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Reviews
RACE, RELIGION, REGION: LANDSCAPES OF ENCOUNTER IN THE AMERICAN WEST
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edited by Fay Botham and Sara M. Patterson
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| University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2006. Illustrations, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 197 pages. $40.00 cloth. |
| During the last decade, the study of religion in the American West has captured the attention of an increasing number of scholars. The work of Ferenc Szasz, among others, has laid a solid foundation, but the influence of Patricia Limerick and Richard White also continues to be felt. While Limerick and White were not particularly focused on religion, their challenge to understand the West in more complex terms has been taken up by a whole new generation of scholars. This group of essays provides an excellent example of the more sophisticated analysis of religion in relation to both race and region that is a part of the new generation of Western historians. The overall result is quite positive. The essays are interesting and well written; they challenge commonly held assumptions and evoke additional questions and areas of research. |
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Editors Fay Botham and Sara Patterson state at the outset of this book that the traditional dichotomies such as black-white, or Christian and non-Christian, used to dissect the sociology of race and religion in the West — or, for that matter, any region of the country — do not work. Instead, these authors reveal a West that is comprised of "nonwhite Mormons, European American Buddhists, or Korean American Catholics." These scholars want readers to think about multis, mixes, and mestizos. "In the West races and religions converge and fuse, creating new racial, ethnic, and religious identities" (p. 3). |
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The first three chapters focus on different ways religion helped shape the nature of community in Los Angeles during the first half of the twentieth century. William Deverell and Mark Wild feature G. Bromley Oxnam's attempt to use the principles and vision of the Social Gospel to create a racially united congregation. An important contribution to the large literature on the Social Gospel, this essay analyzes the rise and fall of Oxnam's Church of All Nations, a large parish in one of the poorest sections of downtown Los Angeles Michael Engh explores the remarkable career of Catholic Mary Workman in Los Angeles, where she "challenged simplistic Americanization, racial prejudice, and traditional gender roles with Roman Catholicism" (p. 27). Workman pioneered a concept of mutuality that honored immigrants' traditions while assisting in their assimilation. Daniel Cady illumines the role of the career of Robert Shuler (not be confused with the Robert Schuler of the Crystal Cathedral), who migrated out of the South to Los Angeles in the early 1920s, and his support for the Ku Klux Klan in Southern California. |
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Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are the most unusual in content. Lauire Maffly-Kipp explores the ways the physical bodies of Chinese people were portrayed in etchings and cartoons and how Chinese people incorporated religious understandings of the corporeal. Pablo Mitchell examines the ways newspapers treated what their editors saw as deviant bodily acts among African Americans and members of the Hermanos Penitentes in New Mexico, while Tisa Wenger examines the Pueblo dance controversies of the 1920s. These three essays not only deal with exotic subjects but also challenge conventional categories (largely originating in Western Christianity and Western philosophy) for understanding religious experience. |
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Chapter 7 focuses on the racial ideas associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints (Mormons) and, in chapter 8, Mary Jan O'Donnell explores how the Islamic Center of Los Angeles has attempted to overcome racial and ethnic division within its membership. |
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Understandably, the editors are reluctant to make too many generalizations about the ways these essays should make readers think differently about the role religion played in shaping the identity of those in the West. Yet, readers are left thinking about the larger significance of the question. These essays certainly point to the need to be careful about glib generalizations regarding religious practices in the region. They suggest that the traditional categories for interpreting religion in America, let alone the West, should be carefully examined for hidden assumptions that deflect attention from much of what actually happened. Yet, there is always a danger in being too attracted by the exotic or the unusual. Much more is still to be written about the way conventional religion in the West played and continues to play an important role in establishing social capital and shaping attitudes of public policy, particularly in regard to the civil rights movement in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The role of the African American church in the West is an important part of the story. An essay or monograph on this subject has yet to be written and, until it is, there is still more to be done on the three R's — race, religion, and region. |
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| Dale E. Soden
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| Whitworth University |
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