Rethinking Jane Addams's private beliefs and public religious expressions has outcomes for the narratives of progressivism, American Protestantism, and the rise of the gendered welfare state. This paper examines the material culture of Hull-House as well as its programs and associations in an effort to reconstruct the religious environment created by Addams and co-founder Ellen Gates Starr during the early years of the settlement. Using correspondence, published writings, and images, the paper argues that Addams's lack of conviction or acceptance of traditional Trinitarian Christianity should not be interpreted as an indication that she abandoned religion, either personally, or as an important aspect of human experience. Instead, Addams sought to make religious experience possible for herself and the first generation of Americans who confronted modernity and the contradictions of progress and blight in the new industrial and urban nation that had emerged by the 1880s. She also attempted to redefine religious and cultural space for the American democracy in a neighborhood where ethnic and religious diversity appeared to progressives like herself, a great barrier to understanding and harmony.

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