Sacred Teepees
Dwight Longenecker on Modern Church Architecture
I am lucky. My job as a charity representative means I visit a different Catholic parish every weekend. Traveling around southwest England gives me the chance to indulge one of my favorite hobbies: church snooping. Any church is interesting—even modern preaching halls have a homely silence about them. But I admit I don’t usually aim for the Methodist halls and Baptist chapels. I look out for the old-timers.
Church snooping here in England means pulling up in little villages to explore those humble historic treasures, the ancient parish churches. I never get tired of spotting the tower of a distant village, then pulling off the road, traipsing across the ancient churchyard to see if the door just might be open. Philip Larkin recounted the same gentle obsession in his poem “Church Going”:
Once I am sure there’s nothing going on,
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle clips in awkward reverence.
A New Style
But I’m in a car, not on a bike, and once I get behind the wheel again, I have to push on to my modern Catholic parish, usually one built after the Second Vatican Council. Vatican II brought a new approach to the Liturgy, and zealous clergy teamed up with trendy architects to establish a new Catholic style. They also wanted to make a political statement. Worship and churches were to be more “people-centered.” The result is an architecture that can only be called the teepee style of church architecture. The Catholic cathedral in Liverpool is even called “Paddy’s Wigwam.”
Built from modern materials of glass, steel, and concrete, these churches were designed to follow the new dogmas of egalitarianism and liturgical folksiness. Hierarchical ideas were anathema, and a shallow form of democracy ruled the day. Church architects followed Frank Lloyd Wright’s brutal rule of modern architecture—“form follows function”—and to facilitate the new understanding of the Liturgy, they built round churches with an altar at the center and the people gathered around. Suddenly it did not matter if a church was beautiful or not. It did not matter if it expressed the glory of God. It did not matter if it was an effort to reveal the transcendent beauty of worship. What mattered was, “Is it liturgically (and politically) correct?”
On my weekends exploring England I come across these round churches. Often they are plopped down like some huge concrete excrement in a mellow suburb of gracious Victorian houses fronted by rose beds and manicured lawns. Other times they appear in modest inner-city housing developments, and you have trouble distinguishing between the church and the multi-level parking lot.
I have asked numerous priests and people if they like our own cathedral, a monstrous sprawl of concrete that squats in a suburb of Bristol. Not one has said he loves it. The most positive response I get is from priests who say, “It works well liturgically.” That is fine, but it is not the same thing as loving a building. How can one love a building that is merely functional? Can one love a parking garage?
I have tried to love these modern churches because I dislike the tendency among church people to be whining antiquarians. I don’t believe in a golden age of religion, art, or architecture. I believe a man is most often right in what he affirms and wrong in what he denies. I have therefore made a real effort to be open-minded. I have tried to discover the hidden greatness of our modern teepee churches. In the end I failed and have turned my energies instead to asking why exactly I dislike such churches. Why do they not lift the spirits? Why do we not find them beautiful? Why do they fail to reflect Christian theology and spirituality?
Perhaps the answer is that the teepee churches do not actually fulfill their function. If they are supposed only to provide a place for the people of God to gather around the altar, they fulfill their function admirably. But perhaps part of their function is to be beautiful as well. Isn’t a church more than a meeting hall? Shouldn’t a church lift the mind and heart to God? Shouldn’t a Christian building reflect the great Christian mystery and point beyond itself to the mystery of the Incarnation? In other words, perhaps I dislike round churches not because they are functional, but because they are not functional enough.
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