Volume 50, Number 11 · July 3, 2003
God's Houses
By Alison Lurie
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
Building from Belief: Advance, Retreat, and Compromise in the Remaking of Catholic Church Architecture
by Michael E. DeSanctis
Liturgical Press, 116 pp., $19.95 (paper)
Houses of God: Region, Religion, and Architecture in the United States
by Peter W. Williams
University of Illinois Press, 321 pp., $34.95; $24.95 (paper)
Wooden Churches: A Celebration
with an introduction by Rick Bragg
Algonquin, 122 pp., $18.95
When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America
by Jeanne Halgren Kilde
Oxford University Press, 310 pp., $45.00
Sacred Architecture
by Caroline Humphrey and Piers Vitebsky
Little, Brown, 182 pp., $15.95 (paper)
1.
Approaching a strange house, we often start to form an impression of its owner. Is it easy of access or surrounded by walls and hedges and gates? Is it beautiful or ugly, well kept up or dirty and run-down? What is it like inside? We take it for granted that there is a connection between a home and its inhabitants; there is even a Jung- ian psychological game based on this premise.
The same thing is true of other types of buildings: apartments, of-fices, schools, and—perhaps especially—churches. Bonnie MacDougall of Cornell University speaks in her lectures of them as "visible religion." People of many different faiths refer to their churches or temples as the house of God. Visitors from another planet, taking this literally, but noticing that God is seldom visible in his designated dwellings, might well attempt to discover his nature from an examination of these dwellings. It would soon be clear to them that the divinity takes many different forms.
The God who resides in most of the great European cathedrals, for instance, is clearly very tall and very rich. He enjoys classical art and music. In Britain and other parts of Northern Europe his personality and taste are restrained: he likes stone statues and wood-carving, but does not care for gold trim or for nudes. Further south in Europe, he has a more dramatic personality, and appreciates luxury: his preference in decoration inclines toward the baroque and even the rococo. Some churches in southern Germany and Austria, with their gilt barley-sugar pilasters and whipped-cream cupids and angels, suggest a highly romantic nature, with a craving for sweets.
Churches, of course, are erected by men (even today, there are few female religious architects). They construct what they think beautiful, what is in fashion, what the patron wants—or a combination of these. But they are unified in believing that their buildings will influence the people who use them. They see architecture as a cause of human action, rather than an effect. Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852), the famous landscape designer and author of The Architecture of Country Houses, thought that it was possible to control behavior through architecture, and that his buildings would make their inhabitants orderly and law-abiding. Perhaps the most extreme version of this view is that advanced by the Oriental science of building design, feng shui, now more and more popular in the West. According to some feng shui experts, a wrongly placed door or window can make you poor, miserable, or neurotic. Today many people of non-Asian origin, not all of them in California, will not move into a house or an office until it has been inspected and rearranged according to this system.
Anthropologists and sociologists, on the other hand, view buildings as the outward manifestation of a society: an effect rather than a cause. Ebenezer Howard, the inventor of the Garden City, believed that culture was embodied in buildings and cities. Most Western houses, for example, have sepa-rate rooms for sleeping, eating, and washing, because we believe that these activities should be kept separate. Joanne Waghorne of Syracuse University sees a connection between the traditional multifamily Indian house, in which the son and his wife and children occupy separate quarters in his parents' home, and the design of Hindu temples which, though dedicated to a single deity, also usually contain smaller shrines to other gods.
Some experts on church architecture hold both views simultaneously. Michael DeSanctis, an architectural historian and design consultant, remarks in Building from Belief that buildings "exert a subtle but real influence on those who inhabit them" but also that "every house represents a self-portrait of its occupant."
Lately several writers have tried to explore the connection between the way buildings look and the lives of the people who use them, particularly in religious architecture. Others, like Richard Giles and Michael S. Rose, have written impassioned studies recommending particular types of church design, with the avowed intent of changing the way people behave, believe, and worship.
2.
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, four possible types of religious architecture became popular in America, each with its distinctive appearance and perceived meaning. In chronological order, they were the colonial, the neo-Gothic, the neomedieval, and (after 1900) the modernist. Churches in all these styles can still be seen, and most are in current use.
The colonial church, favored especially by evangelical Protestants—Congregational, Lutheran, Baptist, and Presbyterian—is often an actual example or copy of the traditional New England church/meetinghouse featured on countless New England calendars and in Grant Wood's famous painting The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. It is simple and rectangular, with a steeple and a shingled roof, and is constructed of wood and painted white. It has many windows and is usually almost without interior decoration except for an occasional curly brass or pewter sconce or chandelier. There may be a balcony running around three sides of the building, supported by columns. The most striking interior feature is the large, impressive pulpit, which may have a canopy or sounding board and is usually elevated three to eight feet above floor level, silently indicating the dominance of the preacher, and of his sermons and prayers.
At first most of these churches contained parallel ranks of box pews whose sides were sometimes so high that most of the occupants could not look at their neighbors: all they could see was the preacher. From a Puritan theological point of view, this was not a disadvantage: worldly curiosity was a distraction from the divine. As Peter W. Williams puts it in Houses of God, "the preached Word [was] the chief point of intersection between the sacred and secular realms." Martin Luther had also stated that written and spoken language was the exclusive representation of God's power, and that the purpose of worship was to praise God and understand his Word. Though hymns might be sung, music was of minor importance, while statues, paintings, and stained glass were considered popish.
To many Americans these colonial and neocolonial churches now seem naturally beautiful, in part because of their elegant simplicity of line and construction, which appears to embody the moral qualities of the early settlers. They suggest colonial American ideals and virtues: honesty, simplicity, thrift, seriousness, idealism, purity, and piety, and a life somewhat lacking in material comforts: the seats in those pews were hard, especially after the customary one- or two-hour sermon.
Nostalgic admiration for these buildings remains widespread. Recently the prize-winning New York Times reporter Rick Bragg published Wooden Churches: A Celebration, in which he declares, "I guess I will go to my grave believing that a church should be wooden and white and have a steeple on it," and "there can be no doubt, no discussion, that this is and always will be the House of the Living God." Bragg's book is a collection of excellent black-and-white photographs of white wooden churches and black and white churchgoers. They are accompanied by well-chosen, often moving quotations from many famous American authors who agree with Bragg—or could, by judicious selection and juxtaposition, appear to do so. Most of the churches in the book are small and simple, and often shabby or even deserted. They also seem to be mainly Protestant, though there are two rather sad-looking Catholic examples in Rodney, Mississippi, and Valle Crucis, North Carolina, and an odd little Orthodox church in Wilkeson, Washington, that has a white wooden onion dome and a Patriarchal cross (with two horizontal bars) atop the steeple.
Variants of the original meeting-house/church were soon developed. There were larger and more impressive neoclassical versions, with a porch, pillars, and pediment, showing the influence of Christopher Wren's classical London churches. There was also a federalist or colonial Williamsburg type, which reproduced the colonial or neoclassical model in red brick with white trim, and tended to be larger and more imposing. These churches almost always have tall Doric or Ionic pillars, and an impressive steeple: they are especially common on New England and Middle Atlantic prep school and college campuses. In the course of the nineteenth century box pews gradually gave way to bench pews, but for many years seats were still rented out at different prices depending on their proximity to the preacher, so that the comparative affluence and social prestige of the parishioners remained clear to all.
3.
From the 1840s on there was what Jeanne Halgren Kilde, in her original and intensively researched When Church Be-came Theatre, describes as a turn toward "more ecclesiastical worship practices and worship spaces." Well-to-do congregations began to move to the suburbs and erect churches in a neo-Gothic manner, which was currently proclaimed in the England of the Oxford Movement to be the only true Christian style. These buildings, which were especially popular with Catholics and Episcopalians, were usually constructed of dark gray stone, with imposing spires, tall pointed windows, and a cruciform ground plan. Some had stone buttresses and steeples decorated with crockets like rows of giant Brussels sprouts.
Inside the neo-Gothic church there was typically a long pillared nave with central and side aisles, a raised sanctuary and altar, and a communion rail that visibly separated the clergy from the laity. The ceiling was often made of dark varnished wood, like the hull of a ship, sometimes with the traditional protruding hammerhead beams. There might be a circular rose window over the entrance, and sometimes separate side chapels. The free-standing colonial pulpit was replaced by a raised preaching platform in front of the altar. Behind and above the altar there might be a reredos (a screen combining painted and sculptured images) or a display of the Ten Commandments. There was often not only a pulpit but an impressive reading desk supported by a ferocious brass or wooden eagle.
These neo-Gothic churches, if large and grand enough, were also furnished with pipe organs and seats or stalls for a choir. Sculpture and painting and stained glass proliferated, even in Protestant denominations that had previously banned them. But perhaps the most striking change was in the lighting. Colonial churches, with their many large plain-glass windows, were full of light. The interior of the neo-Gothic church was shadowy and obscure: it had dark ceilings, dark woodwork, thick stone walls, and narrow leaded windows filled with sheets of frosted or colored glass, or with multi-colored images of angels and prophets and birds and flowers. All this created a mysterious, contemplative atmosphere—sometimes spiritually inspiring and uplifting, sometimes merely melancholy and gloomy. It also preserved a view of God as tall and wealthy and wise, but essentially unfathomable, and not easily approached or understood by the layman.
Jeanne Kilde suggests that these churches, just as in Britain, were the outward sign of a return to an older religious tradition and to a more visual and sensual sort of worship, in which art, flowers, music, and even incense figured. She attributes the change in part to Americans' growing interest in high culture and high society, which was associated with Europe and especially with England. By the mid-nineteenth century, Britain was no longer the wicked stepfather of a rebellious young nation, but the "mother country"—a source of tradition, refinement, and upper-class status.
There were also political changes at work. Many supporters of the neo-Gothic church in the United States, Kilde proposes, had now moved from downtown to expensive suburbs, leaving the less-well-to-do behind. Out of sight became out of mind, and a new view of the church's mission developed. Conservative parishioners no longer felt that their churches should look for converts among immigrants and the poor; instead, they sought social connections and spiritual inspiration. The neo-Gothic church, Kilde suggests, was also seen as a style suited to every Christian denomination—one that could unite respectable churchgoers in the North and the South as the country moved closer to the Civil War.
After the war, for many years, Catholics and Episcopalians continued to favor the traditional neo-Gothic style. This preference was responsible for the building of many neo-Gothic parish churches, and also some of America's most famous cathedrals, including New York's St. Patrick's (begun in 1853), St. John the Divine (begun in 1907 and still under construction today), and Washington's National Cathedral (1907–1990).
For some American Protestants, however, the neo-Gothic churches seemed too European and too consciously artistic. In William Dean Howell's A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890, but set in 1886 at the time of the streetcar strike), the hero, Basil March, and his wife visit New York's fashionable Grace Episcopal Church on Broadway at 10th Street. As Bostonians, they are both impressed and a little ashamed of their reaction to its aesthetic splendor:
Rapt far from New York, if not from earth, in the dim richness of the painted light, the hallowed music took them with solemn ecstasy; the aerial, aspiring Gothic forms seemed to lift them heavenward. They came out reluctant into the dazzle and bustle of the street, with a feeling that they were too good for it....
"But no matter how consecrated we feel now," he said, "we mustn't forget that we went into the church for precisely the same reason that we went to the Vienna Café for breakfast—to gratify an aesthetic sense.... It was a purely Pagan impulse...."
In the 1880s and 1890s some congregations, especially in New England, began to turn to a new, simpler, and less expen-sive style for both houses and churches that mixed the colonial and the traditional English, and thus combined piety and purity with aesthetic and spiritual inspiration. This style, now known as Carpenter Gothic, is probably most familiar from Grant Wood's famous painting American Gothic, and there are several excellent examples in Rick Bragg's book. These churches typically have the basic rectangular colonial shape, but with the addition of tall pointed windows and doors, sometimes set with colored glass. Both houses and churches are often decorated with Victorian gingerbread, and some are painted or plastered with stucco over brick, but usually they are of wood. The exterior walls often have a simple board-and-batten construction, so that they seem to be striped vertically. These vertical pinstripes also carry out the directive of one of the first architects of American Gothic churches, Leopold Eidlitz:
The God of Christianity is...only to be rendered in the monuments of Christianity by loftiness of structure.... The tendency of the structure must be continually upwards....
After the Civil War, though neo-Gothic churches continued to be erected, a new style based on Romanesque and medieval models began to dominate, especially in evangelical denominations—Baptist, Congregationalist, Methodist, and Presbyterian. Perhaps in part because they were so strongly built, most of these buildings are still standing. They typically have thick masonry walls made of bulky blocks of gray or tan or plum-brown stone, with "rusticated," or strongly emphasized, recessed joints, a style which the entry in my Illustrated Dictionary of Historic Architecture says is intended "to create an appearance of impregnability." The overall impression is usually of a monumental medieval or early Renaissance castle, with heavy pillared porches, Romanesque arched doorways and windows, and massive square bell towers, the latter often crowned with battlements that could have sheltered dozens of armed men.
Some of these churches were even more fanciful, with elaborate patterned brickwork, and proliferating into all kinds of steeples and pinnacles and gables and domes. One of the most remarkable examples is Henry Hobson Richardson's Trinity Church in Boston's Copley Square, built in the 1870s. Though today it looks overdecorated and extravagant, at the time it was chosen by the American Institute of Architects for several years running as the finest building in the nation. It was tremendously influential, giving rise to hundreds of imitations all over the country, especially in the Northeast and Midwest.
Like the neo-Gothic church, neo-medieval churches appeared most often in the expensive sections of big cities and in prosperous suburbs. They were favored especially by the rich and the upwardly mobile middle class. These people wanted to worship in impressive buildings, and to hear the most impressive preachers and musicians; and they could afford to pay for this privilege. Many of these churches were soon successful enough to invest in land, building up considerable endowments. Though they might generously fund missionary and charitable works, both at home and abroad, they did not want the objects of their charity at their services. They consciously competed for well-to-do parishioners, while discouraging the indigent through high pew rental fees and inconvenient locations. If you did not own a horse and carriage, it was hard to get to many of these churches on Sunday. Their preachers often deplored the moral condition of the unsaved working class, but it was also not unusual for them to suggest that if "laboring men" who grumbled about their lot would seek and find Jesus, they would forget their rage and envy of their betters.
These monumental churches, like the Romanesque forts and castles they resembled, conveyed an impression of wealth, dominance, order, and security. They not only looked like fortresses or banks, they were seen that way. In their sermons the resident preachers customarily used military and/or business metaphors. "Churches," pronounced the Reverend M.M. Dana of Minneapolis's First Congregational Church in 1886,
are spiritual recruiting agencies.... The church is not a place for drones, for it ought to be a hive of industry.... You are building a spiritual armory, and it rests with you to fill it with weapons.
This was the era of muscular Christianity and the founding of the YMCA, one of whose original goals was the creation of pious and aggressively athletic young males.
Unlike the neo-Gothic church, the neomedieval church did not stand out from its surroundings: instead it resembled many other public and private buildings of the period. Libraries, armories, colleges, city halls, and railway stations all across the country had begun to look like medieval fortresses, and the style was also adapted to the mansions of millionaires. (A striking example is the main building of the artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, known as Yaddo.) One possible implication of these similarities was that the church was no longer a separate, spiritual place, but part of the material culture of the Gilded Age. Church, library, town hall, jail, armory, university, and mansion were united in preserving virtue and the social order.
Why did so many buildings of this period look like fortified castles? Who were the enemies, the besiegers? The period just after the Civil War was a time of great political and social unrest. There was a general fear of anarchists and revolutionaries. Crime was widespread; strikes and rioting were common. Masses of penniless immigrants were beginning to pour into the country; unemployment was high and police protection sporadic. As a result, American cities were often very dangerous places. No wonder that the rich should seek shelter in buildings that at least looked as if they could be defended against an angry mob.
Though the exterior of the neo-medieval church was massive, formidable, and (as Kilde suggests) extremely masculine, the interior conveyed a different message. Indoors the church was comfortable, cozy, and domestic—and (by Victorian standards) feminine. It was well heated, with facilities for socializing, cooking, eating, and child care—for church teas, church suppers, Bible-study groups, and Sunday schools. Furnishings were usually elaborate: pews were lined with plush cushions, floors were covered with thick carpet. Often the décor suggested that of a Gilded Age mansion: in contemporary photographs, some of these church interiors resemble expensive houses of the later Victorian period, and have the same luxurious, somewhat cluttered look.
At the same time, private houses were beginning to resemble expensive churches. They had arched windows, pilasters and balconies, religious paintings and statues, and parlor organs. Chairs and tables and sideboards, like pews and pillars and pulpits, were made of dark oak or mahogany and carved with flowers, leaves, nuts, and vines; ceilings were painted with clouds or stars. Even fairly modest homes often had leaded, stained-glass panels in the front door or a parlor window, depicting religious images—doves, harps, lilies, crosses—while a mansion might contain one or more large windows by Louis Tiffany showing impossibly lush fruit, flowers, birds, and landscapes in shades of gold, royal purple, ruby red, and peacock green.
Though the family home was often seen as sacred, it was the church that remained the home or House of God. This was a fairly new idea: colonial Calvinists did not think of God as actually dwelling in their churches. According to Kilde, "they would no more have sought God's presence in the meetinghouse than in the jailhouse." Of course, once you consider a neomedieval church as the House of God, it is difficult not to imagine that in this incarnation He has the same fears and enjoys the same kind of expensive material comforts and music and art as his worshipers.
But the neomedievalist church in America was not only a fortress and an expensive home: as Kilde points out, it was often also a theater. As early as the 1860s the interiors of these churches began to look like auditoriums. Usually they were square or round rather than rectangular like the neo-Gothic church, and they often had a sloped floor and radiating aisles, so that the stage was visible to everyone in the audience. Pews or padded chairs were arranged in curving rows, like the seats in a theater, and there were additional seats in a gallery overhead, which occasionally ended on each side in the equivalent of a theater box. A large pipe organ usually hung next to or behind the preaching platform, which sometimes had a proscenium arch like that of a theater. Acoustics were taken seriously, and were usually good: the architects who built these churches also designed theaters and concert halls.
For the Puritans, the theater was sinful, and music suspect. But by the 1870s the people who attended what Kilde calls "auditorium churches" no longer considered the arts intrinsically evil. Some plays and paintings and songs might be corrupting, but others were seen as inspiring and uplifting. The auditorium churches rented out space to (and sometimes sponsored) lectures and plays with a moral message and concerts that featured sacred music. Regular church services, too, were often quasi-theatrical events, with dramatic sermons, lantern slides, organ and choir numbers, and perhaps a paid soloist or quartet. Inside the fortress, the arts flourished; and the role of the audience was more active than in the neo-Gothic church. They not only joined in the responses to the prayers and sang hymns; at revival meetings they were encouraged to come to the front of the church and witness for God.
The use to which a church is put can have an important effect on its design, and vice versa. As Caroline Humphrey and Piers Vitebsky explain in Sacred Architecture, stone walls reflect nearly 100 percent of sound, and create what is known as "resonant space," especially in churches with pillars and very high roofs. This is ideal for music, and accounts for the almost unearthly effect of voices and the organ in some cathedrals. Wood, soft materials, and human bodies reflect less than 25 percent; the result is a dry, clear sound, excellent for preaching, especially if the shape of the room is regular and the ceiling relatively low.
The colonial church was ideal for services that centered on a sermon, as most then did. In the neo-Gothic church, music was more effective and more important. This was especially true in Catholic churches, where for centuries the mass had been said in Latin, and it was assumed that much of the congregation would not understand the words. The neomedieval church was suited for both preaching and music. The auditorium shape made the minister's voice more audible, but the size and height of the room and its stone walls favored music, though most of these buildings could not produce the supernatural resonant effects of a cathedral.
By the early twentieth century the neomedieval church was beginning to lose some of its popularity. Society had become less puritanical, and more parishioners were attending secular theaters and concert halls. Meanwhile, improvements in police protection and the legal system were reducing crime, and the psychological need for the appearance of safety and invulnerability may have diminished. For a while, fewer auditorium-type churches were constructed. Aspects of their design, however, reappeared in the theaters of the period, and later in the movie palaces of the early twentieth century, which often included pipe organs and heavy Romanesque arches and columns.
During the revival movements of the 1920s and 1930s, when evangelical and inspirational speakers like Aimee Semple McPherson and Billy Sunday began to draw huge crowds, the auditorium church was also revived, though sometimes in strange forms. Aimee Semple McPherson's Angelus Temple, built in Los Angeles in 1925, was described by contemporaries as looking like a giant spaceship, and seated 5,300 worshipers. In the years that followed, many even stranger religious buildings would appear in America: they would resemble, among other things, flying saucers, rockets, pyramids, Mayan temples, ski lodges, hats, clams, and fish. At the same time, admirers of the past would do their best to build churches that resembled as closely as possible the European cathedrals and chapels of the late Middle Ages.
—This is the first of two articles.
