This is a work of popular and contemporary history written by a British Anglican priest and journalist — a creative way to tell a big story, successfully, in a breezy, colorful, theologically-informed way.
One chapter per church, starting on the West Bank of Palestine at The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Then comes St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the most visible church in the world and the emotional seat of Roman Catholicism, followed by the extravagantly beautiful Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey, which started as a cathedral, then turned to a mosque by the Ottomans in the fifteenth century, then a museum in 1935, and now once again is a mosque. Butler-Gallie quotes the Emperor Justinian I inside the cathedral in the sixth century, who is said to have remarked, while looking up at its amazing dome, “Solomon, I have surpassed thee.”
Those are the first three chapters. After that come churches which are each shown by the author to symbolize something essential to the Christian story. Violence marks Canterbury Cathedral, in Canterbury, England, due to the infamous murder, upon royal command, of Thomas Becket there. Similarly, violence marks 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where the Christian-inspired Ku Klux Klan, at the height of the Civil Rights Struggle in America, set off a bomb on Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, killing four Black girls. Butler-Gallie uses this narrative to explore different Christian ways of answering the essential questions: “If God is just and loving, why has this happened? Why is there a need for justice — the righting of wrongs — when surely an all-powerful and, crucially, all-loving God could simply not have created wrongs in the first place?”
In each chapter, the story of a building is much more than the story of a building.
Churches from Greece (Mount Athos), Dominican Republic (Templo de las Americas), Japan (Kirishitan Hokora), and Massachusetts (Site of the First Meeting House) are here. And then the continent of Africa is well-represented with three church chapters: Bete Golgotha in Lalibela, Ethiopia; Christ Church in Zanzibar, Tanzania; and Canaanland in Ota, Nigeria. The latter was the most fascinating. A church so young that it was built only in 1999, Canaanland fills Chapter 12, and stands in for the author as a statement about the future of the religion itself, since its greatest growth is taking place in Africa. The church was built on an old industrial lot in a suburb of Lagos, “the nation and continent’s largest city.” Butler-Gallie asks and answers in this extended look at a church complex that seats 50,000 people for worship, but also includes a hotel, restaurants, and a bank, “Where, twenty-one centuries after the babe at Bethlehem, do Christians find hope today?”
