Spires Still Point to Heaven

Matthew Smith is a Visiting Professor of History at Miami University.

“The Spires Still Point to Heaven is an important story about the hard-fought battle between evangelical Protestants and Catholics to save souls in Cincinnati, where revivalism became respectable and made the city a religious hub for the nation. Sectarian identity also became inseparable from sectional politics, and religious identification gave women access to the public sphere. Here, the debate about the place of religion in public education has relevance today. Matthew Smith’s study of religious competition in Cincinnati, often expressed as evangelical fervor, helps us better understand the evolution of pluralism, toleration, and liberty in American history.”-R. Douglas Hurt, Professor of History at Purdue University “Matthew Smith has immersed himself in primary and secondary sources, including often overlooked contemporaneous secondary materials, and has synthesized these into a very well-written and compelling narrative. What he demonstrates, among other things, is the relentless push toward toleration and accommodation, even though that push episodically crashed against the shoals of race, ethnicity, religion, and privilege. What is especially impressive about The Spires Still Point to Heaven is its discursive character, covering everything from geography and natural history to William Holmes McGuffey, the female seminary movement, and the (in)famous Cincinnati Bible War. This is an impressive achievement born of prodigious research.”-Randall Balmer, John Phillips Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College, and author of Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America "In this extensively researched volume, Smith focuses on the city of Cincinnati to explore early U.S. tensions between Christian sects, concepts of religion’s role in public education, religious tolerance, nativism, and the temperance movement, to name only the most prominent topics.... This book is very well researched and would be of vital interest to scholars of both early religion and education in the Ohio Valley.... Smith’s book is an excellent example of the type of locally focused resource to which educators and transplants can turn to understand their new homes and neighbors."-Journal of Urban Affairs "The Spires Still Point to Heaven is a well-written and broadly researched text that will be of interest to scholars of American religion and those who want to understand the development of the Western frontier."-American Catholic Studies "The Spires Still Point to Heaven offers readers a fascinating account of multifaceted religiosity in Ohio's 'Queen City' and challenges the habit of trying to wrench homogeneity from America's never less than complicated religious past."-Middle West Review "Exhaustively researched, The Spires Still Point to Heaven deftly synthesizes an impressive array of local and national sources to reconstruct a city in flux and rife with tensions. Tightly written, it represents urban history at its best, offering a deeply nuanced picture of Cincinnati. Scholars of nineteenth-century America will inevitably find their topic of interest appearing in its detail-packed pages."-Journal of the Early Republic "[A] pleasure to read.... Smith has done a prodigious amount of research for this book, and he documents his sources with great care. Each chapter of the book is accompanied by a valuable bibliographical essay. His text is accessible and very inviting."-Journal of American Culture