The Christian House

Definition

The Christian house is the Beecher sisters' coinage for a house "contrived for the express purpose of enabling every member of a family to labor with the hands for the common good, and by modes at once healthful, economical, and tasteful" (p. 43). It is the house as moral instrument: planned — not decorated, not displayed — so that "it will provide in the best manner for health, industry, and economy, those cardinal requisites of domestic enjoyment and success" (p. 43). The warrant is scriptural ("The wise woman buildeth her house," p. 43) and the end eschatological: the house exists "for the training of God's children for their eternal home" (p. 43) — the earthly house is the training school of the eternal one, and dwelling is doubled across death. Under this conception the family is "an institution" divinely instituted ("the great design for which the family is instituted"), set against "societal custom" and "those classes which take the lead in forming the customs of society": the Christian house is designed for the family-institution rather than for fashion. The concept names the fullest nineteenth-century statement of the thesis that the plan of a house is an ethics — that spatial arrangement trains conduct, forms virtue, and distributes labor as a moral discipline.

Key Thinkers

• Catharine E. Beecher — the concept's author and chief designer: the house planned as ministry, the "cardinal requisites" as design criteria.
• Harriet Beecher Stowe — co-author; the colony projection that scales the Christian house up to a Christian settlement with common laundry and central church (p. 48).
• (Related, not yet paged — see log: the Protestant domesticity tradition the sisters systematize, from the Puritan household to the nineteenth-century home-missionary literature.)

Related Concepts

• Domestic Economy — the house's method: health, industry, economy as the requisites the plan must secure.
• Domestic Feminism — its politics: the house as the woman's ministry and jurisdiction.
• Dwelling — the concept's ontological doubling: the earthly house as school "for their eternal home"; dwelling stretched across death.
• Separate Spheres — the social-geographic frame the house presupposes and sacralizes.
• Cooperative Housekeeping — the concept's collectivist horizon: the common laundry "taking the most trying part of domestic labor from each house" (p. 48).
• Utopia — the genre of the closing colony passage: the Christian settlement in the Southern uplands.
• Practical Wisdom — the epistemic virtue the house-builder exercises: "to be 'wise,' is 'to choose the best means for accomplishing the best end'" (p. 43).
• Everyday Life — the material the concept sanctifies: "their detailed examination of everyday household objects indicates a familiarity with the role the household played within Christian society" (editors, p. 43).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• A Christian House (Beecher & Stowe 1869/2006) — the source text: the definition (p. 43); the cardinal requisites (p. 43); "the training of God's children for their eternal home" (p. 43); "the great design for which the family is instituted" against "the customs of society" (p. 43); the Colony projection with its common laundry and heavenly treasury (p. 48).
• Building Dwelling Thinking (Heidegger 1951) — the philosophical counterpoint in the wiki's dwelling cluster: dwelling as letting-dwell rather than as moral training; the comparison isolates what is distinctive in the Beechers' instrumentalization of the house.
• The Ethical Function of Architecture (Harries 1997) — the ethical-function frame within which a house-as-moral-instrument can be discussed (complementary source).

Open Questions

• The Christian house trains conduct through plan: is this the first full formulation of the thesis that spatial arrangement is moral formation — and does it anticipate or contradict the later, secular apparatuses of spatial discipline (Foucault's enclosures, Ardener's orderings; see power-and-space)?
• "The training of God's children for their eternal home" doubles dwelling across death. Can the doubling survive secularization, or is every modern theory of dwelling already a translation of this structure (dwelling)?
• The house is designed "for the common good" with labor divided among "each and all of the family" — is the Christian house a proto-communal domesticity, or the perfection of patriarchal family economy under a female governor?
• The Beechers set the family-institution against "those classes which take the lead in forming the customs of society" — is the Christian house anti-fashion's first manifesto, and does the later decorator's rebellion against rules (rule-breaking) repeat or invert it?