Provoking Religion: Sex, Art, and the Culture Wars

by Anthony M. Petro

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.

328 pages, Hardcover

Published April 22, 2025

About the author

Anthony Petro is an associate professor at Boston University. His first book, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion, tells the history of American religious responses to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and their role in the promotion of a national moral discourse on sex. His latest book is Provoking Religion: Sex, Art, and the Culture Wards.