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Monumental Jesus: Landscapes of Faith and Doubt in Modern America

2021; University of California Press; Volume: 80; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/jsah.2021.80.4.494

2150-5926

Ryan K. Smith,

Religious Tourism and Spaces

The United States is home to a number of outsize and controversial experiments in modern religious architecture that seemingly demand public engagement as well as scholarly analysis. In Monumental Jesus, architectural historian Margaret M. Grubiak heeds this call and reaps rich rewards. Her study gathers several eye-popping examples of modern Christian art on the edge: the University of Notre Dame's exuberant “Touchdown Jesus” mural; the castellated Washington, D.C., Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; the evangelical theme park as exemplified by Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Heritage USA; the world's fair–type campus of Oral Roberts University; the manifestations of fundamentalism at the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter; and the towering Christ of the Ozarks statue near Eureka Springs, Arkansas. For Grubiak, what ties together these various efforts—Roman Catholic, Mormon, Pentecostal, evangelical, and fundamentalist, ranging from the 1960s to today—is their operation in an arena that she conceptualizes as “landscapes of doubt,” in dialectic with landscapes of faith. Across such cultural landscapes, drawing religious insiders and outsiders and believers and doubters into complex communion, she finds powerful reactions ranging from devotion to satire to hostility and even blasphemy. What is at stake when we are confronted with the “Touchdown Jesus” moniker for the Word of Life mural at Notre Dame? Or the “surrender Dorothy” graffiti framing the Emerald City–like Washington Temple? Or the “Gumby Jesus” jokes at the feet of the Christ of the Ozarks? Grubiak concludes, “The power of landscapes of doubt is that they make the questions about religion and belief immediate and visible to us, engaging us in a conversation about the transcendent and the immanent” (13). That conversation is framed on individual terms, not on religious or political terms, so that such landscapes draw their power and purpose from personal situations and serve to prod or clarify our own beliefs.It is a fruitful move for Grubiak to knit together into conversation all these differing examples, raised by different groups and individuals for different purposes. Grubiak's method builds on those developed by foundational scholars in the fields of religious architecture and material religion. Mircea Eliade's comparative conceptualizations of the sacred and the profane are central, as Grubiak traces the deployment of common tools for sacralization and for the organization of space, exemplified by the “cosmic mountain” and the axis mundi. The pioneering work of key scholars of American art and sacred spaces provides further inspiration, including that of Colleen McDannell, David Morgan, Sally Promey, and Gretchen Buggeln, all of whom helped to establish and invigorate the field. Grubiak also draws upon the work of religious studies scholars like R. Laurence Moore who have explored the sacred/secular boundary in America and its relation to sports and commerce.To extend these categories of the sacred and the secular in developing her concept of landscapes of doubt, Grubiak necessarily draws on the discourse surrounding her artistic examples as much as on the material forms and histories of the works themselves. Hence features from MAD magazine, references in The Simpsons, articles from Vanity Fair, Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip, the published memoirs of Bill Nye “the Science Guy,” and even vernacular nicknames among other references in a wide range of media become central to her argument via their commentary on her subjects. Such references in editorials or satirical media become mechanisms for and evidence of a shared public. For Grubiak, these reactions and their media products “make doubt visible” and prompt the individual's response (4). Through it all, she takes her subjects seriously, including their humorous dimensions, but without draining them of their life and energy. It is a capacious approach that served Grubiak well in her first book, White Elephants on Campus: The Decline of the University Chapel in America, 1920–1960, which charts the ambitious but ultimately hapless chapels built on prominent university campuses in the twentieth century.1Monumental Jesus is structured with five chapters, each dedicated to a particular example or category of construction, plus an introduction and a conclusion. The chapters' sequencing moves the reader steadily across a spectrum that starts with lighthearted jest but proceeds toward a dark concluding chapter that grapples with the “perversion of religion” itself (147). The opening chapter, on “Touchdown Jesus,” explores the nexus between faith and sports, using a lens through which even the Catholic faithful have viewed Millard Sheets's thirteen-story mural of Jesus on Notre Dame's library. If the upraised arms of Jesus depicted in The Word of Life recall for cheering football fans the arms of an umpire signaling a touchdown in the nearby stadium, the depiction's popular nickname also implicates Catholic intellectualism, didactic art, and the power of prayer. The book's second chapter centers on the Latter-day Saints temple overlooking the Washington, D.C., beltway, where Grubiak finds humor in the surface responses but a well of suspicion below. The temple, with its highly visible New Formalist design by Keith W. Wilcox, was opened to the general public for a brief time in 1974 before its doors were closed to outsiders long accustomed to attributing hollow wizardry to Mormon beliefs.The subsequent chapter on evangelical theme parks delves into the criminal malfeasance surrounding the Bakkers' much-ridiculed enterprise in South Carolina, modeled from a mesh of influences ranging from Disneyland to the colonial revival to replicas of Jerusalem. This chapter also considers the uneasy transfer of the Heritage USA park from the Pentecostal-inclined PTL (Praise the Lord) network to evangelical leader Jerry Falwell, whose infamous 1987 plunge down the park's water slide highlighted the friction between religion and entertainment. The chapter treats the highly charged campus of Oral Roberts University as well. Roberts relied on his own religious visions and his reenvisioning of designs from the 1962 Seattle World's Fair in creating the campus, which he conceived as analogous to a theme park.The book's fourth chapter begins a shift toward more ominous doubts. It focuses on the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter in Kentucky, which Grubiak analyzes as a megachurch and fundamentalist theme park, respectively. In these examples, doubt is turned back against consensus science, not Christian belief, as the museum's human/dinosaur exhibits and the ark's hulking four-story façade invite rather than dispel confrontation. The book's concluding chapter targets the 65-foot sculpture of Jesus erected on an Arkansas hilltop by the racist, anti-Semitic, Holocaust denier Gerald L. K. Smith. Curiously, here Grubiak seeks to position the piece's meaning as outside true religion. In this instance, Smith's beliefs, also enacted nearby in a Passion play and the exhibits of a living history museum, go beyond the issue of simple doubt to raise the specter of violent conflict. Even as the poison at the statue's source is neutralized through humor, formalist critique, or fading memory, readers quickly find that “Gumby Jesus” is no laughing matter.A broad range of useful illustrations support the arc of Grubiak's study. The author notes some instances where modern copyright holders withheld permission to reprint key images, but the book still features a robust selection that is fully satisfactory, especially given the wide availability of images of the book's subjects online. Grubiak's own photographs mix well with the many iconic, journalistic touchstones and archival images included.In her book's central concepts and execution, Grubiak leaves questions of chronology open. Helpfully, she notes key predecessors for many of her primary examples. For instance, when considering modern evangelical theme parks, she acknowledges that evangelicals have long explored using the tools of entertainment in religion, citing the numerous attempts by nineteenth-century evangelicals to create replicas of the biblical Jerusalem. But Grubiak never fully addresses the question of whether the concept of “landscapes of doubt” can be extended back before the era of mass media and automobile travel. We might turn this question on its head: Have not visible doubts, so to speak, always surrounded even the most forceful expressions of Christian art, from their very origins? One thinks of the gargoyles and grotesques that crawl across Europe's most revered cathedrals. Further, Grubiak might have considered how less iconic examples of Christian architecture commonly involve a discourse of doubt, such as suicides within church buildings, the adaptation of abandoned churches into breweries or apartment homes, or the conscious destruction of vulnerable cemeteries. Such examples, although not pop culture scenarios, are no less laden with persistent, visible doubts.These kinds of questions attest to the promise of Grubiak's approach. Monumental Jesus presents a provocative and engaging step forward in our understanding of religious architecture and sacred space. The book is a notable achievement; readers will not be able to see “Touchdown Jesus” or his like the same way again.