David J. Jepsen

"Old-fashioned Revival"

Religion, Migration, and a New Identity for the Pacific Northwest at Mid Twentieth Century

ON JULY 23, 1950, the Sunday Oregonian devoted its front page to a photograph of Billy Graham, smiling broadly, looking to the heavens, right hand held out invitingly. The thirty-one-year-old emerging star of the evangelism circuit was bringing his revival show to Portland the following day. A temporary "tabernacle," a covered grandstand with sawdust floors designed to hold twelve thousand people, had been built on the northeast end of town. Standing-room-only crowds were expected for the three-day event. Portland — which, according to Graham, had one of the lowest church attendance rates in the nation — "was ripe for a religious revival."¹ One of those who planned to attend Graham's revival was Chester S. Tunnell, a student at Pacific Bible College in Portland. Graham's appearance, Tunnell wrote later, was an answer to his prayers for a "real genuine, old fashioned revival of religion" in Oregon.²

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Graham's appearance in Oregon is an example of what essayist Leonard Sweet called a wave of "overbelief" that swept through America in the 1950s. The religious landscape in America in the 1950s and 1960s, Sweet argued, "was populated largely by unbelief and overbelief."³ The "unbelief" was characterized by increased interest in secular thinking and a growing fascination with what Sweet called a "spinning prism of isms" — from Communism to Modernism. This contrasted sharply with a current of religious conservatism, or evangelicalism — the overbelief — that flowed through many regions of the country.

The dichotomous nature of religion in America at mid-century also describes the Pacific Northwest — then and now. The Pacific Northwest has a long-standing reputation for being "unchurched," perennially trailing the nation in the level of church membership. According to one survey in 2000, nearly 63 percent of the population in Washington and Oregon was unaffiliated with any religion, the highest rate of nonmembership in the nation. But that same survey also revealed a surprising, less-known fact about religion in the Pacific Northwest. Amid the atmosphere of seeming religious indifference runs a strong strain of religious conservatism. Nearly one-third of survey respondents who claimed to attend church regularly identify with evangelical denominations whose conservative beliefs lie outside the boundaries of mainline Protestantism, with membership rates well above the national average. According to a 2004 survey on religious membership, for example, nearly 23 percent who identified themselves as church members belonged to one of a number of Holiness and Pentecostal sects, nearly three times the national average.⁴

Crowds line up to hear Billy Graham speak in Portland in July 1950.

From 1940 to 1960, conservative religious denominations built a stronghold in this largely secular region. The presence of these religious groups can be traced to the great northern migration that began with the Great Depression. Over three decades, hundreds of thousands of people, looking for work and a better life, moved west from the Old Southwest — Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri. The West became fertile ground for thousands of ministers, competing for converts and working to strengthen the presence of denominations such as the Southern Baptists, the Assemblies of God, and the Church of God. In addition to proselytizing whites, evangelicals recruited African Americans, built churches on Indian reservations, preached to Mexicans who had been imported as farm labor, and proselytized to Japanese interned during World War II.

While evangelical groups left a lasting footprint on the region, residents native to the Northwest did not convert in overwhelming numbers. The current strength of evangelical churches in the region is due mostly to migration. Rather than bringing a southern brand of evangelism to the Northwest, ministers brought evangelism to southerners who had migrated there. Most southerners worshipped with other southerners, while native northwesterners worshipped as they had in the past or not at all.

While the Pacific Northwest was building a reputation as an economic "promised land," as Richard Neuberger called it in 1938, religious leaders formed an altogether different impression.⁵ To them, the Pacific Northwest was more foreign land than promised land. Where local boosters such as Neuberger wrote glowingly about economic opportunity, newly arrived ministers wrote about immorality and sin. While local chambers of commerce recruited investors to promote development, religious leaders recruited evangelists to combat "spiritual darkness." Many evangelists found the Pacific Northwest a strange and even hostile place, not unlike a mission in Africa or Asia.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, a group of ministers corresponded with fellow evangelicals and contributed regularly to the Pacific Coast Baptist and other newsletters. Atwood Foster, raised in Cottage Grove, Oregon, was superintendent of the Northwest District of the Assemblies of God from 1942 to 1955, during which time the denomination more than doubled the number of churches in the region. Leonard B. Sigle, a Baptist from Oklahoma, attended seminary in Texas before moving to Washington during the Depression. He is credited with helping start more than fifty Baptist churches in the West, most of them in Washington and Oregon. Robert E. Milam, another Texas native, opened the Antioch Baptist Church in Portland, founded and edited the Pacific Coast Baptist, and wrote regularly about the spiritual needs of Oregonians. During his fifty-year career, Cecil C. Sims, a native of east Texas who now lives in Tigard, Oregon, opened Baptist churches throughout the Wenatchee Valley and later in Tacoma and British Columbia. In 1998, Sims chronicled the growth of the church in the region in Northwest Southern Baptists, 1884–1998.⁶ These men embodied evangelical values and beliefs: they reported having profound salvation experiences, believed in the power to heal and an impending millennium, abhorred worldliness, and loathed Catholicism and Communism.

Historian D.G. Hart calls evangelicalism "the most American version of Christianity" and traces its roots to the English and German brand of Protestantism that emerged with the first revivals in America in the 1730s. An underlying characteristic was the value placed on the "subjective and ethereal" aspects of Christianity, which translated into a greater concern for what goes on outside the church rather than inside.⁷ An educated, hierarchical clergy was shunned for men who had undergone a "born again" experience and could help others achieve it. From the beginning, evangelicals focused on creating a society that reflected Christian values. Evangelicalism is marked by a handful of deeply held convictions: the necessity of the conversion experience to achieve salvation; the inerrancy of the Bible; a stated duty to proselytize; and a rejection of many forms of popular culture. Pentecostals, a subset of evangelicals, emphasize achieving a state of "saving grace" through the Holy Spirit, usually characterized by speaking in tongues, which is distinct from being "born again" and involves a conscious decision to accept Christ as one's savior. Today, no fewer than thirteen religions practiced in Washington, Oregon, and Alaska fall under the evangelical umbrella.⁸

Religious conservatives found room to grow in the Northwest in the 1930s, even though church attendance lagged in other regions. By the 1930s, Martin E. Marty wrote, "the Far West presented a bemusing blend of awesomely secular and intensely religious life." Seven of the eight least "churched" states were in the West, including Washington and Oregon, while cities like Seattle and Portland were an odd mix of secularism and "proverbial zones of intense spiritual experiment."⁹ Nearly all Christian denominations in the Pacific Northwest grew during the twenty years between 1940 and 1960, but the Baptists and the Assemblies of God grew more than most and much faster than the population as a whole. From 1940 to 1950, Washington's population surged by 37 percent to 2.38 million and added another 20 percent to reach 2.85 million from 1950 to 1960. Oregon's population grew by 40 percent from 1940 to 1950 and 16 percent from 1950 to 1960, to reach 1.77 million.¹⁰ Much of the growth came by way of migration from the South and Southwest as states such as Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Mississippi saw their populations shrink.

The Rev. J.E. Murphey, an evangelist at Mt. Tabor Tabernacle in Milwaukie, baptizes convert Belle Speck in the Willamette River in 1936.

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While it is difficult to get an apples-to-apples comparison across denominations, the impact of the exodus on church growth is nothing short of phenomenal. In 1940, there were an estimated 57,000 Baptists and 230 Baptist-affiliated churches in Washington and Oregon. By 1948, the next year for which data are available, those numbers had shot up to 77,000 adherents attending 435 churches. By 1967, there were 152,000 Baptists and 862 Baptist churches in the two states — a 267 percent increase in adherents and a 375 percent increase in churches since 1940.¹¹ Data on adherents for the Assemblies of God are not available, but church construction tells the same story. There were an estimated 190 Assemblies in Washington and Oregon in 1940, 289 in 1950, and 374 in 1960.¹² That equates to an average of more than nine new churches a year for twenty years, an impressive record of sustained growth, especially given that some of it occurred during World War II when materials and labor were in short supply.¹³

Most historians trace the beginnings of the Pentecostal movement in the West to the glossolalia (speaking in tongues) movement that emerged in Topeka, Kansas, in 1900. The movement shifted west in 1906 with the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles, where for two years churchgoers took part in huge rallies in which many people spoke in "languages not their own."¹⁴ The 1920s were marked by the controversy between conservative evangelicals and liberal Protestants. Liberals wanted to modernize Christianity to fit more comfortably in American culture, while evangelicals' strict interpretation of the Bible required the rejection of popular culture or liberal thought. The debate took center stage with the growing interest in Darwinism and the media frenzy surrounding the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925. Scientific pursuits, progressive ideas, and modernist thinking were suspect. A Seattle religious leader, Presbyterian Mark A. Matthews, summed up the evangelicals' concern with his assault on "all phases of Higher criticism, Evolution, Pantheism, Unitarianism, and all diluted forms of Christianity."¹⁵

We get a glimpse of the intensity of the era from the unpublished memoir of Assemblies of God minister Roy Ferguson, written in 1971 when he was well into retirement. Ferguson, who claimed God had healed him of tuberculosis in 1921, ran the Gladtidings Mission in downtown Salem, Oregon, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The mission was a beehive of religious energy, according to Ferguson, as the sounds of raucous revival meetings spilled into the street. Men and women belted out spirituals and prayed to heal converts of any number of afflictions. Daily services and three weeknight meetings, Ferguson remembered, "were like regular church services but with much more freedom of the Spirit." On other nights, the evangelicals met in private homes or preached and handed out literature on downtown streets.¹⁶

On one Sunday evening, a woman strayed into the mission who Ferguson described as "deeply convicted." On that night, the group was led by Walter Smith, a visiting evangelist "who refused to preach unless the anointing of the Lord was upon him." Walter urged the guest "to give herself to the Lord," but she wanted to wait until her family could convert together. The next night, the woman returned with her husband and children. At the appropriate time, the woman and children "went forward and were saved." The group turned expectantly to the husband, but he was having none of it and started to leave.

All at once, without anyone asking them to do so, the Christians fell on their knees and began to intercede. After a very short time this man started to leave the hall but found that he couldn't move [and] fell on his knees and surrendered to the Lord. Afterward he said in the vernacular of a cowboy which he had been, "The Lord hog tied me." In a few seconds he was up with his hands in the air praising the Lord like an older saint. He hugged every man and shook hands with every women [sic] in the building and finally started toward the stove with his cigarette makings in his hand. I opened the stove door so he could drop them in.¹⁷

There is evidence to suggest that this event was typical, although we cannot fully rely on an account written forty years after the event by someone who was so invested in the work of fellow Christians. There is little doubt, however, that the extreme nature of evangelism struck a nerve during the Depression. When other denominations were struggling in the 1930s, evangelicals prospered. The Assemblies of God built sixty-eight churches in Washington and forty-eight in Oregon during the 1930s — slightly fewer than one a month for ten years — an impressive accomplishment considering the beleaguered economy.¹⁸

ALTHOUGH NEW CHURCHES regularly opened their doors in the cities and small towns of the Pacific Northwest, that does not mean they were always full. The Depression contributed to a "period of religious depression" in the Northwest, which did not ease up until the 1940s. Attendance, contributions, and baptisms dropped off as people struggled during hard economic times. During the depth of the Depression, baptisms of Baptists in Oregon fell from about one thousand per year in 1927 to fewer than six hundred in 1940.¹⁹

While the Assemblies fought economic depression, Northwest Baptists fought each other. For more than two decades, they bickered over theological differences revolving mostly around the issues of worldliness and liberalism, which led to a territorial dispute between the Northern and Southern Baptist conventions. The controversy dates back to the church's crisis over slavery, when Baptists, Methodists, and other Protestant denominations split along sectional lines and, eventually, along theological ones. The end of the Civil War did not end the division, however, as the Baptists divided into the Northern Baptist Convention (later called American Baptist) and the Southern Baptist Convention. "Southern Christians had to justify this continued separation from their former brethren," historian George M. Marsden concluded. "The most likely principal explanation was their northern counterparts had been infected by a liberal spirit, evidenced in the first instance in their unbiblical attacks upon slavery."²⁰ But the split did not squelch the Southern Convention's designs for national expansion. Between 1894 and 1912, the two conventions held four comity conferences in efforts to stave off Southern attempts to move north and west, and the 1912 agreement in Hot Springs, Arkansas, stemmed the Southern tide for the better part of thirty years. Baptists who migrated to the Northwest were precluded from opening Southern Baptist churches, yet they found Northern Baptist churches too liberal or their style of worship too subdued. Many chose to form an independent church, resulting in a number of small Baptist associations. An unknown number of Southern Convention immigrants joined the Assemblies of God or other Pentecostal sects.

Conservative Baptists in Oregon split from the Northern Baptist Convention in 1937 and reorganized as the Oregon Baptist Convention, "the last citadel of faith" against liberalism. A "manifesto" written by an Oregon minister in 1939 characterized the vehemence of conservatives and illustrated how the Northwest was prize territory in a national liberal-versus-conservative conflict. Albert Johnson wrote that the Northern Convention had "fallen into the hands of those who knew not Joseph." Baptists moving into the region "look[ed] upon Oregon as the last frontier and stronghold of Baptist conservatism." Johnson predicted that one day all Baptists would unite under a single convention, but until then conservatives must resist the "continued drift from the distinctively Baptist position on faith and polity."²¹

The differences over polity may have contributed to perceptions about the West as a region long on worldly ways and short on religion. The idea that the West was "Godless," "pagan," or "lost" was widely held among evangelicals for much of the first half of the twentieth century. In American Exodus, James M. Gregory describes Baptist ministers who migrated to California during the Depression to bring religion to a "pagan land dominated by secular values and apostate churches."²² In 1931, the Pacific Coast Baptist lamented: "The Pacific Coast today is filled to overflowing with fools who say there is no God."²³ In trying to build a case for a Baptist seminary in the Northwest, student Woodrow Young wrote: "If in the South, the Missionary Baptists must contend with modernism; we have it in the rankest form. Where they have the devil to fight in the yard; we are fighting him at the door."²⁴

The perception that the Pacific Northwest was spiritually backward contrasts sharply with the image fostered by local boosters vying for eastern capital in the 1940s and 1950s. Historian John Findlay has written extensively about regional identity and its role in creating a sense of place. He has argued that the Pacific Northwest has taken on a series of identities throughout history, each "suited to the cultures and concerns of its time" and manufactured in part by people from outside the region who tried to impose their version of the West on local inhabitants.²⁵ In the nineteenth century, railroads created a public relations campaign around the scenic beauty of "the Great Pacific Northwest." In the 1930s, the federal government looked to tap the region's hydroelectric power, contributing to a "heightened regional consciousness" based on the Columbia River and its dams. Northwest booster and journalist Richard Neuberger wrote glowingly in 1938 about the potential of the Columbia Basin, which "can generate more hydroelectricity, grow more wheat, and cut more timber than England, France, and Germany combined."²⁶ Pitchmen such as Neuberger along with the economic growth accompanying World War II and the Cold War helped overcome the negative perception that the region was underdeveloped. Northwest boosters, Findlay concluded, "held themselves as more on par with eastern centers of population, commerce, and industry, and less dominated by California."²⁷

Trinity Baptist opened in Vancouver, Washington, in 1942, when many members of evangelical congregations moved to the area to take advantage of wartime jobs. These members of the Trinity Baptist Church Choir participate in a service in 1946.

Courtesy Northwest Baptist Historical Society

Southern Baptist and Pentecostal preachers conjured their own vision of the West, which had little to do with a sense of place. While business leaders trumpeted the region's economic strengths, evangelists pointed out its shortcomings. Southern Baptists living in the Northwest traveled to the South, wrote letters to friends, and visited Bible schools — all in an attempt to recruit more ministers to the region. The Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth held classes on how to start a mission in the Northwest, and the Pacific Coast Baptist editorialized on the pitfalls of ministering there. In 1944, in a tone reminiscent of nineteenth-century pioneer Leonard Sigle, a native of Oklahoma, warned that anyone planning on ministering in the Northwest had better be prepared:

In order to cope with the difficult problems of building Baptist churches in the Pacific Northwest the pastors should be men of at least average training, experience and ability. It is not likely that men who have failed in other places to build churches, maintain harmony and cooperate with their brethren will succeed in this section. It will depend upon his ability to adapt himself to the problems he finds here.... A true Baptist ministry in the Northwest is similar in many ways to work on the foreign fields. Coming to this section should be regarded with the same spirit as if one were going to China, India or Africa.²⁸

Like those in China or Africa, Sigle continued, churches in the Pacific Northwest "are new and require strenuous evangelistic, enlistment and training programs." They are "scattered over a vast territory," and "as in the heathen lands, there are many false teachings." Finally, he warned, "there are certain fundamental differences between the customs, attitudes and backgrounds of the western people and those of the east and south."²⁹

Cecil Sims, who has studied Northwest Baptists, said Sigle's comparisons were "a little bit extreme but not much." Unlike missionaries in Africa or elsewhere, Sims reminded, Baptists proselytizing in the Northwest faced no language barrier. Like foreign missionaries, however, they struggled to be accepted by locals, whose attitude was "We're going to tolerate you, but we're not going to accept you."³⁰

THE CHALLENGES FACING evangelicals may have been overstated, but the opportunity to proselytize was not. Throughout World War II and for more than a decade afterward, hundreds of thousands of workers poured into the region's cities. They came to Seattle to work at Boeing, to Portland to toil in the Kaiser Shipyards, and to Vancouver to labor at the Alcoa plant. Seattle companies especially were affected, securing $5.6 billion in defense contracts, placing it among the top three cities in war-related orders.³¹ Seattle Mayor William F. Devin told the city council in June 1942 that Seattle had become "better known during the past six months than it had in the previous three quarters of a century."³²

The Northwest was also becoming better known for more than its burgeoning economy. Denominational newsletters, committee reports, and correspondence during the 1940s were replete with news about the "fast moving, freedom-loving, carefree spirit of the West," where newcomers were "soon far away from God ... [and] the moral standards they had at home."³³ Echoing the business boosters, one minister touted the region's mild climate and "natural resources seldom found in such variety in any locality." The population had "doubled" in recent years, he reported, and most of the immigrants were likely to raise their families "in the land that is ever green." But the pastor closed his report with a familiar theme: "Migrants have come seeking gold, not God."³⁴

Baptist minister Leonard Sigle reported that the Pacific Northwest offered "great untouched fields of mission work" for Baptists willing to move to the region. He was particularly enamored with north Seattle, where he started a church at North 105th Street and Fremont Avenue North in 1944. The north end was "very favorable" because of its proximity to Highway 99, which contained "a great host of unreached people." He urged Baptists to "go on from one great project to another, in Seattle, Portland and the other larger cities of the Pacific Coast."³⁵ Pastor Cecil C. Brown was more emphatic: "It simply makes one's heart yearn and bleed for the hundreds of thousands without Christ." The only solution was to "build missionary Baptist churches in every city along the coast."³⁶

The Assemblies of God did not confine their mission activities to the cities and suburbs. They took their message to Japanese internment camps, the region's farms, and Indian reservations. Like Baptists, the Assemblies expressed a sense of urgency in converting both people native to the Northwest and those who were immigrants. For Assemblies of God Superintendent Frank Gray, for example, the internment of Japanese Americans presented a "divinely opened door," and the Assemblies sent two women missionaries to the Minidoka Relocation Center in Hunt, Idaho, where they passed out Bibles and preached with "outstanding results."³⁷

Mexicans poured into the region during World War II, eager to take farming and other jobs that had been vacated by white workers who had moved into defense-related jobs or joined the armed forces. Many came under the federal bracero program. In a five-year period beginning in 1942, more than 220,000 Mexicans legally crossed the border to work in the United States; about 47,000 of them landed in the Pacific Northwest.³⁸ The Assemblies of God began proselytizing to the new migrants and held their 1944 annual convention in Yakima, a hub of the expansive agricultural region of eastern Washington. One evening, prayers and music were offered in the "Spanish language" for the benefit of special guests — forty "Mexican men." According to convention minutes, the Mexicans, "who have been so long in spiritual darkness ... went to the altar seeking God."³⁹

Oregon Baptists also "attempted some mission activity" among farmworkers in the early 1940s. Members of the Baptist church in Independence, Oregon, visited migrant camps, served breakfast, and gave away copies of the New Testament. By 1948, the Northern Baptists, with the help of a three-thousand-dollar donation from a member family, operated four missions in Oregon for migrant workers and wartime housing areas. They even "engaged in Jewish evangelism," according to historian Albert Wardin.⁴⁰ In Wilder, Idaho, the First Baptist church gave away Spanish-language Bibles at local camps. In order to stave off the suddenly aggressive evangelicals, Idaho Catholics recruited priests from Mexico to work among the braceros.⁴¹

Mexicans were not the only racial minority who ventured to the Pacific Northwest in search of a paycheck. In 1940, ten thousand African Americans lived in Washington and Oregon; by 1960, there were about fifty-nine thousand.⁴² Bringing their Baptist heritage with them from the South, African Americans poured into Northwest cities looking for work, filling existing churches and constructing a number of new ones. The black exodus helped create what James M. Gregory called "an early and on-going explosion of religious activity in the black metropolises."⁴³ The number of black Baptist churches increased from three in 1930 to sixteen by the mid 1950s.⁴⁴

Some white evangelicals tried to forge ties with black churches, while others inserted themselves into church affairs. In 1944, C.C. Brown called for Baptists to support African Americans building churches in Oregon, lest they succumb to "the darkest sins of heathendom." Appealing to regional loyalties, Brown acknowledged the differences in style of worship between the races, but he reminded his audiences that Baptist "Negroes" were "folks" from the South who knew the "meaning of being Baptists." Unfortunately, he continued, African Americans "have come into new and strange environments here in these great defense centers" and were no longer under the South's protection. Without Baptist help, he concluded, the "modernists, the cults, the Communists, the Catholics and other wolves will seek to utterly destroy these sheep."⁴⁵

When the Negro Baptist Church opened in Port Orchard, Washington, in 1944, the Pacific Coast Baptist assured readers that the new church was under the temporary leadership of a white minister, Leonard Sigle. The black church, the paper noted with a touch of arrogance, was "not likely to go far wrong with Bro. Sigle leading them for the time being." Sigle was charged with helping the church prepare some "simple" articles of faith, including the requirement that all members provide "satisfactory evidence" of having been saved and "properly baptized." The writer then drew parallels to Africa: "What is the sense of spending thousands of dollars to send missionaries to Africa to win the native Negroes there to Christ and at the same time take but little notice of the vast number of unsaved Negroes right in our midst?"⁴⁶

THE ASSEMBLIES OF GOD, meanwhile, were trying to convert Northwest Indian tribes. Native Americans were the intended audience of evangelical programs that were spiritual as well as altruistic and variously intense and inconsistent. In 1941, for example, the Northwest District of the Assemblies of God purchased a used station wagon for Brother and Sister Sivonen, a missionary couple who took to the road, preaching to Indians on the Olympic Peninsula. For the first year, they lived and traveled in the station wagon, handing out tracts, New Testaments, and prayer cards to any Indians willing to listen.⁴⁷

The Sivonen mission was established in the early stage of what the Assemblies called their "Indian Work," a home mission program that grew for more than a decade. By 1950, the Assemblies had fifty-eight missionaries working on most of the reservations in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.⁴⁸ They built churches, organized Sunday schools, and held tent meetings on reservations from Neah Bay, Washington, to Spokane. Their story reveals both the best and worst of evangelical encounters with racial minorities in the Pacific Northwest. It is a positive story about people in one culture committed to addressing the religious needs of people in another, but who were soon forced to deal with more pressing concerns such as poverty, lack of education, and alcoholism. The story becomes more complex, however, when we assess evangelical attitudes and behaviors toward Indians. The evangelicals' uncompromising approach to Indian culture, their paternalistic behavior and naiveté regarding the Indians' willingness to embrace Christianity, and their simplistic solutions to addressing social ills all served to undermine the program.

Throughout the 1940s, the Assemblies' Indian Work Committee gave increasingly upbeat reports on its activities, including increases in the number of conversions, Sunday school attendance, and healings. In 1946, for example, forty-five Indians turned out for a meeting on the "Spokane-Colville Reservation," and "many of them were Catholic."⁴⁹ The mission at the Skokomish Reservation reported that Sunday school attendance increased from sixteen to fifty-six Indians in two months; a year later, the mission in LaPush boasted that the attendance there had grown from thirty-six to ninety-seven.⁵⁰ While these reports are not fully reliable, they point to the missions' initial success.

Services involving the "healing" and "casting out of demons" drew comparatively large crowds of Indians in Washington and Oregon, and there were reports of healings of pneumonia, tuberculosis, "death ears," cataracts, toothaches, paralysis, and "stomach trouble." At the Tulalip Reservation in 1942, the Gospel Trumpet reported, "quite a number of souls came forward for help. Whole families got saved. Some got saved and delivered of their filthy habits, others of drunkenness." There was also a report that "some got saved and healed at the same time."⁵¹

Missionaries who met indifference and hostility tried different strategies to draw crowds. When Pastor Frank Shaw failed to draw people to his meetings in Marysville, he decided to appeal to Indian culture and held a salmon bake. "That broke the ice," Shaw said.⁵² Some evangelicals found success converting young people, both Indian and white, and then put them to work recruiting older Indians. Teenagers from Port Angeles assisted missionaries at the reservation in the Lower Elwha, and missionaries in Oakville employed two thirteen-year-old girls to teach Indian children.⁵³

Father Peter Huell, who worked with Indian tribes in the 1920s and 1930s, poses here with a group of Paiutes outside Holy Family Church in Burns, Oregon, in 1930. Evangelicals, who as a group abhored Catholicism, competed with Catholics for Indian converts. When Evangelical ministers missionized on Indian reservations in the 1940s and 1950s, they found that many Indians had been baptized by priests.

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Perhaps the biggest obstacles to evangelicals' success with Indians were their attitudes about Indian "superstitions" and alcoholism, which some missionaries believed were related. The "demons" behind traditional Indian ceremonial practices, in the view of some evangelicals, were the same "satanic" forces that led Indians to drink. In one report from Elwha, Indians were supposedly controlled by "the superstitions and power of the evil one" as well as "the power of drink."⁵⁴ In an oft-repeated reference to the similarities to foreign missions, a missionary at the Makah Reservation said his charges were "directly bound by the devil as much as anyone in a foreign land. It will take more than prayer to reach these people."⁵⁵

Indian cultural practices, social problems, and a seeming indifference to Christianity started to wear down evangelicals, especially at the Assemblies of God. In a terse, uncharacteristically candid statement, the Assembly of God leadership reported in 1951 that converting Indians to Christianity was difficult and that the missionaries faced "heavy opposition of various natures" and had not seen "astounding results." Working with "these precious people" is like working in a "foreign field."⁵⁶

While the Assemblies of God were struggling to convert people on reservations in the 1950s, most denominations were experiencing a period of vigorous growth in the Pacific Northwest. By 1950, many of the southerners who relocated to the Pacific Northwest before and during the war had returned to their home states, although many then migrated north again. "The farms they left before the war couldn't feed them after the war," said Cecil Sims. "Things just weren't the same on the farm."⁵⁷

THE COMITY AGREEMENT between the Southern and Northern Baptist conventions began to break down in California in 1941 when fourteen Baptist churches applied for membership to the Southern Baptist Convention. At its 1942 annual meeting in San Antonio, the Southern Convention "overwhelmingly approved" a motion to admit the California contingent. Partly in response to this violation of the 1912 agreement, the Northern Baptists changed its name to American Baptists in 1950, signaling its national ambitions. The same year, the Southern Convention voted to remove all "territorial limitations" from its constitution, clearing the way for the western states to enter the Southern fold.⁵⁸

The Pacific Coast Baptist cheered the decision with a reference to the original sectional crisis: "The North is in too much spiritual darkness. Just as the invading forces of the North went into the Southland years ago and set the physical prisoners free, we need [to] invade the North and set the spiritual prisoners free."⁵⁹ The November 1950 Pacific Coast Baptist signaled a bond between the South and West with a map of the southern half of the United States and the three coastal states captioned "Your Judea and Samaria." The message was clear — the provinces on the West Bank of the Jordan River, the West, and the South were allies in spreading God's message to the world.⁶⁰

Historian David Harrell calls the post-war period the "ecstatic years" of revivalism, when the hope of salvation captured the imagination of millions of American Christians.⁶¹ It was against this backdrop that Billy Graham made his 1950 stop in Portland. Graham was the marquee name among a group of evangelists who filled tents and auditoriums across the country. More than forty-five thousand people attended Graham's meeting over three nights, huge crowds by Portland standards. On the first night alone, 250 would-be converts came forward to be saved or, as Graham put it, "settle it with God the first day." Seminary student Chester Tunnell said he was "somewhat covertly skeptical of the whole undertaking" prior to the event, but Graham's straightforward delivery, apocalyptic urgency, and warning of the power of Communism had Tunnell and the crowd "spellbound." Tensions with the Soviet Union were causing people to return to Christ, Graham told the crowd, "with the Pacific Northwest leading the trend." Portland and Seattle, he said, needed a closer relationship with God because the cities would be "the No. 1 targets in any sneak attack." God is "giving [Portland] its last chance to repent to God for its sins," he warned. Tunnell left the service "asking God's forgiveness for his skepticism" and hopeful that Oregon would finally get its revival.⁶²

The Rev. Billy Graham preaches in Multnomah Stadium in 1950. Oregonians who could not attend his Portland revivals could hear him preach on his nightly radio show or read his newspaper column.

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Graham's tour was a sign of a religious resurgence nationwide, which Life called "a mighty wave over the U.S." Nearly 69 percent of Americans claimed to belong to a church, the magazine reported, with nearly 50 percent reporting they attended church at least once a week.⁶³ America's renewed interest in Christianity surprised but pleased church groups, essayist Leonard Sweet found, as "throngs of Brylcreemed boys and beehive-hairdoed girls" flocked to youth groups, summer camps, and campus Christian centers. During the mid 1950s, Baptists started a new congregation somewhere in the country every five days.⁶⁴ They could build churches so quickly because of a denominational government in which each local church is autonomous. Creating what historian Milton Sernett calls "spontaneous combustion," Baptists organized congregations, raised funds, and erected buildings at astonishing speed.⁶⁵

In addition to building churches, Baptists trained ministers for work in the Northwest. When he was a seminary student in Texas, Cecil Sims heard stories from ministers who returned from the Northwest to recruit pastors. They talked about a dearth of churches, he remembered, along with a shortage of ministers and a "spiritual vacuum" in the Northwest. Sims said he attended a class on "Ministering in the Northwest" that drew many parallels between "foreign" and "home" mission programs. Sims saw in those stories opportunity, especially in Wenatchee, Washington, where he was recruited to start a Baptist church. Wenatchee, with a population of about fifteen thousand in 1954, had only two Baptist churches, while a similar-sized city in the South could have twenty or more. "I saw that as a challenge," Sims said.⁶⁶

After the breakdown of a comity agreement that had precluded expansion beyond the South, the Southern Baptist Convention expanded into the Pacific Coast states in the mid twentieth century. This cover of the November 1950 Pacific Coast Baptist depicts the church's reach into the West and Northwest.

Courtesy of Northwest Baptist Witness

The Southern Baptist Convention eventually decided to invest capital in its Northwest crusade. In July 1952, the director of the Baptist Training Union in Dallas, Texas, wrote to Robert Milam with news of a new nonprofit corporation that had been established "to give financial aid to the churches in the West."⁶⁷ The Baptist Church Loan Corporation set up a separate corporation with $500,000 in seed money to help "the churches in the Pacific Northwest to borrow money to buy or build church buildings."⁶⁸ Between 1952 and 1954, the corporation made twenty-one loans totaling more than $376,000 to churches in Washington and Oregon. The amounts ranged from an interest-free $2,500 note to remodel Calvary Baptist Church in Albany, Oregon, to a $50,000 loan at 7 percent for a new building in Richland, Washington.⁶⁹ "It pleases me to know that Texas Baptists are so vitally concerned about the churches in the west," Gardner wrote Milam.⁷⁰

SIMS'S STORY TYPIFIES the experience of migrating ministers and demonstrates how hundreds of churches were built in the Pacific Northwest. Sims was twenty-six years old when he and his wife and their two infant children arrived in Wenatchee in 1954. The Wenatchee Valley Baptist Church had fifteen members at the time but no pastor, and they met in a private home. Growth came quickly, however, forcing the group to move four times in two years. For the first two months, they met in a vacated warehouse and then rented space in the Women's Christian Temperance Union Hall. From there, they moved to the American Legion Hall and then to an elementary school. "It wasn't long before we were running 70 or 80 people. After a year it was closer to 150 to 200," Sims recalled fifty years later. By 1956, church leaders had raised sufficient funds to purchase three acres on Red Apple Road and start construction. Sims sold $30,000 worth of bonds, issued by a Baptist-sanctioned underwriter, to church members and friends in Texas. Built mostly with volunteer labor, the new church opened in 1958 with 250 members.⁷¹

That was just the beginning for Baptist growth in the Wenatchee Valley, which, according to Sims, was populated by thousands of transplants from the Southwest. Word soon spread about a minister "who talked their language," he remembered, and Sims found himself traveling to outlying towns and preaching in homes, rented halls, and schools throughout the valley. When a group reached a sustainable size, Sims helped it secure the financing and property to build a church and recruit an aspiring seminary student out of the South to be the pastor. During his ten years in Wenatchee, Sims helped start two more Baptist churches in Wenatchee and churches in Leavenworth, Dryden, Chelan, Brewster, and Cashmere. In 1964, he left Wenatchee to pastor the Baptist church in Lakewood, Washington, south of Tacoma.⁷²

Wenatchee was not the only community with a spiritual appetite in the Northwest in the 1950s, nor were the Baptists the only denomination to reap benefits. According to a 1955 survey of Church of God pastors in the Northwest, sustained economic development fueled church growth in both urban and rural communities in Washington and Oregon. The Church of God in Moses Lake, Washington, experienced "phenomenal growth" after Boeing started using nearby Larson Air Force Base for its training facility in the early 1950s. A year after the Church of God opened in Kelso, Washington, in 1953, the city announced a growth plan that changed the church's future "from obscurity to hopefulness." The Oakridge Church of God in Willamette City, Oregon, benefited from construction of two dams on the Willamette River, thriving lumber mills owned by Pope and Talbot, and a new fifty-home subdivision — all of which transformed Willamette City from a "little back-woods town to a thriving little city with new businesses and modern buildings, and a higher cultural level."⁷³

The ministers' excitement over growth prospects suggests they anticipated success in recruiting large numbers of nonadherents or members from other religions. Yet, evangelical ministers, especially Southern Baptists, struggled to convert native northwesterners. Most newcomers worked with or lived near long-time northwesterners, but when Sundays rolled around they sought the familiarity of fellow Oklahomans, Texans, or anyone "who talked their language." Living under a sea of change in a postwar economy in a new region, both the ministers and their fellow southerners were drawn to each other.

Sims called such churches "Southern clubs," and he admitted that "nine out of ten" of his members were former southerners. "They were people who grew up in one area and were trying to adjust in another element," he remembered. "I was the type of preacher they were accustomed to." Sims said he tried not to neglect northerners, but they "did not feel at home worshipping with Southerners. They would say to me, 'I would love being a part of your church, but I don't think I could be part of an Arkansas community.'"⁷⁴ Sometimes regional differences hampered growth. Carl F. Riley, pastor of the Church of God in Centralia, Washington, found a lack of connection between his church and the community. "We are on the verge of growth; but it will be slow though steady," Riley wrote in 1954. "There is a great deal of misunderstanding in the community about the church. Time, patience and work may yet see a strong church here."⁷⁵ R.L. Powell, pastor of the First Baptist church in Tacoma, took his congregation to task in 1950 for cliquish behavior after Sunday services. Regardless of differences in "racial or geographical backgrounds," Powell wrote in the Pacific Coast Baptist, Southern Baptists should not make others feel like there was a "secret fraternity with which they can never be allowed to join up unless they learn the shibboleths or take the ritual ceremony."⁷⁶

Not all ministers were as influential as Powell, and many, according to Sims, failed to command the respect they had taken for granted in the South. He recalled many of his peers eventually returning to their home states because they "could not minister without the cultural support system" they had known in the South. Regional identities also got in the way. Sims walked a fine line between appearing either too conservative or too liberal. "I found myself having to prove that I was not a rigid, negative legalist," he remembered, "nor did I handle snakes or jump pews." Even more damaging was being painted with the same liberal brush as "some of the well known eastern cousins" in the American Baptist Convention.⁷⁷

While most evidence is anecdotal, it is clear that by the 1960s, Southern Baptists knew they had a problem reaching non-southerners. In an unsigned editorial, the Pacific Coast Baptist asked: "What kind of growth are we making? We boast of our size but have to hang our heads when we discuss percentages and non-resident membership.... Is our growth going to result in more of the same thing or are we going to make growth that will be more solid and permanent?"⁷⁸ Local Baptists "had discovered most of the pockets of Southern origin" by the 1960s, according to Sims, and were unable to recruit significant numbers of new members. Church leaders attempted to transform "Southern Baptist heritage clubs into cosmopolitan New Testament churches," he continued, but they were largely unsuccessful.⁷⁹ The pace of church construction in the Northwest slowed dramatically. The Assemblies of God built only sixteen churches in Oregon and Washington from 1960 and 1969. The Southern Baptist Convention, benefiting from the momentum generated by the end of the comity agreement, continued to increase its members, but at a much slower pace than before.

Membership issues affected other churches as well, as the revival-like enthusiasm of the 1950s gave way to the tumultuous 1960s, the Vietnam War, the rise of a counterculture, and a fascination with cults and other nontraditional religions. After enjoying large gains in the 1940s and 1950s, most major denominations faced slower growth in the 1960s. Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Protestant, Episcopalian, and Methodist churches all grew slower than the population as a whole. Only the Southern Baptists kept pace, increasing 20 percent between 1960 and 1970, but again at nearly half the rate of the two previous decades.⁸⁰

MOST EVANGELICALS WHO migrated to the Pacific Northwest in the 1940s and 1950s had found a permanent home in, as one evangelist put it, the "land that is ever green." While 1960 data on denominational membership are not readily available, we can discern trends from current data. In 2006, of the twenty-three groups considered to be Holiness/Pentecostal groups, thirteen are present in the Pacific Northwest, totaling 12.6 percent of all adherents compared to 4.5 percent nationally. The Assemblies of God, with 105,692 adherents in Washington and 49,357 in Oregon, remains the largest Pentecostal group. The International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, theologically aligned with the Assemblies of God, is the next largest, with 44,826 adherents in Oregon and 33,434 in Washington.⁸¹ Baptists are the fifth largest group in the region, accounting for 7.1 percent of adherents, less than half the national average. It is not unreasonable to conclude that the Pentecostals' strength compared to Baptists is partly due to the Baptists' internal disagreements in the first half of the twentieth century. During the fifty years in which Baptist churches were barred from affiliating with the Southern Baptist Convention, people gravitated to other conservative religions. Many started independent Baptist churches under a variety of names, but others found Pentecostal/Holiness sects an attractive alternative to the more liberal Northern Baptists.

Today, four major strains of Baptists practice in the Pacific Northwest: American, Conservative, Southern, and the General Association of Regular Baptist (GARB). Southern and Conservative Baptists dominate the Northwest church scene, a marked change from the first half of the twentieth century, when Northern Baptists predominated. Again, the breakdown of the comity agreement may be the explanation. In 1948, nearly half of all Baptist churches in the region were Northern; only twenty were Southern and most of the remainder were independent. By 1967, the total number of Baptist churches had nearly doubled to 862, with 175 designated as Southern and 220 Conservative, evidence of the relative attractiveness of the more conservative forms of Baptist worship.⁸²

The Pentecostals' impact on minorities is less clear. In trying to assess their work on reservations, it appears that evangelicals made the same mistakes Catholic and Protestant missionaries had made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the Pacific Northwest.⁸³As one minister characterized mid-twentieth-century evangelical work with the Indians: "We saved them; we saved them again; and then we saved them once more."⁸⁴ Evangelicals who proselytized on reservations were intolerant of many aspects of Indian culture and uncompromising when it came to what they called "superstitions." It also appears that Indian traditional religious practices and beliefs were much more ingrained than evangelicals imagined.⁸⁵

Similar conflicting results are apparent if we look more broadly at minority churches in the region. Of the 911 Baptist churches in Washington and Oregon in 2004, only 88 had significant minority congregations — 2 affiliated with American Indian tribes, 17 Hispanic, 22 African American, and 47 Asian, largely a result of the migration patterns of the 1980s and 1990s.⁸⁶ The Assemblies of God appear to have had even less impact on minority communities, with most minority members integrated into Assemblies in the Pacific Northwest. About 91 percent of Assemblies of God adherents are white; the remainder are Hispanic (3.3 percent), Asian (2.3 percent), Native American (1.1 percent), African American (0.7 percent), and other (1.5 percent).⁸⁷

These charter members of the Peninsula Baptist Church on Lombard Street in Portland were photographed in 1951, the year the church was founded. One of many evangelical churches founded in the Pacific Northwest during the mid twentieth century, Peninsula Baptist remains active today.

Courtesy Northwest Baptist Historical Society

Membership rates, however, do not tell the full story. Historian Ferenc Szasz argues that it would be shortsighted, for example, to suggest that Christianity has not had an influence on Indian culture and religion. The resilience of the Christian-based Shaker Church and the prevalence of Christian symbols in traditional Indian ceremonies are two examples of Christianity's long-term effect on Indian religion. So, too, are the number of Christian churches on reservations in the Midwest and Southwest and the many tribal leaders who "see no conflict between traditional beliefs and ceremonies and those of Christianity."⁸⁸

Cecil Sims gave his fellow Baptists mixed reviews. Looking back over a career that spanned a half century, he was not sure what had changed for the better. "In the larger picture," he concluded, "I'm not sure what we accomplished or how much impact we had. We pretty much gave up the battle over modernism. From another perspective, there are 1,000 churches that are here today that weren't here 50 years ago, and they're serving communities in the Northwest."⁸⁹

Still, it is reasonable to argue that the impact of evangelical religions, particularly Baptist, on people residing in the Northwest prior to mid century was minimal. Most of the people who filled Baptist churches on Sundays in the 1940s and 1950s brought their beliefs with them from somewhere else. Although exact numbers are not available, it appears that native northwesterners — be they white, Indian, or of any other race — converted in small numbers. The tendency for southerners to gravitate to like-thinking ministers had long-term consequences. While churches do not keep records of such things today, the demographic makeup of Southern Baptist churches in the Pacific Northwest is distinctly Southern. They are pastored by men who speak with a Southern accent, and whose members trace their heritage to the Old Southwest.⁹⁰

Crowds fill Civic Stadium in Portland to hear Billy Graham speak in 1968.

OHS neg., Folder 453

The Assemblies of God and other Pentecostal sects have a different genesis in the Pacific Northwest. During the 1930s and 1940s, they created a generation of evangelical ministers born and raised in the region. Since it first opened in 1934, the Northwest Bible Institute (today's Northwest University in Kirkland, Washington) has sent evangelicals into Northwest communities. By comparison, Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, founded by the Northern Baptists in 1858, downplays its Baptist affiliation and is largely secular. The lone Southern Baptist Bible school in the region is a satellite of the Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in San Francisco, with ninety students in Vancouver, Washington. Northwest University has more than a thousand students and is not far from two of the largest evangelical churches in the region, Westminster Chapel in Bellevue and Overlake Christian in Redmond, giving the eastside corridor the unofficial title of the "Bible Belt of the Northwest."⁹¹ Given the religious history of the region, it is not surprising that Northwest-born Pentecostals have taken title to an identity created in the Baptist-dominated Old Southwest.

Comparing the work of religious groups in the area of social work provides another example of their limited impact on Northwest culture. Mainline Protestants, Methodists, Catholics, and Jews assumed a visible and sometimes courageous role in the discourse on public issues. During World War II, for example, the Seattle Council of Churches and ministers such as U.G. Murphy worked to protect Japanese Americans and voiced opposition to relocation. As Ellen Eisenberg has argued, religious groups who had been exposed to Japanese people, especially in large cities such as Seattle, were critical components of formal opposition to internment.⁹² In the four decades after the war, mainstream religious groups organized support for African Americans and other minority groups, took the lead in debates over public health, and campaigned to protect women and children.⁹³ There is little evidence of evangelical leadership in these public arenas.

Another explanation for some of the mixed results of evangelical groups may lie in the evangelical view of the Pacific Northwest as a foreign land populated by nonbelievers. Instead of viewing themselves as newcomers trying to bring spirituality to their new neighbors, most evangelicals assumed the mantle of missionary, dedicated to saving natives from "eternal darkness." As long as evangelicals saw themselves as separate from the community in which they lived and worked, it may have been difficult for them to assimilate into the Pacific Northwest and therefore take ownership in its problems.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is fair to say that evangelical suspicions about a "lost" Northwest at mid century were not altogether off the mark. Labels that define a region's identity — whether they refer to rivers, salmon, or religion — generally contain an element of truth. From the beginning, missionaries fought an uphill battle in a region whose population was, and remains, stubbornly secular — or in the parlance of Patricia Killen and Mark Silk, dominated by the "Nones." Although the percentage of religious adherents increased over the twentieth century, peaking in 1970, most people in the Pacific Northwest do not participate in any religion. The "Nones" are distinctive from nonadherents in that they neither affiliate with a religious group nor identify with religion in general. Since 1991, they have been the fastest growing "religious group" in the country, increasing from 14 to 25 percent of adults in Washington and from 17 to 21 percent in Oregon, compared with 8 and 14 percent nationally over the same period.⁹⁴

Numerous explanations have been offered for the low level of religious adherence in the region: a high level of mobility, a frontier mentality, a spirit of individualism, a higher level of education, and the predominance of large urban centers.⁹⁵ Another explanation is the failure of a single religion to dominate the region during early settlement in the mid nineteenth century. The entry of evangelical sects into the region in the first two thirds of the twentieth century, coupled with the rise of independent sects during the Baptist comity agreement, are other contributors. In the absence of a single, powerful religion in the Northwest, there was, and still is, less social pressure to choose any religion.

That may help explain the high rate of "Nones" in the Northwest, but it does not explain the deep pockets of religious intensity found in numerous Northwest communities. An explanation can be found in the 1940s and 1950s, when a great northward migration drew evangelicals and their ministers to the Pacific Northwest and established a strong evangelical subculture in a region long known for being secular. Those pockets represent the success evangelical groups had in casting their nets over southern immigrants, nets that reached few others. The limits of their influence can be seen in the Billy Graham revival show in 1950 in Portland. More than 15,500 believers, nonbelievers, and the simply curious attended Graham's show on the third and final night. According to the Oregonian, the meetings were "true revival meetings in the sense that most of those present obviously are already church folk. When Graham asked how many had brought their Bibles, a forest of arms held Bibles aloft." When only a couple of hundred responded to Graham's call to "accept Christ," he cajoled the audience. "You're mighty near, the Kingdom of God is almost yours," Graham pleaded. With a touch of irony that is only apparent fifty-six years later, the band and the choir broke into the hymn "Almost Persuaded Now to Believe."⁹⁶

Notes

^1.�Oregonian, July 23, 1950, 1.

^2.�Pacific Coast Baptist, August 1950, 2.

^3.� Leonard I. Sweet, "The Modernization of Protestant Religion in America," in Altered Landscapes: Christianity in America, 1935–1985, ed. David W. Lotz (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdman, 1989), 21.

^4.� Patricia O'Connell Killen and Mark Silk, "Surveying the Religious Landscape: Historical Trends and Current Patterns in Oregon, Washington, and Alaska," in Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest, The None Zone, ed. Patricia O'Connell Killen and Mark Silk (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 38.

^5.� Richard L. Neuberger, Our Promised Land (New York: Macmillan, 1938).

^6.� Cecil C. Sims et al., Northwest Southern Baptists, 1884–1998, 2d ed. (Vancouver, Wash.: Northwest Baptist Convention Historical Society, 1998).

^7.� D.G. Hart, That Old-Time Religion in Modern America: Evangelical Protestantism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 6–8, 9–10.

^8.� Killen and Silk, "Surveying the Religious Landscape," 38.

^9.� Martin E. Marty, "Religion in America, 1935–1985," in Altered Landscapes, 4.

^10.� U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (White Plains, N.Y.: Kraus International Publication, 1989), 24–36.

^11.� Roy L. Johnson, ed., Northwest Southern Baptists (Vancouver, Wash.: Northwest Baptist Convention, 1968), 372.

^12.� Most data on church growth for the Assemblies of God came from two sources. In Oregon, I relied heavily on Ethel Berglund and Bernice Dalan Strangland, eds., Building for Tomorrow, 1936–1986 (Salem: Assemblies of God Oregon District Council, 1986), 89–114. In Washington, my primary source was Ward M. Tanneberg, Let Light Shine Out: The Story of the Assemblies of God in the Pacific Northwest (Northwest District of the Assemblies of God, 1977).

^13.� Accurate data are difficult to acquire and verify. Church officials historically were poor record keepers, and what exists is often fragmented. Compiling Baptist data, for example, requires pulling numbers from several associations or districts, archived in multiple cities. There is also some ambiguity about whether a "new church" involved constructing a new building or merely taking over an existing one.

^14.� Ferenc Morton Szasz, Religion in the Modern American West (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), 82. See also Eugene McCarrahed, Christian Cities: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000); and Lillian R. Hutchinson, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976).

^15.� Ibid., 71–72.

^16.� Roy Ferguson, "The Growth of the Pentecostal Movement in the Salem Area as I Knew It" Assemblies of God Archives, Salem, Ore., 3–4.

^17.� Ibid.

^18.� Berglund and Strangland, Building for Tomorrow, and Tanneberg, Let Light Shine Out, passim.

^19.� Albert W. Wardin, Jr., Baptists in Oregon (Portland: Judson Baptist College, 1969), 377, 379.

^20.� George M. Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1991), 171–2.

^21.� Wardin, Baptists in Oregon, 455. Wardin's reference to Joseph is from Exodus 1:8, "Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph."

^22.� James M. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 207. Much of my thinking on the migration's impact on Northwest culture was influenced by Jim Gregory.

^23.� "Fools and Foolishness," Pacific Coast Baptist, July 10, 1931, 1. The reference to "no God" is from Psalms 14:1: "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God."

^24.� "What This Bible School Means to our Missionary Baptist Cause on the Pacific Coast, and Why It Should Be Supported," Pacific Coast Baptist, May 1937, 1.

^25.� John M. Findlay, "A Fishy Proposition: Regional Identity in the Pacific Northwest," in Many Wests: Place, Culture and Regional Identity, ed. David M. Wrobel and Michael C. Steiner (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 59.

^26.� Neuberger, Our Promised Land, 21.

^27.� Findlay, "A Fishy Proposition," 51–7.

^28.� Leonard B. Sigle, "Desirable Qualifications for Pastors," Pacific Coast Baptist, February 1944, 4.

^29.� Ibid.

^30.� Cecil C. Sims, telephone interview with author, February 25, 2005.

^31.� Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History, rev. ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 411.

^32.�Seattle Times, June 6, 1942, 8.

^33.� Theodore R. Buzzard, Lest We Forget: A History of the Evangelical United Brethren Church in the Pacific Northwest (Portland: Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Methodist Church, 1988), 102.

^34.� Ibid., 102.

^35.� "A Mission Has Been Opened in Seattle," Pacific Coast Baptist, December 1944, 2.

^36.� "Editorial," Pacific Coast Baptist, June 1943, 1.

^37.� Minutes of the Annual Meeting of the Northwest District of the Assemblies of God, 20–23, May 1943, 27, D.V. Hurst Library Archives at Northwest University, Kirkland, Wash.

^38.� Erasmo Gamboa, Mexican Labor and World War II: Braceros in the Pacific Northwest, 1942–1947 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990), viii.

^39.� Assemblies of God minutes, May 25–26, 1944, 52.

^40.� Wardin, Baptists in Oregon, 381–2.

^41.� Gamboa, Mexican Labor and World War II, 108–9.

^42.�Historical Statistics of the United States, 24–36.

^43.� James N. Gregory, Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 6, 12.

^44.� Wardin, Baptists in Oregon, 518, 520–2.

^45.� C.C. Brown, "An [sic] Unique Relationship," Pacific Coast Baptist, September 1944, 1–3.

^46.� "Another Great Missionary Venture," Pacific Coast Baptist, May 1944, 2.

^47.� Assemblies of God minutes, May 1941, 26.

^48.� Ibid., June 7–9, 1950, 80–2.

^49.� Ibid., June 6–7, 1946, 77.

^50.� Ibid., June 4–6, 1947, 84.

^51.�Gospel Trumpet, January 10, 1942, 23, available at Anderson University Archives, Anderson, Indiana.

^52.� Donald Dean Johnson, "An Historical Survey of the Church of God in the Pacific Northwest" (M.A. thesis, Anderson College and Theological Seminary, 1955), 283. Johnson surveyed pastors on the current status and future prospects of their church. Their comments are useful because they were written while events were happening, although their objectivity should be questioned.

^53.� Assemblies of God minutes, 1949, 73–4.

^54.� Ibid., 1946, 78.

^55.� Ibid., 1950, 80–2.

^56.� Ibid., 1951, 84.

^57.� Sims interview, February 25, 2005.

^58.� H. Leon McBeth, The Baptist Heritage (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1987), 626–8.

^59.� "Editorial," Pacific Coast Baptist, June 1950, 2.

^60.�Pacific Coast Baptist, November 1950, 1.

^61.� David Edwin Harrell, Jr., All Things Are Possible: The Healing and Charismatic Revivals in Modern America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), 11–12.

^62.�Oregonian, July 24, 1950, 1, 2; Pacific Coast Baptist, August 1950, 2.

^63.� "Mighty Wave over the U.S.," Life, December 26, 1955, 46–47.

^64.� Sweet, "The Modernization of Protestant Religion in America," 24.

^65.� Gregory, Southern Diaspora, 6–15.

^66.� Cecil C. Sims, telephone interview with author, December 13, 2004.

^67.� Gardner to Milam, July 18, 1952, Robert E. Milam Papers, Northwest Baptist Convention headquarters, Vancouver, Wash.

^68.� Baptist Church Loan Corporation, Serving Texas Baptists through a Ministry of Finance (Dallas, Texas: Baptist Church Loan Corporation, 1983), 13.

^69.� "Paid Out Loan List, 1953–2004," Baptist Church Loan Corporation Archival Papers, Texas Baptist Historical Collection, Baptist General Convention of Texas, Dallas.

^70.� Gardner to Milam.

^71.� Sims interview, December 13, 2004.

^72.� Ibid.

^73.� Johnson, "Historical Survey of the Church of God," 291, 121–2, 202–3.

^74.� Sims interview, December 13, 2004.

^75.� Quoted in Johnson, "Historical Survey of the Church of God," 261.

^76.� R.L. Powell, "Danger of Partyism In Churches," Pacific Coast Baptist, October 1950, 2.

^77.� Sims interview, February 25, 2005.

^78.� Unsigned editorial, "'60 We Need," Pacific Coast Baptist, January 1960, 2.

^79.� Sims interview, February 25, 2005.

^80.�Historical Statistics of the United States, 391–2.

^81.� Killen and Silk, "Surveying the Religious Landscape," 38.

^82.� Johnson, ed., Northwest Southern Baptists, 372.

^83.� Bonnie Sue Lewis, "The Creation of Christian Indians: The Rise of Native Clergy and their Congregations in the Presbyterian Church" (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1997). See also Frederick A. Norwood, "Two Contrasting Views of the Indians: Methodist Involvement in the Indian Trouble in Oregon and Washington," in Religion and Society in the American West: Historical Essays, ed. Carl Guarneri and David Alvarez (New York: University Press of America, 1987).

^84.� Ward M.Tanneberg, interview with author, December 21, 2004. Tanneberg is a pastor at the Westminster Chapel Church in Bellevue. He wrote the Assemblies of God history, Let Light Shine Out, in 1977. His writings and generosity with his time were very useful in this work.

^85.� Szasz, Religion in the Modern American West, 166.

^86.� Johnson, ed., Northwest Southern Baptists, 372.

^87.� "Assemblies of God Statistical Report," Northwest Region Office, Snoqualmie, Wash.

^88.� Ferenc M. Szasz and Margaret Connell Szasz, "Religion and Spirituality," in The Oxford History of The American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 389.

^89.� Sims interview, December 21, 2004.

^90.� Mike Kuykendall, telephone interview with author, January 28, 2005. Kuykendall is a professor of Baptist history at the Vancouver campus of Golden Gate Theological Seminary and a former pastor of a Baptist Church in Washington. I owe much to his perspective and knowledge. Given the absence of recent scholarship in this area, we must rely on anecdotal evidence to confirm this point of view.

^91.� Killen and Silk, "Surveying the Religious Landscape," 87.

^92.� Ellen Eisenberg, "'As Truly American as Your Son': Voicing Opposition to Internment in Three West Coast Cities," Oregon Historical Quarterly 104:4 (Winter 2003): 544, 564.

^93.� Killen and Silk, "Surveying the Religious Landscape," 61–63.

^94.� Ibid., 30, 41.

^95.� Ibid., 31.

^96.�Oregonian, July 26, 1950.

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