Signs of the Kingdom: Roadside Religious Signs

Sam Fentress

THE first photograph I ever took of a religious sign—a Toyota with a cross bolted to its roof and the words “THE CHRISTIANS ARE COMING THE CHRISTIANS ARE COMING” painted on its sides [see page 95] —was part of a series I was doing of street scenes. The shot of the Toyota got buried deep in a pile of contact sheets and I quickly lost track of it. At the time I was a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, spending a lot of time in the Art Institute’s print study room looking at Rembrandt’s etchings, especially those with biblical subjects. I was listening to the Talking Heads and reading Thomas Aquinas and the Bible. Several years later the Toyota photograph came to light, but by that time I had already launched into my project of taking photos of religious signs. Perhaps something about that cross-bearing car had slipped into my unconscious mind and began a process that is far from over.

In 1981, while teaching photography at the University of Arkansas, one of my students brought in a photo of a barn literally covered with Bible quotes. Later that semester another student drove me to a place called Christ of the Ozarks in nearby Eureka Springs, where I took photographs of an enormous statue of Christ.

Before moving to St. Louis to teach for a year at a community college, I spent part of the summer working as a traveling salesman for my father’s radio program, Ask Dr. Vance. Our test market consisted of rural radio stations in Missouri and Kentucky. While on the road I took pictures between target radio towns. In Fertile, Missouri I shot a picture of a sign made up of the words “Let Me In” over the figure of Jesus knocking on a large red heart-shaped door [see Plate 5]. An old lady named Hazel Barton explained to me that she put this sign next to the highway in order to do the work of the Lord. How might her sign carry out God’s will? A half-drunk person, she said, might drive by on a Saturday night, see her sign, and be moved to change his life. She wanted the sign to read “A Latch You Must Open,” but her son was the only one who could reach that high and he wrote “Let Me In” instead. Over the years some people had asked her if they could buy the sign, looking at it as folk art, but she had turned them down. Selling the sign would be to stop doing the work of the Lord.

The more religious signs I found, the deeper my fascination with them grew. For a time I continued to shoot landscapes and some portraits, but gradually the signs became my focus. Even before my stint as a salesman I had tended to do a lot of driving to find pictures. Born in Detroit, I had learned to love cars during childhood visits to automobile factories and on many driving vacations with my father. After I had settled in St. Louis I tried to crisscross every street within the city limits looking for signs. I took many indirect backroad trips to see family in Nashville, where I had grown up. I also drove to and from Baton Rouge by various routes while dating Betsy, my wife to be, who was at Louisiana State University studying literature. After we got married we often drove through the South on vacations.

Betsy was wearing blue jeans the day we came upon Jesus Way Goat Corrals near Cleveland, Tennessee. Part way up the drive there was a sign:

HOLINESS OR HELL

Within these confines is holy ground.
Please put on some clothes and cover
your nakedness. Before entering,
women of all ages arrayed in pants,
shorts or dresses that expose the knee
not admitted. Repent or perish!

At the top of the hill there was a kinder, gentler sign:

Men and women

Please observe
If you are wearing
shorts on this
visit, please be
fully clothed
on next visit.

Yet another sign quoted St. Paul’s letter to Timothy on modesty of attire.

While I took photographs of a pickup truck and a VW bus covered with Scripture quotes, Betsy changed into a dress inside our car (which was about the size of a phone booth) and joined me. The proprietor, B.E. Salee, wore a hat bearing a sticky punch label of the words “god hates sin.” He let me photograph his living room wall which was covered with a sign listing the ten commandments. Mr. Salee had not read a paper, listened to a radio, or watched a TV in over twenty years, and while I think his dress code was overly strict, he appeared to be a very gentle and serene man. His withdrawal from contemporary media reminds me of the so-called “pillar saints” beginning with Simeon Stylites, an austere fifth-century hermit and miracle worker who lived for years on a small platform on top of a column.

Gradually friends and acquaintances found out about my obsession and started telling me of signs they had seen. I began to keep files. My tips came from atheists, agnostics, and believers of all stripes. A Jesuit priest who grew up near Duluth told me of a large sign painted on high rocks that all drivers see when approaching that city. Five or six years later my family vacationed in Minnesota and I took a day trip to Duluth to search for the sign. I found nothing matching the description, but I did find the very faded message “Christs Coming” on some small rocks visible only from a seldom traveled side street.

A magazine editor gave me directions to a place on an interstate in central Illinois where I found a “Burma Shave”-type sequence of signs containing the words of the “Hail Mary” [see Plate 6]. A photography assistant told me of a sign outside Houston that became my first target during a week spent in Texas and Louisiana in 1988. I never did find the sign he directed me to, but I came across many others along the way.

With pictures from about thirty states now, I have found that these religious messages—whether they are painted, scrawled, sculpted, or mounted on billboards and marquees—are not restricted to the Bible Belt.

I have also found that while some of the signs are very serious, and others inadvertently humorous, some strive to be deliberately humorous, using wordplay to get people thinking. In Wentzville, Missouri I found a sign that said “Fight Truth Decay. Read Your Bible and Do What God Says.” And in Jackson, Mississippi there was the following sign:

A Dusty Bible Is
Like a Rusty Gun
Not Much
Good

On bumper stickers I found the messages “If God is your co-pilot switch seats” and “Many who plan to seek God at the eleventh hour die at 10:30.” A billboard in Louisiana with a close-up of Jesus’ hand nailed to the cross bore the message “Jesus knows life can be tough as nails.” In Murfreesboro, Tennessee [see page 95] a Baptist church sign said:

World’s Way
Get All U Can
Can All U Get
Sit On The Can

One principle I have found helpful in my search for signs is: “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20). An aesthetic corollary of this is the photographer Frederick Sommer’s aphorism: “The desperate are the greatest image makers.” When I am in a city I often find religious messages if I wander around the poorest neighborhoods. In Harlem I found the message “Obey God or Burn” painted on a rock outcrop in St. Nicholas Park, and “Become a Catholic” in the midst of other graffiti on a boarded-up brownstone.

When I asked two police officers at a McDonald’s in Washington, DC for advice on which areas might not be safe, they pointed out a neighborhood southeast of the Potomac and said gang violence and drug turf wars were common there. It was mid-morning and, thinking the dangerous people might be asleep, I ventured forth in my car. In the front-yard garden of a small apartment building someone had put a stop sign and below it another sign in the style of a speed-limit sign but with the words “Hell Has No Exit.” In Los Angeles similar directions and warnings from some construction workers led me to the sign for Alfie’s Bar-b-que Pit [see front cover] and to G & E Mufflers, where the owner told me why he had an image of Our Lady of Guadelupe as part of his sign. He said, “With some of the cars we work on—especially for low riders—we need all the help we can get. She watches over us.”

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” begins the Sermon on the Mount. That the kingdom of heaven belongs not just to the poor but also to the poor in spirit suggests that being middle class, or even rich, and having trust in God are not contradictory attributes. One theme that crops up again and again in roadside religious signs is a concerted attempt to inject Sunday back into the Monday-through-Friday realm of commerce. This mixture of religious faith and the daily life of business has a long historical pedigree: one could point out, for example, the Très Riches Heures—the Limbourg brothers’ illuminated manuscript from about 1400 which is recognized for the way it uses scenes of agriculture and commerce to ornament the words of a prayer book. Many of my photographs document this juxtaposition of the sacred and the commercial in the modern American landscape.

The photograph titled “Pasadena, Texas. 1988” shows the sign of a hamburger joint called My-T Burger, and the smaller type reads:

PRAISE THE
LORD
BURGER & FRIES
99

At Bennie’s Snacks in Baton Rouge, a good bit of the exterior wall was given over to the words “GOD IS LOVE.” The sign for Nancy’s Clerical Service in Oklahoma City declared, “God plus one is always a majority.” The horse on top of a silo visible along I-75 in Monroe, Ohio hints at the fact that this is a quarter-horse farm, while the only words on the silo, “John 3:3” [see Plate 7], invite the motorist to read about Nicodemus’s nighttime visit to hear Jesus say “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” “Ye must be born again”—from the seventh verse of the same chapter of John’s Gospel—is the prelude to a pitch for area rugs at twenty percent off, in Jackson, Mississippi [see page 95].

At the Furniture Factory Outlet World in Waxhaw, North Carolina, a sign completed the sentence “God is like...” with eleven different consumer brand names and their corresponding slogans, amounting to a Madison Avenue litany of divine attributes: like Coke, He’s the real thing; like General Electric, He lights your path; like VO Hair Spray, He holds through all kinds of weather; like Tide, He gets the stains out that others leave behind.

In other photographs, big business seems to endorse Jesus, when renegade franchisees juxtapose religious messages with the signs of their parent companies—Shell, Union 76, Farmer’s Insurance, British Petroleum, Amoco, Texaco, and Pepsi [see page 99]. This would probably come as no surprise to a religious thinker like Michael Novak, who in his recent book Business as a Calling gently chides the many people who think that being for the religious virtues entails being against the ethos of business.

Some people see road sign evangelism, and much other modern evangelism, as an appropriation of techniques born on Madison Avenue, but I think it started out the other way around. Advertising and PR are derivative of the biblical tradition of evangelization: St. Augustine’s Confessions begat David Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man. In Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion, Michael Schudson points to research showing that many leading advertisers have been the children of ministers or grew up in strict religious households. Early Coca-Cola magnate Asa Griggs Candler, whose family had ties to the foreign missions, ended sales meetings with the singing of “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

But the stretch of Commerce Street that runs between God and Mammon is not one-way. It is clear that for some time now the preachers have been learning from their children in the advertising business—despite moral finger-wagging from those who insist on the separation of Church and just about everything else. Procter & Gamble spent $2.4 billion on advertising in 1993 and no one seemed to care, but when the leaders of the largest religious body in the United States (the Catholic church) announced plans to spend one-twentieth of one percent as much with a New York public relations firm in order to spread accurate information about church teachings, a lot of Americans, including many Catholics, became upset.

To explain why I didn’t get upset I need to go back twenty-four years to the time when I went off to Princeton University in the hope of becoming a lawyer. Though I was heading toward an undergraduate degree in literature, I took what I thought was a minor detour—Peter Bunnell’s course on the history of photography. He opened a new world to me. Courses followed with Emmet Gowin, a master photographer and teacher who deepened my love of photographs and their subjects. These courses, though contemporary in form and subject, nevertheless affirmed the traditional idea that photographs could—and should—be explicated in order to interpret their meaning.

At the same time, however, I was exposed to a very different theoretical framework in courses taught by a Marxist formalist painter, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. Visiting his studio in New York’s Chinatown, I became enamored of the New York avant-garde scene with its minimalist aesthetic, its materialist religion of Art, and its controlling theory of painting that abandoned depth and illusion in favor of abstraction and pure formalism. Art was supposed to be about itself, so the emphasis came to be on critical theory rather than on the subject of the painting or photograph. As Hilton Kramer quipped, “The more minimal the art the more maximum the explanation.”

During this time Gilbert-Rolfe, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson founded October magazine, which became notorious for its opaque, jargonistic prose. It preached a particularly abstruse version of the current orthodoxy of the New York art world. Behind this fashionable aesthetics lay the theory of deconstructionism, which holds that texts and images are defined not by their inherent properties but by their relation to other texts and images. According to this view, language is a prison-house which prevents us from grasping reality. All images and philosophical claims can be debunked, since language is nothing more than a collection of arbitrary signs. The deconstructionists argue that all meaning is political: since there is no inherent meaning in texts or images, whoever is most successful in arguing their particular interpretation achieves cultural dominance. These ideas added up to an antisacramental theology of absence, doubt, and nothingness.

Despite my enthrallment with this religion of Art, or perhaps because of it, I began to feel a deep void in my life. In high school I had abandoned the Methodist church and wandered through agnosticism toward atheism, with detours into Eastern religions. Mentally and spiritually ungrounded, but anxious to respond to Mr. Gilbert-Rolfe’s challenging philosophical system, I found some solace in Nietzsche, one of the intellectual godfathers of deconstruction. But at the same time, despite years of being a casual relativist, I was haunted by one cold hard fact that I couldn’t demythologize: the Holocaust. It occurred to me that I might doubt doubt itself. I began to look for a philosophy with the guts to say that what the Nazis had done was objectively evil.

Ironically, it was in taking a philosophy of religion course taught by a Nietzsche scholar that I caught a brief glimpse of the Catholic church. In that course I read excerpts from the writings of Thomas Aquinas, who claimed that there is objective truth in matters of faith and morals, that the supernatural builds on the natural, that religion is above—but not contrary to—reason. It is difficult to convey just how radical, bizarre, and astonishing these ideas appeared to me, and how passionately in love with the church I came to be over the next several years. To my mind it was the Catholic faith that was truly “punk,” avant-garde, on the cutting edge. The resurrection of the body, the miracles, all that was contained in the creeds, bowled me over, staggered my imagination.

Still at the embryonic stages of this conversion, I lost interest in a solipsistic series I was doing depicting people taking their own photographs—a “self-referential” project in the formalist manner. These photographs had been my offering to the Art god. My new attitude was expressed succinctly by Diane Arbus: “For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated.” Now the outside world became my focus, and I began to use an eight-by-ten-inch view camera in Tennessee, taking documentary pictures of landscapes that showed signs of human intrusion, but of a sort that suggested harmony with nature. I loved signs of commerce and industry, evidence of human labor. Emmet Gowin taught me how to develop the large view-camera negatives, how to make contact prints on Kodak Azo paper with Amidol developer, and how to bleach the prints with sodium thiosulfate and potassium ferricyanide. I still felt that I was satisfying formalist dictates in my documentary photographs, for two reasons. One was that the large negatives made extremely detailed prints and thus took advantage of a property inherent in the photographic medium: the ability to provide lots of visual information. The other reason is that I usually sought out high vantage points, often bridges or viaducts, from which I had an over-all look down on my subject, placing the horizon very high in the frame. Using a lens of longer-than-normal focal length, the result was a picture that lacked hierarchy—an effect sought after by minimalist artists.

Enormous industrial yards, full of various piles of things, often yielded such detailed pictures without a sense of hierarchy. I shot an electrical equipment supply yard, a lumber yard, a barge-manufacturing assembly line, and a recycling yard filled with piles of sorted scrap metal. My photographs were, in effect, a polemic against Luddite thinking, a defense of interaction between man and nature. I was also very interested in the history of gardens, particularly in the contrast between classical eighteenth-century French gardens—formal, symmetrical, obviously arranged—and romantic nineteenth-century English gardens, which were asymmetrical, informal, and natural in appearance. I was fascinated by the way the layout of each industrial site seemed to relate to one or the other of these garden traditions.

Out of college, I moved back to Tennessee to see how long my savings would last. During the next six months I did little more than read, take pictures, and develop them. Emmet Gowin’s deep love of the Old and New Testaments began to sink in as a glowing personal example to emulate. I lived as a virtual recluse in Johnson City, where I knew no one. One day a merchant there asked me, a total stranger, if I knew Jesus Christ as my personal lord and savior. I don’t remember how I extracted myself from the conversation but his question haunted me. It was a great gift of a question, and I still feel its challenge and invitation and love.

Penniless after my stay in Johnson City, I moved back to Nashville, loading trucks and sorting packages for United Parcel Service for most of the next year, until I was accepted into the graduate school of the Art Institute of Chicago. At about the same time I received a small grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which I used the following summer while living in Chattanooga. While not abandoning my roots in a formalist approach to documentary photography, I began to give in to my hunger for something more than the merely factual. I was reading the Bible and theology and Shakespeare and philosophy. I read Malcolm Hay’s Europe and the Jews, the sad history of the mistreatment of the Jews at the hands of Christians.

Before this my photographs had had very little shadow. They were lit by more or less uniform light, which is fine for documenting facts. More and more I was thinking of truth rather than of mere facts, of mystery and symbolism and emotion and beauty, and sin and evil, which were things that formalist theory—with its focus on the purely formal properties of a work—could not account for. My black-and-white photographs now came to include more shading, more darkness.

The Art Institute of Chicago let me do a semester of independent study back in Princeton with Frederick Sommer and Emmet Gowin. I began to spy regularly on the Catholic mass at the off-campus Aquinas Institute. I had spent four years at Princeton without being tempted to darken the door of a church and now I felt driven—as if to something forbidden—to go and watch Catholics celebrate the liturgy of the Word and the liturgy of the Eucharist. I watched the new pope’s visit to the United States on TV. I listened avidly to the new album of my old favorite Bob Dylan, his first recording as an evangelical Christian.

I began to find myself sitting next to Catholic priests on airplanes and trains. I felt as if someone was looking for me. Around this time I shot the Toyota with the cross on top. All my new passions were beginning to meld: Rembrandt, the Talking Heads, Catholic theology, my reading of the Bible, my fascination with the commercial landscape, especially as rendered by Walker Evans in the South of the 1930s, and my interest in structuralist semiotics and its theory of signs. Holy words were coming to play a part in my life and I was interested in seeing if they might fit in landscape photographs, as they had in the old illuminated manuscripts. Eventually some of my landscape photography started to focus on nature, leaving behind the weekday world of working landscapes. At roughly the same time I started photographing religious signs.

Around the time of my baptism as a Catholic in 1982 I began to feel an urge or a call to document religious signs in all fifty states, so this project is far from complete. I try to work within the documentary tradition of Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and the Civil-War and Western-exploration photographers, as well as in the post-1950 variants of that tradition exemplified by the work of Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Hilla and Bernhard Becher, Lee Friedlander, and Emmet Gowin. I want to keep my work literal so that anyone—an atheist, a Jew, a Moslem or a Christian—can draw something from it.

How do I place these signs in the larger context of religious faith? The Bible, of course, is full of signs. Moses holding up the Ten Commandments is perhaps the closest thing to a modern advertising sign in the Old Testament. He was trying to achieve customer loyalty for Yahweh and take market share away from the golden calf—“Brand X.” Noah’s rainbow and Moses’ miracles to convince Pharaoh to release the Israelites come to mind as other striking signs. The words of Deuteronomy 6:4-5 were even to be written on the door frames and gates of houses: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” As a sign of their faith many Jews still place on their doorpost a small case called a mezuzah, which contains a tiny scroll inscribed with Deuteronomy 6:4–9 and 11:13–21.

Aaron, the brother of Moses, and John the Baptist were early versions of the advance man, going out before the star to make sure the posters are put up, the media notified. Of course, Jesus was not always enamored of signs. An angry Jesus weighed in concerning signs in this exchange from Matthew 12:

Then some of the scribes and Pharisees said to him, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.” But he answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign; but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”

Of course, Jesus himself became the true sign, his life, passion, and resurrection an icon of holiness. Thus signs have less negative or ironic connotations after Jesus is resurrected. The last verse of Mark says of the apostles: “And they went forth, and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following. Amen.”

Catholic theology sees the seven sacraments instituted by Christ as signs (both words and actions) that actually make present the grace they signify. These signs are neither purely natural nor purely spiritual, but a new order of reality, expressive of the Incarnation of Christ.

The road from biblical signs to the modern advertising testimonial and celebrity endorsement goes by way of the votive religious painting, paid for in thanksgiving for some blessing received. Part of Raphael’s daily bread in 1512 came from the donor of the Madonna di Foligno altarpiece, Sigismondo de Conti, who credited miraculous intervention when he survived a direct hit by a meteor on his home. St. Jerome is shown presenting him to the Virgin and Child, while the meteor is painted in the distance, about to hit his house. The implied public-relations message—“This painting of Jesus was donated by Sigismondo de Conti”—is an early version of messages like “This episode of The Lucy Show was sponsored by Crest.”

Another modern version of the votive painting is the practice of taking out an inexpensive classified ad in a newspaper to say “In thanksgiving to St. So-and-So for favors received,” followed by one’s initials. The person who paid for a billboard I shot one night in Kansas City had a bigger budget and something wonderful to be thankful for [see page 99]. The billboard reads:

Miracles Really Do Happen
and Mine Was Big!
Pray to St. Jude ALR

In another variation, this one in St. Louis, a former-drug-addict-turned-Christian house painter left an enormous sign of his thankfulness all over the flat roof of a house he painted, without telling his client the homeowner. Difficult to see except from above, the sign went undetected for several months until a neighbor saw it from far away. The owner actually liked the sign, which read “JESUS IS LORD! JESUS LOVES YOU.” Later, however, she needed a new roof, so now the message is gone.

Not long after I began this series of photographs, some people suggested to me that these religious signs were a disappearing vestige of a dying, unlamented culture. From the beginning, however, I had found these signs in all states of freshness and decay, and still do. The sign with Jesus knocking on a heart-shaped door has been lying facedown in the mud for years now, but I keep finding new messages popping up.

Some of those people who were hopeful that evangelism was dying out would criticize the makers of the signs I photograph for mixing business and religion, and there is certainly ample biblical support for challenging the world of money, or Mammon. Even if one allows for the possibility that business can be moral, what about those who contaminate the spiritual realm with it? Isn’t that what made Jesus so mad that he drove the money changers from the Temple? In fact, I think that the truth might be the other way around. More often than not, it seems to me, the signs that mix commerce and religion are trying to inject a little of the Sabbath into the Monday-through-Friday world—a materialistic world that bombards each of us with 3,500 advertising messages per day.

In Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person,” there is a character, Mrs. McIntyre, of whom it is said that “Christ in the conversation embarrassed her the way sex had her mother.” In contrast to such squeamish souls the sign- makers stand as a retro or low-brow sort of avant-garde of outcasts. Most of them do not believe in the separation of Church and world, Church and business, Church and state, but do believe in a Christ who inspires awe, even fear, as in the psalmist’s phrase, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

My documentary photographs extend the sign-makers’ PR for Jesus. I see their work as a new version of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, this time posted in front of the American civil church ruled by Supreme Court judges, many of whom seem bent on enforcing the separation of Church and almost everything, thereby establishing a religion of their own. I chafe at the oppression of this new theocracy. Although I do not advocate the establishment of a Christian theocracy, or any other state religion, I am for the separation of the Church and nothing.

Before the automotive age, my great-great-grandfather, a Mr. Ledford from the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee, was zealous about the Bible and preached on street corners. This part-Irish son of a Civil War captain believed the world was square. In the end he hung himself, God rest his soul. He was probably one of those to whom literary critic Louis Rubin was referring when he wrote:

Primitive Protestantism in the South is puritanical....the struggle against Satan is individual, continuous and desperate, and salvation is a personal problem, which comes not through ritual and sacrament, but in the gripping fervor of immediate confrontation with eternity.

With the birth and dramatic expansion of the car culture, Jerusalem has met Detroit, creating many new opportunities for street preaching. Christian evangelism via roadside signs, whether Protestant or Catholic, is—at least until the end of the era of automobile travel—a natural way to obey Christ’s command to “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation.” The traveler becomes a pilgrim, whether in the individual sense of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or in the corporate sense of the Pilgrim Church described in the documents of the Second Vatican Council. The philosopher Josef Pieper wrote about man as being in the “status viatoris,” the state of being on the way, in an existential sense. In his essays Walker Percy called man a sovereign wayfarer. Christ called himself the way, the path, the road. With all manner of signs, twentieth-century versions of my ancestor Mr. Ledford can point wayfarers toward the kingdom of heaven.

Visit Sam Fentress as Image Artist of the Month for March '08

Issue #16 • Summer 1997