The Home as American Sacred Space

Towards the end of the introduction  in American Sacred Space, Chidester and Linenthal ask "What is American about American sacred space?" (25) 

This is a great question. After all, in many ways sacred spaces are similar in their features and characateristics. We can use the same set of concepts and tools to examine and analyze sacred space no matter where they are.   

They suggest that these spaces have been distinctively shaped by the American historical experience. They go on to discuss several feature of the American historical experience that have been particularly influential in shaping these spaces. These include:

• the frontier situation
• the American legal system
• a managerial ethos involving the federal bureaucracy
• commodification and property rights
• revolutions of information technology
• a national orientation and patriotic sacrality
• American civil religion

One new and interesting idea they bring to the analysis is that of "home." While homes are ubiquitous, they write "At first glance, the home might seem the locus of the ordinary, the everyday, or the mindane in American symbolic life. However, domestic space in America has also been set apart as a special, sacred site of religious significance" (22). They go on to mention the "cult of domesticity" that has ritualized and regulated family relationships as been a compelling force in shaping public and political life. American politicians have long wanted to extol their familial virtues and present their families in performances of the virtuous and happy Christian family. 

This may indeed be a distinctive (though not exclusively) American sacred space. Thinking about this, I was struck by the sheer number of homes that have been turned into sacred sites. In fact, we will be visiting one of these during the summer institute - Monticello.  All the "founding fathers" have their domestic shrines, most famously George Washington's Mount Vernon. But there are so many more throughout the American landscape--almost every community has preserved and maintained homes as a form of sacred space from the Ernest Hemingway Home in Key West, FL or Graceland in Memphis, TN, a full-blown shrine to a mythic figure.  In Kentucky we have Ashland the home of Henry Clay in Lexington, KY and the William Whitley home established in the frontier near present-day Crab Orchard the hometown of my wife. And there are so many others, almost uncountable. Why do Americans create shrines and sacred sites out of homes? What do these say about the American home as a sacred site, the "cult of domesticity", the Christian home and family, and the "great men" who built and ruled over these homes? 

What are the layers here? "Home" is in one sense a place constructed by and for the family. The home is the ultimate "built environment" - the site of meticulous energy, control, supervision, maintenance of a very personal nature and its own family culture. And the home is the location of private religious observance from Passover to Advent wreaths to ancestor altars. Of course some families have more autonomy and agency here than others. The home raises the whole question of what is family anyway? What are the religious and cultural forces that have acted to create this idea of home?  These have been interpreted as monuments to a man's greatness-but this perspective is now actively contested. In one sense, the domestic is in tension with and contrast to the political. Andrew Jackson's home in Nashville, TN was called "Hermitage" as if it was an escape from the political man, a place of privacy and sanctity. And George Washington longed to escape politics and the District of Columbia and return to the freedom and leisure of civilian life at Mount Vernon. A leisure, we might add, built on the labor of enslaved people. But at the same time, domesticity "the family man" has long been source of legitimacy for politicians in American.  And the family photo has been an inescapable aspect to political campaigns.