I was in England this summer and saw our future in one very specific reality: the loss of church as a building-centered cultural hub. After a thousand years of building them, England is now at the low ebb of using church buildings as churches. There are now 50-year-old renovations that were spawned by deconsecrated houses of worship. They have become simply buildings.
When clients change, buildings remain. I have renovated disowned church buildings, and churches have been repurposed in America since the first church was too small, abandoned, or needed relocation.
But history is there for us beyond ourselves—and the recent history of post-World War II in Europe saw the cultural decline of organized religion to levels that make American religious culture seem robust. The wave of change is not fashion or political. It is the way God comes into our lives.
In much of Europe, Catholicism was directly entwined with the government. In the last generation, many sacred buildings have been abandoned and are now protected by the state as “monuments” or “protected heritage sites.”
Secularization was inevitable when you “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s,” as Matthew, Mark, and Luke recounted. Humans make buildings, print Bibles, compose hymns, and plan services. After 45 years as an architect, I know that the aesthetic touches us because God is discovered there, but the things that convey God are often found in what we make.
Americans are finding God in places other than buildings—48 percent in nature (Pew Research Center), or in the extreme complexity we are discovering. But our religious rituals, including the buildings that implement them, have less value for many, mostly younger, people. For whatever reason, Europe led the way in renovating abandoned churches.
Raf Casert writes in Fortune about a church in Belgium:
The confessionals where generations of Belgians admitted their sins stood stacked in a corner of what was once Sacred Heart Church, proof the stalls—as well as the Roman Catholic house of worship—had outlived their purpose. …
Across Europe, the continent that nurtured Christianity for most of two millennia, churches, convents and chapels stand empty and increasingly derelict as faith and church attendance shriveled over the past half century.
But buildings are just us, as are the rituals we hope are triggers to the God who is there. I think religion in Europe will see the next generation of the ways God is found in us.
Davide Dimodugno writes in Emory University’s Canopy Forum, “What seems essential to ensure that the future of these religious buildings is in line with their glorious past is the involvement of communities.” Their future is not found in the traditional vortex of spirituality being called into our lives via the aesthetics we make.
Often among the most ancient of public buildings in the English countryside, these historic places are in the fulcrum of towns and cities and have a secular value enhanced by undeniable legacy—some to be rendered classically profane. These places are not only historic and focal, but they are built with extreme craft and care, and their ghost of grace often silently envelops their secular uses, despite renovations.
Our historic focus on the buildings meant to respond to humanity’s spirituality has seen a catalyst in the renovation of Notre-Dame de Paris; eight percent of French Catholics are “practicing,” but when Notre-Dame’s restoration was finished in 2024, Easter attendance rose by 30 percent. The pungency of antiquity is found in much of Europe’s architecture, but add the provenance of worship and its collision with faith and the result is dynamic and, well, daunting. In the Northeast and the West Coast of America, the unapologetic intention of building the sacred is foundering on the rocks of the same cultural change Europe experienced two generations ago.
Churches are being abandoned as congregations combine, cease to exist, or cannot support the buildings created by long-gone parishioners. In Europe this is old news, where the last casualty of World War II might be the role of the church as an integral part of its culture, manifested in phenomenal building efforts, resulting in transcendent cultural icons.
What do we do with the carcass of the whale once it is dead? Some feed off it, some are housed by it. But the essential reality of the whale is now just physical, because its life has left. But we know the dead whales, our churches, on the beach of our culture are what they are, like Notre Dame.
These buildings are not just historic. They allude to the deep reality that the same Pew Research Center says: 83 percent of us know there is more than ourselves in the world we live in. And those buildings often trigger that reality in us, no matter their use. Most churches that are not sites of “architectural tourism” still have assets.
Most parish churches have the perfect location, the charm of antiquity, and the bones of a life that has left them. Architectural tourism has made Gaudi’s Sagra Familia in Barcelona a hugely popular tourist destination, and the building is an extraordinary effort. But is its tour de force architecture the only reason to see it, along with the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben?
In the face of Europe’s new bounty of empty churches, Pope Francis stated a truth that religion must address: We must “initiate processes rather than possess spaces.” Are we listening?
Duo Dickinson, an architect based in Madison, Connecticut, has designed more than 1,000 projects, including homes and churches.
