When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship

in Nineteenth-Century America by Jeanne Halgren Kilde

Review by: Gretchen T. Buggeln
The Journal of Religion, Vol. 83, No. 4 (Oct., 2003), pp. 611-612
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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 Book Reviews

is well executed, but the demonstration of the Baptists' relations with other reli-
gious groups leaves a lot to be desired. Nowhere is this more true than in his treat-
ment of the "war" between the Quakers and the Baptists in the 1650s. Ann
Hughes's vivid and authoritative account of these disputes, published in 1990, is
not cited; neither is very much of the equally relevant scholarship on early Quak-
erism. The fact is that Baptists lost ground seriously to the Quakers in the 1650s
(as Bell notes, Quakers accused the Baptists of doing too well in material terms
through their compliance with the Commonwealth governments). The Baptists
competition with the Quakers it is a phenomenon every bit as important as Bap-
tist-Leveller and Baptist-Fifth Monarchist relations, but you will not find it sub-
stantially discussed here.
So while there is much to admire about this clear-sighted study of the develop-
ment of Baptist organization under the general sign of millenarian expectation,
there are plenty of gaps left to fill.
NIGEL SMITH, Princeton University.

KILDE, JEANNE HALGREN. When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evan-
gelical Architectureand Worshipin Nineteenth-CenturyAmerica. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002. xiii+310 pp. $45.00 (cloth).
For those who desire to understand the experience of the "person in the pew,"
there is perhaps no better approach than to ask questions about the pews them-
selves, to interrogate the material circumstances of religious practice. In Jeanne
Halgren Kilde's fascinating new book, we discover many things about the spiritual
experiences of late nineteenth-century American evangelicals as they worshipped,
studied, and socialized in the massive, neomedieval church buildings that are the
focus of the study. This revealing architectural form has been surprisingly neg-
lected, yet these buildings were extraordinarily prevalent and important in their
time, appearing by the hundreds in American suburbs from coast to coast. As Kilde
demonstrates in this well-written and well-illustrated study, these churches both
formed and represented the attitudes and aims of evangelical Americans as they
faced a rapidly changing world.
When Church Became Theatre describes the development of the auditorium
church form and its associated functions and meanings from its beginnings in
1830s New York City (Charles Finney's followers converted the Chatham Theatre
into the Chatham Chapel in 1832 and built the Broadway Tabernacle in 1836),
through its large-scale adoption by suburban evangelical congregations across
America in the 1880s, to its fall from favor-that is, until modern, consumer-
oriented megachurches began to employ its architectural descendant. In their hey-
day, these churches were complexes of rooms centered on a large radial-plan
amphitheater with an often enormous stage framed by a dramatic arch, a highly
visible organ and choir loft, marquee lighting, comfortable theater-type seats, and
harmonious and colorful interior decor. By the 1880s these buildings routinely in-
cluded parlors, lecture halls, kitchens, gymnasiums, locker rooms, and numerous
Sunday school rooms. Typical examples include First Methodist Episcopal (Lovely
Lane) Church in Baltimore (1884) and Pilgrim Congregational Church in Cleve-
land (1894).
Kilde's evangelicals are Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists, and Presbyte-
rians, united by a shared vision of worship and mission and not yet divided into lib-
eral and orthodox camps. Kilde beautifully reads this shared vision in the archi-

611

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The Journal of Religion
tecture. "By the close of the nineteenth century," she writes, "a tripartite religious
agenda or code characterized evangelical churches-worship, family ministry, and
missionizing-and neomedieval auditorium churches physically expressed each of
these ongoing functions in their very forms" (p. 198). A new emphasis on mean-
ingful, accessible, and participatory worship across evangelical denominations is
reflected in the appearance of choir lofts and organ pipes and also in the arrange-
ment of seats that allowed all the worshipers to see and be seen by the preacher
(and each other). The comfort, convenience, and domestic aesthetic of the church
interior and its many functions, particularly for the service of children, illuminate
the importance of "family ministry."And the bulky, stone architecture, Kilde ar-
gues, spoke "an aggressive masculinity that countered the disempowering effects
of the increasing urbanization and femininization of U.S. society" (p. 106). These
"spiritual armories" "trumpeted the new public role of evangelical religion" as a
source of order and stability that would reach out to and protect the larger com-
munity (p. 107).
Kilde's careful and thorough research in published and unpublished congrega-
tional, denominational, and architectural records successfully engages architec-
tural history, religious studies, and social and cultural history, and this book will be
beneficial to scholars in many disciplines. Particularly impressive is her location of
these buildings within the larger architectural conversation. She demonstrates that
the auditorium church was not a derivative form but evolved in conjunction with
developments in theater architecture and Richardsonian Romanesque design. In-
novations such as adaptable rings of Sunday school classrooms around a central
hall (often referred to, mistakenly, as the Akron Plan) were at the cutting edge of
institutional building.
Despite the focus on neomedieval auditorium buildings, Kilde doesn't neglect to
take account of the fortunes of the competing Gothic style over the nineteenth and
into the twentieth century. The back-and-forth between the desire for Gothic time-
lessness and mystery and the impulse toward welcoming, comfortable, and partic-
ipatory auditorium spaces makes one of the most interesting dynamics in Kilde's
book. Gothic or neomedieval, these concrete expressions of religious belief and
practice illuminate what was most important to nineteenth-century evangelicals of
a given time and place. Just as American Protestantism has produced a bewilder-
ing array of denominations and sects, its architectural legacy is unusually restless,
diverse, and complex and deserves much more attention. Kilde's book is a welcome
step in this direction.
GRETCHEN T. BUGGELN, Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library.

AAMODT,TERRIE DOPP.RighteousArmies,Holy Cause:ApocalypticImageryand the Civil

War.Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2002. xx+236 pp. $35.00 (cloth).

RighteousArmies, Holy Cause is a revision of a dissertation completed in 1986 at

Boston University. Terrie Dopp Aamodt, professor of English and history at Walla
Walla College, documents the apocalyptic interpretations that Americans gave to
the Civil War, placing the war years against a background of rising antebellum
apocalypticism. Aamodt argues that apocalypticism was a major component of
American reflection on the war, one "which fed both on the millennial fervor that
had fired the first half of the nineteenth century and on the tendency of North-
erners and Southerners alike to predict a special destiny for America" (p. 3).
Aamodt finds a "startling similarity" between Northern and Southern reactions

612

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