Liberation in White and Black: The American Visual Culture of Two Philadelphia-area Episcopal Churches

Abstract

Liberation in White and Black studies, respectively, Washington Memorial Chapel (WMC) and The Church of the Advocate (COA), which are two Episcopal parishes in the Diocese of Pennsylvania. This dissertation investigates the ways that the visual culture of these spaces represents and affects the religious, racial and national self-understanding of these churches and their ongoing operations by offering particular and opposing narrative interpretations of American history. These "sacred spaces" visually describe the United States (implicitly and explicitly) in terms of race and violence in narratives that set them in fundamental opposition to each other, and set a trajectory for each parishes' life that has determined a great deal of its activities over time. I develop this thesis by situating each congregation and its development in the context of the entire history of both the Episcopal Church and Philadelphia as related to race, violence and patriotism. WMC is what historian of religions scholar Jonathan Z. Smith calls a "locative" space and tries to persuade all Americans to patriotically covenant with images of heroic "White" freedom struggle. COA is what Smith calls a "utopian" space and tries to compel its visitors to covenant with a subversive critique of the United States in terms of the parallels between biblical Israel and the African American freedom struggle. My analysis draws especially on the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu and David Morgan. A major focus of Pierre Bourdieu's work in both Language and Symbolic Power, and The Logic of Practice is the power of group-making. Group-creating power is often exercised through representations that create a seemingly objective sense of group identity and a social world that is perceived as "natural." David Morgan writes that religious visual culture functions as this sort of political practice through the organization of memory among those who are drawn to "covenant" with images. The Introduction of my dissertation lays out the theoretical approaches informing the visual culture analysis of these Episcopal Churches and raises the significant questions. Three main chapters provide: 1) an historical background of patriotism, race and violence in the Episcopal Church and in Philadelphia in particular, and 2-3) a thorough analysis of the history and visual culture of each space in context. A great deal of my analysis will be interpretive "readings" of the visual culture of the aforementioned churches in their larger contexts to explain how the visual culture represents social classifications to affect the constituents religious, racial and national self-understanding, and their ongoing operations by offering particular and opposing narrative interpretations of American history. The project concludes by summarizing the ways that the analysis of these spaces explicates the thesis with thoughts about the implications for the disciplines involved and further research.