Materiality and the Sensorium in U.S. Religions

In The Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote about the body’s unique capacity for “double sensations.” When someone presses their hands together, the sensation felt isn’t one of two objects resting side-by-side, wherein one hand monopolizes the role of touching and the other feeling. Instead, the sensation felt is an ambiguous combination with both hands alternating between “touching” and “being touched”. In this paper, I extend Merleau-Ponty’s idea of reciprocal perception to a larger discussion of how perception and experience translate to the creation of culture through the relationship between material objects and cultural bodies using an example of a Civil War cockade badge. I argue that material meaning is something that’s accrued beyond the original intended use, actively creating culture as it extends it. I explore how an approach that intricately pursues this co-constitutive relationship offers a productive framework for the study of material culture, “secular” or “religious”.

In the mid and late nineteenth-century, U.S. American spiritualism flourished; mediums contacted the dead through private seances and public performances, using their bodies to channel and communicate with the spirits. Spiritualists used these communications to glean information about the spirit world, which they believed would allow them to bring their steadily progressing material world into alignment with the perfection of the spiritualist afterlife. In this paper, I suggest that the spiritualist fiction of Elizabeth Phelps (The Gates Ajar) and Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith (Bertha and Lily) theorize the senses as a key site of spiritualists’ religious imaginaries. Using the sensorium, white spiritualist women imagined sensory utopias in which their embodied experiences were integrally connected to the flourishing of their communities. I show that these spiritualist utopias were specifically racialized through the sensorium, which allowed spiritualist women to uphold structures of oppression in order to imagine alternative futures for themselves.

This paper explores the racialization of Christianity in interwar America by focusing on ecumenical Protestants' perception of non-Western Christian visual arts. The extant scholarship highlights the ubiquity of whiteness in American religious paintings, including Jesus icons. But the "color of Christ" in the interwar period was far more contested, as American Protestants faced the diversity of "indigenous" Christian arts across the world. This paper examines liberal missiologist Daniel Fleming's 1930s effort to collect non-white Jesus images from Asia and Africa, which he believed would challenge the American conflation of whiteness and Christianity. Despite his progressive intention, Fleming's celebration of non-Western Christian arts was based on romantic racialism, or the idea that each race had its own innate, immutable qualities to be expressed. By characterizing these arts as "indigenous," Fleming further perpetuated asymmetry between white Christianity, which was colorless and universal, and other racial groups' Christianity, which was ethnic and particular.