Religion from the Outside:

Christian Symbolism in Non-Christian Art

Saturday 13 June 2026

Christian symbolism gains its primary meaning within the theological and liturgical grammar of Christian faith. Yet many of its images, narratives, and visual motifs circulate widely beyond explicitly Christian contexts. This conference explored how Christian symbols are reinterpreted, reframed, and redeployed in non-Christian settings across literature, music, visual art, film, television, and digital media. Papers examined cases ranging from nineteenth-century opera and modernist literature to contemporary animation, gaming, and popular culture.

We invited contributions that investigate how Christian imagery functions when detached from Christian confession: as aesthetic resource, cultural memory, critique of Christianity, vehicle for other spiritualities, or simply as widely understood symbolic vocabulary. We were particularly interested in a) the use of Christian symbolism to offer alternatives to Christianity, and b) its use in contexts so far from its origins that it develops an alternative system of reference.  Our preference was to focus on central cases of work by artists not professing Christianity, leaving edge cases for another time.

The conference was organized by Brendan Wolfe and Madeleine Meyer, and sponsored by the Art as Revelation Project, the St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology, and the Culture and Conscience Initiative.  Paper abstracts may be found here.

Please direct any questions about the event to [email protected]

Schedule