The Refinement of Religious Practices in Nineteenth-Century Louisville, Kentucky

My dissertation recovers the nineteenth-century religious practices of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants in Louisville, Kentucky. Additionally, a comparative analysis of these religious practices reveals that by the end of the nineteenth century in Louisville, the public practices of some Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish congregations had moved toward a refined, formalized public religiosity, while other congregations in those traditions protested these changes. By refinement, I mean a conscious effort at beautifying spaces and material culture as well as the ordering and routinization of practices themselves. Many of Louisville's religious congregations transformed eclectic, unsophisticated religiosities of the early nineteenth century into consciously urbane projections of their refinement.

Louisville's nineteenth-century history lends itself excellently to this type of comparative study on the religious practices of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. The city's demography and economy illustrated the westward migration of eastern populations in the post-Revolutionary and early republic and Louisville also represented growing regionalism and urbanization in the nineteenth-century United States. The pluralism of Louisville was remarkable in its mixture of regional origin, ethnicities, and races. The city had the ethnic European enclaves of a northern urban center, but also a substantial (slave and free) African American presence of a southern city.

One result of this racial and ethnic diversity was a religious pluralism rich with a mixture of American, European, and 'Americanized' religiosities. There were a variety of Catholic parishes, Jewish synagogues and temples, white Protestant churches of wide diversity, and African American churches of an impressive breadth. Two hundred and fifty local religious institutions emerged in Louisville, Kentucky, before 1900.

With the emphasis on the religious practices of local institutions in nineteenth-century Louisville, my dissertation examines community formation, identity, sermons, death practices, hymnody, liturgy, and architecture. Thus, each chapter takes a specific topic (congregational formation, space and architecture, worship, death) and analyzes that topic throughout the entire nineteenth century for Louisville's congregations. I focus on the most public and ordinary elements of religious practice in nineteenth-century Louisville. In the coming months, a free version of this dissertation will appear online and available through common web searching.