Finding Proof for the Miracle of Sacred Spaces

When Notre-Dame Cathedral caught on fire in April of 2019, social media erupted. A major news source described the extraordinary response: “It really was as if the world had stopped…. What started as a firestorm by a cigarette butt was really a kind of existential crisis for Notre Dame and for the world.”

Why and how could a nearly 900-year-old building mean so much to so many people in so many places and in so many ways?

The simplest answer to that profound question may be that meaning is inherent in places designed for worship. From prehistory to now, from caves to cathedrals, from one system of belief to another, sacred spaces have held a special place in human cultures. They remind us, whether consciously or not, of our capacity to enter, however briefly, a realm of reality above the ordinariness of the everyday. That being human may well involve brief instances of being beyond our humanness.

“It’s a miracle, really, how a physical, material thing can create a bridge or a door into something metaphysical, something transcendental,” says Julio Bermudez, Ph.D., professor emeritus at The Catholic University of America and president of the Architecture, Culture and Spirituality Forum, a 1,000-member international organization that he cofounded in 2007.

Across religions, he points out, sacred spaces have a dual function. They’re devices for conveying religious precepts and they’re also powerful stimuli for encounters with spiritual realities. “This has not gone unnoticed by theologians and church leaders as their centuries-old collection of thoughts and arguments on the aesthetic intent and rationale for sacred architecture attests,” Bermudez notes. “Indeed, there is no shortage of reasons why sacred spaces matter in facilitating the pedagogic needs, experiential sustenance, and, therefore, the endurance of faith traditions.”

But, beyond scholarly claims and speculations, the fundamental question remains: Do such impacts really exist?

The Rev. Dr. Matthew Niermann, an experimental Evangelical Protestant church research expert, confirms that there’s currently very little concrete evidence to answer that question. “Many have tried to explain the success of sacred architecture,” he acknowledges. “Theological aesthetics scholarship is perhaps the most obvious example, although in recent decades other disciplines have joined these efforts. Yet, all these efforts so far provided little or no empirical evidence to support their arguments. So, in the end, they can’t withstand scientific scrutiny and reliably advance and implement our understanding in the real world.”

That’s about to change as Bermudez and Niermann are now co-leading an interdisciplinary team embarked on an ambitious new study. Bringing together experts in architecture, psychology, interior design, computer science, liturgy, and theology, the goal is to scientifically determine how sacred architecture communicates and shapes spiritual understanding across religious and non-religious groups. Drawing on the theory of aesthetic cognitivism — the idea that art can impart knowledge— they’re gathering scientific evidence to reveal the real influence of architecture on participants’ spiritual sensibilities.

Using mobile eye-tracking systems, AI-driven scene analysis, biometric sensors, and questionnaires, the team is studying how architectural features in churches of different denominations influence perception and understanding, and how these compare with reactions in a secular building. Conducted in Southern California, the study involves 180 participants, evenly divided among Catholics, Evangelical Protestants, and non-religious. Their ages range from 21 to 65.

“We’re very interested in not only how participants say they understood the buildings through surveys, but also how their bodies reacted to these buildings,” says Bermudez . “What’s fascinating when you begin to look at the data results is that you recognize that, regardless of whether participants were Catholic, Protestant, or non-religious, in a more beautiful space, they’re more inclined and compelled to really think about life’s meaning. Even up to 10, 15 years ago, this was not possible. But at this particular moment, we can answer questions we have never been able to answer before.” 

This latest project builds upon two earlier Templeton Religion Trust-funded studies. The first examined the cognitive and aesthetic effects of sacred versus secular architecture, while the second focused on identifying the architectural features responsible for those effects.

This latest project “aims to change the conversation on sacred space by establishing the necessity and benefits of considering and empirically gauging both the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ in the interaction between architecture and religion that naturally arises in the experience of sacred buildings,” explains Bermudez. “It’s fundamentally addressing the important questions of for whom do these spaces work, and how does a person’s religious background shape their experiences?”

A three-year undertaking, the scale is unprecedented. In total, the team expects to conduct 540 experimental sessions, generating what they hope will be one of the most comprehensive datasets yet collected on the relationship between architecture, cognition, emotion, and spirituality. Because they’re using the same methodological framework as the two previous studies, the researchers will be able to compare findings across all three investigations.

At the center of all this work is a broad claim: that sacred architecture may actually and actively shape how people perceive, understand, and experience spiritual ideas. By combining theology, aesthetics, and biometric science, the researchers hope to help establish what they describe as a new field of study: Experimental Theological Aesthetics.

“As theologians and as philosophers, we have an idea of how this works. Theological aesthetics begins to examine how we understand God through beauty. Empirical aesthetics begins to ask, how does beauty affect the body and how do we understand beauty as humans? Experimental Theological Aesthetics brings these two fields together for a fuller understanding,” explains Niermann.

“We’re not just measuring what people say they feel,” adds Bermudez. “We’re tracking what they’re actually looking at and linking it to measurable biometric effects. Experimental Theological Aesthetics is a needed discipline for this time because it brings the tools and the disciplines together to identify what in the space is driving the experience.”

The results may prove revolutionary as they map the aesthetic interaction between sacred architecture and human physio-cognitive-affective responses for the first time.

“Serving as a catalyst, our work seeks to be one of many inquiries for bringing together science and faith into a more robust understanding,” emphasizes Niermann. “It will not only meaningfully contribute unique knowledge to the growing evidence-based design movement in architecture. It can also provide architects, theologians, and church leaders with scientific knowledge to better design, construct, and assess the impact of the built environment on the human mind, heart, and spirit.”