In the late twentieth century, artists were on the front lines of the culture wars. Leaders of the Christian Right in the U.S. made a national spectacle out of feminist and queer art, blasting it as sacrilegious or pornographic--and sometimes both. On the bully pulpits of television and talk radio, as well as in the halls of Congress, conservatives denounced artists ranging from Robert Mapplethorpe and Judy Chicago to Marlon Riggs and David Wojnarowicz. Conservatives, alarmed by shifting sex and gender norms, collided with progressive artists who were confronting sexism, homophobia, and racism. In Provoking Religion, Anthony Petro offers a compelling new history of the culture wars that places competing moralities of gender and sexuality alongside competing visions of the sacred. The modern culture wars, he shows, are best understood not as contests pitting religious conservatives against secular activists, but as a series of ongoing historical struggles to define the relationship between the sacred and the political. Through captivating case studies of "subversive" artists, Provoking Religion illuminates the underside of the culture wars, revealing how progressive artists and activists rendered from those most apparently profane aspects of human life-the stuff of conservatives' worst nightmares--their own haunting visions of the sacred.

"Anthony Petro's robustly interdisciplinary Provoking Religion expertly reimagines the terms and tactics of the Culture Wars. Revealing how the late-twentieth-century battle narrative pivoted around a divide managed by White Christian conservatives, their oppositional claims to "moral authority," and the reductive vise of their "literalist aesthetics," Petro illuminates the religion(s) and plural complexities and communities of the largely queer and feminist artists the wars staged as uniformly "secular." Impressively innovative and smart, Provoking Religion issues a timely clarion in the literatures on religion and art, and well beyond." - Sally Promey, Author of Religion in Plain View: Public Aesthetics of American Display