The cross: Church symbol and contest in nineteenth-century America

Church History

Volumn 70, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 705-733

  Smith, Ryan K ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 55549137967     PISSN: 00096407     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3654546     Document Type: Article

References (85)

1. "The Cross in Italy," Presbyterian Magazine, Feb. 1852, 92 (last quotation)
2. Burlington's Presbyterian pamphleteer offered an extended discussion of the cross's Roman Catholic associations in "One Faith," 70-72, explaining how "For many ages, the Cross has been specially identified with the Church of Rome."
3. and Geo. S. Tyack, The Cross in Ritual, Architecture, and Art (London: W. Andrews, 1900). Few scholars have examined the use of the cross by American Protestant churches. In the early twentieth century, after the cross had been accepted into the major Protestant denominations, several British and American authors began reviewing the symbol's technical, historical development
4. Colleen McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840-1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986)
5. and McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), though these relatively brief discussions have not outlined the symbol's contested appropriation. Other studies have explored the symbol from a theoretical or theological perspective, illustrating the general capacity for religious symbols to cross broad cultural boundaries
6. See Andrew Landale Drummond, The Church Architecture of Protestantism, an Historical and Constructive Study (Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1934), 270-312
7. Daniel J. Fleming, "Religious Symbols Crossing Cultural Boundaries," in Religious Symbolism, ed. F. Ernest Johnson (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1969), 81-106
8. and Goodwin Watson, "A Psychologist's View of Religious Symbols," Religious Symbolism, 117-27
9. "Crosses and Weathercocks on Churches," Episcopal Watchman, Apr. 1827, 14 (first quotations)
10. Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter With Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)
11. Anne C. Rose, Beloved Strangers: Interfaith Families in Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001)
12. David A. Gerber, "Ambivalent Anti-Catholicism: Buffalo's American Protestant Elite Faces the Challenge of the Catholic Church, 1850-1860," Civil War History, June 1984, 120-43
13. Margaret Bendroth, "Rum, Romanism, and Evangelism: Protestants and Catholics in Late-Nineteenth-Century Boston," Church History 68 (1999): 627-47
14. Sergiusz Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 1993)
15. and Owen Chadwick, The Reformation (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1965)
16. For a view from the nineteenth century, see C. W. Bennett, "Catholicism and Protestantism as Patrons of Christian Art," Methodist Quarterly Review, Jan. 1877, 79-99
17. For studies of Reformation-era iconoclastic violence, see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)
18. and John Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535-1660 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973)
19. John Henry Hopkins, Essay on Gothic Architecture, With Various Plans and Drawings for Churches: Designed Chiefly for the Use of the Clergy (Burlington, Vt.: Smith & Harrington, 1836), 41 (last quotation)
20. For the spread of spires and steeples, see Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992), 169-80
21. Peter Benes, ed., New England Meeting House and Church: 1630-1850 (Dublin, N.H.: Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, 1979)
22. Barbara McLean Ward, "In a Feasting Posture: Communion Vessels and Community Values in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century New England," Winterthur Portfolio 23 (1988): 1-24
23. and Christopher H. Owen, "By Design: The Social Meaning of Methodist Church Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Georgia," Georgia Historical Quarterly 75 (1991): 223-35
24. R. A. Smith, Philadelphia As It Is In 1852: Being a Correct Guide to All the Public Buildings; Literary, Scientific, and Benevolent Institutions; and Places of Amusement; Remarkable Objects; Manufacturies; Commercial Warehouses; and Wholesale and Retail Stores in Philadelphia and its Vicinity... (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1852), 299 (first quotation)
25. On the symbolic significance of the Bible among nineteenth-century Protestants, see McDannell, Material Christianity, 67-102, 125. Many scholars have identified the lack of true iconoclasm among early American Protestants
26. See Allan I. Ludwig, Graven Images: New England Stonecarving and Its Symbols, 1650-1815 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1966)
27. James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1977)
28. Dillenberger, The Visual Arts and Christianity in America
29. Diana Williams Combs, Early Gravestone Art in Georgia and South Carolina (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986)
30. and Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), especially 197-241
31. "The Cross," Christian Recorder, 14 Dec. 1861
32. The Laity's Directory to the Church Service, for the Year of Our Lord MDCCCXXII (1822)
33. Metropolitan Catholic Almanac and Laity's Directory, for the Year of our Lord 1853 (Baltimore: Fielding Lucas, 1852)
34. For membership figures, see Shaughnessy, Has the Immigrant Kept the Faith? 63-73, 113-36
35. and Roger Finke and Rodney Starke, The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 110-15
36. "How Account for the Success of Romanism," The American Protestant, Dec. 1845, 195 (third quotations)
37. J. Colver Wightman, "The Fundamental Law of Christian Worship," Baptist Quarterly, Apr. 1867, 195 (last quotation). The list of similar observations is long
38. For example, see Tefft, "A Day with the Catholics," the Ladies' Repository: A Monthly Periodical, Devoted to Literature, Arts, and Religion, Sept. 1847, 283
39. For a review of the evangelical ambivalence toward the role of church buildings, see Julius Melton, Presbyterian Worship in America: Changing Patterns Since 1787 (Richmond, Va.: John Knox Press, 1967), 28, 47-57
40. See Jon Davis, "Catholic Envy."
41. Review of Gardiner Spring, The Attraction of the Cross, Designed to Illustrate the Leading Truths, Hopes, and Obligations of Christianity, in Princeton Review, Jan. 1846, 159 (first quotation)
42. C. E. Robins, "With the Nuns," Putnam's Monthly, Nov. 1868, 582 (last quotations)
43. "The Moral Influence of the Cross," Princeton Review, July 1835, 370 (first quotation)
44. "On the Use of Crosses," New York Observer, 3 Dec. 1842 (second quotation)
45. Lewis R. Dunn, "Power of the Cross," Ladies' Repository, May 1848, 141 (last quotation)
46. See also Gardiner Spring, The Attraction of the Cross, Designed to Illustrate the Leading Truths, Hopes, and Obligations of Christianity (New York: American Tract Society, [1845])
47. "Symbolism of the Cross," Harper's Weekly, 15 July 1871, 659 (first quotation)
48. John T. Short, "Symbolism of the Pre-Christian Cross," Methodist Quarterly Review, Oct. 1876, 612 (second quotation)
49. "Symbolism of the Cross," Harper's Weekly, 659
50. Tyack, The Cross in Ritual, Architecture and Art, 14-17
51. Mary Janes Ingham, "The Cross of Flowers," The Ladies' Repository, May 1867, 266 (first quotation)
52. and Linda C. Hults, "Pilgrim's Progress in the West: Moran's The Mountain of the Holy Cross," American Art (Winter/Spring 1991)
53. Joseph S. Varnum, Jr., "A Chapter About Churches (Concluded)," New York Observer, 1 May 1847
54. For one example of an archaeological study advocating the revival of pre-Reformation symbolism, see Wills, Ancient English Ecclesiastical Architecture
55. For ecclesiology, as well as details on Grace Church, New York City, see Phoebe B. Stanton, The Gothic Revival and American Church Architecture; An Episode in Taste, 1840-1856 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968)
56. and William H. Pierson, Jr., American Buildings and Their Architects, vol. 2, Technology and the Picturesque, the Corporate and the Early Gothic Styles (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 152-58, 173-219
57. Ingham, "The Cross of Flowers," 266-67 (last quotation)
58. "Casa Wappy," National Magazine, Oct. 1855, 295
59. "Methodist Church Architecture"
60. "Methodist Church Architecture. Second Article," National Magazine, Jan. 1856, 77-79
61. "Editor's Drawer," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Apr. 1866, 677 (first quotations)
62. Ingham, "The Cross of Flowers"
63. S. D. Maxwell, "St. Paul's Methodist Episcopal Church, Cincinnati," Ladies' Repository, Feb. 1871, 122-26 (last quotation)
64. For the Oxford movement see Owen Chadwick, The Mind of the Oxford Movement (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960)
65. Peter Benedict Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760-1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
66. Robert Bruce Mullin, Episcopal Vision/American Reality: High Church Theology and Social Thought in Evangelical America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 149-77
67. Stanton, The Gothic Revival
68. and E. Clowes Chorley, Men and Movements in the American Episcopal Church (New York: Scribner, 1946)
69. A fine example of an Episcopal debate over the use of the cross can be found in the pamphlet Puseyite Developments, or Notices of the New York Ecclesiologists. Dedicated to their Patron, the Right Rev. Bishop Ives, of North Carolina (New York: Berford & Co., 1850), 9
70. James Patrick, "Ecclesiological Gothic in the Antebellum South," Winterthur Portfolio 15 (1980): 137-38
71. C. M. Scammon, "In and Around Astoria," Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, Dec. 1869, 496
72. "One Faith," 37 (first quotation)
73. [Flavel Mines], A Presbyterian Clergyman Looking for the Church. By One of Three Hundred Sixth and Seventh Thousand (New York: Pudney & Russell, 1853), 504-11 (last quotations)
74. See also Peyton Harrison Hoge, Moses Drury Hoge: Life and Letters (Richmond, Va.: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1899), 90
75. Melton, Presbyterian Worship in America, 61-70
76. "West Spruce St. Baptist Church, Philadelphia," Scientific American, 23 Jan. 1869, 53
77. For personal testimony regarding the symbol's devotional effects, see Tyack, The Cross in Ritual, Architecture, and Art, 96
78. Puseyite Developments, 9 (first quotation)
79. Nevins, Practical Thoughts: Thoughts on Popery, 93 (last quotation)
80. For a few Protestant accusations of idolatry, see Smith, Popery Fulfilling Prophecy, 28
81. John Dowling, The History of Romanism: From the Earliest Corruptions of Christianity to the Present Time (New York: Edward Walker, 1846), 259
82. W. C. Brownlee, Letters in the Roman Catholic Controversy, 2d ed. (New York, 1834), 282
83. For a Catholic defense on the proper uses of and behaviors involving crosses, see Gibbons, Faith of Our Fathers, 19-20 and 232-46
84. For the role of Mary in Protestant households, see McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America, 40-48, 128-45
85. For more on Protestantism and representations of the human form, see David Morgan, ed., Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996)