1 of 6

The term American West generally calls forth a kaleidoscope of larger-than-life images: the Grand Canyon, Yosemite and Yellowstone, the California Redwoods, Mt. St. Helens, Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, the Oregon coastline, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, Canyon Country, Billy the Kid, Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickcock, Buffalo Bill, Santa Fe, Tombstone, Las Vegas, the recent "battle of Seattle," and everybody's choice for the prototypical city of the twenty-first century: Los Angeles.

But there is something missing from this panorama—any mention of religion or spirituality. For most people, religion and the great American West run on separate tracks.

This view needs revising. From the onset, religion has played a central role in shaping the West, and it continues to do so today. In fact, historians who write exclusively about a secular West have left a very important factor out of the equation.

Let's start with the indigenous groups. All the region's Native Americans place their spiritual traditions at the heart of their cultural world-views. From 1598 to 1798, Franciscan friars were the sole ordained clergy in all of New Mexico, and the Franciscan presence still looms large today in California and the Southwest. From the early 1840s to c. 1870, the histories of Utah and the Latter-day Saints were virtually identical, a situation that still holds true in a number of isolated Utah communities. Jewish immigrants to the West encountered far less prejudice than they did in either the East or the South, and Jews served as mayors and/or governors of several turn-of-the-century western locales—including a term as governor of New Mexico's Acoma Pueblo—well before they assumed similar positions in New York or Illinois. The Episcopal Cathedrals in Boise and Laramie, the Boston Avenue Methodist Church in Tulsa, and Trinity Methodist Church in Denver still anchor their respective city centers. While their functions may have shifted over time, these urban churches remain vital to their communities. The list could easily be extended.

All right, you might say, I will concede that the religious theme has often been overlooked in the saga of the American West. But over the last century, what precisely did all those churches do?

Here the answer is multifaceted. In one sense—proclaiming their version of the faith—the church mission has changed little over time. But "proclaiming the faith" in a western context has always transcended mere words. Faced with a raw, basically unstructured society, western churches immediately established both programs and institutions to embody their message. Since western life has changed so drastically over the last century, these programs and institutions have naturally followed suit.

This shift may be clearly seen in three "freeze-frame" vignettes of modern western life: the fin de siecle era, c. 1890-1910; the bleak years of the Great Depression; and the post-1960s "spiritual revolution." While western church commitment to sustaining a proper moral order remained constant during these periods, the techniques varied with the demands of the day.

Although Catholic and Protestant churches sent missionaries westward before the Civil War—especially to California, the Southwest, and Oregon Territory—it was not until the arrival of the railroad in the late 1860s that clergy and parishioners traveled west in any great numbers. There is an old adage that "the Baptists came on foot, the Methodists in a Conestoga wagon, the Presbyterians rode the train, and the Episcopalians arrived in a Pullman car," but this comment reflects social class far more than it does historical reality. Actually, Protestant clergy from all the mainline denominations arrived in various parts of the West at approximately the same time. Each enjoyed its share of delivering the "first" sermons for the area and founding "First" (Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, etc.) churches.

next page... |  1 of 6

share this page