Religion Out Loud

Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism

Isaac Weiner

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814708262
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

· “Fascinating, resourceful, and thoughtful from beginning to end.” – David Morgan, Duke University

· “Deftness and discerning insight.” – Leigh Eric Schmidt, Washington University in St. Louis

“Brilliantly researched and intellectually nuanced… In sum: a pleasure to read and to ponder.” – Sally M. Promey, Yale University

PART I
The Sounds of Power

1
From Sacred Noise to Public Nuisance

The gods were probably the first to complain about human noise. “The land had grown numerous,” we read in the ancient Akkadian epic poem Atrahasis, “the peoples had increased, / The land was bellowing like a bull. / The god was disturbed by their uproar. / He said to the great gods, / ‘The clamor of mankind has become burdensome to me, / I am losing sleep for their uproar. / Cut off provisions for the peoples, / Let plant life be too scanty [fo]r their hunger.’” Human efforts to regulate noise have never proven so destructive, but their complaints probably date back as far. The cultural historian Emily Thompson cites Buddhist scriptures dating from 500 BCE that catalogued “the ten noises in a great city,” including “elephants, horses, chariots, drums, tabors, lutes, song, cymbals, gongs, and people crying ‘Eat ye, and drink!’” The second-century Roman poet Juvenal wrote that it was impossible to sleep at night because of “the perpetual traffic of wagons in the surrounding streets.” Medieval towns restricted blacksmiths to specially designated areas in order to contain the disturbance caused by their hammering. Residents in early modern cities complained about the cries of street hawkers, drunken revelers, and stray dogs wandering through the streets. Today, New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection describes unwanted noise as “the number one quality of life issue” for city residents. As long as people have lived in close proximity, it seems, they have complained about—and tried to protect themselves from—the sounds of others.¹

And yet what is just as significant is that there always have been certain sounds that have not been subject to complaint. Some sounds have been permitted to resound freely, unabated by human regulatory efforts. Some sounds have either gone unnoticed or been deemed sufficiently important (or commonplace) that their echoes could not be regarded as “out of place.” Some sounds have not been heard as noise. And “wherever Noise is granted immunity from human intervention,” the composer R. Murray Schafer wrote in his groundbreaking study of the historical soundscape (a term he coined), “there will be found a seat of power.” Some sounds escape notice, that is, not on account of their tonal quality, but on account of the identity of those who produced them and the particular social function they serve. The right to make noise freely signals social power, for only certain institutions and individuals have regularly enjoyed the right to make themselves heard. “To have the Sacred Noise,” as Schafer described these specially protected sounds, “is not merely to make the biggest noise; rather it is a matter of having the authority to make it without censure.” Acoustic dominance, in other words, is not so much a matter of drowning out all other sounds with one’s voice, but of being able to take for granted the right to do so without complaint.²

The category of “sacred noise” is hardly stable. As societies change, so, too, can the identity of those sounds—and sound makers—deemed exempt from social proscription. What is permissible and what is not may vary widely across time and place. New sounds may garner approbation, while sounds long tolerated can give rise to complaint. If making noise freely is a sign of social power, then, we can learn something important about a given society by attending to these shifting perceptions. What does it mean, we might ask, when a sound long taken for granted becomes subject to controversy? What does it say about those who “have the Sacred Noise” when their auditory practices come to be heard instead merely as noise?

The changing perception of church bells in the United States offers a valuable case study for exploring these questions more carefully. Having long taken for granted their right to ring bells, American churches suddenly found their practice under attack during the last few decades of the nineteenth century. Especially in urban centers, it became increasingly common for neighbors to complain bitterly about the sound of nearby chimes. Even more surprising, many of them turned to the law for protection and achieved some degree of success. In several cases, bell ringing became subject to careful regulation by the state. Churches could no longer enjoy the same right to make noise freely without censure.

The “bells question,” as it was described in American newspapers, emerged during a time of profound social transformation. It was not a coincidence that church bells came to be heard differently at a historical moment when American Protestantism (and religion more generally) was facing a wide array of challenges from forces such as urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. American cities grew tremendously in size during the second half of the nineteenth century. In New York, for example, an 1850 population of 515,500 swelled to 3,437,202 by 1900, and Chicago saw its population rise from 29,963 to 1,698,575 over the same period. Much of this growth was fueled by new arrivals, first from Ireland and Germany, and later from Southern and Eastern Europe. Already by 1850, Catholics outnumbered any single Protestant denomination in the United States. By 1910, 41 percent of city residents were foreign-born. In this context, bell ringing was hardly the only traditional Protestant prerogative that encountered opposition. Churches also found it increasingly difficult to safeguard the peace and sanctity of the Sabbath day, for example. Just as their right to make noise was being called into question, so too was their right to enforce quiet, at least on Sundays, and the shifting responses to these auditory practices mediated, in part, how Protestant Americans experienced the dramatic changes of the nineteenth century. Never simply about noise, the church bell and Sunday law debates gave rise to much broader questions about Protestantism’s shifting position in American society, the place of religion more generally in the industrial city, and its fate in the modern world. These debates offered an important occasion for working out the unsettled boundaries between religious and civic authority in a rapidly changing nation.³

Church Bells as Sacred Noise

Christian churches have long made a lot of noise. “If all the bells in England should be rung together at a certain hour, I think there would be almost no place but some bells might be heard there,” declared the sixteenth-century preacher Hugh Latimore. Latimore might have exaggerated, but his observation spoke to the perceived pervasiveness of church bells in early modern Europe. Bells were prominent features of European soundscapes, as unremarkable, perhaps, as they were unavoidable. For at least a thousand years, Christian churches used bells to announce services publicly, calling those within earshot to join in communal prayer. Their chimes tolled the canonical hours, rang the hours of the clock, and often marked the beginning and end of each workday. They celebrated public processions, festivals, and other ceremonial occasions. They accompanied momentous rites of passage, such as baptisms, weddings, and funerals, and they celebrated civic occasions such as coronations, royal visits, or national holidays. Bells marked the temporal and seasonal patterns of Christian communal life. They regulated everyday rhythms, while they also signaled significant breaks or interruptions of the normal order.⁴

If bells oriented Christians in time, they also oriented them in space. Churches often were situated at the center of their parishes, uniting all those within earshot. If one could no longer hear the bells, then one had moved beyond its geographic boundaries. Bells functioned as the voice of these Christian communities, and individuals developed strong emotional attachments to their local bells. Bells also signaled external threats and called out to God for protection. Their alarms warned inhabitants about marauding soldiers, spreading fires, and impending storms. Catholic communities even baptized bells, which endowed them with the power to ward off evil spirits, especially those deemed responsible for thunder and lightning.⁵

Protestants’ disavowal of these baptisms, part of their broader critique of Catholic “superstition” and “magic,” indicates how bells also played an important role in the construction and regulation of religious differences, particularly during the centuries following the Protestant Reformation. Although few Protestant churches condemned bell ringing altogether, Protestants and Catholics often contested its meaning, articulating their confessional differences in relation to this particular auditory practice. Moreover, Catholic and Protestant rulers routinely banned bell ringing in the churches of their sectarian rivals. “As late as 1781,” the historian Benjamin Kaplan found, “Joseph II’s famous Patent of Toleration insisted that the ‘churches’ that Austrian Protestants could now build were to have no towers or bells. In 1791 England’s Second Catholic Relief Act stipulated similarly that Catholic chapels could have no steeples or bells.”⁶

As these examples suggest, bell ringing often marked the limit of tolerable dissent. In fact, it was not until several centuries after the life and death of Jesus that Christians of any sort began to announce their services publicly in this way. In the early church, when Roman authorities suppressed Christian practice, Christians avoided unwanted attention (and likely persecution) by clandestinely spreading news about meetings by word of mouth. Later, as they gained some degree of security following the Edict of Constantine, Christians employed a variety of auditory devices, including trumpets, pieces of wood knocked together, and the human voice. The earliest evidence of church bells appears to date from the sixth century, but they spread only gradually from monasteries to cathedrals to large churches to country parishes. One historian has argued that bells did not likely enter into widespread use in churches of all sorts until the end of the tenth century or the beginning of the eleventh. Bell ringing signaled the Church’s expanding institutional influence and authority.⁷

In all of these ways, bells played a critical role in the formation of Christian communities. Generating strong affective attachments, they located individuals in space and time, mapped geographic boundaries, and demarcated the limits of social inclusion and interaction. They regulated the cadences of everyday life, contributed to the production and performance of religious authority, and maintained social order. Bells served important integrative functions, but they also were sharply contested, invested always with both meaning and power. They offered a powerful auditory cue in relation to which Christians negotiated their collective identities and made sense of their shared lives together. R. Murray Schafer even described Christian parishes as “acoustic communities,” an evocative suggestion that takes seriously the extent to which their boundaries were constructed sonically as well as visually and doctrinally.⁸

Given their significance for Christian communal life, it should come as little surprise that European colonists brought these varied bell-ringing traditions with them to the New World. The colony of Jamestown already had two bells by 1614, and many New England towns installed bells over the course of the seventeenth century, where they were used much as they had been in Europe. Many settlements required residents to live within earshot of the church. The sounds of its bells defined the limits of safe passage, distinguishing white civilization from the “wilderness” beyond. Bells announced service times, and they also announced town meetings and militia days. Early morning bells and evening curfew bells standardized colonists’ schedules and helped to ensure orderly behavior. Church bells played an important role in the construction and maintenance of colonial social order.⁹

Bell ringing became more and more widespread over the course of the eighteenth century, and its proliferation contributed to what the cultural historian Jon Butler described as “the sacralization of the colonial landscape.” As colonial society grew more diverse, it also developed a unique sound of its own as immigrants from England and the Continent braided together their distinct bell-ringing styles (English bells tended to be swung full circle while Continental bells tended to hang “dead” as chimes or carillons). These differences only underscored how important bells were to both groups and how prevalent they had become throughout the colonies. During the 1750s, a German settler to central Pennsylvania could still complain that “the whole year long one hears neither ringing nor striking of bells,” yet his experience was growing increasingly uncommon. Church bells had become customary features of the American soundscape.¹⁰

Considering how ubiquitous bells were on both sides of the Atlantic, churches received relatively few complaints about their volume. Their clamor could prove particularly onerous for the sick, and many churches voluntarily refrained from ringing bells during plague epidemics or in response to particular incidents of illness. In 1762, for example, a proctor suffering from smallpox induced his Oxford chapel to silence its bells while he lay sick in bed. And in an exceptional case in 1724, Dr. Martin and the Lady Arabella Howard even went to court to silence the five o’clock bell at a church in Hammersmith, England. Lady Howard was of a “sickly and weak constitution” and complained that she “was much disturbed and disquieted” by the ringing of the early morning bell. Her husband struck a deal with the churchwardens, agreeing “to erect a new cupola, clock, and bell” in exchange for their promise “that the five o’clock bell should not be rung during [their] lives.” But when a new churchwarden ignored the terms of their agreement, the parties ended up in court, where Martin successfully obtained an injunction that prohibited the church from sounding the offending bell.¹¹

Yet the Martin case was extremely unusual. Prior to the nineteenth century, individuals rarely turned to the law to silence the chimes of church bells. More typically, the clamor of church bells was presumed to signal social vitality. A 1602 account by Philip Julius, Duke of Stettin-Pomerania, reported that London youths often vied to ring bells as loudly as they could, even wagering “considerable sums of money” on their competitions. “The old Queen is said to have been pleased very much by this exercise,” the report continued, “considering it as a sign of the health of the people.” Buoyed by such attitudes, churches generally took for granted their right to ring bells as often and as loudly as they wanted. Bell ringing constituted “sacred noise,” in Schafer’s sense of the term, an auditory practice whose exemption from social proscription signaled the broader authority of those who engaged in it.¹²

Even in antebellum American society, churches continued to ring bells freely without censure. They faced relatively few challenges to their presumed public prerogative. Quite to the contrary, most Americans heard bells not as the sound of acoustic dominance, but of political freedom. Across the new nation, churches rang bells to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and they did so again each year to commemorate the Fourth of July holiday. They also punctuated presidential inaugurations and other important festivals in the life of the nation. Bell ringing thus made audible the ambiguities and tensions surrounding religion’s public place in American society, a society with no national church yet in which many took for granted the essential Christian character of its people. Despite formal religious disestablishment, the prominence and ubiquity of bells, especially on important civic occasions, offered an aural reminder of Protestant Christianity’s continued power and pervasiveness. Even as political partisans contested the role that religion should play in the workings of government, very few were able to hear the public call of church bells as sounding distinctly out of place. Church bells went generally unnoticed, subtly proclaiming the continued authority of those who rang them.¹³

Sunday Laws, Silence, and the Sound of Authority

If church leaders typically took for granted their own right to make noise, then they also expected to be specially protected from noise, and imposing silence on others constituted another important vehicle for exercising public power. As the cultural historian Peter Bailey has put it, silence, too, has long signaled “the sound of authority.” There are different kinds of religious silences, however. On the one hand, sound restrictions have offered an important vehicle for policing the boundaries of tolerable dissent. A 1253 English statute, for example, required that Jewish services be conducted in a low voice “so as not to be audible to Christians.” A 1710 decision similarly permitted Hamburg’s Jewish community to worship privately “as long as they refrained from ostentatiously provoking their neighbors by using ceremonial horns or trumpets or by publicly displaying liturgical lanterns.” Such regulations offered Christian rulers an important vehicle for containing the threat posed by religious others. They extended minimal levels of toleration for Jews and other non-Christians while clearly marking their inferior status as outsiders to the community. These sounds were not targeted because they were “really” too loud, in some objective sense, but because they constituted audible signs of “bad faith,” sounds deemed religious, but of the wrong kind. As such, they belonged to what the sociologist Emile Durkheim referred to as the “negative cult,” sounds that had to be carefully set apart, subject to strict interdiction, in order to safeguard the sanctity of the sacred. They had to be designated “out of place” in order to reaffirm the dominant social order.¹⁴

At the same time, church leaders also confronted the more pragmatic problem of how to shield their services from all sorts of seemingly mundane disturbances. They sought to silence those sounds regarded as “profane” or irreligious rather than as bad religion, those that threatened on account of their volume rather than their source. Particularly in urban environments, a wide range of acoustic annoyances could disrupt the solemnity of religious worship, including clattering horse hooves, cart wheels, and barking dogs. In 1620, an English ecclesiastical court even sanctioned a woman for bringing “a most unquiet child to the church to the great offence of the whole congregation.” During the eighteenth century, Philadelphia’s Great Meeting House at Second and Market Streets fell into disuse “because the street noise became too much.” An eighteenth-century English architect designed churches without ground-floor windows to avoid the same problem. Perhaps most remarkably, New Orleans clerics in the 1830s complained about the “unpleasantness of being daily disturbed, during prayers in Jesus Christ’s temple, by the crack of the whip and the screams of its victims” emanating from a nearby jail yard. Since they were disturbed only by the noise and not by the pain that gave rise to it, city officials responded by relocating the jail far enough away so that its torturous practices would no longer distract the devout.¹⁵

In antebellum America, church leaders regularly sought special legal protection from such aural disturbances. As the church historian Robert Baird re...