American Sacred Space

Religion in North America

by David Chidester, Edward Tabor Linenthal

In a series of pioneering studies, this book examines the creation―and the conflict behind the creation―of sacred space in America. The essays in this volume visit places in America where economic, political, and social forces clash over the sacred and the profane, from wilderness areas in the American West to the Mall in Washington, D.C., and they investigate visions of America as sacred space at home and abroad. Here are the beginnings of a new American religious history―told as the story of the contested spaces it has inhabited.

The contributors are David Chidester, Matthew Glass, Edward T. Linenthal, Colleen McDannell, Robert S. Michaelsen, Rowland A. Sherrill, and Bron Taylor.

368 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1995

About the author

David Chidester is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town.

Reviews

[Samuel · Rating 2 out of 5]

In American Sacred Space, edited by David Chidester and Edward T. Lintel, several scholars combine their efforts “to theorize the concept of American sacred space and to examine the production and presence of sacred space in a series of important American case studies.” It is important to note (which may have been accomplished with a subtitle to the book) that the authors are more concerned with American civil religion—more patriotic than religious—as opposed to a strictly religious look at various denominations and American belief systems. In reaction to the theory that American sacred space has generally been pluralistic yet harmonious, this work consistently finds American space to be more conflictual. The editors write: "Sacred places are arenas in which power relations can be reinforced, in which relations between insiders and outsiders, rulers and subjects, elders and juniors, males and females, and so on, can be adjudicated. But those power relations are always resisted."

Space is contested for many reasons—economics, politics, etc.—but when issues of religion and reverence for deceased persons enters the equation, the contest for space reaches the most serious of undertakings for Americans. By looking at sites in which Americans seek to preserve the memories and cultures that constitute a collective history—including Native American sacred sites, the national monument at Pearl Harbor, the idealized Christian home, and the US Holocaust Museum—this book seeks to identify and explore the cultural battles for space, memory, and history that are eventually read into the American landscape. The stories nearly all emphasize the role of the courtroom as the scope of American civil exclusion has expanded. In this sense, sacred space seems to exist because of and in spite of contestation among various groups of Americans.� This book is a collection of diverse essays that fit loosely together under the broad concept of contested “sacred space” within an American (though with some transnational considerations) framework. Robert S. Michaelson explores the meanings and results of Supreme Court rulings against disputed Indian Land claims; essentially the court sees the economic repercussions for the federal government as too great to yield its “ownership” of sacred Indian lands back to Native Americans. However, Michaelson teases out the growing minority of dissenters who are beginning to demand that the government recognize the spiritual dimension of its land. Bron Taylor’s “Resacrlizing the Earth: Pagan Environmentalism and Turtle Island” considers the Earth First! movement and its associations with Native American religious beliefs as well as those of eastern religions. Despite the movements foundational belief that all of the earth is sacred, it takes a practical approach to prioritizing places most in danger of further capitalistic exploitation and ecological damage, which are essentially battles of ideology and land rights. Matthew Glass’ Mount Rushmore article furthers the discussion on contested meanings of sacred places by comparing American patriotism and veneration of white presidents with the sacred respect for the Black Hills by Native Americans. This article most explicitly makes the case for considering American civil religion—patriotism and historical memory—as a truly religious force. Colleen McDannell’s “Creating the Christian Home” makes the interesting and convincing case that homeschooling is a religious (rather than an educational) American phenomena carried over from the nineteenth century desire to make the home a Christian haven. Edward T. Linenthal’s consideration of the Holocaust Memorial Museum similarly deals with interpretations of space, memory, and religious freedom, and David Chidester’s “America as �Sacred Space in South Africa” considers diverse, transnational dimensions of American sacred space. Rowland A. Sherrill “American Sacred Space and the Conquest of History” concludes the set of essays with the idea that “homogenization” of the American landscape (the fact that the superhighway and strip malls consistently look more similar than dissimilar throughout the United States’ built environment) has resulted in a “placelessness” for many Americans. This has exacerbated the contest for American sacred spaces to be commemorated as physical markers of historical (even if partially imagined) pasts. Overall, these essays were diverse, interesting, and fairly convincing, but as noted earlier, a clarifying subtitle could have more explicitly set forth the book’s focus on American civil religion rather than institutional religion.

[John]

American Sacred Space presents a decidedly uneven collection of essays by (mostly) North American scholars, loosely gathered around the title topic--so loosely gathered, in fact, as to make the whole volume unfocused and of limited usefulness.

In the Introduction, the editors helpfully survey the various scholarly positions on spatial sacrality, particularly in terms of the dichotomy between an Eliadean/substantive model and a Durkheimean/situational (or functional) model; this dichotomy is standard in the large scholarly literature on sacred space, and this introduction captures it well, while not adding any earthshaking insights.

The first three essays are made somewhat tedious by their proximity to one another in the volume, as all three involve the political tensions between the uses of spaces (both sacred and secular) by the United States government and the sacrality of the same spaces to Native Americans. While a volume on "American sacred space" could hardly do justice to its topic without approaching it from the standpoint of the first Americans and the ongoing dialectic of their relationship with later claimants to American space, three chapters in a row--nearly half the printed pages of the book--make for repetitive reading, particularly when other topics (as noted below) are left uncovered.

Colleen McDannell's essay on the role of Christian homeschooling in sacralizing the American home is promising, but much of what she says is unfortunately outdated (the book was published in 1995, and homeschooling has grown and changed enormously in the intervening 17 years). For instance, McDannell's study suggests that homeschoolers are overwhelmingly conservative or fundamentalist Protestants. This may have been the case in the early 1990s, but I think the situation is much more complex now, as homeschooling has grown in popularity among Catholics and Orthodox Christians, as well as among secular progressives who are dissatisfied (for very different reasons) with the public schools in America.

Chidester's contribution, on the perception of America as sacred space by South Africans, is the least satisfying contribution to the collection. This long-winded essay really doesn't seem to be about American sacred space at all--the essay is about an ideal rather than a spatial reality, and its subjects are not Americans but South Africans. At the least, this feels like an essay that would have been a happier fit in a different volume.

The two highlights of the collection are Linenthal's fascinating discussion of the difficulties faced during the planning and design of the United States Holocaust Memorial and Rowland Sherrill's concluding review essay looking at topics in American sacred space and history through the lens of three important recent (at that time) books on the topic.

What, critically, is missing from this book is any kind of engagement with more "conventional" expressions of spatial sacrality. Perhaps one of the three overly-similar essays mentioned above could have been replaced by one that examined American hierophanies (the Sacred Grove in Palmyra, or El Santuario de Chimayo mission, perhaps). Or an essay could have examined the role of sacred space in American town planning--Which denomination gets the church on the corner of the town square? Which ones are relegated to the bad neighborhoods? How do these dynamics of spatial sacrality reflect American economic, demographic, political, racial, or other social realities?

[Jamila Gonzalez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nice overview of theories on sacred space in the introduction by Chidester and Linenthal. They divide the theories into "situational" and "substantial." For example, Claude Levi-Strauss' theorizes sacred space as "situational." Sacred space is an empty "signifier" so it is “susceptible to the reception of any meaning whatsoever” (6). On the other hand Mircea Eliade view's sacred space as "substantial." For him, the sacred irrupts into space creating centers. In more simple terms, substantial means some sort of divine phenomenon whereas situational means the human aspect.

Jonathan Z. Smith is likewise situational or humanistic. He sees sacred space being created as a result of “cultural labor of ritual, in specific historical situations involving the hard work of attention, memory, design, construction, and control of place” (6).

Their final theorist, Van der Leeuw, is a mix. He does see an agency of sacred power so that aspect of his theory is "substantial" or perhaps divine. Otherwise, he is mainly situational. First off, he sees the home and temple as nearly equivalent in meaning; an authentic religious experience is akin to homesickness. He sees the modern western home as having lost some of that sacredness because there are no clear boundaries and its ownership is alienated. Sacred space for Van der Leeuw must include aspects of property and politics of exclusion.

Chidester and Linenthal go on to emphasize that sacred space is inherently contested space for two reasons. First, it is spatial and like any mundane space, it can be contested so it is. Second, sacred space has a surplus of meaning. That meaning is subject to appropriation, exclusion, inversion, and hybridization. For example America was Israel to early Puritans (ie John Winthrop), but Egypt to slaves (29).

The two other chapters I read were also very good, "Creating the Christian Home" by Colleen McDannell and "Locating Holocaust Memory" by Linenthal. McDannell's essay argues that homeschoolers are more motivated religiously than for educational reasons. She makes a good case that for them the home is sacred space.

Linenthal describes the process of creating the sacred space of the Holocaust memorial in Washington, D.C. on the mall which is sort of the sacred center of American civil religion. I especially found interesting the use of soil and ashes from concentration camps which mixed with the sacred soil of the Mall to create a kind of sacred relic to sanctify the space.