The Impact of Religious Illiteracy on Museum Communications

Written by Chiara Cecalupo

The tendency in the Western world is seeing religion everyday more as something gone from being a public sphere to a total individuality, and this has contributed to a revision of the approach to religion, leading to forming personal beliefs and religions drawing on all the world's faiths. Alongside this radical change in the approach to faith, there is the constant and irreversible social and cultural secularisation of society, with an increasingly multicultural (and therefore multi-religious) social composition and a constant weakening of school teaching of history, Latin and art history across the continent. This means that generations of Europeans are then becoming completely unaware of the Christian religion. Moreover, if we look at the tourists who continuously arrive throughout Europe from all parts of the globe, we understand that our Christian historical and archaeological heritage today speaks to people who do not belong to the Christian tradition. 

At the same time, however, the Christian religion dominates the physical landscape of European tourism: religious buildings are central in the tourist flows of all nations, they are the main sightseeing of a city, and Christian heritage goes way beyond churches, beyond the sacred/religious museum or attraction alone. The entire European artistic heritage is in fact steeped in Christianity: it is clear that if the public loses the familiarity between biblical narrative, rituals, liturgy, and European culture, it will be increasingly difficult to understand our heritage. When most visitors no longer recognise religious themes, objects and figures, we can say that we are facing a religious illiteracy of postmodernity. And whoever works in the museum field cannot ignore it, it must become our first concern.

In a museum horizon where aesthetics rule, there is a risk that the world's great spiritualities will be reduced to a level of mere idolatry. In addition, religious communication reaches visitors is an entirely subjective and individual matter, according to their own background and their previous religious knowledge, which, as we have seen, is continually changing and becoming smaller. The contemporary museum, whatever it exhibits, must therefore present religious features to an audience that often neither understands nor shares them, bearing in mind that the presentation of religious aspects must start from the point where visitors are.  If the nature of the audience in museums is moving more and more towards internationality, if the public today always has different religious knowledge or no faith tradition, the museum, if it wants to be a real meeting point for everyone, must create a dialogue and seriously consider the visitors' background in any programming.

The components of religion (concepts, practices, experience, and rituals) in the sociological approach to the belief, are all non-material, and can only be explained in connection to the objects through interpretations provided by the museum. It appears clearly that the standardised language that we use today in museums to communicate Christian heritage it has to be revised integrally. If then put ourselves in the shoes of those new secularised and multicultural audiences, what we may read in museum panels does not make much sense, and certainly does not help the understanding of the object in the museum. It is against this non-understanding that we must work. 

It happens frequently to assume that visitors have an a priori, sophisticated knowledge and understanding of the Christian religion. This is often unjustifiably assumed, and Christianity in a secularised world requires an anthropological approach, just as one does for pagan or exotic objects. So, a first solution may be treating Christian heritage with an anthropological cut, as we usually do with religions of lost civilisations or beliefs from other continents. A wider presentation of a ‘cultural biography of objects’, of the anthropological aspect of the artefacts, can be useful for Christian objects in museums, which are vehicles of moral messages designed for specific practical use and to represent early Christian ideals and theology. Reinterpreting the early Christian religious aspect in the museum serves to make these objects speak seriously, to everyone and in a way that is relevant to people and the present time.

From a communicative point of view, another excellent tool may be storytelling, the detailed communication of the emotional aspects of a single object. In order to preserve Europe's religious heritage for the future, researching and telling their general history and their single stories are essential, because the general public cannot be expected to care for a heritage it has no access to, nor sympathy for, nor knowledge about. 

In general, museums have limited mediation strategies if we choose to bind ourselves exclusively to unidirectional verbal communication (both written and oral), and very limiting can be the display, the most immediate but at the same time most immobile form of communication in a museum. A good example is displays that reconstruct original contexts and create intuitive connections among the audiences. They in fact answer the question ‘how does this artefact originate and what ground does it have in its religious context of origin?’. This is the case, for examples, of museum reproductions of specific cultural spaces, or period-rooms.

This hints, far from being a definitive solution, may recall universal special experiences to help visitors understand and can easily offer a cue for mending that link between object and religious context that underpins the theological understanding of the artefact and is the first step in recreating a discourse of immediate experiential understanding. The future therefore presents us with interesting communicative challenges. Understanding our audience and the world in which we work will increasingly mean questioning the way we have worked so far, seeking new ways of communicating and explaining. Not doing so will mean that in a generation the materials of Christianity will remain mute.

Basic Bibliography

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C. Cecalupo, Apuntes para una historia del museo sacro cristiano desde la antigüedad hasta nuestros días, Tarragona 2024.

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J. E. A. Kroesen, “This Is My Place”. (Hi)Storytelling Churches in the Northern Netherlands, in Religions, 12, 702 (2021).

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