Church-Building and the Consolidation of the United States, 1865–1900

In the decades that followed the American Civil War, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and Episcopalians across the Northern United States embarked on a massive centrally coordinated church-building program. Just as capitalists and politicians poured resources into the American West and South to consolidate and cohere the newly reunited nation under a single economic and political order, these Northern Protestants also hoped to bind the republic’s sections with a homogenous faith by bankrolling a continental network of church edifices across the country. This article explores the role of the postbellum Protestant church-building endeavor in the broader process of national consolidation. It argues that the movement was nationally consolidative in three ways. Firstly, by pooling and re-distributing capital from wealthier congregations to their needier counterparts, the church-building organizations themselves brought greater uniformity and unity to the process of Protestant expansion in the United States. Secondly, the movement was compelled by a powerful religio-political philosophy of church-building the author terms “republican ecclesiology,” which endowed the Protestant edifice with a key infrastructural role in national reunification as a stabilizing bastion of piety and patriotism, especially in the American West. Finally, church-building advocates believed that the cross-continental financial networks forged between benefactors and beneficiaries consolidated the nation spiritually by creating a more united body of Protestant believers all invested – emotionally as well as financially – in their compatriots’ salvations.