Religion has always played an important role in the lives of Hoosiers. Since the first settlers established Indianapolis in 1821, the new residents sought to nurture their faith and to shape the moral character of what would become the seat of state government in 1825. A city of churches, Indianapolis was described by historian Jacob Piatt Dunn “as unquestionably more moral and religious than the average frontier town.”
As in other early settlements, the first religious meetings were held in homes and businesses. A schoolhouse built in 1821 was a frequent church meeting site. Conducted by traveling preachers, these early church meetings attracted settlers of every denomination. A popular meeting site was a wooded knoll in the center of town, what is known today as Monument Circle.
Methodists were first on the scene, organizing a class in 1821 and later erecting a brick building at the southwest corner of the Circle and Meridian Street. A multidenominational Sunday school was organized in 1823, and three years later the Indianapolis Sabbath School was founded.
Baptists established a church rather than a class in 1822, making them the first denomination to claim a real home in the state’s capital city. Presbyterians started sharing a preacher with Presbyterians in nearby Bloomington in 1822 and formally became a church in 1823. After about a dozen years, a disagreement led to a division that separated American Presbyterians into a traditional or Old School church and an evangelical or New School church. In 1838, 15 members of the First Presbyterian Church withdrew to organize a Second Presbyterian Church. The new church’s minister was Henry Ward Beecher.
After leaving Indianapolis in 1847, Beecher went on to become of the nation’s most renowned clergymen. His sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), said to be a major impetus for the Civil War. Upon meeting the author, Abraham Lincoln allegedly remarked, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”
As settlers made their way to Indianapolis, they brought their own religions and beliefs. The first setters, of course, were from surrounding states. Gradually, people from the East Coast and from Europe headed to new homes in Indiana, creating a wide array of religious denominations.
A new denomination that came into existence in 1830, the Disciples of Christ, built a house of worship on Kentucky Avenue in 1836. They also opened a coeducational college known as North Western Christian University in 1855. Located at what is now 13th Street and College Avenue, the school was founded by Ovid Butler to promote that Christian movement. The school had no president, two professors, and 20 students. In two decades the college had proven so successful that it moved to a 25-acre campus and was renamed Butler University in honor of its founder. In 1922 Butler University purchased Fairview Park and in 1928 moved its campus to the current Fairview location, which consists of 31 buildings covering 290 acres. Today, Butler University is a nationally recognized comprehensive university with more than 4,000 students. Butler University’s athletic teams are known as the Bulldogs. Butler’s basketball arena, Hinkle Fieldhouse, was the largest basketball arena in the United States for several decades.
For a century or more, the religious center of Indianapolis was the heart of the city—in a very real sense. The Circle, the center of the city’s Square Mile, was home to five churches. By 1884, Christ Church was the only one left. The others moved to new locations as the city expanded and folks left the downtown area for the suburbs.
Today, Christ Church Cathedral is a city landmark on the Circle, the oldest religious building in continuous use in Indianapolis. The building is also the city’s best example of early Gothic Revival architecture. The parish of Christ Church built a simple chapel on this site in 1838, a year after the congregation was formed. Listed in the National Register of Historic Places, Christ Church Cathedral features stained glass and a bell tower.
Organized in 1836, the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church is the oldest continually operating African-American church in the city. The group obtained its first church building from the Episcopalians when the Christ Church congregation started the facility that would become Christ Church Cathedral.