By Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey, Published The Straits Times, 2 Oct 2012
THE murders of four Americans in response to an amateurish online video about Prophet Muhammad, like the 2005 attempted murder of a Danish cartoonist who had depicted the Prophet with a bomb in his turban, have left many Americans confused, angry and fearful about the rage that some Muslims feel about visual representations of their sacred figures.
The confusion stems, in part, from the ubiquity of sacred images in American culture. God, Jesus, Moses, Buddha and other holy figures are displayed in movies, in cartoons, in churches and on living-room walls. Americans place them on T-shirts and bumper stickers, even tattoo them on skin.
The United States was settled, in part, by radical Protestant iconoclasts from Britain who considered the creation and use of sacred imagery to be a violation of the Second Commandment against graven images. The anti- Catholic colonists at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay refused to put images of Jesus in their churches and meeting houses. They scratched out crosses in books. In the early 1740s, English officials even marched on an Indian community in western Connecticut, where they cross-examined Moravian missionaries who reportedly had a book with "the picture of our Saviour in it".
The colonists feared Catholic infiltration from British-controlled Canada. Shortly after the Boston Tea Party, a Connecticut pastor warned that, if the British succeeded, the colonists would have their Bibles taken from them and be compelled to "pray to the Virgin Mary, worship images, believe the doctrine of Purgatory, and the Pope's infallibility".
It was not only Protestants who opposed sacred imagery. In the South-west, Pueblo Indians who waged war against Spanish colonisers not only burned and dismembered some crucifixes, but even defecated on them.
In the early republic, many Americans avoided depicting Jesus or God in any form. The painter Washington Allston spoke for many artists of the 1810s when he said, "I think his character too holy and sacred to be attempted by the pencil". Visiting Russian diplomat Pavel Svinin was amazed at the prevalence of a different image: that of George Washington.
"Every American considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his home," he wrote, "just as we have images of God's saints."
Only in the late 19th century did images of God and Jesus become commonplace in churches, Sunday-school books, Bibles and homes. There were many forces at work: steam printing presses, new canals and railroads, and, not least, the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Catholics who brought with them an array of crucifixes, Madonnas and busts of saints. Protestants began producing their own images, often to appeal to children, and gradually became more comfortable with holy images. In the 20th century, the United States began exporting such images, most notably Warner Sallman's Head Of Christ (1941), one of the most reproduced images in world history.
There was also resistance, however. When Hollywood first started portraying Jesus in films, one fundamentalist Christian fumed, "The picturing of the life and sufferings of our Saviour by these institutions falls nothing short of blasphemy".
Mr Vernon E. Jordan Jr, an African-American who was later president of the National Urban League and an adviser to President Bill Clinton, recalled that white audience members gasped when he played Jesus as an undergraduate at DePauw University in Indiana in the 1950s.
In fact, race has been a constant source of conflict over American depictions of Jesus. In Philadelphia in the 1930s, the black street preacher F.S. Cherry stormed into African-American churches and pointed at paintings or prints of white Christs, shouting, as one observer recounted, "Who in the hell is this? Nobody knows! They say it is Jesus. That's a damned lie!"
During the civil rights era, black-power advocates and liberation theologians excoriated white images of the sacred. A 1967 "Declaration of Black Churchmen" demanded "the removal of all images which suggest that God is white". As racial violence enveloped Detroit that year, African- American residents painted the white faces of Catholic icons black.
More recently, there have been uproars over the Nigerian-British painter Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary (1996) and the New York artist and photographer Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (1987). Serrano's image of Jesus on the crucifix, submerged in the artist's own urine, roused a crusade against the National Endowment for the Arts in the late 1980s.
Ofili's painting of a dark- skinned Madonna with photographs of vaginas surrounding her enraged Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York. The mayor, who mistakenly claimed that elephant dung was smeared on the image when in fact it was used at the base to hold up the painting, tried to ban it from being displayed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999. One upset Christian smeared white paint over it.
Images of the sacred haven't caused mass violence in the United States, but they have generated intense conflict.
America's ability to sustain a culture supersaturated with visual displays of the divine, largely without violence, came only after massive technological change, centuries of immigration and social movements that forced Americans to reckon with differences of race, ethnicity and religion.
Edward J. Blum is associate professor of history at San Diego State University, and Paul Harvey, a professor of history at the University of Colorado/Colorado Springs.
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