INSIDER: Why Protestants Don’t Build Cathedrals, and Why Our Churches Got So Ugly

JD Hall

The ‘architecture rant’ is one that my kids are used to on long car rides. In between pointing out what roadside features might make a good refuge in the Zombie Apocalypse, eventually the topic of architecture comes up while driving through small towns and seeing the shopping mall churches and civic buildings that look like they came from the Cold War era Soviet Union.

THE WORLD HAS MOVED ON

The rant goes something like, “How would like to work in a place like that? Do you know what that says? It says the people who built that hate the people who have to be there all day. It says ‘these 90-degree corners and lack of windows testify you’re barely important enough to be kept out of the rain.’ It says ‘you deserve no beauty, either on the inside of the cubicle farm or outside by looking through a window.”

And my loving wife reminds me ‘not everything is a plot.’

Or the rant sometimes goes something like, “I remember when court houses were designed by artists, and not by lego factories; they want to crush the human spirit.” You know, perfectly sane, not-at-all schizophrenic ramblings like that.

But when we come across a cathedral, which often times are the most beautiful buildings in the small towns along Route 66, I am caught off guard by mixed emotions. They are indeed beautiful. And they’re a testimony to an age that used to be, but is no more. I feel like Roland of the Dark Tower, while looking at an abandoned ferris wheel in the distance beyond a great desert, and explaining that the world has moved on.

“The world has moved on,’ we say… we’ve always said. But it’s moving on faster now. Something has happened to time” – Roland the Gunslinger, The Dark Tower

THE THEOLOGY OF ARCHITECTURE

Is there a theology of architecture? Sure. There’s a theology of everything, especially of the physical world.

The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament show his handiwork (Psalm 19:1). What God has made says theological things about God. His greatness. His beauty. His creativity. His vastness. His complexity. His simplicity. His mercy. His wrath. His love. His abundance. His power. These are all testified to us by the things he’s made.

My father-in-law, a lumberjack who has now passed beyond the celestial veil, would put my wife upon his knee in the woods as a child and point to the trees and with tears in his eyes and say, “Do you see? The trees are clapping for Him?” He meant it, and took it from Isaiah 55:2, “All the trees of the field will clap their hands for him.” He was killed in a sawmill accident, but it was an appropriate place out in the woods, his family finding peace that it was in the middle of a worship service between nature and God.

If we look around we can see God’s anthropomorphic fingerprints all around us, and every single ounce of his Creation scream to us something about Him.

Likewise, what we “create” (which is a funny word to describe moving stuff around and organizing things that God has already made) also says something about us. Beautiful people make beautiful art. Beautiful voices make beautiful songs. Beautiful designers make beautiful designs. Beautiful cultures have beautiful buildings. And the same is true for the ugly things.

Although I took “art appreciation” in college, I didn’t learn to appreciate it at the time. Art, my 17 year-old self thought with an eye-roll. Cool. It was much to my surprise then, that I began to miss art, real art, when it became altogether rare to see. It was the deficit of beauty in our culture that first drew my attention to the importance of it. Beauty in written, spoken, visual, or audible form is the fruit of civilized humanity. When humanity suffers, art suffers. When humanity is enslaved, art becomes enslaved.

Consider, if you will, the video below as an expression of exactly the type of art that is missing – that which we used to have as a culture – but has been altogether replaced by gangster rap, fat runway models, and surrealist paint splatters.

This is Emma Kok singing Voilà at Vrijthof square in Maastricht (Netherlands).

While this type of thing was once the standard of beauty, I’ll remind you that Cardi B’s WAP (do not google that for the love of all that’s pure and holy) was song of the year for BET and won the American Music Award and the People’s Choice Award.

Ugliness has absolutely taken over culture, music, art, and fashion. If this seems far fetched, consider that Kamala Harris’ step-daughter, Ella Emhoff, is a fashion model for Vogue Magazine.

Ugliness has run amok. There’s obviously nothing wrong with being an ugly human, but putting one on the cover of a magazine and saying “this is beauty” or an obese woman on a body soap commercial and saying, “this is healthy” certainly seems like an intentional assault upon both our judgment and our senses, as neither is true. What’s happening with First World aesthetics? Have we really forgotten beauty?

And so many people have noticed that our church houses and public buildings have changed dramatically, just as the covers of our magazines and music has changed dramatically. Ugly has become standard, with little attention at all towards that which Martha Washington called, “that which is grateful to the eye.”

Granted, many of the ugly church houses that grace our land (like the one above) are borrowed from pre-established buildings, much in the same way that you can tell the new tattoo parlor used to be a pizza hut. But that doesn’t explain the intentional ugliness perpetrated upon church goers on the inside of the building.

What once was covered with stained glass, ornate molding, and artistry, has been replaced with black paint and drabness. And many of these church houses on the inside that look like a Marylin Manson recording studio have million dollar budgets. They could have beautiful aesthetics; they’ve made a conscious choice not to.

We have gone from beautiful buildings full of light and “Crystal Cathedrals” (which is now owned by the Papists, by the way) to darkened warehouses. There’s something more to it besides Protestants not sitting on generational wealth taken in exchange for springing people from purgatory. Something else is going on.

THE WAR ON ARCHITECTURE

Take a look at what we lost. Modern buildings are boxes. Buildings of years ago were works of art.

Even bridges were art.

But if you think it’s only the design of buildings and infrastructure that was once designed as art, you’d be mistaken. Look at old household appliances. Look at old street lamps. Look at old waste baskets. Look at old cars. Yes, even trash cans were at one time designed to be beautiful.

We live in an uggo world. Is it a plot? In a way, yes. To summarize, Marxists intentions in their spheres of influence were to gut cultures of their cultural beauty and reduce humans to chattle who exist to support the state. My farm animals aren’t given fancy woodwork on their stalls because I can only build with 2x4s and they’re animals who wouldn’t appreciate it. And this is the attitudes towards us, of modern architects.

Central planning, from a Marxists perspective, looks at humans as commodities that – like cattle – simply need protected from the elements. They need to be sheltered from the rain, and kept at comfortable temperatures. This way, cost-affordability is prioritized above beauty. Function is prized above form. No longer should men build monuments to be prized; in a Marxist paradigm the only monuments that exist should be dedicated to the state. Beauty is for the elite ruling class; it is not for the common people.

Legitimate art imitates or “recreates” God’s beauty. God must be declared dead in the Marxist system, and so his works must not be duplicated because imitation is flattery. Instead, new art forms were developed, which promoted the feeling of unsettling alienation, rather than individual inspiration. To some extent, both sides of the Post-War Consensus attacked classical art. I might open up this bag in another article, but the CIA funded Abstract Expressionism, and even paid to finance the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (the birthplace of Abstract Expressionism), co-founded by John Rockefeller.

They paid artists like Jackson Pollock and de Kooning under the table, asking them to churn out as many ugly pieces as possible. The Post-War Consensus demanded the “strong gods” of cultural appreciation to die, and weaker gods installed, who could not use art to unify a people. The best way to do that, was to make art dog-ugly. Art unifies culture. But they needed art that would divide a people, to keep them dis-unified and weak. And for the first time, art became something that drove controversy and division.

WHY DON’T (SOME) PROTESTANTS HAVE CATHEDRALS?

Do you remember when I said (above) that what we create says something about our beliefs? The “low church” Protestants believed that the Roman Catholic Church had replaced the real gospel and the real God with the “smells and bells” of the high church liturgy, in the same way that conservative evangelicals believe that charismatics have replaced the Holy Ghost with smoke machines and glitter dropped from air vents at Bethel Church in Redding. And frankly, there’s something to the concern.

The “simple church house” tradition came from the Puritans, who desired to return to a much simpler gospel.

In his preface to the Bay Song Book, New England Puritan John Cotton said, “God’s altar needs no polishings.” His point was as simple as the designs of the Puritan “meeting houses” (which they did not refer to as churches, under the New Testament idea that God does not dwell in buildings, but in people.”

The design of the Puritan meeting house exemplified this conviction. Just as salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, the meeting house would reflect that simplicity. Made almost indistinguishable from regular homes, at least on the outside, it became clear in contrast to Catholic cathedrals that what made this place special was only special as God’s people gathered to worship. The attention, the Puritans believed, would be on the Means of Grace (worship, preaching, Word, sacrament etc) rather than artistic design or craftiness. And rather than a complicated interior, Puritan meeting houses were much simpler (as you can see below).

Although the Puritans went to what some would call ‘extremes,’ making them appear as residential homes on the outside, most Protestants intentionally rejected the urge to make church buildings a testimony to the church or denomination’s wealth. Although there are exceptions to this principle, such as the “high church” Episcopalians or Anglicans, Protestants largely crafted buildings with simplicity in mind. And the reason for that was thoroughly theological.

In addition to desiring to de-link buildings from the definition of “church,” because the church is anywhere God dwells (and God the Holy Ghost now dwells in bodily temples belonging to saved humanity), Puritans also were largely resistant to the notion of sacred objects. They eschewed the superstitions of Rome, their believing in Holy Water by the incantation of a priest, the notion of transubstantiation (because of the Christological heresies it requires, including ongoing propitiation and a denunciation of Christ’s bodily nature), or the use or relics. It only made sense that they would reject the idea that physical ornation meaningfully adds to worship, but held instead that it was a distraction to true religion.

And so, when someone asks, “Why are Protestant churches so ugly?” it betrays an arguable presupposition; Protestants don’t really consider these buildings churches. Protestants consider the church, or ecclesia, to be the saints that gather for worship.

God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands (Acts 17:24).

Protestants, until very recently, were also largely iconoclastic, meaning that they interpreted the Second Commandment literally. Images of God are strictly forbidden in the Decalogue, and because Jesus is God the Son, images of the Son of God were taboo. And according to the fine print in the Second Commandment, so were images of angels. Because Papist cathedral aesthetics largely used sacred imagery, it left the Puritans wondering what exactly they would use to decorate the meeting house, or what images to put on the walls; so they decided for none.

This seems hard to believe today, as many Protestants and evangelicals think nothing of supporting films depicting Jesus, – ranging from the missionary “Jesus Film” or the Passion of the Christ – or sending children home from Sunday School with coloring book portraits of Jesus. But for most of Protestant history, these would have been excommunicative acts. These days, most Protestants think nothing of displaying a nativity set, but not long ago, a visiting pastor might have been prone to shatter them. And for full disclosure, I’m an iconoclast and I have definitely threatened to break some nativity sets.

Romanists merge the First and Second Commandments into one so they can largely ignore the part about graven images, and then splice the Tenth Commandment into two so they still have a Decalogue. But for Protestants, the reading seems clear:

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth (Exodus 20:4).

Traditionally, iconoclasts have not interpreted this to be a prohibition against art in general, but against religious imagery, especially if designed for use in worship. This was largely the position of the church fathers, with a few abstainers who didn’t engage in the argument. In fact, various Catholic Popes like Clement V forbade icons up until the 700s. Their argument was simple; the only image of Christ permitted is that which is found in the bread and wine of the Eucharist.

But finally, there certainly is a matter of money. While Protestants have these other, deeper reasons for simple church designs, they also are largely broke. The Catholic Church has a large financial advantage, partly thanks to preaching a religion that requires membership in the church to receive salvation – and often throughout history – to hold a religious wedding, baptize your child, or to be given a Christian funeral.

The Catholic Church of Rome is the largest land-holder in the world, is easily worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and that’s not counting “priceless” assets like works of art. Even in impoverished Third World nations, Romanist Cathedrals exhibit a flaunting of wealth, taken in a combination of proceeds collected by impoverished people in exchange for indulgences, to the financial gifting by the Vatican and funded by First World papists.

THE APPEAL OF CATHEDRALS

Many Christians around the world, or at least the Christian-adjacent, are taking a second look at “high church” religion, and find their aesthetics both compelling and beautiful. Protestant and evangelical churches have largely become irreverent and unserious. Those churches who paint their walls black and have a ceiling with open duct work, as though it was a factory or rave night club, were at one time popular by comparison of the stuffy, dead religion of mainline Protestantism. But it appears, the pendulum is swinging back around, and “seekers’ are looking for a church that doesn’t send the message it’s a youth group for adults.

With rampant ugliness in the world, the ability to wander into a beautiful building and see the splendor of human design, is appealing. In a world of ugly, a beautiful church house – especially in its interior – truly does seem like a “sanctuary” (as the evangelicals call it) from the world. Stepping foot into a church house that was a reclaimed stock yard doesn’t quite put out that vibe.

It seems that Protestants have gone from embracing simple to embracing ugly, and that’s a real shame. A simple building need not be an ugly one. It would be wise of Protestants and evangelicals to again take pride in their meeting houses, with intentional simplicity to magnify our convictions, but without confusing it with ugly.

I’m convinced that if our sermons were beautiful, if our fellowship was beautiful, if our worship was beautiful, whether or not the church was gold plated with cherubim on the wall and an idol-Christ on Communion table wouldn’t matter. People care little for smells and bells, or pomp and circumstance, when the presence of God is felt. If our sermons were rich, people wouldn’t have to flock to a church that is. A well-crafted service of worship is more important than a well-crafted building design. The Word of God, properly preached, is rich enough in itself.

I’m with those (in spirit) who complain that America’s churches houses are not as nice (or big, or majestic) as they used to be, and I also mourn the loss of a world that appears has moved on. But there is no awe and wonder in being within a space made by human hands that can replace the awe and wonder of being in God’s