New book explores controversial history behind American churches’ designs

By Leila Ugincius

Most conventional Protestant churches contain familiar features: candles, floral arrangements, stained glass and, of course, crosses. But many items that seem standard to most Protestants today would have shocked their 19th century forefathers, says Virginia Commonwealth University professor Ryan K. Smith.

“Flowers on the altar were like red flags to a bull – they enflamed the congregation,” said Smith, an assistant professor of history, who explained that these items once were associated strictly with Roman Catholicism — a religion widely discriminated against in the 1800s. Yet in spite of the era’s anti-Catholics views, Protestant churches began to embrace these elements.

Smith examined this paradox in his first book, “Gothic Arches, Latin Crosses,” which is due out in May from The University of North Carolina Press.

“Smith demonstrates significant connections between rising anti-Catholicism and Protestant appropriation of ‘Catholic’ design and decoration,” wrote University of Maryland Professor Sally M. Promey in reviewing “Gothic Arches.”

The impetus for this movement was born of necessity, Smith noted. While the Church was not widely represented in the United States before the 1830s, a tide of German and Irish immigrants from 1820 to 1850 changed the landscape.

“People thought, ‘we’re going to a have a majority here.’ People see there’s some power in Roman Catholicism,” Smith explained. “You had Catholic churches coming into cities that had never had them before. Protestants were hostile but they were also fascinated.”

Smith wrote a first draft of sorts while he was a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware. Rather than approach his dissertation with a dry, myopic view, he thought: “What if I started it as if I was writing a book instead of a dissertation?”

His strategy paid off. His dissertation, “Protestant Popery: Catholic Art in America’s Protestant Churches, 1830-1890,” was a finalist in 2002 for the Allan Nevins Dissertation Prize, which is sponsored by the Society of American Historians for the best-written doctoral dissertation on a significant theme in American history. He easily parlayed his paper into the manuscript for “Gothic Arches.”

“I tried to write this as accessibly as I could,” he says. “It hasn’t changed too much from the dissertation.”

Smith found working on the book so rewarding, that he already has his sites set on a new project — studying saints’ relics, which all Roman Catholic altars were required to have enshrined inside them.

“I think the idea of considering where these bits and bones came from and what they meant to people could be an interesting project.”