Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism

2. Church Bells in the Industrial City

40 > 41 Europe,” they announced at the exposition’s close. “We have met the Tartar and the Turk, the Saracen and the worshipper of Buddha. We have seen that they had industry greater than our own, and skill in execution not inferior. Yet we have walked through the Exposition with blinded eyes if we have not learned that this power, the power which has made us superior to the Chinaman , the Hindoo, and the Turk has its source and spring mainly in religion. That it is to Christianity that we owe forces . . . that carry us forward in a course of progress.”2 America’s centennial celebration arrived during a time of rapid societal transformation. The heterogeneity that Philadelphians experienced during the exposition was hardly short-lived, and the challenges that it posed would not soon go away. As industrialization and immigration reshaped American cities, Christian communities and their leaders often struggled to adapt. These new conditions could make religion’s place in American life seem deeply unsettled and uncertain. Yet many Protestant Americans continued to project a profound sense of optimism about the future and supreme confidence in their own cultural authority. Even if they could no longer take their dominance for granted, they retained—and articulated—a deep belief in the essential Christian character of the American people and in America’s special destiny as God’s chosen nation. They responded to the challenges of the time by asserting a close link between Christian faith and progress, arguing that only Protestant Christianity could provide the proper foundation for the advancement of modern civilization. The transformations of postbellum American society thus gave rise to both new anxieties and new certainties about Protestantism’s place in American society, and the varied responses to Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition brought this tension to the fore, revealing both its perils and possibilities.3 That same year, several distinguished denizens of Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square neighborhood began to complain about the clamor caused by bell ringing at St. Mark’s Protestant Episcopal Church. The ensuing legal dispute created a furor. “Philadelphia society was rent in twain,” a later account would relate. “Matrons had to select dinner guests, all of whom either favored or opposed the bells of St. Mark’s. The Centennial Exposition and the Pennsylvania -Princeton football game were nearly eclipsed.” Dismissed as frivolous by many contemporary observers, this bells dispute raised surprisingly serious issues as it brought to the fore many of the same tensions described above. The different parties to the case were all members of Philadelphia’s white upper-class Protestant elite, yet their varied responses to St. Mark’s bells expressed different assumptions about how Protestant churches would retain their moral influence and authority in postbellum American cities. 42 > 43 population had grown to over 817,000. A report that same year boasted of 575 churches in the city, or “religious societies with ‘distinct places of worship,’” which included 359 Protestant Episcopal, Methodist Episcopal, Baptist, or Presbyterian churches, forty-three Roman Catholic churches, fourteen Quaker meetinghouses, and nine Jewish synagogues. In this context, it became increasingly difficult for Anglo-Protestants to take their dominance for granted.6 As in other nineteenth-century American cities, Philadelphia grew diverse yet fragmented, a “divided metropolis.” Immigration fueled ethnic and religious tensions, and industrialization sharpened social divisions and class distinctions. Class differences, in particular, separated Philadelphians from each other socially and spatially, as different segments of society settled in different parts of the city. What several scholars have described as a singular , seemingly homogeneous upper class emerged, “aloof and apart from the rapidly developing heterogeneity of the rest of American society.” Members of this insulated and isolated class tended to emphasize social stability in the face of disorienting change, and they shared Victorian values of conformity , domesticity, and respectability. They lived in discrete neighborhoods, many of them moving westward across the city during the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, to settle around Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square. There, they lived close together in beautifully designed row houses, and they built important social networks by attending the same schools, clubs, and churches. While these elites may not have been great in numbers, they wielded tremendous social power and dominated Philadelphia’s commercial, cultural, and religious institutions, constituting what the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell first described as an informal Protestant Establishment.7 Philadelphia’s social and spatial stratification mapped its religious geography . While upper-class establishments...