Book Review

Canada and the United States

Ferenc Morton Szasz's pioneering historical overview of religion in the modern (twentieth century) American West (from the 100th meridian to the Pacific Coast) challenges the adequacy of conventional accounts of the nation's religious history that are told from exclusively eastern perspectives. With the West included, the national story is more rich and complex than we have known. Long-accepted generalizations now must be altered. First, the Spanish Catholic and Russian Orthodox colonial heritage qualifies assumptions about essentially Anglo-Protestant foundations of American religious history. Second, by the end of the nineteenth century, migrations and settlements in western regions had come from all directions and represented ethnic cultures of the world, which fostered an unusually pluralistic religious life in the West. Third, therefore, no hegemonic Protestant mainstream ever developed in the West overall, while local congregations of diverse Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and other religious traditions flourished under what Szasz calls "a largely secular cultural umbrella" (p. 194). Fourth, add to this the enormous significance of the development of a new indigenous American world religion from within the Mormon empire at the crossroads of the West, the continuous unfolding of Asian world religions (especially varieties of Buddhism, Islam, and Eastern Orthodox Christianity), and the flourishing of Native American spiritualities, and we have a new perspective on the nation's religious history.

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