Creating the Multifaith Chapel, 1938–1955: Architecture and the Changing Understanding of “Religion”

Abstract

Interfaith or multifaith chapels are so ubiquitous now in the United States—present in colleges and universities, hospitals, shopping malls, and airports—that their development as a distinct architectural form is often taken for granted. Yet that development in the mid-twentieth century was complex and even fraught. Taking a religious studies approach, this article examines the development of three early examples—the Chapel of the Four Chaplains, the Brandeis University chapels, and the MIT Chapel—to reveal the gradual movement, conceptual and architectural, toward a viable space serving many religions. While the former two examples proved unsuccessful in their goal of establishing a shared interfaith space due to their reliance on an understanding of religion as discrete traditions that resulted in exclusivist incompatibilities, the latter example moved beyond the emphasis on traditions to advance an unconventional, phenomenological understanding of religion as individual experience and spiritual life, and by doing so successfully achieved the goal of creating a space amenable to practitioners of many traditions, or none. Further, this article demonstrates how architecture functioned as a constitutive component in the developmental and popularization of this fresh understanding of religion and religious experience.