinsof is right, the foundational work of art historian and religious studies scholar David Morgan in visual culture and material religion serves as an exceptionally sophisticated academic strategy to redefine raw, zero-sum coalitional warfare as an intricate study of cognitive and aesthetic management.
\nMorgan achieved prominent standing in the academy through books like Visual Piety, The Sacred Gaze, and Images at Work. His core thesis is that religious imagery and material culture do not merely illustrate preexisting theological beliefs; they actively construct the social world. He argues that looking is an act of relationship-building, creating what he calls a sacred gaze\u2014a culturally specific way of seeing that helps a community form shared identities, establish boundaries, and maintain a sense of cosmic order. To his peers, Morgan provided an objective, scholarly framework to explain why human groups invest immense emotional and physical resources into mass-produced devotional objects, images, and visual habits.
\nA Pinsofian analysis strips away this elegant, materialist framework. Human coalitions do not develop a sacred gaze or weaponize mass-produced imagery because they want to configure reality or engage in an aesthetic dialogue with the divine. They deploy visual culture as a highly functional tool for group dominance. Pictures of saints, specific flags, mandatory dress codes, and distinct public monuments function as coalitional badges. They signal internal commitment, police group compliance, and warn external rivals of a faction’s presence and collective strength. The production and defense of these visual markers are not exercises in cultural imagination; they are calculated moves to capture public spaces and protect social territory.
\nBy framing this intense Darwinian fight for symbolic dominance as an exploration of visual piety and material agency, Morgan creates an ideal high-status mission statement for his own field. It positions the visual culture theorist as the elite technician who can decode the hidden, psychological scripts behind everyday human consumption. His framework provides university departments, editorial boards, and museum curators with a sophisticated platform to look down upon popular religious practices and political icons, analyzing them from a safe, analytical distance as complex taxonomic data rather than raw displays of group power.
\nMorgan did not discover a benign, interactive process of collective sense-making. He executed an effective academic strategy, using rigorous visual and historical analysis to climb to the peak of the university hierarchy, securing a prominent professorship at Duke University and anchoring the global study of material religion. His theories provide a beautiful map of the objects humans cling to, proving that treating a fierce coalitional struggle over public symbolism as a visual misunderstanding of material agency is the ultimate method to secure institutional authority.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During the Second World War, a printing press at Chicago Offset Printing Company ran two shifts a day producing a single image: Warner Sallman‘s Head of Christ. The 1940 painting showed Jesus in three-quarter profile against a dark ground, hair … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[92],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t