Notes on Northern European Protestantism in Current Year, Twenty Twentysix

Earlier this month I went on a trip that took me to England for about five days, then to Latvia, Finland, and Iceland for a day or two each. I was in England to go to Oxonmoot, which is a Tolkien thing; I was in Finland to visit an online friend, and in Latvia and Iceland getting to and from Finland. This gave me many opportunities to go into beautiful Protestant churches, and even more opportunities to look at them from the outside. Sometimes Catholic and Orthodox churches too; I’m looking forward to seeing how a film photo that I took in Riga, with a sort of herring bruschetta and a glass of kvass in the foreground and the spire of St. Jacob’s Cathedral in the background, came out. If it looks good enough, I’m going to title the photo “Daily Bread,” which is perhaps not exactly me at my most avant-garde.

I was particularly taken with two churches in Oxford, St Giles’ and St Mary Magdalen’s, and with Helsinki’s well-known rock church, Temppeliaukio. Temppeliaukio is carven directly out of the living granite bedrock, with drains in the floor to collect moisture; there is a domed copper ceiling; there is a reinforced-concrete pulpit. Outside, and growing over much of the underground structure, is a brushy garden, moss and rocks and grass and low flowering shrubs and crows.

Temppeliaukio’s interior is a kind of church architecture that I used to hate and still dislike in the abstract, but I loved it here and I am not entirely sure why. It could have been a love for granite, or a love for copper, or a lessened hatred for reinforced concrete, or the inviting and clean-feeling roundness of the place; a close friend of mine assures me that God likes circles, and I believe her, because she knows how God feels about these things better than I do. So I am a Damascus-bound Saul when it comes to at least some kinds or some executions of “modern” ecclesiastical architecture. I could probably stand to revisit some churches in my own neck of the woods that I have disliked in the past, such as St. Vincent de Paul in Albany, New York, or Most Holy Redeemer in Hadley, Massachusetts. (Both of these are Catholic. During the brief midcentury springtime of American Catholicism, they threw up an awful lot of suburban parishes that look like post offices or middle schools built around the same time (Most Holy Redeemer). A bit later on when a generation of American clergy were scrambling to preserve and reinforce the accomplishments of Vatican II, there were many controversial renovations or “wreckovations” of older and more ornate churches (St. Vincent de Paul). Protestant churches in my part of New England tend to be much, much older, and to have spare, Puritan-influenced interiors that are hard to screw up too badly.)

St Giles’ and St Mary Magdalen’s, conversely, are the better part of a millennium old, and it shows. St Giles’ is old enough that its style is transitional not between Gothic and some later style but between Gothic and an earlier style, the Norman expression of what gets called Romanesque on the Continent; to oversimplify enormously, it’s a Romanesque building with Gothic pointed arches. The construction, as opposed to later additions or alterations, dates to 1120, not an especially good year for England. St Mary Magdalen’s, which is popularly called St Mary Mags’, is almost as old but has changed much more over time, including a “restoration” (essentially wreckovation ante litteram and in a diametrically opposed aesthetic direction) in the early Victorian period.

I’ve been learning to ring church bells lately. I rang a bell in St Giles’ and signed their belltower’s guest book for visiting ringers, and watched them unveil a plaque commemorating various peals that they rang in observance of the 2022-2023 handover from Queen Elizabeth II to King Charles III. I did not get very far on the specific bell that they were having me practice on, but at least I can now say that I rang in Oxford.

For all the apocalyptic stories one hears about the Northern European Protestant state churches, their demographic implosions and slasher-movie legitimacy bleed-outs, I didn’t get that feeling from St Giles’, or from St Mary Mags’, or from Temppeliaukio. Possibly this is an issue of different standards or starting points or baselines. These parishes seemed more vital than most of the Episcopal Church parishes with which I’m familiar, but the Episcopal Church was not been one of America’s largest denominations to begin with. The Church of England comprised an absolutely majority of the country’s population well within living memory, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland technically still does. Besides, these churches are all to some extent tourist destinations as well, which would obviously tend to artificially inflate the numbers of butts in pews, even during services (and I was in St Giles’ for a service).

Then again, maybe that is not such a bad thing, considering; I am, after all, an advocate of the view that some kind of investment or “buy-in” from arts- or folklore- or history-minded tourists has become an indispensable ingredient in cultural preservation efforts in much of the world. Humblebrag though Phoebe Bridgers may about getting bored at Japanese temples, and kvetch though old-timers will at being gawked at by passport bros or influencer baddies, as a cultural survival strategy it works better and is morally sounder than most readily available alternatives.

The atmosphere in these churches also put into renewed context for me just how Catholic-inflected American magisterial Protestantism tends to be. Even the actual Catholic Mass that I went to in Oxford, at Holy Rood in Grandpont and conducted according to the Ordinariate liturgy, felt lower-church than some American Anglican or Lutheran services! The priest used language like “washed clean by the blood of Christ” in his homily; this is a way of thinking and speaking that, while theologically correct, is alien to the aesthetic cultures even of the Protestantisms with which I am most familiar and most comfortable.

I say “Ordinariate liturgy.” This is a very small but (God willing) growing current within the Catholic Church, instituted by Pope Benedict XVI and fostered and encouraged by Pope Francis and now Pope Leo XIV, that seeks to incorporate as much of Anglican history, culture, and practice as possible. The so-called Uniate churches of Eastern Europe aren’t a perfect analogue, but they aren’t a terrible one either. In the United States, Ordinariate Catholics have a great deal of overlap with the Latin Mass crowd, and there’s an ersatz quality that shows up in the unofficial use of terms like “Traditional English Mass,” hearing which would immediately have made Cranmer, or for that matter Pole, have a health problem. Not so at Holy Rood.

I will write more on this another time, perhaps. Certainly there is more to be said. These churches, and these Churches, are not going anywhere as cultural patrimony in Northern Europe, even if it might become very difficult to get more than “two or three together” in a few decades’ time.