City of Bethlehem, in Palestine from Views in the Ottoman Dominions, in Europe, in Asia, and some of the Mediterranean islands (1810) illustrated by Luigi Mayer (1755-1803), via Creazilla

Plenty of Christmas carols emphasize the regal and supernatural aspects of the day or evoke the emotions that Christians have long felt when contemplating the birth of Jesus. “O Little Town of Bethlehem” emphasizes the quietness surrounding the birth of the Christ child in a little town. No one noticed except angels, who in this text don’t appear to people.

American preacher Philips Brooks visited Bethlehem largely because of exhaustion after the Civil War. Once he wrote the text, he asked his organist Lewis Redner to compose a tune for it. They lived to see what they thought was just a carol for the children in their Sunday school became nationally famous. Later, it became known around the world.

Philips Brooks

Brooks was born into a wealthy Boston family in 1835. After graduation from Harvard University in 1855, he taught briefly at Boston Latin School, which he found frustrating. He decided to become a minister and enrolled at the Episcopal Theological Seminary.

Ordained in July 1859, he began his ministry at Philadelphia’s Church of the Advent the following month. In 1861, he became rector at Holy Trinity Church. He returned to Boston to in 1869 as rector at Trinity Church. In 1891, he became Bishop of Massachusetts. He died suddenly in Boston in 1893.

While still a young preacher, Brooks’ anti-slavery sermons gained him national recognition. Besides his formal church work, he ministered to Black troops in the training camps near Philadelphia.

Brooks’ service at Holy Trinity began the same year as the Civil War. Nearly every family had young men serving in the Army. From the pulpit, Brooks had to look out over those mourning the death of a husband, son, or brother. Not all the dead fell in battle. Brooks’ own younger brother George died of typhoid in 1863 while serving in the Union army. No sooner did the war end than President Lincoln died at the hands of an assassin. Brooks was asked to preside over the funeral and preach the sermon.

Pastoring under those circumstances took a physical and emotional toll on him. Brooks took a sabbatical after the war and traveled through Europe and the Middle East during 1865-1866. Besides countless museums, cathedrals and other holy sites, Brooks visited the Roman Coliseum and the great pyramids of Giza. Nothing impressed him as much as his brief stop in Bethlehem for Christmas. He returned to Philadelphia in September 1866.

Lewis Redner

Adoration of the Shepherds / Bartolomé-Esteban Murillo, ca. 1650

Lewis Redner (1831-1908) was a real estate broker by profession. Outside of work, he involved himself heavily in religious and philanthropic activities in Philadelphia. Besides involvement in the YMCA, the Brotherhood of St. Andrew, and other organizations allied with the Protestant Episcopal Church, he helped raise funds for the Lincoln Institute, a home for children orphaned during the war.

He had no formal musical training, but he learned to play organ and had a great love of sacred music. Over the course of his life, he composed several hymn tunes, only one of which ever became widely known.

When Brooks became rector at Holy Trinity, he asked Redner to play organ and serve as Sunday school superintendent. The church grew rapidly under their leadership. Within a year, more people attended services than the church had seats in the sanctuary. They started with a Sunday school attendance of 36. After 19 years at Holy Trinity, Redner had grown it to more than a thousand children every week.

Brooks’ visit to Bethlehem

Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem via Wikimedia Commons 

On Christmas Eve 1865, Brooks’ tour group was in Jerusalem. He decided to visit Bethlehem and described the experience in two letters. To his family, he wrote,

After an early dinner [we] took our horses and rode to Bethlehem. It was only about two hours when we came to the town, situated on an eastern ridge of a range of hills, surrounded by its terraced gardens. It is a good- looking town, better built than any other we have seen in Palestine. The great church of the Nativity is its most prominent object; it is shared by the Greeks, Latins, and Armenians, and each church has a convent attached to it. We were hospitably received in the Greek convent, and furnished with a room. Before dark, we rode out of town to the field where they say the shepherds saw the star. It is a fenced piece of ground with a cave in it (all the Holy Places are caves here), in which, strangely enough, they put the shepherds. The story is absurd, but somewhere in those fields we rode through the shepherds must have been, and in the same fields the story of Ruth and Boaz must belong. As we passed, the shepherds were still ” keeping watch over their flocks,” or leading them home to fold. We re- turned to the convent and waited for the service, which began about ten o’clock and lasted until three (Christmas). We went to bed very tired.

In another letter to the children at Holy Trinity’s Sunday school, he wrote,

I remember especially on Christmas Eve, when I was standing in the old church at Bethlehem, close to the spot where Jesus was born, when the whole church was ringing hour after hour with the splendid hymns of praise to God, how again and again it seemed as if I could hear voices that I knew well, telling each other of the ‘Wonderful Night’ of the Savior’s birth, as I had heard the year before; and I assure you I was glad to shut my ears for a while and listen to the more familiar strains that came wandering to me halfway round the world.

The genesis of O Little Town of Bethlehem

O Little Town of Bethlehem text in Brooks’ handwriting, via Wikimedia Commons 

Such an experience demanded a poem. After his return to Philadelphia, Brooks struggled to craft just the right words. Finally, in 1868, he decided to stop working so hard and just let words flow through his mind in peace. The now-familiar hymn bubbled up as a result.

Brooks asked Redner to compose a suitable tune to perform for the Sunday school’s Christmas program. As Redner later described his experience,

As Christmas of 1868 approached, Mr. Brooks told me that he had written a simple little carol for the Christmas Sunday-school service, and he asked me to write the tune to it. The simple music was written in great haste and under great pressure. We were to practice it on the following Sunday. Mr. Brooks came to me on Friday, and said, ‘Redner, have you ground out that music yet to “O Little Town of Bethlehem”?’ I replied, ‘No,’ but that he should have it by Sunday. On the Saturday night previous my brain was all confused about the tune. I thought more about my Sunday school lesson than I did about the music. But I was roused from sleep late in the night hearing an angel strain whispering in my ear, and seizing a piece of music paper I jotted down the treble of the tune as we now have it, and on Sunday morning before going to church I filled in the harmony. Neither Mr. Brooks nor I ever thought the carol or the music to it would live beyond that Christmas of 1868.

Thus, both Brooks and Redner described their work as a gift from God after they ceased their own labor.

Subsequent history of O Little Town of Bethlehem

The congregation enjoyed “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” but Brooks and Redner didn’t promote it. A local book seller produced a few copies. Those copies spread out of town. William R. Huntington, rector of a church in Worcester, Massachusetts, included it in The Church Porch, a hymnal he published in 1874 for Sunday schools.

Hymns are traditionally known by the first line of the text. Hymn tunes go by different names, generally unknown to most people. Huntington named Redner’s tune “St. Louis.” The hymn achieved national distribution with its inclusion in the official Episcopal hymnal published in 1892.

Ralph Vaughan Williams decided to include the text in The English Hymnal (1906), but he rejected Redner’s tune in favor of an old English folk tune, “Forest Green.” Thus, American and British congregations don’t use the same melody.

Sources:

The history of “O little town of Bethlehem” / Beth Gillem, Dogwood Journal. December 20, 2021
Lewis H. Redner and “O little town of Bethlehem” / The Woodlands, December 18, 2020
O little town of Bethlehem / Charlene Mires, Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia
Philips Brooks / Encyclopaedia Britannica