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There is no country in the whole world," Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1840, "in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America." Eighteenth-century philosophes might have assured their readers that the diffusion of knowledge would spell the irreversible decline of religion, but Tocqueville saw facts disproving this jejune theory. "There are certain populations in Europe whose unbelief is only equaled by their ignorance and their debasement," he wrote, "while in America one of the freest and most enlightened nations in the world fulfils all the outward duties of religion with fervor." Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. And yet Tocqueville was emphatic that this fervor had nothing to do with forms: "I have seen no country in which Christianity is clothed with fewer forms, figures, and observances than in the United States."
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When American Protestants first broke with decades of pious iconoclasm in the 1840s and began adopting the crosses, candles, choir vestments, sanctuary flowers, stained glass windows, and Gothic architecture of Roman Catholics, a sea-change took place in American religion. Why and in what ways Protestants adopted these Roman Catholic forms is the theme of Ryan K. Smith's Gothic Arches, Latin Crosses: Anti-Catholicism and American Church Designs in the Nineteenth Century. Well-researched and engagingly argued, the book is a welcome contribution to a subject that has not received the attention it deserves.
Protestant appropriation of Roman Catholic forms occurred in an America rife with Protestant anti-Catholic bigotry. When Catholic Europeans began immigrating in large numbers in the 1840s, the charge was reiterated that they were superstitious, dangerous, and inassimilable. It is only against this background that one can appreciate the irony of not only the Episcopal Church but the Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and even Baptist churches adopting the forms and usages of an otherwise abominated popery. What motivated them to borrow so from their idolatrous neighbors?
The sheer number of those neighbors gave them a kind of irresistibility. As Smith shows, the rise of Roman Catholicism in 19th-century America was phenomenal. In 1820, there were 124 Roman Catholic churches; in 1860, 2,550. By comparison, in 1820 there were 600 Episcopal churches and in 1860, 2,145. With the enormous influx of Irish, Polish, Italian, and German Catholics beginning in the 1840s, the Roman Catholic hierarchy in America reasserted their Church's traditional splendor. By the 1850s, not only Episcopal but non-prelatical churches were increasingly seeking out ways to compete with this Roman magnificence. In 1853, the General Convention of the Congregationalist Church formally approved the use of crosses for their churches by arguing that "There is no good reason why every little chapel of the Mother of Harlots should be allowed to use what appeals so forcibly and so favorably to the simplest understanding, and we be forbidden the manifest advantage which its use would often give us." Here was the argument that would inform a good deal of Protestant borrowing of traditional Roman forms—hence the "unprecedented market," as Smith shows, for pew-fittings, pulpits, fonts, altars, stalls, lecterns, vestments, altar-cloths, surplices, chasubles, albs, and cassocks, though in appropriating these Roman accoutrements, Protestants were careful to make them serve distinctly Protestant purposes.
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