While providing pre-1840 background and a contemporary epilogue, Peter Williams focuses on telling how wealthy Episcopalians shaped American culture from 1840–1960. Deliberately focusing on the Northeast, with some minor attention to the Great Lakes region, Williams show how the major strands of Episcopal thought, high-, low-, and broad-church, were woven into church architecture, ornamentation, and stewardship to form the fabric of American culture. Clearly demonstrating that historians need to pay more attention to the Episcopal Church, the book reinforces stereotypes of Episcopalians as the wealthy elite.
The interdisciplinary Religion, Art, and Money combines biography, social history, theology, and art criticism. The book argues that elites attracted to the Episcopal Church sought to shape American faith and social responsibility through the cultural and religious institutions they built and founded. Williams begins with the collaboration between the Rev. (later Bishop) Phillips Brooks and H. H. Richardson in the creation the 1877 Romanesque Trinity Church in Boston as a building suited to the broad-church Brooks.
Episcopal emphasis on liturgy and stewardship brought clergy and lay patrons together to pursue projects that helped launch and shape the gothic revival in architecture, then expanded to include cathedral building projects. After less than a page attention to the early Gothic Revival inspired by Richard Upjohn and James Renwick, Williams explores buildings designed by Ralph Cram beginning in the 1890s. Cram's designs for All Saints Ashmont and St. Thomas (New York City), became the warm-up for his work on a new Trinity (Boston), St. John the Divine (New York City), and the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul (Washington National Cathedral). In each case, Cram collaborated with a sympathetic bishop: William Lawrence in Boston, Henry C. Potter in New York, and Henry Satterlee in Washington, D.C. All were high church clergy interested in worship spaces that emphasized the sacramental nature of worship and used art to reinforce a sense of awe and mystery. These later projects also attracted major lay donors.
Episcopalians understood stewardship to mean that wealth brought responsibility for others. Episcopalians William Graham Sumner, Richard Ely, and Vida Scudder helped promote the social gospel. The Church implemented it architecturally through parish buildings with facilities designed to host programs aimed at the poor. It also led Episcopalians to found private schools designed to teach values and responsibility to the sons of the elites.
A final chapter explores how elite Episcopal patrons intertwined faith and art. William Cooper Proctor inherited leadership of Proctor and Gamble. He generously used his fortune to endow the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Ohio and a children's hospital, and to serve on numerous arts boards, notably that of the Cincinnati Symphony. J. P. Morgan not only supported parishes in New York City, including ten years as treasurer for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, but worked for the Church at the national level. He provided major financial support for the development of both the Book of Common Prayer 1892 and 1928. He was also an important figure in the development of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Both Detroit newspaper publisher George C. Booth and Isabella Stewart Gardner turned their homes into art museums. Gardner built a strong religious art collection, while hosting religious retreats and services. Booth focused on the Arts and Crafts Movement and founded Cranbrook Press. Henry Ford's most lasting legacy is Greenfield Village. The author contrasts Ford's mythical America at Greenfield, filled with uprooted iconic buildings, with the living history site, Colonial Williamsburg. The non-millionaire Episcopal clergyman, the Rev. W. A. R. Goodwin, enlisted Rockefeller support to turn an iconic location into a model for historic preservation.
Williams's command of the topic falters when he moves beyond the New York-Boston corridor. He mischaracterizes nineteenth-century Minnesota under mildly high-church Bishop Henry Whipple as part of the “Biretta Belt” (81). Whipple fostered a broad-church ethos while supporting the modestly high-church Seabury Seminary. The author slights Bishop Whipple's own interest in architecture by crediting James Breck with the leading role in construction of the cathedral in Faribault. Whipple was a proponent of gothic architecture when he arrived in Minnesota, enthusiastically spreading Upjohn's carpenter gothic plans to parishes throughout Minnesota and choosing James Renwick to design the Shattuck School chapel in Faribault. An over-focus on Pittsburgh's Calvary Church completely ignores the role Trinity Church played a generation earlier with its 1872 gothic building and philanthropies, especially those by millionaires Felix Brunot and John Schoenberger, both of whom worked closely with their wives in every good work. The author also omits Pittsburgh's Emmanuel Episcopal Church from the later discussion of Richardson buildings.
Two oversights are more systemic. By excluding the South, Williams misses the ways that Southern progressive Episcopalians were a part of the very story he is telling. More importantly, other than Scudder and Gardner, women are nearly absent from the book. The Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross was much more active as a network of social reformers than would appear from reading Religion, Art, and Money. The author credits the Society of Arts and Crafts for setting up the first exhibit of local handmade products and then a showroom in 1900, but Deaconess Sibyl Carter's Indian lace project predated the Society. Carter had begun selling handcrafted lace to New York Society matrons in the 1890s. Williams covers only schools for boys when discussing Episcopal education; and clearly does not have a full grasp on the way women acted as partners to male family members and clergy in developing and sustaining social outreach. For example, while Williams discusses Goodwin and the Sr. and Jr. John Rockefellers’ roles at Williamsburg, there is no mention that Abby Aldrich Rockefeller was a partner in the restoration and donated the core works in the folk art museum named for her.
Nonetheless, Williams has pointed us in new interdisciplinary directions, and the book has much to offer a variety of readers. It should serve as encouragement to more fully develop this story.
