Selling Spirituality and Spectacle: Religious Pavilions at the New York World’s Fair of 1964–65

After visiting the New York World’s Fair of 1964–65 in Flushing Meadows, Queens, shortly after opening day in April 1964, the religious scholar Martin E. Marty published in the Christian Century a short but scathing review of the fair that focused on the religious pavilions.¹ The title, “Religious Cafeteria,” made his contempt clear, as did his text. Marty wrote, “If a whipped-cream-topped strawberry sundae with artificial flavoring represents to you a gourmet meal, a defizzed coke a connoisseur’s drink, and a Montavani album an aesthetic delight, the fair is for you. Whoever can park his conventional canons of criticism at the $2.00 gate will enjoy the fair. It is great for the children.”² He especially deplored the Protestant and Orthodox Center, where the exhibits of different denominations offered “the same old wearisome cafeteria line of implicitly and sometimes explicitly competitive religious groups.”³ His words echoed those of cultural and architectural critics who considered the fair a commercial enterprise designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator in American society.

In its appeal to popular tastes and open commercialism, however, the fair reflected much of what characterized American society in the 1950s and 1960s. In a period marked by a rapid rise in church membership and the construction of religious buildings in the United States, the fair stands out for its relative preponderance of religious pavilions, greater than that of any previous fair. In its crassness, the fair, including its religious pavilions, mirrored the growing materialism of American secular and religious culture in the postwar era. Like the fair pavilions in general, the religious pavilions competed for spectators in the marketplace of the fairgrounds. Their forms echoed and exaggerated architectural trends under way in religious buildings, underscoring a tension between trying to maintain distinct identities and belief systems and using elements of modern design to attract followers (Figure 1). Historian R. Laurence Moore has observed that America’s strict separation of church and state forced religious leaders and organizations to compete for audiences in order to survive. They had to give the public what it wanted while trying to carve out a distinct niche in American society.⁴ The competition at the fair resembled the denominational competition that had long occurred in America but had intensified in the postwar years, despite calls for greater ecumenism.

But something bigger was at work, as well. In writing about the spiritual awakening in the United States in the 1960s, religious scholar Robert S. Ellwood outlined a major shift happening in American society and religion. Drawing on Jean-Francois Lyotard’s two great metanarratives of modernism—the liberation of humanity through progress and the unity of all knowledge—Ellwood argued that by the 1960s incredulity toward these myths marked the beginning of a shift from modernism to postmodernism. Modern religion had established itself as an institution parallel to other modern structures, such as the nation-state or the university, with each denomination presenting its own version of universal truth. But ultimately, these structures had failed to improve society for all.⁵ Whereas modern metanarratives had sustained religion through the 1950s, in the 1960s many denominations became more decentralized, reflecting less hierarchy and more involvement of the laity.⁶ Changes, including the decline of mainline Protestantism as a national religion, the rise of evangelicalism, and the liberalizing trends of the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, forced churches to seek more involvement in the world if they wished to remain relevant and play a role not only in saving souls but also in shaping a new society. Indeed, the decade of the 1960s marked an era of the “servant church,” in which the church was seen as an agent of transformation and hope.⁷

Figure 1.

Billy Graham Pavilion, New York World’s Fair, Edward Durell Stone, architect, 1964.

Milstein Division of United States History, Local History & Genealogy, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, most world’s fairs have...