Virtually anything human beings use to live their lives must be manufactured or harvested, wrought from raw materials by skill and labor. This may seem obvious, but consider the rows of hand-crafted thimbles, needles, hand tools, footwear, images, and amulets displayed in museums. The ingenuity and careful fabrication they exhibit demonstrate in the most material way the fact that human beings build their worlds and expend incessant effort to keep them in good working order. The plentiful availability of goods to which members of modern, industrialized societies are accustomed is easily taken for granted.

Things matter precisely because of the work they do. This essay will survey the visual and material cultures of religions in America with an eye to understanding how religious peoples of many different kinds have relied on things. “Material culture” refers not only to objects and images, but also to what they do and the power they have in performing the cultural work of organizing the world, cultivating and maintaining relations with sacred realities, and imagining the communities, places, pasts, and futures that compose one's sense of reality. By producing, collecting, revering, and exchanging their sacred objects, people are able to secure vital relationships among themselves, their ancestors, and the divine. It will become evident that this applies to modern as well as ancient peoples. Moderns cling to photographs, monuments, plastic statuary, and mass-produced lithographs no less emotionally than ancient peoples gripped stone effigies or medicine bags.