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So far we've focused primarily on how the Christian church came to the American West in the nineteenth century, but what has it been up to since then? To find out, we talked to Richard Etulain, a historian and literary scholar at the University of New Mexico who wrote on western religious history in The American West: A Twentieth Century History (University of Nebraska, 1989), which he co-authored with Michael P. Malone. He's also interested in how the West has been perceived, a topic he explored in Reimagining the Modern American West: A Century of Fiction, History, and Art (University of Arizona, 1996). He helped us see how the region has changed during the past decades, often in surprising ways, and how the church has responded.

What forces have been most important in shaping the culture of the West?

It's been said that if you were to choose two remarkable turning points in western history in the last 200 years, they would be two events a hundred years apart—the Gold Rush and the Second World War, one in the 1840s and one in the 1940s. They each brought large numbers of people into the American West, new people with religious affiliations, new people who could be converted to religious affiliations.

Let me give you an example. I live in Albuquerque. In 1940 it had 30,000 people. In 1950 it had 100,000 people. In 1960 it had 200,000 people. And now it has 500,000. That big boom in population would be the same for Tucson, Phoenix, San Diego, and Seattle. Now Las Vegas is really the growth spot.

This has led to a situation most people are unaware of: the West is the most urban part of the United States. In 1900 California was an urban state, meaning that more than 50 percent of the residents lived in incorporated areas of 2,500 and higher population. The United States as a whole was not urban until 1920. California is still the most urban state, as well as the most populous—one out of nine Americans lives in California.

That doesn't sound much like the classic "wild West."

People often imagine the West as an open and individualistic frontier. A lot of western historians say that's an old-fashioned idea, more myth than reality. But it is at least part of the American intellectual landscape.

In fact, the West is a series of urban oases, meaning that we live in urban centers, but we have all that open space in between. The most excessive example is Nevada, which has a population of nearly two million, almost all of whom—probably 90 percent—live in two urban centers, the gambling towns, Reno and Las Vegas.

Though the West is urban, the open spaces have created a sense of isolation and distance, especially in the first half of the twentieth century and in more agricultural areas, like Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas. Those areas had small populations and few large churches, and it was difficult for them to get pastors. But those populations are a small part of the total, so you have to make a distinction. Isolation and distance are there for the rural areas, but increasing numbers of people are living in cities.

When we think of urban areas, we usually think of ethnic populations. Is this true in the West?

Definitely. The West is the most ethnically diverse region in the country. Americans think of four main groups of minorities: African American, Hispanic or Latino, Asian American, and Native American. Most Hispanics, most Asian Americans, and certainly most Native Americans live in the West. Increasing numbers of African Americans are there, too, especially since the Second World War, when there was a gigantic influx of blacks coming to work at military installations.

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