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Introduction
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Introduction
If the Puritan founders of Boston could return today for a Sunday morning tour of some of Boston's churches, they would be astounded by the variety of Christian forms and traditions. At an African-American Pentecostal church on Highland Avenue in Somerville, women in hats and white gloves greet worshippers for a service that lasts at least two hours and includes an altar call and perhaps a baptism with full immersion. At the Holy Trinity Armenian Apostolic Church on Brattle Street in Cambridge, the Divine Liturgy is conducted by three Orthodox priests wearing brocaded vestments in a large, elegant church built by Armenian immigrants. At the Park Street Church in downtown Boston, worshippers and tourists stream up the stairs into the vestibule and on up to the second-floor sanctuary for a traditional Protestant Sunday morning worship service. In the afternoon, Park Street's Chinese, Japanese, and Indonesian Christian fellowship groups meet in the church. In Chinatown, the Chinese Evangelical Church has an early service with old-fashioned Protestant hymns sung in Cantonese and a second service in English with new Christian "soft-rock" music and instrumentation. At St. Paul's, the Episcopal cathedral church facing Boston Common, an African-American woman bishop leads the service. And Arlington Street Church, at the other end of the Common, has a thriving lesbian and gay ministry. Our Puritan visitors would be hard pressed to find a single church that closely resembles the traditions of worship they brought to the shores of New England more than 350 years ago.
The Christian tradition has 2,000 years of history and many streams of tradition. In terms of church families, there are the Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox traditions, all of which have a firm presence in the Boston area. In cultural terms, Christianity is found in every part of the world and now, in the late twentieth century, there are more Christians in the Southern Hemisphere, with the burgeoning churches of Latin America and Africa, than in the Northern. Some of Christianity's cultural diversity has also become visible in the Boston area. There are Chinese churches, like the Chinese Evangelical Church and St. James Catholic Church, both in Chinatown. The Roman Catholic church also has Italian, Irish, Mexican, and Vietnamese congregations. There are African-American churches, like the vibrant Twelfth Baptist in Roxbury and St. Paul's African-American Methodist Church in Cambridge. Iglésia Bautista Central in Cambridge is one of more than forty Hispanic Pentecostal churches in the Boston area. Boston's Orthodox churches include Coptic, Ethiopian Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, and Armenian Orthodox congregations. Among the most recent Christian communities are Indian immigrant congregations. A Syrian Orthodox church of Indian immigrants bought a building in Maynard. The Mar Thoma Church, a reform group that broke away from India's Syrian Orthodox in the nineteenth century, has a congregation that meets in an Episcopal church in Burlington, while a congregation of the Church of South India meets in the Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Waban.
For all the Christian diversity we see in the late twentieth century, it was a very particular group of Protestants, the Puritans, who first settled this part of the New England coast. The Pilgrims, a smaller "separatist" group that had broken with the Church of England, landed in 1620 and established Plymouth Colony. But it was John Winthrop and the Puritans, so named because of their original intention not to separate from but to purify the Church of England, who settled in 1630 on the site of what became Boston. They were dissidents and reformers in England; in New England, they became the Christian "establishment." In 1629 in Salem the first congregational body was called into being by covenant. The First Congregational Society of Salem, today a Unitarian-Universalist church, stands on that site.
In 1636 Harvard College was founded at Newtown, now Cambridge. The well-known words from New England's First Fruits describe the priorities of the first sixteen years and the purpose for which the college was envisioned: "After God had carried us safe to New England, and we had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God's worship, and settled the civil government, one of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust." The oldest endowed chair at Harvard is the Hollis professor of Divinity and half of those who graduated from the college in the 17th century did indeed become ministers. Biblical languages and daily prayers were required until well into the 19th century. Though not required today, the tradition of daily morning prayers continues at Harvard's Memorial Church, and is considered the oldest regularly-meeting prayer service in North America. It is important to remember that these early Puritans envisioned a new world in which Christianity would decisively shape a whole civilization. They spoke of a "Biblical Commonwealth" in which church and state would be one, working together with zeal and discipline to the glory of God. Religion --and that meant Puritan Christianity --pervaded every aspect of life. The idea that the state and the church should be entirely separate was still unheard of in Europe. It was no different in New England --except that the "established religion" was not the Church of England, as in England or in Virginia, but the Puritan Standing Order, with its particular congregationalist polity. The Cambridge Platform of 1648 spelled out some of the implications of the vision of a new Zion in America. While it was not quite a theocracy, the civil authorities were to rule by the law of the Bible. "Blasphemy, Heresie . . . open contempt of the Word preached, Profanation of the Lord's Day" were deemed punishable civil offenses.
There were early dissenters, however, including people of non-established churches as well as people who did not believe in the establishment of religion. Roger Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635 for his critique of Governor Winthrop's colony and his views on freedom of belief. He then settled in what is now Providence, Rhode Island. In 1637, Anne Hutchinson was found to be "disrupting the peace of the Commonwealth and the churches," and was tried for the heresy of a radical "covenant of grace" over and above any reliance on "works" and for having the audacity to teach her views, quote the Bible to support them, and claim divine inspiration. She was banished from Boston and took refuge in Rhode Island. Her friend Mary Dyer, a Quaker, was also run out of the Bay Colony as a dissenter. Refusing to accept expulsion, she returned repeatedly to press for her religious freedom until she was finally hung on Boston Common in 1660.
The 1700s brought a change in spirit in two distinct ways. First, the rationalism and humanism of the Enlightenment began to influence the "natural religion" of public Deist leaders such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, who spoke of a universal God and emphasized the enlightenment of reason. Another challenge to the "establishment" was from a very different movement beginning in the 1730s and 1740s: the sweeping religious fervor and pietism of the Great Awakening. The formality of establishment churches was too restrictive for these new winds of spirituality. The bell of awakening resounded from the pulpits of powerful preachers like Jonathan Edwards in Northampton and George Whitefield, whose Boston circuit in 1740 included sermons at King's Chapel, South Church, and Harvard College. Whitefield denounced the dreary dryness of the churches and their preachers, saying: "I am verily persuaded, the generality of preachers talk of an unknown, unfelt Christ. And the reason why congregations have been so dead is because dead Men preach to them!"
When British troops pulled out of Boston on March 17, 1776, a day still observed in Boston as "Evacuation Day," the rector of the Anglican King's Chapel in downtown Boston went with them out of loyalty to the crown. When that pulpit was filled by James Freeman, a new liberal tradition of interpretation and preaching began to develop at King's Chapel. Thus was the Unitarian movement born. As American historian Sydney Ahlstrom put it, "The first Episcopal Church in New England became the first Unitarian Church in America." Unitarianism, born in the new spirit of the Enlightenment with its confidence in human rationality, responsibility, and virtue, developed a more humanitarian view of Christ and a less exclusivist and more universal view of God and God's dealings with humanity. The quip of the day was that the Unitarians believed in "the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of Man, and the neighborhood of Boston."
This new liberalism was strongly skeptical of the populist piety of the Great Awakening. Indeed, the Harvard faculty denounced the charismatic preachers who had "taken people from their work and business, to attend their lectures and exhortations, always fraught with enthusiasm and other pernicious errors. . ." In the early 19th century liberal thinking got a firm foothold at Harvard with the appointment of Henry Ware as Hollis Professor of Divinity, and Harvard became one of the primary battlegrounds in the conflict between old Puritan congregationalists and the new thinking that became Unitarianism. By the mid-nineteenth century, Harvard had become one of the unmistakable standard bearers of Unitarian liberalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists carried this thinking to its logical conclusion, moving beyond the spiritual, intellectual, and institutional arena of Christianity with an interest in Asian religions and in a new spirit of universalism.
The relations of "church" and "state" changed radically in the period after the revolution, with the negotiation of a new federal union and the writing of the American Constitution. The emerging American consensus prevented the "establishment" of any state religion while protecting the "free exercise" of all religions. At the state level, however, "disestablishment" did not become a reality in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts until 1833, when state support of churches entirely ceased. Churches became wholly voluntary associations, supported by the donations and energies of their constituencies, a pattern which is being adopted now, in the late twentieth century, by such diverse traditions as Hinduism and Islam as they take root in American soil. In the 1800s the whole range of Christian churches and denominations developed in Boston --Presbyterians and Congregationalists, Methodists and Baptists, Lutherans and Swedenborgians, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox.
Among the many landmarks of Protestant Boston are early black churches. African slaves were brought to New England in the seventeenth century, but in 1783, in the wake of the American Revolution, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts made slavery illegal. Social equality was something else, however, and even the churches directed blacks to seats at the back of the balconies where they would not be seen. In the first decade of the 1800s the First African Baptist Church was formed. The congregation built a church, consecrated in 1806 on a street now called Smith Court on Beacon Hill. This meeting house, sometimes referred to as "the Black Faneuil Hall," resounded for ninety years with the voices of freedom and reform -- from William Lloyd Garrison to Frederick Douglass. In 1898, the African American congregation outgrew the building and sold it to an Eastern European Hassidic Jewish congregation, Anshe Lubavitch, which met there for many decades until the building was purchased as an historical landmark of African American history. Indeed, it is still the oldest Black meeting house in the country.
In the first decade of the 19th century, a French cleric, John Cheverus, became the first Catholic Bishop in charge of the Boston diocese of the Roman Catholic Church. He remained in Boston as a beloved leader of what was a rather small Catholic community until 1830. The first Roman Catholic church was Holy Cross Cathedral in Franklin Square, built from 1801-03. By 1820, the immigrations that would change the face of religious Boston had begun. First, there was a massive exodus from Ireland, bringing as many as 200,000 Irish immigrants a year, totaling four and a half million Irish between 1820 and 1920. Their religious world was very different from that of the Christian and Unitarian religious liberals of Boston and from the rationalism and free inquiry of the German Enlightenment. They came from a rural Irish milieu, shaped by a climate of scarcity, famine, and pessimism, and dominated by a conservative Catholic Church. As Oscar Handlin put it, "Irish Catholics could not think like their neighbors without a complete change in way of life." In the 1830s the Boston Pilot was launched, the Catholic periodical named for a journal in Dublin. In the 1840s and 50s, more than a dozen Catholic churches were founded.
In the late 1800s, Italian immigrants arrived and, for a few decades, shared the North End with Eastern European Jews. The first Italian Catholic church was St. Leonard's on Hanover Street. Eventually, further down Hanover Street, the early-19th century New North Meeting House designed by Bulfinch was transformed from a congregationalist meeting house to St. Stephen's Roman Catholic Church. A multitude of smaller shrines appeared in the North End and today this area still provides the energy for many summer festivals or festas--St. Jude, St. Rosalie, St. Agrippina, Madonna Della Cava, and St. Anthony -- each with its own procession and street fair.
Immigration from Greece began in the 1890s. In 1895, a Greek Orthodox priest passing through Boston on his way to Georgia found enough Greek Orthodox faithful to hold what must have been the first services in Boston. By 1899, the Greek community in Boston had both a priest and regular services in a rented hall at the corner of Stuart and Tyler Streets. In 1905, the "Hellenic Association of Boston" was formed to "establish a school for teaching Greek," and in 1906, the Association purchased land and built its first church on Winchester Street. The Church of the Annunciation was consecrated on February 12, 1907. It served the community for seventeen years until Christmas Day, 1924, when the community moved to a fine new cathedral near the Museum of Fine Arts on Parker Street, where the Cathedral church remains.
Syrian immigration also began in the 1880s, the term "Syria" here referring to a larger area of the Middle East including what is now Lebanon. Nearly half were Orthodox Christians under the Patriarchy of Antioch. Of the Antiochean Orthodox churches, St. George's in Boston is the oldest, founded at the turn of the century. St. John of Damascus began on Hudson Street in Boston in 1907, and in the 1930s a group of congregants from this parish began St. Mary's on Inman Street in Cambridge, next to Cambridge City Hall, the most "Americanized" of the Antiochean Orthodox churches in Boston. In addition to Orthodox churches, Syrian Christians established other distinctive congregations in Boston -- the Melkite Catholic Church of the Annunciation on the VFW Parkway, a Maronite Church called Our Lady of the Cedars of Lebanon near Jamaica Pond, and an Arabic Evangelical Church in West Roxbury.
There are many other Orthodox Churches in the Boston area, with ethnic roots in all parts of the Eastern Orthodox world. There are Armenian Orthodox churches in Cambridge, Watertown, and Boston. While Armenians began to settle in Boston in the 1880s, the first church was not consecrated until 1923. The large Armenian Apostolic church at 145 Brattle Street in Cambridge was built in the late 1950s and consecrated in September of 1961. The first Russian Orthodox parish began in Roxbury in 1951 and moved to its present home in Roslindale in 1969. There is the striking new Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox cathedral on the Fenway at 165 Park Drive, now part of the Orthodox Church of America. More recently, there are a number of smaller orthodox congregations from Ethiopia and India.
Boston's churches provide living testimony to the history of Christianity in America. The Old Ship Church in Hingham, its roof constructed like the hull of a great ship, was built in 1681 and is the oldest continuously used house of worship in the United States. The Old South Church (Third Congregational) served as a colonial meeting house where protest and revolution were discussed. In 1775 in the bell tower of the Old North Church the sexton hung two lanterns to signal the movements of the British to Paul Revere. In Park Street Church at one corner of the Boston Common, William Lloyd Garrison gave his first major anti-slavery speech in 1829. The Y.M.C.A. movement was born in Boston in 1854. In 1879, the First Church of Christ Scientist was gathered by Mary Baker Eddy and before long its first building, the "Mother Church," became the headquarters of the international Christian Science movement.
The churches of Boston have also given visible evidence of the increasing diversity of the Christian tradition in New England. Especially in the past twenty years, this diversity has become evident in the great number of multi-congregational churches. It is this that would perhaps astound our Puritan visitors most -- the growing number of diverse ministries and congregations sharing a common church space. For example, at Tremont Baptist Temple downtown there are Cambodian, Ethiopian, and Hispanic ministries. In the city of Cambridge, the Cambridgeport Baptist Church shares its old brick building with the Iglésia Bautista Central, an Hispanic Pentecostal congregation. The North Prospect United Church of Christ on Massachusetts Avenue near Porter Square shares its building with a Korean congregation, the Harvard Korean United Church of Christ. And in the heart of Central Square on Franklin Street, the signboard of the Cambridge Church of the Nazarene gives clear testimony to the new face of Christianity in Boston:
English Congregation
Sunday Services
Sunday School 9:45
AM Worship 10:45
Haitian Congregation
Sunday School 10:00
AM Worship 11:00
CCFC Afternoon Worship 1:45
Portuguese Congregation 5:30
Chinese Bible Study Friday Evenings 7:00
By the late 19th century there were so many churches in Boston that inter-church cooperation became a necessity. Today Boston can look back upon a long history of ecumenical relations among the churches, relations given institutional expression today in the active work of the Massachusetts Council of Churches. And now in the last decade of the 20th century, as Boston becomes increasingly multireligious, local clergy councils and councils of churches throughout the Boston area are grappling with how to reconfigure themselves to take into account the new religious reality of their communities.