Page 312 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

clastic inclination, which serves to express its difference vis-à-vis Catholicism’s
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high regard of the image as a site of devotion (cf. Latour 2002). As David Mor-
gan (1998, 3) argues in his work on visual piety in America, “the act of looking
itself contributes to religious formation and, indeed, constitutes a powerful
practice of belief.” He shows that, certainly in popular Protestant practice, im-
ages have a central role in that they recon¤rm in a visual mode what people
believe and think. The popular protestant aesthetic, to use his terms, “pivots on
seeing as real what one has imagined” (26).
Morgan’s plea to devote attention to “looking” as a practice constituting be-
lief in Protestantism is well taken. While it is impossible in the framework of
this essay to delve into a genealogy of looking in Ghanaian Christianity, it is
useful to glance brie®y at the way that mid-nineteenth-century Protestant mis-
sions introduced looking as speci¤c Pietist practice. While the churches were
kept sober and empty, and the missionaries were at pains to condemn local prac-
tices of idol worship, new religious images were introduced into converts’ living
rooms. For instance, the missionaries brought to Africa the famous lithograph
of The Broad and the Narrow Path, which belonged to the popular culture of
the Awakening and was cherished by African converts. This lithograph, still
popular in Ghana and reprinted in numerous actualized versions, presents a
very interesting relationship between image and word, as I have explained in
detail elsewhere (Meyer 1999a, 31ff.). Juxtaposing images and biblical refer-
ences, the lithograph focuses on a particular spectator who is made to look at
the image and at the same time to look up the biblical reference in order to
understand the former. Its ¤rst lesson is that the eye of God, depicted at the top
of the image, sees everything and is able to penetrate the surface of the hidden.
In order to be able to adopt His perspective, one has to submit oneself to His
visual regime which entails that in order to see, one has to be seen. Here vision
depends on divine surveillance. The second lesson is based on the juxtaposition
of images and references to biblical texts and shows that, since images may
evoke many confusing associations, it is only possible to determine their mean-
ing by referring to the Bible. Thus, because there is little con¤dence in the power
of the eye to genuinely understand an image, the lithograph offers a didactic
device to practice the Protestant way of seeing the world. Here the Bible is pre-
sented as a key to allegorical interpretation, and thus limits the interpretative
freedom stemming from the image. At the same time the lithograph, which,
after all, is an image itself, acknowledges that the Bible alone is unable to cre-
ate meaning, that images are needed in order to af¤rm the Bible’s power to
explain them.
While converts found it dif¤cult to appropriate or even accept many new no-
tions introduced by missionaries, it seems that they quite easily adopted Prot-
estantism’s popular visual culture and its acts of looking. At the same time
viewing the world as an image to be understood by reference to the Bible alone
was not enough for African Christians who were far more inclined than mis-
sionaries to obtain access to the realm of the invisible and to have visions. This
urge to see, of course, links up with local religious traditions, which considered

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