| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 32.4

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 32.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Religion in the Modern American West. By Ferenc Morton Szasz. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000. xviii + 249 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00.)

Historians of the twentieth-century West have neglected organized religion, according to Ferenc Morton Szasz. This gap is significant. While the region has never produced a religious mainstream, and individualism has remained preeminent, the West may be setting "the stage for national religious life in the twenty-first century" (p. xvi). Szasz has begun to address these issues with Religion in the Modern American West. 1

The book's thesis is that although the region "participated in all national religious trends, westerners generally bent these trends along their own trajectories" (p. xv). Szasz defines the West as extending from longitude 100^o west to the Pacific and divides the century into three periods: 1890–1920 (institution building), 1920–1960 (cultural clashes), and 1960–1999 ("culture wars" and growing diversity). Because the range of potential topics is too much to cover in one volume, he emphasizes human activity over impersonal institutions and "central" groups rather than those at the "margins." For each period, chapters explore general trends, personalities, and religious life. . . .

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