| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America. By Jeanne Halgren Kilde. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. xiv, 310 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-19-514341-8.)
The church edifices of nineteenth-century mainstream Protestantism are some of the most important legacies of democratic association still found in the changing American built environment. Jeanne Halgren Kilde's When Church Became Theatre reveals the profound importance of those spaces in the production of our national, religious, and social identities at this critical time of national definition. The book is also an excellent contribution to cross-disciplinary cultural studies because Kilde provides us with a meticulous, archivally based study with insights broadened by her successful integration of semiotic iconology and social history.	1
Within the changing contexts of nineteenth-century religion, society, and culture, Kilde views churches as complex cultural texts as well as agents in the changing ritual processes of worship. How a group wants to view itself and its relationship to God, clergy, and the public is eloquently traced through the shifting uses of architectural styles that broadcast specific cultural meanings to the public and through interior arrangements that produced important interactions between clergy and laity.	. . .

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