What do our buildings say about us?

There was a rather profound answer to what seemed a rather innocuous question and, although I cannot vouch for everything Tucker Carlson says or writes, this was spot on.  You can watch it here -- a short clip of a larger interview with Chris Cuomo.   He is precisely echoing what Winston Churchill said of how we shape our buildings and then they shape us.  What he is referring to, however, is the impact of the brutal slabs of concrete and glass upon our culture and our very identity as people.

This is not simply about worship.  It applies to everything.  We have become accustomed to living and working and visiting bland, hard, and indifferent architectural styles and we have also become blind to what this has done to us.  From the cookie cutter landscapes across suburban America to the warehouse style that has predominated most of our public buildings, we no longer reflect nor even believe that beauty is important.  Utility has become our beauty.

To say that this has not influenced worship is to live in the dark.  Of course, it has.  We have become a people who translate into the sacred sphere the very same values of indifference and coldness that our public buildings and domiciles have become.  Less is more is not simply about taking down stuff from our walls or eliminating clutter but depersonalizing our public lives with private consequences.  Within worship this has come to mean that the only thing which is not bland, hard, or typical in the spaces in which we conduct liturgy are the people themselves.  Long expanses of gray or beige and slabs with right angles dominate nearly every aspect of our spaces and they do impact our lives.

Could it be that our devaluation of what happens within the Divine Service may be influenced by the cold, hard architectural forms that have dominated new church buildings for more than a half a century?  Could it be that our failure to appreciate and celebrate the means of grace as the means of God's presence on earth have had something to do with our translation of worship into entertainment?  Could it be that our capitulation to the idea that only what we value and what we value in the moment are important is itself a reflection of and a refusal to receive the legacy of those who went before?

Listen to the way that Tucker Carlson handles this question -- an answer received with surprise as if Chris Cuomo had never even thought of this before.  But, of course, he had not and neither have most of us.  We are prisoners of our buildings and that is especially true of ugly ones that diminish our human spirit and identity rather than direct them to that which is eternal.