Those who follow Utah’s legislative sessions will have noticed the passage last month of SB 193, a bill that would make Good Friday—or at least four hours of it—a state holiday beginning in 2027. Those in certain social media circles will also have heard the clamor surrounding the bill, including speculation about what it signals. Good Friday and its associated devotional practices have not traditionally held a central place in the worship life of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Rather, they are associated with what Protestants and Mormons have sometimes dismissed as the “pageantry” of Catholicism. Does SB 193 mark a rapprochement between Catholics and Latter-day Saints, or simply reflect a broader consolidation of cultural power among conservative Christians and their desire to make that visible with official recognition of a religious holiday? To complicate things for the conspiratorially minded, David Habben’s The Way of the Cross, a reinterpretation of the Via Crucis or Stations of the Cross, opened just in time for Holy Week at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art.

David Habben is an artist who has made a career of moving fluidly between what others treat as separate worlds—illustration and fine art. An associate professor in BYU’s design department, his illustration work has been recognized by Communication Arts, 3×3, Graphis, and the Society of Illustrators, while his paintings and drawings continue to appear in gallery settings. That fluency between categories—the willingness to refuse a false boundary — carries over into his relationship with belief. He has described a long fascination with “how we determine our faith and what we worship…where we devote our thought and our time,” and a recognition that we tend to encounter those larger questions through a lens shaped by our own experience. It is the sensibility of someone who has learned to sit with multiple traditions at once without needing to resolve them — which may be exactly what drew him to the Stations.

The Stations of the Cross is a devotional sequence associated with Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy that traces Christ’s path from condemnation to crucifixion and burial. Formalized in the late medieval period and often linked to Franciscan traditions, the Stations typically consist of 14 moments—Christ before Pilate, the carrying of the cross, encounters along the way, and the crucifixion itself—each accompanied by prayer and reflection. Installed in churches—like the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City, where you’ll find Sam Wilson’s version—or set along pilgrimage routes, they invite the faithful to move physically from one scene to the next, embodying a meditation on suffering, sacrifice, and redemption.

It is a tradition that mainstream Protestantism has historically been indifferent or actively hostile to; early reformers explicitly rejected much of the devotional apparatus surrounding Holy Week as unscriptural Catholic “popery.” The LDS tradition, emerging from that Protestant milieu and then radicalizing it further, was if anything more emphatic in its rejection—the “whore of Babylon” language from the Book of Revelation was applied by Joseph Smith and early church leaders quite directly to the Catholic Church and to apostate Christianity generally.

Installed adjacent to BYU’s Gates of Paradise exhibition, Habben’s The Way of the Cross wraps around the gallery walls, inviting a quiet, processional movement through the space. Accompanied by a prayer, each work is in a minimalist style that is more layered than it might first appear: a dense, looping brush of ink—reminiscent of woodcut or linocut—serves as a foundation, with color applied separately in the manner of screenprinting, its registration deliberately allowed to slip. Over both layers float geometric forms, white-outlined rectangles and triangles that neither anchor the figures nor contain them, hovering above both, belonging to neither. Color does much of the emotional work: in one image, two figures are individuated entirely through hue—crimson against lavender—readable as an encounter before the forms themselves resolve. In another, a falling figure reads as almost weightless despite its collapse, the crown of thorns barely indicated, the cross rendered in warm gold grain against red. There is no blood, no overt violence. This is not Matthias Grünewald’s (or Mel Gibson’s) idea of the Passion. Instead, the narrative emerges through small details—a bowed head, the suggestion of a crown of thorns, the weight of a collapsing body—held at a distance and filtered through abstraction.

The installation makes the devotional logic of the space explicit: a wooden church pew sits at the center of the gallery, oriented toward a fifteenth image of the resurrected Christ on the far wall, its axis as deliberate as any altar arrangement. Traditionally, the Stations conclude after 14 images with Christ’s burial, a Good Friday meditation that ends in absence rather than resurrection. Habben preserves that structure while also setting it slightly askew — that distinction resonating in a Latter-day Saint context, where the cross, and images of Christ’s suffering, have often been set aside as symbols and subjects of art in favor of the resurrected, victorious Christ.

“I was never like, ‘Oh, I’m going to do a Mormon Stations,'” Habben says about the project. “It was, I’m going to do this for myself. And if I was the one saying this, how would I say it?” Encountering the tradition through travel and time spent in cathedrals, he was drawn to what he describes as “an embodiment of your worship.” Rather than adopt the traditional language, he rewrote it. The historic prayers associated with the Stations tend to dwell on human unworthiness, inviting the participant to identify with Christ’s suffering through a recognition of one’s fallen state. “I felt like the St. Francis–attributed prayers… want you to feel less, that Christ can come in,” he says. His version shifts that emphasis. “I take more of a sense that the message he delivers is, You can be your divine being already. Let’s help you remember that.” It implies a path rather than a rescue. “Not that I’m horrible now, necessarily, but take me where I’m at and help me be better.”  Habben is aware that this approach is shaped by his own context, that it is an LDS-inflected version. “It may be vanilla, it may be Utah,” he says, “but it is what I’ve got to bring to the front.”

David Habben, “Station 3: Jesus Falls for the First Time”

Habben could have called the exhibition “Stations of the Cross.” His choice of “The Way of the Cross”—a direct translation of Via Crucis—resonates in interesting ways. “The Way” was the earliest name for the Christian movement before it had a name; it also echoes the Tao, the foundational concept of a path or way in East Asian contemplative thought. Whether conscious or not, the title opens the work outward, suggesting that what Habben is after is less a reinterpretation of a specific devotional tradition than an inquiry into something the traditions share. It is a personal—and in a sense universal—way of the cross.

If Governor Cox signs SB 193 into law, don’t expect processional movements to pop up at local LDS wardhouses. Good Friday has never really been part of LDS observance. Even Easter can slip by relatively unnoticed—especially when it coincides, as it often does, with general conference weekend, and members watch proceedings on screens rather than gather for local worship. Critics of SB 193 decry the blow it would deal to the separation of church and state—but Christmas, enshrined in the civic calendar without controversy, already does that. The more telling problem may be cultural rather than constitutional as the bill seems to emerge from a place of theological opportunism: a majority faith—the Utah legislature is still 90% LDS—leveraging a holiday it does not observe, in service of a pan-Christian coalition whose identity is defined less by shared theology than by shared cultural opposition.

Habben’s work offers a different model. His Way of the Cross does not assert so much as adapt, taking a form long held at a distance—and historically condemned—and reworking it into something quieter, more provisional, more honest about its own limitations. Less a declaration than a negotiation. Less an annexation than an arrival.

The Way of the Cross, BYU Museum of Art, Provo, through Aug. 22

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.