Religion in Plain View: Public Aesthetics of American Display

Promey’s (American and religious studies, Yale Univ,; Painting Religion in Public) book is a dense, sprawling analysis of how religious displays affect landscapes, confront observers, and fade into the mundane background of daily life. Her book’s scope is immense, covering roadside shrines: bumper stickers; billboards on U.S. highways, buildings, and places of worship from Hawai‘i to New England; U.S. Supreme Court rulings; the National Park Service; heritage fabrication; and the effect of white Protestant colonialist practices on the visual contours of lived spaces. Promey shows a robust knowledge of the subject matter and often surprises in the way she is able to draw attention to religious displays that are present but overlooked. There are myriads of religious displays in the United States, however, and the geographical and conceptual vastness of the content means that the text sometimes moves abruptly from place to place, back and forth, linking ideas and topics in a manner that can be nuanced but unpredictable.