Book review: “Twelve Churches: An Unlikely History of the Buildings That Made Christianity” by Fergus Butler-Gallie

In his 2025 book Twelve Churches: An Unlikely History of the Buildings That Made Christianity, Fergus Butler-Gallie takes the reader on what he calls a journey “in bricks and mortar, flesh and blood” through the two thousand years of Christian belief.

The “bricks and mortar” are the twelve church buildings on which Butler-Gallie focuses although one no longer exists, having been replaced by an American suburban housing development, and another is “just rocks,” a seemingly random pile of stones in Japan.

His reference to “flesh and blood” recalls the often visceral human experiences connected to these twelve church buildings — and to Christianity for two millenniums.

Such as violence.

For instance, the church that no longer exists is the First Meeting House in what is now Danvers, Massachusetts. It was wiped away seemingly in the hope of forgetting its connection to the Puritan witch hunts of 1692 in which 24 innocent men and women and one child were killed. All in the name of religious purity.

 

“Little islands of faith”

The “just rocks” is a shrine, created in the early 1600s, on Mount Yasumandake, in a rural area about two hours northwest of Nagasaki.

It consists of little more than a short central column, now struck at an irregular angle, and a clearly carved stone acting as a pagoda-style roof…This is the Kirishitan Hokora. The Christian Shrine.

Butler-Gallie explains that the shrine was made to look like a random pile of stones because it represented the faith of “hidden” Japanese Christians who were being persecuted and tortured for their faith.

These communities sought to continue their worship but with the knowledge that they would never be able to do so in public, becoming little islands of the Christian faith, ever more separate from the rest of the world.

One such group…went up the nearby mountain and built their shrine. It became the closest they had to a church for the next 250 or so years.

 

The evolution of the Christian church

In the final pages of Twelve Churches, Butler-Gallie uses a quotation that has been widely attributed to Richard C. Halverson, a Presbyterian minister and writer who served as the chaplain of the U.S. Senate from 1981 through 1995:

“In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ. Then the church moved to Greece where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome where it became an institution. Next, it moved to Europe, where it became a culture.   And, finally, it moved to America where it became an enterprise.”

While Butler-Gallie describes that as an oversimplification, his book certainly details how, from age to age, the Christian church has evolved in itself and in its relationship to the wider society.

Here are the twelve churches he examines in his chronological and geographical journey through Church history:

• The Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem, West Bank of Palestine.
• St. Peter’s, Rome, Italy.
• Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey.
• Canterbury Cathedral, England.
• Mount Athos, Greece.
• Bete Golgotha, Lalibela, Ethiopia.
• Templo de las Americas, Dominican Republic.
• Kirishitan Hokora, Kasuga, Japan.
• Site of the First Meeting House, Salem, Massachusetts, United States.
• Christ Church, Zanzibar, Tanzania.
• 16^th Stret Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama, United States.
• Canaanaland, Ota, Nigeria.

In each case, the church building represents the Christian faith at a time of great unrest and controversy in which believers were seeking to figure out the meaning of Christ’s message and call.

 

Much that is revelatory

In Twelve Churches, Butler-Gallie, an Anglican minister, an author and a journalist, has taken on a huge subject, and it’s clear he’s aiming for the widest possible audience of believers and non-believers.

As a result, there are times when he tries too hard — when he loads up one too many anecdote or goes off on a tangent too far.

People familiar with church history are likely to find some sections old hat while those without any historical grounding may find themselves floating around in his glibness and his everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach.

Nonetheless, there is much in Twelve Churches that readers of any background will find revelatory.

 

Slavery, sexuality and beauty

It’s not news, for example, to recognize that Bethlehem is now the site of great violence and oppression.

Yet, few readers are likely to know that Christ Church in Zanzibar was built on the site of the world’s largest slave market, and they aren’t likely to have considered why so many Christians took part in the slave trade or permitted that trade to exist despite the teachings of Jesus.

Butler-Gallie’s chapter on the monastery of celibate monks on Mount Athos delves deeply in the church’s complex relationship to human sexuality, while his look at Canterbury Cathedral and the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1170 deals with the church’s attitude to and use of violence throughout the many centuries.

St. Peter’s is an example of the beautiful in church structures and also begs the question of how much wealth should go for beauty and how much for easing the pains of the needy and oppressed.

 

“Christianity’s strangeness”

At the end of his travels — not only across geography to North and South America, Africa and Japan, the United Kingdom and Turkey, Greece and Italy and the West Bank of Palestine, but through the winds and turns of two thousand years of history — Butler-Gallie wonders what Christianity’s next evolution will be.

There is reason, he says, to hope since Christianity “doesn’t deny the messy parts of life but claims that even they can be redeemed.” Indeed, he notes that the symbols of the faith are a manger, a cross and an empty grave.

I find hope, therefore, in Christianity’s strangeness. In its paradox. In that it might bind together all the times and places and people mentioned here in an eventual, hopeful whole…

The idea that frail and flawed humanity might, by hope in that same Christ, be transformed into vessels for God’s glory. Sometimes that idea has led to immense beauty and wonder, and sometimes to power and corruption; it has motivated hope and faith, it has caused quests for expansion and purity, it has affected how we think about sex, profit, violence, nationhood, and justice. It has shaped people’s lives and people’s deaths.

 

Three lessons

And, in an epilogue, Butler-Gallie details three lessons he learned in visiting the twelve churches and writing his book.

Firstly, I have learned that churches have the infinite capacity to surprise…They hold stories and secrets, highs and lows. It should not be surprising — they speak of humanity and the Divine after all — and both of those are capable of being infinitely surprising.

All of the churches, he writes, have been defined by service, and they “exist for those who seek shelter from the ways of the world, who need help, either physical or spiritual; they exist to serve as reminders that we are not alone.”

And, in addition to surprise and service, the churches have a sense of belonging:

Belonging both to a particular place, with all its history and baggage and beauty, but also to something bigger. To Christ and the faith he continues to inspire. What else can link the Vatican, Canaanland, Salem, and the hillsides above Kasuga?

Surprise, service, and belonging. As Butler-Gallie notes, they aren’t always done right, and they aren’t always simple.

And maybe they’re enough to be the hope of Christianity in the future.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

2.4.26