| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Religion in the Modern American West. By Ferenc Morton Szasz. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000. xviii, 249 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8165-1476-3.)

Ferenc Morton Szasz, professor of history at the University of New Mexico, writes that, after three decades of teaching intellectual history, he considers "religion" one of the three "overarching themes" in American culture. Lamenting what he sees as its neglect by historians of western history, he further states that "a secular interpretation of regional history is a lie about the West" and "ignores a central component of the human experience, the historical locus of both personal and social vision." Viewing the modern American West as a participant in all national religious trends, Szasz focuses his analysis on how westerners "bent these trends along their own trajectories." As a result, Religion in the Modern American West moves toward correcting the "lie," as the author deftly weaves the story of religion into the wider social and cultural context of the twentieth-century American West. . . .

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