The article describes the goals, principles and different forms of the presentation of the cult of saints in the exhibitions of anti-religious and local history museums in the context of the ideological and cultural tasks of museum construction in the early 1930s. The issue of the presentation of icons and objects of church worship for anti-religious purposes was extremely acute: on the one hand, it was impossible to create an exposition about religion without exhibiting artifacts related to it, on the other, these artifacts were supposed to expose religion. After the campaign to uncover the “relics”, they were often exhibited in museums for anti-religious purposes, but this demonstration most often had the opposite effect. The article analyzes the materials of the discussion on the possibility of using icons and religious objects in anti-religious exhibitions. The author shows that during the period under study, the contradictions between the “anti-religious”, who considered interest in religious art as “grave aestheticism” that strengthened religion, and representatives of the so-called “culturalism” who tried to preserve and exhibit items of religious culture in museums. Particular attention is paid to studying the search for a “third way” in resolving the existing conflict between the classical principles of exhibiting religious art and the new so-called an “anti-religious” approach, which was based on the comparative study of religions and field anthropological research on popular religiosity. The main principles of this “third way”, focused on the preservation and display of items of religious culture, were the rejection of their pietistic interpretation, attention to formal art analysis, as well as Marxist historical, cultural and sociological analysis.