My first encounter with evangelical worship took place in the First Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, Indiana. I had just passed through Sunday school and was now permitted to worship with the adults at the real religious service. The congregation (well over 500 people on a good Sunday) was seated in curved pews that looked down upon a platform set against the east wall of the sanctuary; it was furnished with a lectern and pulpit, a remembrance table, an American flag, fresh-cut flowers (given in memory), and two high-backed chairs reserved for the ministers in their black Geneva gowns. Behind the platform, the white-robed choir was arrayed in ascending rows, having advanced to this place while singing the processional hymn. A splash of polished organ pipes further enhanced this impressive backdrop. Above the pulpit there was a plain white cross.

My older brother and I were placed between my two grandmothers, who sang with great courage, dueling joyfully at the upper limits of the human voice. My father, who had led us manfully to our places, always managed to escape just before the sermon on the pretext of helping his friends prepare the coffee and biscuits. They talked golf in the church basement, blissfully unaware that their presence in the kitchen was contesting the gendered divisions of church work. My mother had died when I was a baby, but it was she who had introduced the family to this congregation.

Of the sermons I remember almost nothing, although for years I assumed Zion was a town in Scotland. During the service my mind was often drawn to the stained glass window that filled the entire south wall of the sanctuary. Known simply as the Harrison window, it offered a romantic interlude during moments of tedium, and I have often wondered if it was Tiffany's radiant image of the angel of the Resurrection that had drawn me to the study of religion and culture, albeit in a foreign land.

What I was witnessing almost 50 years ago, Jeanne Halgren Kilde explains, was the culmination of a process of architectural change that had begun well before the Civil War. Her rich and fascinating study traces the transformation of evangelical worship in America from the neoclassical New England meetinghouses that still ordered Protestant worship in the early 19th century to the massive neomedieval structures that had become the predominant church form throughout America a hundred years later. In clear and accessible prose she details not only the changes that took place to the interior and exterior composition of the church but also the articulation of auxiliary institutional spaces, such as Sunday schools, church parlors, meeting rooms, and kitchens.

But the book is far more than an account of an important series of ecclesiological developments, valuable as that may be. Drawing unobtrusively upon the insights of postmodern analysis, Kilde carefully deconstructs the transformation from neoclassical to medieval in relation to a number of social and cultural questions. How, for example, did the shift from box pews to amphitheatrical seating mark a change in the relationship between the minister and the congregation; how did the advent of the Gothic style signify a new response to the changing political climate of antebellum America; how did church decoration and the rise of professional choirs relate to the increasingly middle-class composition of suburban congregations?

Once one starts down such an interesting analytical path it is hard to know where to stop. I wondered, for example, about trying to deconstruct the representations of the sacred within this new religious space. In all cultures, representations of the sacred acquire special attributes. Whatever secular forces may have shaped this new space, the fact that it was associated with the worship of God gave it an authority that set it apart from other architectural spaces. Even a ten-year-old knew one had to behave in a certain way inside a church; the sanctuary of that old church seemed timeless and unchanging. How did this work—how did this space become sacred?

Embedded in the narrative is another, perhaps more controversial theme. Kilde is intrigued by the relationship between religion and popular culture, and in the chapter from which the title of the book is taken—"Church Becomes Theatre"—she links the transformation of evangelical worship to the changes that were taking place in opera houses and other large theatrical venues. For professional architects, churches and theaters presented similar spatial problems, and they responded to them in the same way. In terms of seating, lighting, and staging, church and theater led parallel lives; indeed they seemed to feed off one another. Here the practical, utilitarian character of American evangelicalism enjoyed free rein: the fact that theatrical techniques could be used to present religion more effectively fully justified their widespread adaptation to religious purposes.

Visually this relationship is beyond question—in the late 19th century theaters and churches looked much the same. But I wonder whether this did not trouble those evangelicals who were determined to protect the purity of their religion from the intrusion of modern and secular notions, who may have bristled at the notion of the church becoming a theater or worship becoming performance. Did the sacred qualities of the church in some way protect it from this equation? But then there are two meanings in the title of this book, and if the first may go too far, the second is spot on. Even if the church did not become a theater, all these theatrical techniques were nonetheless very becoming: they suited the needs of evangelical worship very well.

Reading architectural space is a highly rewarding enterprise, and one stands in awe of the author's ability to explore nonwritten texts so creatively. By skillfully chronicling the movement from one church type to another and linking this transformation to the social and cultural concerns of American evangelicalism, this book not only enriches our understanding of American religious history but also brings what was peripheral to center stage, illuminating old questions and opening up new ones.

And yet the very strength of the story raises some important questions about the narrative Kilde so carefully constructs. Her study focuses upon the development of the amphitheatrical arrangement within a neomedieval structure; but is the dominance she claims for this new setting of worship limited by considerations of geography and class? All the new medieval churches the author selects are suburban and self-consciously middle-class; but what of the churches in smaller cities and towns where a single congregation had to encompass different classes and competing traditions of worship? Did they follow the same architectural course; did these evangelicals worship God in the same way? In my own field of study—Protestant Ontario—the neomedieval form was used by all denominations for all their churches throughout the Victorian period. From north of the border, American religious architecture appears incredibly eclectic. Is the story this book tells the only story, or just one important (perhaps even dominant) story among many?

The way Kilde handles the Gothic revival also suggests a few problems. In her account of the period leading up to the Civil War, she treats the building of fashionable Gothic churches as something of an unfortunate architectural interlude because it drew evangelical congregations away from experimenting with new forms of worship; Gothic then returns at the end of the story as an alternative to the amphitheatrical arrangement, one which would become the preferred architectural idiom for many liberal congregations in the early 20th century. The Gothic revival was of course championed by high church Anglicans, and their preoccupation with the restoration of pre-Reformation liturgies clearly set them at odds with the basic traditions of evangelical worship. But Augustus Welby Pugin's famous mantra of the Gothic revival—in it "we find the faith of Christianity embodied and its practices illustrated"—was not only a call for the reproduction of medieval churches but also a statement of the utilitarian character of Gothic design. Its principles, the Ecclesiologist explained, were based on "the strictest utility"; long before the Bauhaus, Gothic theory tied form to function. High Victorian architects in Ontario and elsewhere followed this dictum to their advantage, effortlessly adapting the medieval form to the needs of hundreds of Protestant congregations.

The association of Gothic, utility, and moral purpose also ran through the work of John Ruskin, perhaps the most influential architectural critic in the English-speaking world. Through his extensive writings Ruskin transformed the way Protestants saw their churches, and developed (albeit from a different perspective) themes that are central to this study—the social and religious meaning of architectural change and the link between worship space and popular culture. In sum, the Gothic may well have been more central to the core narrative of the text. Regrettably, Ruskin's name does not appear in this study.

I also wondered about nation and empire. American historians of religion have written at great length about the close relationship between American evangelicalism and the national destiny of the United States. While this study suggests a link between new seating arrangements and democratic ideals, I kept hoping the story would push this further by considering the association between the new church form and the iconography of American nationalism. In Canada the link between architecture and nation was clear from the start. The Gothic parliament buildings in Ottawa placed the new Canadian nation firmly within a British imperial narrative, and every Protestant church in every village and town in Ontario praised Queen, God, and country. How did this relationship develop in the United States?

The narrative suggests a disjunction between church and nation, for in rejecting the neoclassical church form, were not the Protestant churches also distancing themselves from the neoclassical images of the American nation state that were so firmly embedded in the national capitol and being reproduced in public buildings throughout the country? Did the separation of church and state in some way temper the relationship between the forms of evangelical worship and the representations of American national identity? Perhaps evangelical religion was able to shape American culture precisely because it was not linked directly to the nation state.

William Westfall teaches history and humanities at York University in Toronto. He has written extensively on religion and architecture in Canada and is the author of Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario, and The Founding Moment: Church, Society, and the Construction of Trinity College.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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