Context and Empathy in Exhibiting Religious Artifacts
Suzanne Fischer
The size draws your eye first–about fifteen feet long, a sheet of plywood painted white–but it’s the content, painstakingly painted in black, that mesmerizes you: an intricate, divinely-inspired alternate history of the universe. This dispensational chart (private collection, no photograph) was created by Nels Thompson, who led a nondenominational “evangelical, fundamental, dispensational” tent revival ministry in the West from about 1900 to 1935 which was carried on by his son-in-law through the 1970s. The chart outlines the seven “dispensations” or eras of the world in which God relates to His people in different ways. To a viewer convinced by the chart, the world is newly ordered, the arc of history has a clear trajectory (toward the Millenium), and the viewer’s next actions are clear: repent, believe, and follow.
Dispensational charts are a genre of material culture that were produced in great numbers in the late 19th century, and are still being produced today. They can be found in many archives and publications, though it is unusual that such a large chart for teaching and preaching survived. They are very difficult to exhibit appropriately. They require so much context–but are so aesthetically compelling, a kind of prophetic flowchart–that institutions may be tempted to throw up their hands and exhibit them as weird objects rather than as evidence for a historical story involving very sincere, dedicated people. This does a disservice both to the historical actors who created them and to our visitors who bring their own questions to the artifact.
The story of the dispensational chart is the story of many religious artifacts. Research from the Pew Research Center’s project on Religion and Public Life shows that Americans increasingly believe that religion has no place in public life, and that we tend to be ignorant about religious beliefs and religious history, even those of their own faith communities. As the influence of “American civil religion” has declined, formerly ubiquitous religious ideas are no longer hegemonic, but also no longer widely known, and have not been replaced by information about our increasing religious pluralism. The percentage of Americans who identify as “nones” has also been increasing; people increasingly find religious practice unnecessary, uncompelling, uninteresting, or even a force for evil in the world. This means that the amount of contextual information visitors need to engage with religious artifacts has also increased–and that history institutions also need to step back and make a case for why religion and its artifacts matter.
Develop a visitor-centered exhibit practice around the history of religion will rest on two strategies: providing context and provoking empathy.
Context is key. While religion is a deeply embedded part of many visitors’ lived experience, we can no longer assume that all visitors will understand the universalizing character of religious practice in general, the way religion can color and guide everything a historical actor did, starting with the most basic tenets of their worldview. And we can no longer assume that visitors know anything at all about any specific religious group’s beliefs, including the Puritans (given all the new scholarship on early American religions.) We also must help visitors understand that indigenous people had and have their own religious practices, and not portray them as people on whom colonial religions acted.
We at museums and historical institutions tiptoe around even providing basic religious context: for fear of getting it wrong, for fear of political repercussions, or even due to history practitioners’ own ignorance. We can learn, however, from the way the best public history of science, technology, and medicine (HSTM) interprets complex, controversial, or now-disproved ideas. The HSTM emphasis on methods, details, and cultural context, while “blackboxing” rightness or wrongness, can be a model of exhibition practice that doesn’t take a stand on the correctness of beliefs, and that leaves space for visitors to bring their own experiences and understandings to the content. Withholding a judgement of rightness or wrongness about a particular religious belief or practice is generally recommended.
Visitors are not passive receivers of cognitive content. A deeply engaging exhibition experience must provoke empathy with people from the past. Religious artifacts should be interpreted in light of the people who made, used, revered, and distributed them. Religious people from history should be portrayed as relatable and understandable (as much as any person can be understandable, including oneself!) This requires the contextual information of how religions worked in the lives of people in certain eras and communities, but it also requires a portrayal of personal subjectivities. First-person quotes; photographs; and quotes from contemporary friends, observers, or detractors can all add life to a religious artifact. Artifacts relating to personal religious practices, such as religious clothing worn daily, home altars, or an e-meter, may be more effective in building empathy than silver chalices and official vestments.
Empathy is also required in deciding what to display and how. If religious groups object to a certain object being put on display and being seen by outsiders, as is the case with some artifacts collected from indigenous peoples, the museum or historic site should follow the wishes of descendent communities. We should also be very intentional if using artifacts in exhibit contexts that could be seen as blasphemous: the case of historic Bibles at the National Museum of the American Indian is a good example.
To move forward with this new direction for interpreting religious artifacts, we need to know more about our visitors. Visitor research on knowledge of and attitudes toward religious beliefs, lives and objects can guide our exhibition practices. We should also begin to prototype exhibition strategies–perhaps around just one object, one time period, or one religious movement–and study visitor inputs and reactions. This way, we be more effective in helping visitors engage with this enormously meaningful and influential facet of American history.
Looking forward to learning more about the project. I know this is a public history conference, but I was thinking about the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. I haven’t visited there for many years, but my recollection is that much of the work centered around religious experiences, even if outside the canonical ecclesiastic norms. Do objects exhibited and valued for their aesthetic properties carry different weight as “religious objects” and, if so, how is that different than an historical museum context?
I think this raises many crucial issues in exhibiting religion ideas, religious artifacts, and religious sites, especially when these are in the public sphere. As I discuss in my case study, I think sites owned by churches and interpreted by churches face different issues. At least for the Mormon sites I am familiar with, the tendency to want to promote empathy among visitors–a very specific kind of empathy–far outweighs any attempts to provide necessary historical context.
Elizabeth, that is actually my major problem with AVAM, which I think does a lot of great work otherwise. Many of the artists were motivated by deep religious faith. I think it does a disservice to the artists and their work that the museum doesn’t give visitors better toolkits for understanding why particular religious ideas and even particular stories and verses were so important to the artists.
I also wrote about some of these issues in the context of an exhibit from the 1970s at https://publichistorian.wordpress.com/2015/04/01/museum-revival/
Hi Suzanne,
I really appreciate your emphasis on empathy. As public history practitioners, we need to be empathetic as we talk about religion and display religious objects. I also think that this is a skill we should be teaching people at public history sites. If we can teach them to empathize with people in the past – religious or otherwise – they might also learn to treat one another with more empathy as well.
Suzanne –
You bring up great points. I especially like your views on indigenous peoples and their faith and the display of artifacts. The idea that we need empathy to understand both the people and the artifact is a key a point. We do not need to accept another’s belief, but we must seek to understand it and how it affects the individual or group. This effort takes empathy.
This conversation also brings up the notion of affect, both as an aspect of audience engagement and also as an intentional (and often ignored) strategy of those producing interpretation at public heritage sites. The work of Laurajane Smith and Sheila Watson on affective responses of visitors is a productive beginning to more intentional practices around curating emotion in public history, but in the context of religion is also raises some tricky questions that push beyond simple cultural relativism.