Holy Ground: The Buildings That Made — And Unmade — The Christian Faith – Religion Unplugged

(REVIEW) When people talk about “the church,” it’s rarely in reference to a physical place. It’s often something above us, beneath us, or over there and full of people.
It can, therefore, be easy to forget the role physical space plays in sustaining religions, for good or for ill, and why talks of bringing about a “New Jerusalem” were not, for a lot of Christians, so very far-fetched. They started in places made of brick and stone — and as Fergus Butler-Gallie points out, “Jerusalem is a somewhere, not a nowhere. Specifically, it is here.”
This contention is at the heart of the Anglican vicar and author’s latest book, “12 Churches: An Unlikely History of the Buildings that Made Christianity.” Far from being a dull book about church architecture that neglects the human side of the story, the joy, violence and sometimes sheer strangeness of the buildings discussed here — such as St Peter’s Basilica — is always rooted in the people who inhabited them, and the wider historical currents their faith inspired them to take the lead in or latch on to. 
READ: New Book Unearths The Lost Leadership Of Women During Early Christianity
This means the prose tone can veer between tragic and droll, but this is a Butler-Gallie specialty, and he navigates it skilfully. In the same chapter, he book-ends the depressing account of the murder of four black teenagers by the Ku Klux Klan at the 16th Street Baptist Church with an account of the 16th-century preacher Thomas Muntzer, who advocated his army of peasant followers bring about a new and more godly world order by force. He was considered to be, even by Martin Luther, slightly too dogmatic in his views.
Both are examples of how hard it can be for Christians to gauge whether their own notions of justice are in sync with those mandated by the Bible, and what role they should play, if any, in bringing them about.
As the author puts it, “trying to personally bring about God’s justice might sound like a good idea,” but the world outside the church’s walls always has its own rules. What these tensions look like when mapped onto short human lives is rarely consistent. It’s often messy and bloody.
This obsession with a “better world” can be inward as much as outward-facing. The chapter on the First Meeting House in Salem, Massachusetts, is one of the strongest, reminding us that the sparse inner structure of the building reflected the spirituality of the community — one that in its quest for modesty and purity sent 19 people to the execution block. 
His analysis of how this happened is smartly done, highlighting how a community’s obsession with purging itself of undesirables (a temptation present in all human societies) was behind the witchcraft accusations, rather than just cheaply conflating religious belief with superstition. Salem became famous partly because that community’s brand of Puritanism was dying out, and witchcraft executions were an uncommon trend that could provoke a drive for vigilante justice.
That said, Butler-Gallie doesn’t shy away from how a spiritual understanding of evil could be conflated with “little, petty community hatreds” and, without Christianity’s multi-layered relationship with ideas about purity, “Salem would never have happened.” Yet by the same token, in Salem and beyond, people’s Christian faith has given people the bravery to push back against superstition. Churches can both stoke irrationality and be a barrier against it.
In the West, Christianity might often be seen as either a dangerous superstition or an irritating fairytale, but if either of those is true, it means there’s something particularly remarkable about the lengths people will go to in order to keep church doors open. They are structures that represent not just human endurance, but the endurance of belief itself. 
In the century ahead of us, when Latin America, Africa and the Far East will play a far greater role in what “the church,” the physical and the spiritual, will look like, Butler-Gallie reminds us that faith is not going away any time soon. It remains to be seen where and what shape the next 12 churches will take.
Maddy Fry is the editor of the Westminster Abbey Review magazine and the founder of U2 and Us on Substack. She writes about politics, religion and pop culture, with bylines in The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph, Time, The New Statesman and The Huffington Post. She also enjoys drinking stout, listening to U2 and telling you why you are wrong about the “Star Wars” sequels.
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