Characterized by cultural sensibilities and social visions that formed the “mass consciousness of the modern world,”1 the sixties were synonymous with the expansion of existing realities in almost every aspect of human life. Expressions such as John Cage’s “Everything we do is music,” and Allen Ginsberg’s “Everything is holy!” to Joseph Beuys’ “Everything is art,” conjured an existential optimism in the shadow of the Cold War. In his 1962 manifesto, Absolute Architektur, Austrian architect Hans Hollein criticized architecture as a “ritualistic expression of pure elemental will and sublime purposelessness.”2 Here, he questioned if in times of conformism and cultural crisis a later proposal, Alles ist Architektur, from 1968, he eliminated any definitional enclosure to architecture at all, arguing that architecture was the truth of everything and that it was determined only through active processes of social redefinition toward the emergence of a new form of selfhood.
While the production of identity in the immediate postwar era assumed many guises across the globe, the experience of the burgeoning American middle class was steeped in a postindustrial logic of mass consumerism, which informed every aspect of the built environment.3
Religious architecture in the United States was no exception, and the postwar era found many congregations shifting their desire for iconic landmarks to the production of more ‘recognizable’ structures that blended with the consumer landscape. In anticipation of these changes in the structures and practices of worship, and anxious about the continuing place of religion in a secular landscape, Evangelist Reverend Robert H. Schuller confronted existing Protestant models by ushering in new religious typologies and challenging perceptions of where (exactly) religion might be located.
Schuller’s endeavor began in 1955 when he first arrived in Southern California from Illinois, where he had, in only five years, successfully grown a church from 38 members into a congregation of over 500 members. On the heels of this success but with no money in his pockets, Schuller moved to Orange County where he saw the opportunity to establish a new Reformed church. While searching for a place to start a church he coincidentally found a drive-in movie theater that was vacant on Sunday mornings and which served his purposes. He rented the place and preached, rain or shine, from the concession stands of the theater and delivered his message via the standard drive-in theater radio transmission that was attached to the cars. His drive-in service was so popular that it soon gathered enough funds to build an ‘actual’ church. However, Sunday morning services at the drive-in movie theater remained an essential part of his practice, and he continued preaching in both the church and the drive-in. In 1959, Schuller earned enough funds to build what he called the “Garden Grove experiment” and make his dream of a “walk-in, drive-in” church come true.
Inspired by nineteenth-century revivalism and early-twentieth-century modernist visions of mobility, Schuller imagined a church embedded within the secular world without compromising the moral objectives of his religious practice. Unlike the nineteenth-century revivalists who relied for spiritual renewal and change of mindset upon de-familiarization of the emerging urban population in camp meetings in the wilderness, Schuller familiarized the seeker using modern commodities such as the automobile and television to bring them together as part of an all-encompassing immersive evangelical experience.
Revivalist preachers went out of their institutions to preach the Word where it was needed: “when the people wouldn’t come to church, then the church would have to come to the people.”5 Schuller’s understanding of religion and the secular world, however, was that they were not mutually exclusive, which became most evident in the architecture he envisioned. Through his expanded idea of evangelization Schuller sought to update and at times overcome traditional forms of symbolic meaning in religious architecture, thereby also suspending the traditional dichotomy of form and function in favor of a media-inflected apparatus capable of negotiating between the inward and outward desires of a liberated postwar self—between hermetic autonomy and environmental immersion. If religion could be “retailing,” it could potentially be everywhere without being bound to what was understood as a traditional church. Though he certainly advocated valuing the divine over the laws of the market, he did not reject the “commercial aesthetics”6 that came with the rise of capitalism. Instead, he sought to extend and integrate his church with such an aesthetic to render it compatible with the secular processes, which he aimed to shape.
Known as the father of the “dreamer-movement,” Schuller was in search of someone who could materialize his vision. He found Richard Neutra, then “perhaps the only architect in California to match Schuller’s ambitions”7 and skilled enough to develop his complex idea. Neutra took on what seemed to be an impossible challenge. Despite the immanent contradictions between the modest traditions of Protestantism and the image of a humble preacher merged with that of a “heroic movie star silhouette,”8 the opening of the Garden Grove drive-in church in 1961 gave the Christian world a glimpse into the future of what was possible in modern religious architecture. Transparent glass facades, gardens with water features, and a car amphitheater signified the beginning of a new era. A few years later, in 1968, with the erection of the Tower of Hope, Neutra completed Schuller’s West Coast Gesamtkunstwerk.
The 90-foot tall structure, complete with high-speed glass elevators and the first 24-hour telephone-counseling center in America, further emphasized Schuller’s claim of expanding into new territory in evangelizing the secular world. His church, and the tower––the tallest structure in the region––transmitted a new shining image of Christ to the public and provided a visual pivot for the intensified sensory perceptions of an expanded religious experience conducted over radio waves. By emphasizing physical characteristics such as accessibility and location, Schuller recognized the fact that churches, like businesses, needed to accommodate a steady flow of people. As he would later explain in his 1975 pamphlet, Your Church Has Real Possibilities, one of the major criteria of a successful church is surplus parking: “with the development of shopping centers, Americans had become used to the convenience of easy parking. But a look at reality gave evidence that parking wasn’t always easy for churchgoers at ‘superchurches.'”9 In his church, parking was staged as a crucial aspect of his religious practice and the larger architectural ensemble. In fact, parking was such an integral part of his philosophy that it presented a direct analogy for the extension of his church into the physical and media landscapes connecting the larger geography with the collective and the self.
When the large-scale glass sliding doors of his church opened for his Sunday service, the theatrical act of Schuller stepping outside of the structure transformed the service into an event in which the automobile became an active presence in a religious ceremony only nominally carried out inside the church. The ritual of opening the grand doors not only had a symbolic character of Schuller stepping out of traditional religious frameworks, but it also signified the expansion of new horizons exemplifying that the inner and the outer world of a church should no longer be accepted as separate realms. The mutual immersion between inside and outside, pews and cars, the self and the body of the church, all connected by shared radio signals produced an environment for worship that was at once novel and primal in its appeal to sheer experience. Within this choreography, the building, as an extension of Schuller himself, performed as a node in a seemingly infinite sacred geography.
In a conversation with Schuller, Neutra asked: “why did the churches ever get into the custom of building structures that obstruct from their view the outside, secular world?” Schuller supposed, “It would come from the concept that God is in the sanctuary or in and around the altar.” Schuller felt enlightened by Neutra’s response: “But Christians sought fellowship with Jesus on the mountaintop, in the out-of-doors. They had experiences with Christ under the open sky and in the sanctuary and on the beach. Then why did Christians develop the kind of church that they did?” Neutra then proceeded to answer his question: “in the early days, the Christians were forced underground…in the dark underground caverns, candles were required to give light. Consequently, little children…were raised to have religious experiences in a setting where the world was shut out and only candles flickered. So, when these Christian children became adults and finally emerged into the sunlight … they designed the structures that would recreate what, in their minds and experiences, was a religious mood…The buildings were designed to be dark, with flickering candles on a gloomy altar at the end of the corridor….So, in planning a church, they are unconsciously seeking to impress those who were raised in a church––instead of trying to design a structure that would make an impression on non-churched, secular Americans…Hundred of thousands of churches are designed to stimulate, not the positive emotions of joy and hope that come with the fall of the sunlight in the room; rather they are designed to stimulate the negative emotions of darkness, dreariness, and gloom!” Schuller criticized, even felt “painfully sorry” for pastors who tried to impress modern and unchurched Americans, when the biggest impression they made in their communities was “colored and influenced by an out-of-style, out-of-this-world architecture.” Churches like this announce to one and all: ‘This church is old-fashioned, out of date, from bygone generations without any exciting plans for the future.'” Winning people for Christ should be the main emphasis, so if a church’s structure stood in the way of growth, “then remove, remodel or relocate the structure.”10
“If a sanctuary is designed first of all to impress non-churched people, then it must be remembered that these meaningless symbols only confuse and distract Christians. There are those who argue this point with me. But I know of no one who disagrees with my position on this issue whose church is growing faster than ours! And I have observed that those who quarrel with this position on church architecture and insist on letting it be dark and gloomy, resplendent with all sorts of mysterious symbolism, are themselves pastors of churches that are not for the most part meeting with the enormous success of winning and converting the unchurched person.”11
Apart from his modern interpretations of evangelical revivalism, Schuller understood that the ideological separation of secular and traditional religious values created a breeding ground for new religious views. He believed that his philosophy fostered “the evolution of the soul and spiritual life as more significant and beautiful”12 when integrated into an architectural framework that was connected to the secular world. This meant the way religion was communicated had to change, and the architecture with it. He wanted to give the impression that going to his church was a form of beauty for everyone, which particularly addressed the secular population who turned their backs on traditional churches.
In times of decentralized suburban cultures and de-regulated religious ecologies, his vision was to embrace the larger cultural geography to define new horizons in evangelizing the American households. The infinite production of new images and means of representation reflected changing cultural paradigms that in turn engendered new processes of redefinition and the emergence of a new self as determining factors the way they pass through religion, and religion passes through architecture. The need to develop a universal architectural framework in which the self could interlock with the larger geography marked a new chapter in the evolution of evangelical performances, and the radical reconfiguration of religious architecture.
And, though he desired to move beyond ideology, Schuller’s church nonetheless nourished traditional values, which he was able to fuse with the media of culture and entertainment into a postwar consumer phenomenon that could be characterized as “the cult of the new”13––an obsessive belief that the new is always better than what came before. Probably the most radical aspect of the postwar era, this cultish desire for novelty was intensified by developments in televisual mass media, which blurred the distinction between communion and communication. Schuller recognized that to sustain the success of his church he needed to position it squarely upon the screens across, which political and religious campaigns battled for the attention of American families. With the screen as its proxy, the American home––a place “where a man could display his success through the accumulation of new consumer goods”14–– and its commodified extensions became the place in which morality and domesticity conflicted with secularism and created the ideal ground for Schuller’s operation. It was here where Schuller perfected his “sales strategy” for religion by packaging sermon together with architecture and new consumer-oriented services. From Garden Grove the first episode of Schuller’s weekly Hour of Power would air in 1970, leveraging architecture as an instrument of nascent televangelism that would, for better or for worse, come to define the image of Protestant worship in the secular media landscape. In the immediate postwar era, the seemingly infinite production of new images and means of representation the reflected changing cultural paradigms that in turn engendered new processes of “redefinition and [the] emergence of a new self and a medium of expression that expanded the field.”15 Schuller’s vision of the spatial mobility of the Word coincided with these processes and generated a new topological diffusion for evangelicals with multiplied connections from the parking lot to the home, the city, the region, and beyond.
— Antonio Petrov
Published in Manifest Vol 2 Kingdoms of God
1 Pinchbeck, Daniel. “Embracing the Archaic: Postmodern Culture and Psychedelic Initiation.” In Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art since the 1960s, edited by David S. Rubin, 139 p. San Antonio, TX, Cambridge, Mass.: San Antonio Museum of Art; In association with the MIT Press, 2010.
2 Hollein, Hans. “Everything Is Architecture.” Discourse on Practice in Architecture Reader (1968): 459461.
3 Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 2004.
4 Schuller, Robert Harold. Your Church Has Real Possibilities. Glendale, Calif.: G/L Regal Books, 1974.
5 Ibid.
6 Glickman, Lawrence B. Consumer Society in American History:: A Reader. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.
7 Lavin, Sylvia. “Drive-through Window.” In Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture, 119-30. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004.
8 Ibid.
9 Time-Magazine (1975) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,913788,00.html.]
10 Schuller, Robert Harold. Your Church Has Real Possibilities. Glendale, Calif.: G/L Regal Books, 1974.
11+12 Ibid.
13 Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.
14 May, Elaine Tyler. “The Commodity Gap: Consumerism and the Modern Home.” In Consumer Society in American History:: A Reader, edited by Lawrence B. Glickman, 298-315. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.
15 Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford, OX, UK; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1991.
