What can a photograph tell us about an individual’s religious beliefs and practices? A lot, according to Colleen McDannell, author of Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. In that book’s opening chapter, McDannell unpacks a single image—a snapshot of the living room of a home built by the Farm Security Administration—to reveal how wall hangings, knick-knacks, and furniture communicate valuable (and otherwise unobtainable) information about a family’s connection to the divine, the church, and other believers.

McDannell’s analysis came to mind as my partner, Dan, and I began processing the photographic collection of the Religious News Service at Presbyterian Historical Society. The photographs in the collection are nothing like the one McDannell uses in her analysis—most of the images are photojournalistic shots of denominational gatherings, public appearances, or other religion-related activities. Nevertheless, McDannell’s larger point—that a photographic image can tell us just as much or more than the written word—still applies to this fascinating collection.

Since its founding in 1934 by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, Religious News Service (RNS) has operated as a sort of religious Associated Press, sharing religious happenings and religious takes on current events with the broader reading public.

To say that RNS’s photographic records capture every U.S. religion-related event in the twentieth-century would be an overstatement—but not a major one. The photos depict typical national and international “current events”: political ceremonies, summits, and speeches; social events like rallies, protests, demonstrations; scenes from wars and other conflicts; and the like. But they also depict specifically religious events, trends, and observances, and introduce viewers to important contemporary figures in Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish communities.

Some researchers might value this collection for its visual chronicle of major events in twentieth-century American religious history. Indeed, the collection does substantially document the history of American Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish groups during the twentieth century. But for researchers who want to move beyond this narrative usage, the collection might prove useful in raising questions. Why do the photos often document meetings between politicians and religious figures? And why do they so frequently depict those whose religious beliefs and practices make them “different”—Amish, Orthodox Jews, Catholic nuns?

Questions like these point to the real utility of a collection like the RNS photos: scholars of American religious history can take the collection itself as a historical document and consider how its composition—its foci and its lacunae—reveals Americans’ thinking about religious matters during this era. Perhaps RNS focused on political-religious interactions because so many mid-century Americans were concerned about the “dividing wall” between church and state. And perhaps photographers pursued images of the Amish, Orthodox Jews, and Catholic nuns because Americans have had (and continue to have) an ongoing fascinating with the unknowable religious “other.”

Regardless of their value to researchers, the RNS photos—from the breathtaking to the bucolic, from the horrifying to the hilarious—have provided for interesting conversations between my processing partner and me over the last month-or-so. Check out the thumbnails below for some images from our processing work.  Photographs may not be used without permission from the Presbyterian Historical Society.

In 1898, a Southern Presbyterian named Lachlan Cumming Vass II volunteered as a missionary to the Congo Free State. At the time, the nation was still under the oppressive control of Belgium’s King Leopold II. In the 1890s, Leopold’s dummy non-governmental organization, the Association Internationale Africaine, began to exploit Congolese natural resources (including rubber, copper, and other minerals) and to forcibly employ indigenous peoples as laborers. Leopold made huge profits from these endeavors, but only through the violent physical oppression of Congolese workers, many of whom were tortured, maimed, and/or killed. Estimates suggest that this forced labor system directly or indirectly decimated the Free State’s indigenous population by 20%. Gradually, the international community learned of these atrocities, often through consciousness-raising activities of Presbyterian missionaries like William M. Morrison and William H. Sheppard. Upon his arrival, Vass quickly joined his colleagues’ efforts.

Vass’ photographic documentation of the atrocities now resides at the Presbyterian Historical Society, in the Vass Family Papers collection. My partner Dan and I recently had the opportunity to process these records. As we did, I was fascinated to learn more about Presbyterians’ roles in exposing the horrors of early colonial Congo rule.

Vass spoke explicitly about the rubber worker atrocities in a 1906 letter to Stanley Hall, president of the Congo Reform Association in the U.S.:

“How bad are the conditions? . . . I am in a position to say from personal experience . . . that the conditions in the Congo have not in the least been exaggerated . . . . It would make your blood boil to see some of the treatment meeted [sic] out on these poor defenseless people . . .”

Vass was also frank about his own cultural and social baggage, having been born in the Reconstruction-era South just seven years after Emancipation:

“I am a Southern [white] man from the black belt of eastern [North Carolina] and I don’t think we are often loaded with praise for our love of the Negro . . . but I wish to protest in the strongest terms to the absolutely inhuman way these poor people in their own country are being butchered by the white man, and all under the cloak of Philanthropy. I believe confidently that there has never been such a contemptably dishonest government on the face of the earth.”

Vass and his fellow missionaries certainly suffered for their outspokenness. In fact, both Sheppard and Morrison were charged with libel after they accused the Company Kasai rubber company of malfeasance and violence against workers. (Both missionaries were eventually acquitted). Nevertheless, the actions of these Presbyterian missionaries contributed to the overall effort to topple the regime, which succeeded on November 15, 1908, when Belgium annexed the state.

What amazing activists! You can learn more about Vass II and his work in the Congo by checking out the Vass Family Papers at PHS.

[Excerpts above from L.C. Vass, letter to G. Stanley Hall, September 4, 1906, Vass Family Papers, 1:14, Presbyterian Historical Society (Philadelphia, Pa.).]