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Reviews of Books
Temples of Grace: The Material Transformation of Connecticut's
Churches, 1790–1840. By
Gretchen Buggeln
. (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2003. Pp. xiv,
312. $39.95.)
Reviewed
by
John Fea
, Messiah College
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Let's face it; most of us are ill-equipped to interpret the built environment in order to reimagine the early American past. We need more studies like Gretchen Buggeln's Temples of Grace, a study of Connecticut churches that uses things like pew slips, communion silver, scissor trusses, and fluted gallery columns to illuminate life in the new Republic. Nearly all of what we know about church buildings comes from the work of architectural historians who are uninterested or untrained in explaining the larger cultural significance of the structures that they study. Social and cultural historians, on the other hand, have rarely looked to ecclesiastical architecture as a guide for understanding religious life. Within the past decade or so, however, scholars of American religion have turned to the material world to explain what Jon Butler has called the "sacralization" of the landscape. Architectural historians and cultural historians are talking to one another more than ever, and Gretchen Buggeln's book should become an important part of the conversation. |
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What distinguishes Temples of Grace is the author's careful and successful attempt at grounding Connecticut's early national churches firmly within the state's social, economic, and religious life. Students of architecture and material culture will learn much from this book, but so will students of New England religion. Those familiar with the work of Dell Upton or Peter W. Williams on church buildings will be just as comfortable moving through Buggeln's pages as those more oriented toward the works of Bruce Daniels and Richard L. Bushman on early Connecticut or Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll on religion in the first several decades of the nineteenth century more broadly. |
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Temples of Grace is the story of how Connecticut Congregationalists and Anglicans (with a few Baptist, Methodist, African American, and Union churches added, at times a bit awkwardly, into the mix) accommodated themselves to the culture of the early Republic. This is not a new story. We already know a great deal about how Protestants in this period made peace with democratization, the market revolution, and religious disestablishment. But, by turning her attention to church buildings, Buggeln provides us with a new and exciting way of exploring these well-rehearsed themes and often enhances our understanding of them. |
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Buggeln reminds us that the construction of church buildings did not occur in an economic vacuum. The decision to build was intricately tied to the behavior of the market. After Connecticut's religious disestablishment in 1818, Congregational churches could no longer rely on taxes to underwrite their new edifices. As a result, those responsible for building projects in local churches were chosen more for their business acumen than for their spiritual sensibilities. Church construction—a process that Buggeln chronicles in amazing detail—required money, a reality that prompted members of building committees to pitch their projects as investment opportunities. Pews became commodities of the marketplace—sold by congregational leaders to fund the erection of new churches and consumed by town residents seeking to satisfy their religious desires and to affirm their social standing within the community. |
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