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When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America by Jeanne Halgren Kilde Oxford Univ. Press, 2002 328 pp.; $45

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?

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