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Introduction. 

Over the past seven months I have been from Memphis to Mobile, Montgomery to Mebane, Burlington to Birmingham, Gadsden to Greenville, Atlanta to Attalla, Pensacola to Pigeon Forge, and not once on any of these trips have I failed to find God. And I wasn’t even looking for him.

            I was looking for biscuits. I could, but I won’t, bore you with the details of this debacle. Suffice it to say that it involved a camera, a cookbook, and a concept known only to myself as “Grandsbiscuitization,” or the process by which something ceases to be Southern and becomes, instead, “southern style.” In no way did this project come close to completion, or even really starting. What it did do was to show me that Southerners, at least the ones I talked to, and the South itself, would much rather talk to you about their God than their biscuits.

Over the thousands of miles that I have recently driven across the South I have yet to see one sign that tells me how to make a biscuit. I have, however, seen more signs than I can count telling me how to get to heaven, or rather, how not to go to hell.

            Realizing that the South I was looking for was not the South that was being revealed to me, I took up the task of documenting as many of these signs as I could.

But make no mistake that this is in any way complete. This is merely the beginning of a larger piece of work. Here I will offer no analysis, no conclusions, only pictures, approximations of the complexity of the Southern religious roadside. I hope you enjoy seeing them as much as I enjoyed finding and photographing them.

- Joe York