Church Signs Across America

For three years, Steve and Pam Paulson traveled throughout the country with a camera, documenting the often seen yet rarely analyzed (and sometimes misspelled) signs meant to get people off of hell’s toilet and into God’s pew. If there’s one lesson to be learned from this book, it’s that church sign sloganeering can be a delicate art. After all, it takes a certain amount of finesse (or divinity?) to manipulate all-caps plastic letters into godly roadside phrases like “DON’T GIVE UP! MOSES WAS ONCE A BASKET CASE!” From the menacing (“WHAT PART OF ‘THOU SHALL NOT’ DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?”) to the downright dorky (“OUR SUNDAYS ARE BETTER THAN DAIRY QUEEN”), these church signs allow a fascinating glimpse into one of the smallest God-damned literary scenes in America.