Abstract
Attention to region and religious identity continues to provide a fuller understanding of American religious history. Dale Soden’s study of religion in the Pacific Northwest stands in this tradition of understanding American religion by exploring the development of American religion in this region. The history of the Pacific Northwest includes the range of American religious expressions, from conservative evangelicalism to the mainline to Judaism to Catholicism to the spiritual, but not religious (“spiritual but not religious”—SBNR), as well as the indigenous religions. His book notes how the characteristic topics of American religion have a different orientation in the Pacific Northwest, where all except the indigenous communities arrived at similar times in westward expansion and all existed from the beginning as minority religions to the present.
The book blends chronological and topical approaches to its study, with the first chapter, entitled “Here Come the Victorians,” introducing both the book and the arrival of religious traditions migrating to the region. Stimulated by the Klondike gold rush of 1897, Americans flocked to the region, bringing with them their respective faiths of Judaism, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism, and meeting the faiths of the indigenous people. Shaped by their experiences elsewhere, with strong representation from the South, Protestants spent the opening period, for example, building strong institutions, particularly colleges, but also anchor downtown churches, in this period. Their work created spaces that resembled similar spaces in the regions from which they migrated. In the new spaces of the Pacific Northwest, the architecture and institutional presence would suggest the dominance of the states of origin. The numbers, however, would reveal a land of minority faiths.
Soden also provides a particularly strong chapter on the Social Gospel, illustrating what this movement looked like outside the northeast and the classic centers of mainline Protestantism. Social Gospel leaders of this region included Seattle’s Presbyterian pastor, Mark Matthews—a transplanted Georgian who expanded the church’s activities to include numerous social services. Matthews, although placed accurately within the Social Gospel tradition by Soden, possessed a traditionalist theology that provides evidence of evangelical embraces of the movement. The Pacific Northwest, though, hardly became a place where evangelicals constituted the center of gravity, and this shapes the story of the Social Gospel in the region. The Social Gospel becomes a story of religion, not simply Social Christianity, as demonstrated by the strong presence of Rabbi Stephen Wise, whose reforming ministry in the Pacific Northwest receives detailed treatment.
Protestant Liberalism and conservative Evangelicalism developed in the Pacific Northwest as separate movements brought to the region by others and less as schisms that occurred in the region itself. Soden provides a particularly helpful narrative of these two forms of Christianity, with strong descriptions, grounded in primary materials, of the competing approaches to Protestantism that Liberalism and Evangelicalism possessed and the separate spheres the two regions occupied from the beginning of their presence. Similarly, Soden provides a chapter on the connections between racial prejudice and religion in the Pacific Northwest. The Ku Klux Klan found support within the ranks of some forms of Pacific Northwest Protestantism, and Soden’s chapter, “Tolerance and Intolerance,” yields a helpful analysis of the interplay of white supremacy, sectarian Christianity, and regional distinctive.
Dale Soden has crafted a well-researched study of religion in the Pacific Northwest grounded firmly in the larger context of American religion. His book will naturally be of value to anyone interested in the history of religion in this area. His study joins other important works, including especially Patricia O’Connell Killen and Mark Silk’s edited volume, Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None Zone (Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press, 2004), and provides a complimentary and extended companion to that short, but important book. Soden’s study, though, provides more than a narrative of religion in the Pacific Northwest. He places numerous universal themes in the study of American religion, like Evangelicalism, race, gender, and the Social Gospel, in the specific context of the Pacific Northwest, and in doing so he shows how the region and the themes possess a symbiotic relation. Because no theme and no group dominated the religious landscape of the Pacific Northwest—the mainline is always one of many identities, for example—all traditions operated as vital minority traditions from the beginning. The examination of the universal national religious themes developing in a particular context will provide an important addition to our understanding of religion in America.