Why Evangelicals Don’t Build Cathedrals
The Poverty of Evangelical Architecture
God Cares About Right Worship
Every serious Bible reader has had the experience of coming upon the building codes for the tabernacle in Leviticus. The exactness and precision can be confusing. From the dimensions to the materials involved, some of the biblical literature reads more like the specs for a commercial project than divinely inspired text. But divinely inspired texts they remain. What are we to make of this God who has such exhaustive and precise architectural expectations regarding right worship?
God has always been concerned with right worship. In many ways, the first sin was a failure of worship above all else. Trading the right worship of the garden, Adam failed to function as the liturgical leader and Eve sinned. Adam then submitted to the voice of his wife instead of obeying the voice of God.
Made to Build
If God cares about right worship, it should not surprise us that construction and architecture matter to him. He did not invite us into dominion as passive participants. He called us to order and beautify the world (Gen. 1:28; 2:15). You can see this design written into creation itself. Mothers nest before giving birth. Men dream of building cities. Humans are hardwired to build.
Modern architecture, however, has become a monstrosity of dehumanizing aesthetics. On the campus of Texas A&M sits the infamous Langford Building, which houses the Department of Architecture. Built in 1977, the builders rejected the classical revival style and embraced the cold sterility of modernism; massive concrete blocks, a cold expansive interior demurring the inspiration of many aspiring architectural students. In my first year as an architect undergrad, I spent countless nights sight drawing the cruel and sterile lines of Langford.
Warehouses for Worship
Churches have followed this trend of dehumanizing aesthetics. Few are willing to invest in enduring architecture. Instead, they build commercial warehouses that double as worship spaces (1 Chron. 17:12; 1 Kings 5:5). No evangelical church today would dream of something like the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Even among the most affluent megachurches, beauty ranks low. Capacity and acoustics come first. And so the building is conceived of not as a “house for the Lord” but as a “space.”
This reflects theological convictions, some inherited from the Reformers’ iconoclasm. Yet even the Reformers built beautifully. The real reason is evangelical pragmatism. For churches today, beauty seems unnecessary at best and a waste of money at worst. You can almost hear Judas: “This could have been sold and given to the poor.”
Budgets, Speed, and the Spirit of the Age
The assumptions in budgeting for the normal church in America follows as thus. The main thing is seeing souls saved. Nothing motivates the average evangelical more than evangelism. Our history and legacy has been indelibly shaped by revivalism, resulting in a focus on the means and methods of seeing the lost saved over and against transmitting our tradition. The best way to see souls saved is to invest dollars in reaching those souls in need of saving. When it comes to accounting for the cost of a new construction project for churches, the most pressing concerns are budget and time.
This is endemic for all construction in our day and age. We do not have a patient bone in our cultural body for construction projects that last well beyond our lifetime. This attitude in the church has resulted in mass produced, low quality material, high return on investment projects that trade beauty for projected attendance metrics and budget demands. Utilitarianism is the name of the game. Rather than invest in construction design that is beautiful, many opt for designs which are indistinguishable from the suburban commercial landscape in which they find themselves while investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in state of the art sound systems, screens, and lighting for their “worship” entertainment experience.
Beauty as Witness
The massive opportunity in our architectural ghetto of chaos and sterility is to build church buildings which are simply beautiful and draw in otherwise lost souls through inspiration and wonder, the encouragement to look up and beyond themselves. Because the modern age bifurcates the material and immaterial realities of life severely, the material is often held to be nothing more than a malleable corpse upon which the immaterial should be expressed. There is very little regard for the material world, much less building construction, to be a means by which we experience beauty as a given. Rather, the material world is only useful to the modern man insofar as it serves the purpose of self-expression. This leads to terrible aesthetics, each fad uglier than the last. The modern church, eager to reach modern man, accepts this bargain. In doing so, it trades beauty for relevance.
But, right now, beauty is the need of the hour. Evangelicals typically have a reverence for truth and goodness (even if those are often misunderstood). Beauty, on the other hand, is not just neglected but treated as entirely subjective. Why? Beauty divides and discerns. It revolts against the spirit of the age in calling one thing beautiful and one thing ugly. The opportunity for the church is to reclaim the center when it comes to defining what is beautiful. And church architecture can serve as a potent reminder of our God who is beautiful. Our God who judges. Our God who discerns.
Dreaming of Protestant Cathedrals
All of this concern may be idealistic however given the reality of city coding and serious budget constraints for many churches. Zoning laws and city codes often make building difficult. Environmental restrictions or discriminatory policies block expansion. In such a world, dreams of a Protestant cathedral die quickly (or slowly) in bureaucracy.
These two factors, a lack of internal conviction regarding the theological importance of church architecture and external pressures to conform to a modern aesthetic through generic and cheap construction as well as zoning regulations, snuff out any dreamer who aspires to build the protestant Sagrada Familia. We live in a utilitarian world and are led by materialist and pietistic pragmatists. Because we have become obsessed with and made our north star the saving of souls, anything that might take away budget funds from that is made to be a threat to God’s mission itself, including investing in beautiful building design. Obsessed with saving souls, we treat beauty as a threat to God’s mission itself.
One can imagine an America filled once again with beautiful church buildings in cities, each building from each Protestant tradition embodying the theological convictions of that particular denomination. Maybe not cathedrals. Beautifully simple houses of the Lord will do. Colonial churches dotting our towns testify that this is possible. Their care and intention haunt us still. They remind us that it is possible to build beautifully for God. But until evangelicals take their eyes off pleasing man and fix them on the living God, such beauty will remain a pipe dream.