Adding to a body of recent work on the politics of American space, Ryan K. Smith's book posits the thesis that the changing face of nineteenth-century church design was rooted in a controversial history of Nativist struggles with Catholicism. The book divides the analysis into five chapters dealing with the violent conflict in terms of the increasing occurrences of specifically “Catholic” symbols (the Latin cross, flowers) and Catholic-inspired architectural features (the Gothic) in Episcopalian, Methodist, Baptist and Unitarian churches in this period. These denominations, variously noted for their prior austerity, began to adopt materially more innate forms of aesthetics and ritual from Catholic worship. Smith shows that the surprising material changes in the nature of Protestant religious ritual in this period, including the burgeoning interest in positive notions of the beauty and the opulence of Catholic worship, whilst seemingly at odds with the prevailing, violent, anti-Catholic insurgency of mid-century, owe much to American nation-building and the growing dominance of global markets. Smith reasons that by borrowing symbols and accoutrements from Catholic services, the Protestant majority sought to simultaneously undermine Catholicism on the American mainland and develop a form of worship that better served changing tastes, whilst offering an external perception of American grandeur, wealth and influence.

As a vehicle for interesting anecdotes and insights into the alterations and accommodations within the history of a massively influential force in American cultural life, Chapters 3 to 5 are strong on content and impressively researched. It is in capturing the many phenomenological responses to a time of cataclysmic change in aesthetic tastes and increasing concern for the material in life that the many journals, logs and so on are fascinating. However, several of the other chapters, such as Chapter 2, were of markedly less interest to anyone whose concerns lie less specifically in ecclesiastical history than in broader aesthetic and cultural matter. I have one major concern with the book: in exploring the era of approximately 1820 to 1880, the analysis offers little on the effect of the Civil War on issues of spirituality, the material and the politics of public space. Perhaps this event effected little change on the nature of Protestant and Catholic worship, although a history of this in the context of this book would have been interesting.