Ten Ways to Save the World
1.
In a purple-walled gallery of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, you can visit the shrine constructed by Air Force veteran and janitor James Hampton for Jesus Christ’s return. Entitled “Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nation’s Millennium General Assembly,” the altar and its paraphernalia were constructed to serve as temple objects for the messiah, who according to Hampton, based on visions he had of Moses in 1931, the Virgin Mary in 1946, and Adam in 1949, shall arrive in Washington D.C. His father had been a part-time gospel singer and Baptist preacher, but Hampton drew not just from Christianity, but brought Afrocentric folk traditions of his native South Carolina to bear in his composition. Decorated with passages from Daniel and Revelation, Hampton’s thinking (done in secret over 14 years in his Northwest Washington garage) is explicated in his 100-page manifesto St. James: The Book of the 7 Dispensations (dozens of pages are still in an uncracked code). Claiming that he had received a revised version of the Decalogue, Hampton’s notebook declared himself to be “Director, Special Projects for the State of Eternity.” His work is a fugue of word salad, a concerto of pressured speech. A combined staging ground for the incipient millennium—Hampton’s shrine is a triumph.
As if the bejeweled shield of the Urim and the Thummim were constructed not by Levites in ancient Jerusalem, but by a janitor in Mt. Vernon. Exodus and Leviticus give specifications for those liturgical objects of the Jewish Temple—the other-worldly cherubim gilded, their wings touching the hem of infinity huddled over the Ark of the Covenant; the woven brocade curtain with its many-eyed Seraphim rendered in fabric of red and gold; the massive candelabra of the ritual menorah. The materials with which the Jews built their Temple were cedar and sand stone, gold and precious jewels. When God commanded Hampton to build his new shrine, the materials were light-bulbs and aluminum foil, door frames and chair legs, pop cans and cardboard boxes, all held together with glue and tape. The overall effect is, if lacking in gold and cedar, transcendent nonetheless. Hampton’s construction looks almost Mesoamerican, aluminum foil delicately hammered onto carefully measured cardboard altars, names of prophets and patriarchs from Ezekiel to Abraham rendered.
Everyday Hampton would return from his job at the General Services Administration, where he would mop floors and disinfect counters, and for untold hours he’d assiduously sketch out designs based on his dreams, carefully applying foil to wood and cardboard, constructing crowns from trash he’d collected on U Street. What faith would compel this, what belief to see it finished? Nobody knew he was doing it. Hampton would die of stomach cancer in 1964, never married, and with few friends or family. The shrine would be discovered by a landlord angry about late rent. Soon it would come to the attention of reporters, and then the art mavens who thrilled to the discovery of “outsider” art—that is work accomplished by the uneducated, the mentally disturbed, the impoverished, the religiously zealous. “Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nation’s Millennium General Assembly” would be purchased and donated to the Smithsonian (in part through the intercession of artist Robert Rauschenberg) where it would be canonized as the Pieta of American visionary art, outsider art’s Victory of Samothrace.
Hampton wasn’t an artist though—he was a prophet. He was Elijah and Elisha awaiting Christ in the desert. Daniel Wojcik writes in Outsider Art: Visionary Worlds and Trauma that “apocalyptic visions often have been expressions of popular religiosity, as a form of vernacular religion, existing at a grassroots level apart from the sanction of religious authority.” In that regard Hampton was like so many prophets before him, just working in toilet paper and beer can rather than papyrus—he was Mt. Vernon’s Patmos. Asking if Hampton was mentally ill is the wrong question; it’s irrelevant if he was schizophrenic, bipolar. Etiology only goes so far in deciphering the divine language, and who are we so sure of ourselves to say that the voice in a janitor’s head wasn’t that of the Lord? Greg Bottoms writes in Spiritual American Trash: Portraits from the Margins of Art and Faith that Hampton “knew he was chosen, knew he was a saint, knew he had been granted life, this terrible, beautiful life, to serve God.” Who among us can say that he was wrong? In his workshop, Hampton wrote on a piece of paper “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” There are beautiful and terrifying things hidden in garages all across America; there are messiahs innumerable. Hampton’s shrine is strange, but it is oh so resplendent.
By the time Brother genuflected before , the founder of the Quaker Society of Friends, his tongue had already been bored with a hot iron poker and the letter “B” (for “Blasphemer”) had been branded onto his forehead by civil authorities. The two had not gotten along in the past, arguing over the theological direction of the Quakers, but by 1659 Nayler was significantly broken by their mutual enemies that he was forced to drag himself to Fox’s parlor and to
