Amid declining church attendance, a different religious renaissance is underway

Although Nicolas Charbonneau was raised Catholic, he gave little thought to his faith as a teen. That changed in college during a semester abroad in Rome, when he visited St. Peter’s Basilica for the first time. “I didn’t even know what St. Peter’s was until I walked into it,” Charbonneau, an architect and principal at Harrison Design, said.

This formative experience set in motion the process of bringing Charbonneau back into his faith. He was captivated by how a sacred structure could catalyze a religious experience and embody order and the prevailing philosophies of the day. “I had no idea that there was so much thought and philosophy captured in the architecture,” he told me recently. The trip lit a fire in Charbonneau to bring back to the United States the kinds of buildings and artwork he saw in Europe.

But at the time, his interest was not exactly in vogue.

Since the 1950s, modernism, with its emphasis on simplicity and functionality, has been shaping the standards in architecture. The University of Notre Dame, where Charbonneau ended up studying, was the only school he knew of that offered a program focused on training for classical architecture.

But things have been changing since Charbonneau earned his degree in 2009, and when it comes to designing churches, Charbonneau is busier than he’s ever been. Working from Washington, D.C., he leads Harrison Design’s Sacred Studio, which focuses on designing traditional and classical churches. In the 10 years since Charbonneau launched the studio, it has seen an increase in commissions from all around the country for classical and traditionally designed churches, mainly in the Catholic tradition, a surprising development given the backdrop of declining church attendance and church closures.

“It’s been a real resurgence, it’s really phenomenal,” Charbonneau told me.

The influence of modernism as well as the Second Vatican Council, a series of meetings held between 1962 and 1965 that sought to modernize the Catholic church, gave rise to boxy, austere and futuristic-looking churches, which ultimately didn’t stand the test of time, Charbonneau said. In other faiths too, ornamentation and traditional styles were abandoned in favor of more experimental church designs.

“What has happened is that the experiment has run its course,” Charbonneau said. “I think we’ve realized the value of having a building that will last for a long time.” He continued: “These buildings were designed to speak to not just the time but to the human soul on a very fundamental level.”

But this sacred architecture revival also dovetails with a broader shift toward traditional values within the Catholic Church. The number of priests who identify as progressive has nearly vanished, especially among those ordained after 2020, with more than 80% of them identifying as “conservative/orthodox” or “very conservative/orthodox,” according to a report by Catholic Project at the Catholic University of America. The Free Press reported this week on young women who are wearing veils to Mass , as their great-grandmothers did. In a recent piece, Ross Douthat of The New York Times wrote that “the old conservative confidence has made a comeback.”

The resurgence of classical education , historically championed by religious institutions, also points to a growing interest in time-tested educational principles. Sacred buildings and their architecture, too, have come to embody stability and continuity in the face of a volatile political landscape and increasingly secularized culture.

Designing the sacred

The debate between traditional and modernist architects has long been a defining tension in the field, and occasionally it’s risen to a national controversy. For example, in 2020, former President Donald Trump issued an executive order titled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” requiring new federal buildings to be built in classical style. The order sparked controversy, and even some classicists were against mandating specific architectural details in government buildings. In February of the following year, President Joe Biden revoked the order, although two federal courthouses commissioned during Trump’s presidency are currently in the process of being built .

When it comes to religious buildings, architectural elements like verticality and imagery play an important role in fostering the sense of awe and transcendence that often shape the religious experience. For instance, Harrison Design worked on the renovation of a stone granite chapel at Thomas Aquinas College in Northfield, Massachusetts, a campus that previously belonged to a Protestant all-girls school. While the exterior was in collegiate gothic style, the inside was distinctly Protestant. The renovation involved designing an ornate sanctuary and adding large reredos — an ornamental screen behind the altar — that draws the eye upward to bring more verticality to the design. Architects also added statues, confessionals and stations of the cross.

The success of the church is in its ability to inspire a transformative experience for the worshipers, according to Duncan Stroik, a practicing architect and professor of architecture at the University of Notre Dame, who is also the editor of the Sacred Architecture Journal. “When you walk into a church, does the architecture reinforce that? Does the architecture and the art help you to realize this is not just another meeting house or another room, but it’s a sacred place?” said Stroik.

Stroik’s All Saints Church, built in 2000 in the countryside of Kentucky, was one of the first examples that showed younger architects that designing in tradition “can be done,” Charbonneau told me.

“Parishes do not have to settle for mediocre church buildings that fail to move the soul,” said the introduction to a book about the church. More recently, Stroik designed a new ecumenical chapel at Hillsdale College in Michigan, with a portico formed by the doric limestone columns and a supporting brick dome. “The ability to use columns again is structurally exciting — it may not matter to normal people, but as an architect, it’s kind of fun,” Stroik said.

And sometimes it’s about more than just the aesthetics. Charbonneau often hears from clients that church design can get in the way of conducting proper Catholic liturgy and that worshipping can feel like “inhabiting an experiment.”

“The space is that medium that communicates the barrier between the eternal and the temporal,” said the Rev. Greg Markey, the chaplain of Thomas Aquinas College who worked with Harrison Design on the renovation of the chapel. “Now there is a movement to go back to the tried-and-true means of communicating the sacred to the person in the pews.”

Smaller but more vibrant

The story of a religious revival of any kind — much less one that requires significant funding — may seem surprising today in light of troublesome statistics about churchgoing. But in places that are seeing population growth, and where religious life persists, the congregations are ready to restore churches and even build new ones. “If you chart new church buildings and population growth, they’re very closely associated,” Stroik said. For instance, in 2019, Harrison Design completed a 37,500-square-foot church in a suburb of Atlanta, based on a New York church that was inspired by the Baroque churches in Rome.

In Norfolk, Connecticut, Saint Mary Church has seen significant growth over the past 20 years. The parish grew both in numbers and in financial capacity, according to the Rev. Markey, the priest who also led the renovation of the church in partnership with Duncan Stroik. The numbers came from a growing Hispanic community that filled the pews, and parishioners attending the traditional Latin Mass were eager to back the renovation with donations. These two factors enabled the parish to accomplish the project, the Rev. Markey explained.

“I do think the Catholic Church is getting smaller, but there are places where it’s more vibrant,” the Rev. Markey told me. The young generation in particular is driving this return to tradition. “And people who are Catholic, they are very committed to the faith and they’re committed with their finances as well. They want a beautiful church to worship in.”

More traditional temples

About a decade ago, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints also made a shift toward building more traditionally inspired temples, according to Paul Monson, a professor of classical architecture at Utah Valley University who worked for the church for a decade designing new temples and later restoring pioneer temples to the original interiors and architecture.

“There was a real interest to make temples more timeless, to create designs that were more connected to history and place that they were in,” said Monson, who is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame architecture program.

For instance, in designing the Philadelphia temple, which opened in 2016, the architects studied the Independence Hall and the old churches in old-town Philadelphia to create a sense of continuity and coherence.

“We studied windows, doors, hardware, furniture, moldings — we really tried to make it feel like it had always been there in a way,” Monson said.

After the grand opening, a Philadelphia Inquirer critic wrote about the building, saying, “It may be the most radical work of architecture built in Philadelphia in a half-century. … Because it dares to be so out of step with today’s design sensibilities and our bottom-line culture.”

The church’s team took similar approaches to designing temples built in Tijuana, Mexico, and Fort Collins, Colorado, photographing local architecture and studying the history of these cities. A distinctly classical Provo Utah Rock Canyon Temple will replace the now-demolished old Provo temple that was built in 1972.

‘We can’t keep up’

The growth of UVU’s program, which focuses on traditional architecture, is another sign that the tide in approaches to sacred architecture is turning — in five years, the program has grown from 25 students to over 200, Monson said.

“There has been an incredible surge in interest,” Monson said, adding that the students have had 100% job placement. “The growth has been hard to manage, because we can’t keep up.”

Today, in addition to Notre Dame, Benedictine College in Kansas and Catholic University in Washington, D.C., are among colleges and universities that offer classical design programs. And while the enrollment at Notre Dame’s architecture program remained steady, Stroik has seen an increase in international students from Australia, Nigeria, Taiwan and Guatemala. Monson explained that the UVU program is rooted in “principles that don’t go out of style.”

It’s not that every building needs to look like a Greek or Roman temple, he explained. “I see classical and traditional as more broad categories that can incorporate a lot of different cultures,” Monson said.

And some architects, even within the Catholic tradition, express caution against a sweeping return to the past. Rafael Morales, principal at Jackson and Ryan Architects, has advocated for creating the sense of the sacred while also staying in touch with the evolving culture.

“The dangers of just returning to the traditional styles ... you run the danger of losing the culture, you no longer engage the culture with architecture that captivates everyone,” he said in an online interview. He pointed to Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, a contemporary masterpiece by Antoni Gaudí that in his view successfully created the sense of the sacred within the context of contemporary culture.

Hubs of community

The sacred architecture revival has been a distinctly American phenomenon, several architects noted, partly due to the growing economy. Although “the United States does not have the largest group of Catholics in the world today, nor are we the most churchgoing, we continue to be a leader in new sacred art and architecture,” Stroik wrote in an editorial for the Sacred Architecture Journal. For instance, the German statue company that Harrison Design partners with on the churches, gets most of its commissions from the United States.

Stroik believes that South America and Africa might see a similar revival next, given the countries’ growing population. Stroik estimates that over the next 25 years, the Catholic Church will need 250,000 new churches and cathedrals worldwide to accommodate the growth (although he believes many people will be accommodated in church halls and additional Masses). “All of this activity will require a new generation of architects and artists,” he wrote .

Designing a church today also means thinking about the changes ahead: Will the congregation grow or will it shrink? Architects employ phased design to build in the possibility for growth, Charbonneau told me, but “right-sizing” the church is always important, he said, especially since the size can fluctuate with the influx of visitors at Christmas and Easter.

But at a time when society is fragmented and polarized, churches will remain important hubs of community and connection in their towns. With this in mind, Charbonneau has begun to conceive of a church as the focal point of a larger, multifaceted complex. For example, he is designing a master-plan for the St. John Paul II Parish in Olathe, Kansas, which will begin with a church, but will eventually expand into a larger campus with a school, a coffee shop and a gathering hall. All these social functions of the church are coming back, Charbonneau said.

“And it’s because the church is becoming a haven. I think there is this recognition that we need community, that we need to be around each other,” he said.