On The Road With Jesus

Sam Fentress is a Jack Kerouac of sorts. He travels the roads of America looking to find not himself but Biblical signs and bill boards - messages to praise and persuade.  In his many sojourns he has found farmhouses, grain silos, restaurants, hair salons, gas stations and even traffic signs bearing Biblical messages. An artist and a photographer, Fentress first started photographing roadside biblical messages when a student in his class brought him a picture of a barn covered in Scriptures. Fentress was stunned.

"It just knocked my socks off as a picture," he said. "The boldness of the farmer in covering the roof, the sides — every square foot of the barn had some sort of Bible quote, Old Testament, New Testament, Gospels, Epistles, Revelation."

Fentress has photographed an urban billboard which rotated its message to read among other things.

• God is like Coke: He's the real thing.
• God is like Pan Am: He makes the going great.
• God is like Tide: He gets the stains out that others leave behind.
• God is like-VO-5 hair spary: He holds through all kinds of weather.
• God is like Alka Seltzer: Try him, you'll like him.

Behind the billboard was a building with a big sign, "Furniture Factory Outlet World." God and mammon jousting for attention.

Now Fentress has a book out of his collection of photographs titled "Bible Road" which he edited for what he hopes is, "interesting both theologically and aesthetically."

Sam Fentress has spent the past 25 years crisscrossing America's highways and byways, stopping along the way to snap shots of religious signs in every state except Hawaii. He found everything from John 3:3 on a farm silo in Ohio to "Obey God or Burn" scratched into a rock in Harlem....

At some point in the late '70s or early '80s, Fentress realized the farmer wasn't alone. Wherever he looked, he saw religious signs along the roadside. He started to methodically photograph thousands of such images over the next two decades. Along the way, he also became a Catholic.

Fentress, 52, has a master of arts from the Art Institute of Chicago and his work is collected by museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the St. Louis Art Museum.

The religious roadside signage is particularly American, he said, given the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of speech and religion and the country's religious diversity.

"Americans are told they can say whatever they want," he said. And people feel free to say it — or perhaps, show it — whether on their front lawn, barn or business.

Fentress said he was intrigued by the juxtaposition of landscape and religious message. Some images capture signs on businesses, which he attributed to a capitalist tendency to co-opt religion into something that can be marketed and sold. But he also recognized the impulse to spread the "good news" wherever possible.

In Las Vegas, he spotted Glorified Bodies Inc., a collision repair shop with the Christian fish symbol on its signpost. He noted the relationship between Jesus' resurrected body, as described in the New Testament, and restoring damaged cars. [Link]

For some samples of Fentress' photos see here.  (Crossposted at Accidental Blogger)

Comments

[Usha]

Quite amusing. Photographing religious signage is a pastime that will keep a person busy in the States, for sure. I have to laugh at his assertion, however (I sincerely hope Fentress didn't really say this):

"The religious roadside signage is particularly American... given the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of speech and religion and the country's religious diversity."

Where's the religious diversity in the States and the sense of freedom to display religious sayings? It's only Christian sayings that I see freely flaunted from barn roofs and beauty parlor marquis. Indeed, in every example shown from Fentress's work, we see only Christian messages. I have to wonder how free an American would feel to put up a big sign that says something more along the lines of "There is no deity but Allah," or even the following wiccan prayer:

"Gracious Goddess,
You who are the Queen of the Gods,
the lamp of the night,
the creator of all that is wild and free;
Mother of woman and man;
lover of the Horned God and protectress of all the Wicca:
Descend, I pray,
with Your Lunar ray of power
and bless your Child this night (morning/day)."
(from A Wiccan Rosary )

—let alone painting a large green crescent or swastika on the side of their barn.

[Ruchira Paul]

Usha, my thoughts exactly. It is all quite cute and funny as long as it is Christian. Diversity is far from making it to the public square although Jewish groups have had some success, but not quite making it to the billboards yet. My husband did see a bumper sticker on a car before him last week which read, "Choose to be Chosen. Choose Judaism."

I took a good friend of mine (a devout Baptist) to a Buddhist temple last month. We didn't enter the temple but I wanted to see the statue outside which some call one of Houston's 7 Wonders. She didn't say anything but her face was turning a bilious green when I decided to drive away.

But as for the rest, this and this are what we are more likely to encounter amidst the current public discourse.

[Patricia]

I have bookmarked this page.

[Tomas]

I was spellbound - wow, Thank you for the chance to walk on The Road With Jesus