David Morgan has been one of the most important pioneers in exploring the visual world of religion—particularly that of American Christianity—and The Forge of Vision might be regarded as summa Morganensis. In it Morgan, who teaches at Duke University, has drawn extensively on his manifold earlier writings, added to them with new material, and arranged them in an interpretive framework that is both challenging and provocative. Morgan combines the training of an art historian with the skills of religious studies enterprise. His prose varies from the eloquent to the convoluted, which produces part of the challenge; he is overly susceptible at times to the allure of the jargon of critical studies, ethnography, and other recently popular methodologies, which can make for a bumpy ride. However, his accomplishment is a distinguished testament to a notable career, and is well worth the effort.

Morgan's task is to demonstrate the significance of the imagination in modern Christianity, and the role of visual media in channeling that imagination. He begins with a familiar meme or topos—what one might call “the Zwinglian divide,” that is, the rejection by the Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli of the bodily or otherwise “real” presence of Christ in the Eucharist. By doing so, Zwingli legitimated a metaphysical disconnect between the natural and supernatural realms that had been essential to traditional Roman theology, and by doing so delegitimated the material world as a channel for communication with the divine. This resulted most dramatically in not only the rejection of visual and material displays in Christian churches but—dramatically in Cromwell's England—in their active destruction. Thus, goes the story, Protestantism has from its beginnings been iconoclastic or at least aniconic in spirit and, at times, action, a fundamental difference from the Roman Catholic tradition from which it split in the sixteenth century.

The problem with this story, according to Morgan, is that, while rooted in actuality, it is, like most dichotomies, a considerable oversimplification of the long, complex, and evolving truth that has characterized the relationship between Protestant Christianity—whatever that phrase may essentialize today—and the visual arts. Roman Catholic visual piety has not changed that much from late medieval times to the present, although Catholic Reformation efforts such as those of Ignatius Loyola certainly enhanced the role of the visual imagination in conforming the individual sensibility with that of the institutional Church. Although Protestants banished the saints (in the traditional sense) from the sanctuary, they by no means banished graphic representations of religious import. Portraits of founders and martyrs and other illustrations useful for evangelism and pedagogy were now readily distributed with the new medium of print, and were entirely acceptable as long as they were confined to the illumination of biblical teachings and the honor of those through whom those teachings had been revived, witnessed, and disseminated. The issue was not the act of visual representation, but rather that of what was being represented.

Morgan puts this conflict into a broader framework by invoking the notion of “sacred economies of exchange,” in which items of religious significance become the object of financial as well as spiritual transactions. In the Roman system, images and relics were exchanged for money and brought with them spiritual power. Among Protestants, the exchange was of information, usually in the form of printed matter allowing access to the divine Word. The violent interchanges between the two camps that ensued were partially a response to financial oxen that were being gored in the process. Morgan also argues plausibly that the shift in the understanding and use of sacred images helped bring about new ways of experiencing the body, both individual and social. Along with this came a fundamental understanding of the order of the cosmos that had dire consequences for the notions of hierarchy that enhanced the importance of the everyday world and its inhabitants at the expense of the clergy as mediators between the adjacent worlds of the natural and supernatural.

After setting up this fundamental shift in the experience of the visual in the context of the Protestant Reformation(s), Morgan explores a variety of themes in roughly chronological order without attempting a comprehensive history of the visual in modern Christianity, including nationhood, the expansion of Christianity to the global East, images of Jesus, and abstract painting, providing with each a lesson in the interpretation of visual texts.

A useful contrast with Morgan's fine (if sometimes dense) book is Robert Orsi's History and Presence (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016). Like Morgan, Orsi both advocates and exemplifies a methodology differing from traditional narrative history as a means of exploring religious history. Orsi presents a series of cases, relying heavily on ethnographic methods, in which the world of Roman Catholic materiality is explored in its impact on individuals and communities of believers. Orsi frames these illuminating studies with methodological excursuses in which he takes scholars of religion to task for refusing to take this materiality seriously in the context of “lived religion,” and traces this insensitivity to a Protestant/secular lineage dating back to the “Zwinglian divide.” One might argue with Orsi about whether this skepticism about the “reality” of the supernatural—the presence of what he ambiguously terms “the gods”—at least as experienced by believers, has been as thoroughgoing as he insists. Morgan takes both Catholic and Protestant constructions of the sacred in a serious and nuanced way, and provides one (among, perhaps, many) phenomenological paths to an understanding of the Christian experience of the supernatural that is at once empathetic and illuminating.