About 5 miles from my apartment, there is an old church that was built on a fifth-century Roman mausoleum in what is now the small town of Saint-Prex on Lake Geneva. It is one of the oldest churches in the country. Three apses and a bell tower were added in the 12th century. Shortly afterward, the church became a stop on the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, the Way of St. James. It was transformed into a Protestant church in 1536 when the Bernese expelled the Savoy and now sits empty most Sundays. The history of Christianity in Europe, its displacement of paganism and subsequent growth and decline, can be traced in the building itself.
In his new book, Twelve Churches: An Unlikely History of the Buildings that Made Christianity, Fergus Butler-Gallie attempts to do just that but on a global scale. The 12 churches in the book are from “almost every continent” and “a wide range of denominations,” Butler-Gallie writes, to capture the “breadth and depth” of Christianity. He attempts to offer a “new history of Christianity” by examining “churches and the people who prayed in them.” For it is in churches, Butler-Gallie argues, that we see attempts to deal with the complexities of life “rendered into stone.” In fact, we don’t just see “the story of Christianity” in these churches. We see “the story of our modern world,” Butler-Gallie claims, “a story of who we should be, as well as who we sometimes are.”
Things get off to an inauspicious start with the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, which Butler-Gallie is unable to visit because it is located in the West Bank. He gives a potted history of the building and relates a few interesting anecdotes. Brawls have sometimes broken out between the Catholic, Armenian, and Orthodox priests who all have an ownership stake in the church. In 1869, there was a fistfight over the color of a new curtain. In 2011, “a group of rival priests bashed one another on the heads with brooms during the annual Christmas cleanup, resulting in the intervention of riot police.”
The church tells us two things about Christianity, Butler-Gallie argues, both banal: The first is that “Christianity is a faith which encompasses socially liberal, economically comfortable people in the West and some of the poorest people on earth.” The second is that “both life and death are inherently linked.”
Things improve somewhat with visits to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Butler-Gallie offers a detailed history of St. Peter’s, from the founding of Old St. Peter’s, as it is called, on the site of St. Peter’s tomb (many early Christians met at burial sites because of the privacy they offered) to the complicated, century-long construction of the new St. Peter’s beginning in 1506.
Butler-Gallie reminds us that the selling of indulgences to build the new St. Peter’s played a significant role in sparking the Reformation. Martin Luther alluded to the church in his Ninety-five Theses. If the pope knew the hardship the sale of indulgences was causing ordinary people, he should wish “the basilica of St. Peter’s were burned to ashes” rather than build it “with the skin, flesh, and bones of his sheep.” There is a real sense in which St. Peter’s “made,” as the title of Butler-Gallie’s book states, what Christianity is today.
The same may be said of Hagia Sophia. “Hagia Sophia,” Butler-Gallie writes, “tells the story of Christianity’s strange and complicated dance with secular power better than any other building in the world,” and he’s right. Its construction was ordered by Constantine, on the site of a pagan shrine, and finished by his son. It burned in A.D. 404, was rebuilt by Theodosius II shortly afterward, and burned again in 532. Justinian I built the third iteration of the basilica, which is what we have today. It was the largest church in the world for nearly a thousand years.
The church is currently a mosque, as it was from 1453 to 1935. (It was used as a museum from 1935 to 2020.) Hagia Sophia “was designed to be a global church, not just a local one,” Butler-Gallie writes, “but, as is so often the case, the world had other ideas.” His point is that Christianity’s political power has always been limited, far more limited than people sometimes claim, partly because Christianity is not particularly suited to exercising it and partly because Christians have so regularly been at odds. When the Crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204, they stripped Hagia Sophia bare and brought prostitutes into the church “to dance around the holiest part … in ‘unnatural ways.’”
Except for these chapters on St. Peter’s and Hagia Sophia, Butler-Gallie comments very little on how the buildings themselves were designed and built and focuses rather on things that happened in or around them — the murder of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, for example, or accusations of witchcraft in Salem’s First Meetinghouse. In some cases, he writes about what doesn’t happen in these places. His chapter on Mount Athos is only nominally about the famous monastery. His real interest is the monastic vow of chastity and the fact that “there are no women” on “the whole of Mount Athos.” In some cases, he gets wildly off track. In a chapter on the Japanese Christian shrine Kirishitan Hokora, he devotes several pages to the Church of Scotland in the 17th century.
WHEN THEY ACTUALLY BANNED BOOKS
Unlike St. Peter’s, Hagia Sophia, or Mount Athos, most of the churches included in the book have had little long-term effect on Christian belief and practice. While the construction of Christ Church in Zanzibar, Tanzania, in 1873 on the site of a former slave market or the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963 are significant events, it is difficult to say that they “made” Christianity what it is today.
In the end, Twelve Churches is a survey of Christian attitudes toward various topics — beauty, power, money, sex, and race — as they were expressed in various places at various times. Butler-Gallie is an affable, liberal-minded priest-cum-tour guide who hits all the low and high points. The book is beautifully designed and includes wonderful little sketches of the churches at the beginning of each chapter. It is easy to read and, unfortunately, easy to forget.
Micah Mattix is a poetry editor of First Things.