Twelve Churches : An unlikely history of the buildings that made Christianity – 9781399731300

A New Yorker best book of 2025’brilliantly inventive’. – Tom Holland’learned, highly informative and readable’. – Literary Review’thoughtful, humane and open-minded’.

– Kirkus Reviews’A brilliant book’. – Library Journal’witty writing’. – The Times’Hugely accomplished and endlessly readable’.

– The Spectator***With his trademark reverence and revelry, The Revd. Fergus Butler-Gallie travels through time and place to get to the heart of the religion he is so passionate about. In this book he takes us from Bethlehem and the birth of Christ some 2000-odd years ago, to the immediate present and future of Christianity.

He brings together a Baptist Church in the segregationist American South with a medieval monastery in the heart of the Greek countryside; the Vatican – beautiful, imposing, vainglorious, the seat of Catholicism – with a sparse, tiny private church above the rocky coastline of Southern Japan. Twelve Churches is a quest for a new people’s history of Christianity, told through the stories of twelve churches scattered across the globe. Through a patchwork of interlinking and varied human stories, Butler-Gallie takes us on a physical and historical journey, exploring the role of hope, faith and beauty in Christianity, but also its fraught relationships with sex, violence and power.

The story of Christianity is, he shows, the story of our modern world: it’s a story of who we should be, as well who we sometimes are.