Baptist Landscapes

February 28, 2008

photo used under Creative Commons License, by Flickr user Amber Rhea

In my Cairo class I continue to point out ways that religious concepts and values make their way into the landscape. Today my example was the notion of a Baptist landscape. Baptists, with their insistence on congregational autonomy, are hardly going to tend toward the development of unified religious landscapes. We may be able to find patterns that Baptist churches follow, but we will never find hierarchical and ordered landscapes such as we find in Catholicism with the Vatican and subsidiary points in the hierarchy.

I should add that this is definitely a dynamic relatioship. One reason the Baptists are so numerous in the South must be that this autonomous way of thinking about groups has a certain resonance with the population. In the end a religious system and regional culture end up mutually strengthening each other. It is not important to separate those two elements.. just to recognize that ways of thinking and religious values end up finding their way into the design of landscapes.