"Religion is ever-present in American public life. Displays of religion-such as bumper stickers or Jesus fish on cars, anti-abortion billboards with Bible verses, and the Star of David on Jewish deli signage-saturate public spaces and are so ubiquitous that they constitute something like visual background noise. In Religion in Plain View, Sally M. Promey analyzes the ways religion makes itself visible and considers the key histories that shaped these modes of display. Such displays, Promey insists, are not accidental; rather, the public display of religion in the United States is a strategic site of complex and individuated religious practices. Specifically, Promey reveals these displays to be a Protestant technology of white nation formation in three key ways: the close link between Christianity's mandate to evangelize and capitalism's promotional idiom of advertising; Anglo-Protestant Christians' deliberate colonization, extirpation, and dispossession of territories occupied by Native Americans, Africans, Hawaiians, and other marginalized peoples; and the promotion of a distinctly white Protestant vision of the nation's history and religious complexion. Religion in Plain View is a revelatory and nuanced picture of the ways in which religion claims public space and, in so doing, informs the distribution of power in the US and secures deeply ingrained assumptions about the proper shape of American religion and life"--

Sally M. Promey is professor of American studies and religious studies as well as the Caroline Washburn Professor of Religion and Visual Culture at Yale University, where she directs the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion. She is author or editor of several books, most recently Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice.