Paper short abstract:

Religious objects mediate connections between people and the divine. In this paper I explore the ways in which religious objects are made valuable instruments through ritualisation, while asking how they become carriers of meaning in the personal relation between humans and non-human entities.

Paper long abstract:

Interaction with the spiritual world always requires mediation (Meyer 2009, 2012). Bodies, objects, and technologies are used in everyday religious practices to make the divine present on earth. Mediation, however, also poses a problem for religious actors – especially within Christianity — since immediate contact with God or the Holy Spirit is idealized over mediated access, and bodies, things, and technologies don’t always last.

In this paper, I ask how religious objects become and remain valuable for people as instruments which make the divine present on earth. Using my fieldwork in ‘dechurched’ Roman Catholic churches in the Netherlands which must get rid of their sacred objects before closing down (Cuperus 2019), I will show how items are imbued with ‘sacred value’ which ‘sticks’ to them, even when they are no longer useful as mediators in Holy Mass but are remobilized as art in museums or as kitsch in home decoration.

This paper aims to answer the question how to understand the way in which sacred value or spiritual capital (Openshaw 2019, 2020) becomes imbued in objects, while simultaneously acknowledging that these processes are not merely technical – in the sense of ‘machinal’. I will argue that interaction between human and a range of non-human actors (objects, deities) are not just ritualized processes of authentication (Chidester 2018), but necessarily involve a much more artful and poetic process (Stolow 2014) wherein both person and object become carriers of meaning.