Twelve Churches: An Unlikely History of the Buildings That Made Christianity

Karen Armstrong meets Pico Iyer in this sweeping history of Christianity that visits a dozen places of worship on every inhabited continent to tell their often wild stories and examine their sometimes difficult legacies.

Christianity is the largest religion in the US with upwards of 200 million people, and its churches often possess an allure and beauty that fascinate even the most committed atheist. What fascinates Fergus Butler-Gallie is that each place of worship tells a story—of place, time, and most of all, people. It is in these sanctuaries that the complexities of life from birth and death to power, sex, violence, justice, and beauty are encapsulated, and here, in Twelve Churches, Butler-Gallie takes us on a fascinating journey through time to unravel the story of Christianity as told by the people who have lived it on every inhabited continent.

Beginning with the birth of Christ over 2,000 years ago in Bethlehem at the location marked by the Church of the Nativity—a confusing warren of a building—Butler-Gallie leads us to a remote stone outcrop in Mount Athos, Greece, where the monastic vow of celibacy is taken to an optimistic extreme by excluding all female animals. We learn that at Canterbury Cathedral, the stones have been soaked in blood that is both famous and infamous. On the coast of Japan, a cave like church marks the spot where Christian martyrs were tied to crosses at low tide—and left there. The 16th Street Church in Birmingham, Alabama, remains the site of one of the Ku Klux Klan’s most infamous bombings, and the meeting house in Salem, Massachusetts, remains a monument to the ways that a quest for purity can lead to mass murder. And in Nigeria we visit a church the size of an airplane hangar, where every Sunday it fills almost every one of its 50,000 seats.

An engaging blend of history, geography, travel, biography, spiritual reflection, and a wry sense of humor, Butler-Gallie shows us that despite its complexities and controversy, such a faith is still worth following, and that by acknowledging the past we can ultimately discover the path toward healing and hope.