Like politics, religion votes with its feet. The “meat in the seats” of attendance is the metric of judgment for places of worship. We want validation, not only for ourselves but what we value.
We translate our values into the buildings we erect too. And those values often demand justification. Like any political party, the cosmetics of “style,” religion, and building can find validation in public opinion. Recent polls attempt to connect “style” and “faith” in architecture. Christianity Today just published the results of a Barna Group Survey: the article is titled “Americans Think Church Should Look Churchy,” i.e., “traditional.”
The tally of the vote count in the survey is amazingly even: 90% favor “easily identifiable” (interpreted in the article as “traditional”) churches — it is broken down into 38% who love “modern” in feel and 28% who say they love “trendy” in sacred space — and the article says that churches are overwhelmingly desired to be “timeless and transcendent.” Is THAT “traditional”?
Other surveys show a cultural shift away from “traditional” weekly worship. Yet 2025 has seen an uptick in church attendance. Our buildings do not shape these realities: our buildings only reflect them.
Places where we come to God are devoted to capturing the intimate universality of connection beyond ourselves. There is no recipe, no rule book, no Bible to follow in designing sacred space. But we try to control the definitions of what design can employ in making places of faith. So “style” becomes a spiritual expression. And we can vote for whatever “style” reinforces our hope to legitimize the exquisitely intimate.
Historically, the connection between the infinite and the intimate has been transformed in the cauldron of places of worship. Architecture becomes a cultural manifestation that accommodates the inexplicable.
Is sacred “traditional?” Is it “modern?” Is it voted in, or already in each of us? I think it’s just human. We love beauty, in all the ways we know it — we do not worship “style.” I think sacred has no “style,” but we want it to.
But like all buildings, places of worship are filled with all the baggage of humanity. No matter how we use them, all buildings either embrace us, remain neutral to our use or, worse, the architecture we create actively fights our hopes. In creating sacred space, those hopes are exquisitely personal, and any aesthetic misfit challenges our faith. (Before COVID, a group desperately tried to validate the “good” of “traditional” architecture in a Harris Poll.)
When our culture tries to apply “right” and “wrong” to the styles that define what we like and don’t like, the rheostat of our hearts is force-fit into the toggle switch of the Law. But there is no Law of Beauty, not in any formal sense. God has given us the gift of beauty in our lives — we did not define it. When we use what we do — buildings, music, words — to touch God, we are not doing the work; we are trying to see through the armor of faithless fear that separates us from him. And find beauty.
We discover the love of God in beauty, with no need for voting to confer its legitimacy. And we find him in the places where we can listen and hear over the constructions of our hope to validate our faith. Faith and grace are simply there — without ratings, style, or election.
In faith we are all just human. In religion, faith becomes cultural too — with all its prejudices and burdens. In architecture, “style” becomes the religion designers are devoted to. But God does not create buildings or fix elections: God is just in us, without justification. Other than love and grace, that has nothing to do with the things humans make.
We try to make the sacred democratic when God simply loves us: good/evil/traditional/modern. No matter what we create to capture that love, we can only discover it.
