The Church Was Lying Before the Beer Arrived

Why the Pitcher & Piano didn't desecrate a holy place, it just unmasked a hollow one.

In my last post, I explored the war of smells inside the Pitcher & Piano, a place I imagined as a strange mix of vanilla decay and sweaty life. But the visual war is even more jarring.

When you look at photos of this bar, you are struck by the contrast of a pub operating inside a High Gothic chapel. It is a visually shocking contrast of the sacred clashing with the profane. But as I dug into the history of the building and the people who made it, I found that this tension wasn't introduced by the beer taps. It was there at the setting of the cornerstone.

The Historical Roots: The Great Ejection of 1662

The story of this building, originally built in 1876, begins in 1662. The congregation of this church ties its lineage back to this year and an event called the Great Ejection.

During this year ministers such as John Whitlock and William Reynolds lost everything for their convictions and their refusal to conform to the state church. Though barred from preaching through the Five Mile Act, they continued preaching in secret.

What strikes me about this story is that these men possessed a “Heavy Thing.” They had gravity. They were willing to lose it all on the basis of what they viewed was right. Whether they were right or wrong, these men had an attractive gravity to their convictions and became, in a way, mythic founders who could act as an example and template for their spiritual descendants, something you’d expect to carry through from generation to generation.

The Weightless Gravity: The Evacuation of Conviction and Orthodoxy

Over the next two centuries, the congregation drifted. They moved from the heavy, dense weight of their founders and moved toward the lightness of Rationalism.

By 1802, the congregation had formally adopted the Unitarian label, rejecting the Trinity. The Jesus they presented was the “Jesus of the Cheek” (the passive moral teacher who says “turn the other cheek”) but never the “Jesus of the Whip” who cleanses the temple with a whip of cords. The reality of Christ is that He is both, and in no way contradictory. But with the proliferation of Rationalism and a morality void of metaphysical conviction, they reduced the complex character of Jesus into a nice, safe moral teacher. They wanted the morality of the Rabbi without the judgment of the Lord.

They became the intellectual elite of Nottingham, favoring what James Martineau called a “critical, cold and untrusting” theology to a theology of depth and weight. Their theology had decomposed to something of nice thoughts and low density, a diffuse mess of nonsense.

The Architecture of a Lie (1876)

Wanting to build a new meeting place, the congregation hired Stuart Colman to help build the new chapel. The style they wanted was a High Gothic Cathedral. They valued the aesthetic of the style, which had a resurgence during the time.

What makes this choice strange is the history surrounding the Gothic Revival style. This style was championed by A.W.N. Pugin, who believed that the style celebrated the Mystery of the Incarnation and the Mystery of the Trinity. Within this style of architecture, there were symbolic representations of both the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity. In a word, the structure represented the “whole Christ.”

By building this structure, the Unitarian Congregation effectively built a mask for their theology, covering over the fact that they had half a Jesus (both in his Divinity and in his being a Jesus of the Cheek only) with a structure that screamed for a whole Jesus. They dressed their rationalistic theology in the symbolic vestments of the mystery of the true Christian faith, borrowing the historical aesthetic of the Faith without joining in the actual convictions and historical community of that faith.

Pugin, the father of the Gothic Revival, called this type of masking “Architectural Falsehood”. He believed a building’s form must declare its function. To build a High Altar for a theology that doesn't believe in the Sacrifice is, architecturally speaking, a lie.

The Bar Was Inevitable

With all of this considered, the Pitcher & Piano seems more a logical conclusion than a tragedy. The Unitarians had already moved their focus from God’s act of atonement to a theological view focused on hollowed out acts of morality. Since they were already focused on the viewpoint of man and the desire to be the social elite, the conversion of the structure into a bar, a social setting bent on making people feel good, is a logical next step.

The tension we feel in the structure, which by its symbolic form evokes feelings of awe, is a tension that was baked into the structure from the beginning. It lures us in, promising the Whole Christ, but delivers only consumption, noise, and emptiness.