Faith + Place: Investigating Chattanooga’s Religious Landscape

I am not a native Chattanoogan. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, I have developed a particular interest in how our fair city developed.

So when given the opportunity to help develop and deliver a course on exploring religion through the people, spaces, and places where faith is practiced in town, with my colleagues Dean of Spiritual Life Angelina DiVincenzo and Technical Theater Director/Theater Manager Ben Wagner, I was all in.

That became Comparative Religion in the Chattanooga Landscape, a three-week, place-based course that took the girls out of the classroom and into the city.

Rather than learning about religion from textbooks, we asked students to look at the places where people practice it: churches and temples, schools and universities, memorials and gathering spaces, and landscapes understood to be sacred.

We began with the deceptively difficult question: What even is religion? The girls developed their own working definition and learned about some basic tools for studying religious traditions respectfully and comparatively. And then we started walking, using Chattanooga itself as our primary text. The girls practiced “reading” sacred spaces, considering how geography, architecture, ritual, memory, and community reveal the values and beliefs of the people who built and sustain them.

At Audubon Acres and Ross’s Landing, we explored Indigenous history, Cherokee spirituality, and the complicated relationship between people, place, memory, and removal. We toured McCallie Avenue, visiting First Presbyterian, Christ Episcopal, and Methodist sites to trace the development of Chattanooga’s Protestant communities and their influence on education, philanthropy, and civic life.

We then encountered Chattanooga’s Jewish, Catholic, Hindu, and other communities, expanding our understanding of a city whose religious landscape has always been more diverse than its predominantly Protestant character might suggest.

Somewhere along the way, the course became more personal as the girls discovered how deeply that landscape is entwined with GPS.

First Presbyterian was once led by Reverend Thomas H. McCallie, the father of GPS founder Grace McCallie. At the Old Stone Church on the corner of Georgia and McCallie, the girls heard about the Patten family, whose legacy includes that structure, the University of Chattanooga (now UTC) and its Patten Chapel, and three GPS May Queens. UC’s last Chancellor, who was also a minister, Dr. Leroy Martin, was the grandfather of GPS Receptionist and Stewardship Coordinator Katherine Betts ’76.

At Second Presbyterian, the girls were greeted by the Rev. Carolyn “Lina” Robinson Hart ’73. At Mizpah Congregation, the rabbi proudly showed them a wall of photographs connecting generations of Jewish Chattanoogans, including current and former GPS girls. Marilyn Center ’58 was also prominently listed on a plaque naming women who had served in temple leadership. At the Sanatan Mandir, the girls noted the names of many GPS families listed among those who helped make the temple’s construction possible.

These moments changed the way we viewed Chattanooga. The religious landscape was no longer just a collection of sites and structures; it had become a history of people who suddenly did not seem so distant because of their GPS connections.

We set out to understand how religion shaped Chattanooga and came away with something more: an appreciation for how GPS women and their families have helped shape the city’s religious and civic life. That is one of the gifts of doing local history. The past becomes personal. Our girls can see that women who once wore the dress also occupied these spaces. They, too, were GPS students before becoming the women whose names and contributions we encountered across town.

And perhaps seeing that connection made it easier for our girls to begin to imagine the marks that they, too, might someday leave on the local landscape, spiritual or otherwise.