Abstract

Increasingly, the practices of corporate branding and all of the contingent theories, strategies, and visual identity practices associated with them are crossing the divide between the secular business world and the worlds of the sacred. Now openly employed by churches and other religious institutions, branding practices are common fare in the American religious marketplace. Using the case of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the implementation of its 1985 corporate seal, this article sets out to show that the visual identity systems of contemporary denominations are recoding the organizational logic of these churches and redefining the traditional role of religious symbols.