Casual Friday

We recently received the announcement below. You may be interested. (Quincy says to tell you that what got her hooked on doing history was her experience doing research at the Oregon Historical Society for her undergraduate senior thesis. Because she was an undergrad, she didn't have one of these nifty fellowships.)

The Oregon Historical Society will once again offer Senior and Graduate Sterling Fellowships in Pacific Northwest History for 2013. Sterling Fellowships support four weeks of research in the Oregon Historical Society Research Library with $2,000 for graduate students and $2,500 for professional scholars. The deadline for applications is October 1. More information is available here.

Book of the Month:

Patricia O'Connell Killen and Mark Silk, eds., Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None Zone

Review by Susanna Morrill

Like magma from below the religion’s volcanoes, religion in the Pacific Northwest is an energetic, viscous fluid that is capable of altering the public landscape, galvanizing citizens for action, but not in ways easily predicted or directed by leaders of religious organizations (18).

With these words, Patricia O’Connell Killen sums up the religious landscape of the Pacific Northwest. Having lived in the Northwest for the past eight years, for me, this simile effectively captures religion’s complicated presence here. As the editors and authors of this 2004 volume note, about 63% of the region’s population (Oregon, Washington, and Alaska) remain unaffiliated with any religious institution and no one institutional religious tradition dominates (or has ever dominated) the region, as is the norm in other areas of the country (22). Yet Northwesterners live, act, and talk in ways that are profoundly religious. A fascinating problem: How do we as teachers and scholars understand and study regional religious expressions that are so fluid and non-institutional? This is the task that the authors of The None Zone tackle with great success and in short order (the book is only 202 pages, including appendix and index). I used the book as an effective backbone for an upper level course on religions of the Pacific Northwest and, at the same time, it has provided a starting point for my own research on religion in the Northwest.

Killen, Silk, and their host of authors offer to students and researchers scholarly tools—good tools—to use, to change, to challenge. By creating some guiding categories and concepts, they establish a concrete starting point for understanding religious life in the Pacific Northwest. Of particular help is how they breakdown the religious landscape of the Northwest into four broad streams: fading semi-establishment religions, “sectarian entrepreneurs,” religions of the Pacific Rim, and those who identify as secular, but spiritual. With these categories they begin to capture the viscous, hidden, and flexible religious reality of the region.

The book has an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion written by various scholars who live and work in Oregon and Washington. As with all the books in this “Religion by Region” series (edited by Mark Silk and Andrew Walsh), much of the data used in the book is derived from the North American Religions Atlas (generated in 2000 from responses by religious groups) and the American Religious Identification Survey (generated in 2001 from responses by individuals).

However, the authors take both historical and sociological approaches to the material. Initially a bit disconcerting, I found these variegated methodologies worked extremely well in the classroom. They provoked students to think critically about the advantages and disadvantages of historical and sociological approaches to understanding religious life in this region and, more generally, to studying religion. Killen and Mark Shibley, for instance, give us the sociological, religious, and cultural lay of the land in the first chapter, emphasizing the region’s peculiarity: that “nones,” (those who claim no religious affiliation or identification) make up almost a quarter of the population in Oregon and Washington, a rate much higher than the national 14% (41). In the second chapter, Dale E. Soden offers a history of the semi-establishment religions of the Pacific Northwest: Catholicism, mainline Protestants, and Reform and Conservative Jews. The fact that the establishment religion is actually a grouping of three disparate, often conflicting religions demonstrates the historical religious heterogeneity of the region. James Wellman, using interviews with clergy, creates a profile of the regionally surging “sectarian entrepreneurs,” mostly non-denominational and Holiness/Pentecostal evangelicals who effectively employ business models and media communications (80). Lance D. Laird writes about religions of the Pacific Rim, skillfully combining in his discussion Native American traditions; traditions from East, Southeast, and South Asia; and religion of the Pacific Islands. Shibley takes up the formidable task of capturing and talking about those who claim to be secular but spiritual, those people taking full advantage the opportunities offered to them in the “open religious market” of the Pacific Northwest: New Age adherents, anti-government groups, and those engaging in “earth-centered spirituality” (140, 142). Killen finishes the book summarizing what has gone before, suggesting future avenues of research, and offering concluding insights on the material.

Occasionally, the brevity of the book detracts from the overall success of it. The main focus of the book is Oregon and Washington. Alaska is rarely mentioned beyond the introductory, contextualizing chapter and, when it is, the mentions are brief and not very elucidating. Within the larger series, this grouping seems like the best home for Alaska, but, at the same time, the little information we have suggests that Alaska is different enough from Oregon and Washington that it may deserve its own chapters or parts within the book. Native traditions in Alaska have a wider and weightier public presence than they do in Oregon and Washington (15.6% of the population in Alaska is of Native American or Alaskan Native heritage compared to less than 2% of the population in Oregon and Washington), while the long history of Orthodox Christianity in the state deserves a more in-depth and extended treatment (106). My sense is that there is simply not a lot of scholarship on religion in Alaska. In general, Native American traditions get short shrift in the book. Lance D. Laird successfully finds similarities in the influential yet peripheral status of Native American and Asian religions, but otherwise these religious traditions are different enough that they do not fit together completely comfortably in one chapter.

The category of “nones” is perhaps most exciting for scholars of Northwest religious life. Killen wonders if they are manifestations of the process of secularization and/or if they represent a new kind of modern American religiosity. This is a pertinent question in the present day when, nationally, more and more people identify with this moniker. Can the religious history of the Northwest help to illuminate these national trends? Is the region a kind of religious frontier that will send eastward missionaries of a new religious expression, Whitmans of the “none”-based spirituality? Can scholars of this region’s religious life discover valuable questions and concepts that will help illuminate this growing trend in the religious landscape of the U.S.? This book asks and provokes important questions. It is a valuable tool in the classroom and serves as the base of what I hope will be a burgeoning scholarship on the religious life of the Northwest, a scholarship that, in turn, may help us better understand larger trends within the religious landscape of the country.

Editor’s note: Have you read this book? What do you think about it? Join the conversation and leave your thoughts in the comments! If you have a suggestion for a future book of the month, or if you would like to review a book for the book of the month series, please contact us. Next month, Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp reviews Hokulani K. Aikau’s A Chosen People, a Promised Land: Mormonism and Race in Hawai'i (University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

Book of the Month:

James J. Kopp, Eden Within Eden: Oregon’s Utopian Heritage

Review by Anne Blankenship

When I pulled Eden Within Eden (published in 2009 by Oregon State University Press) from the shelf, I discovered two related projects: a narrative placing Oregon’s utopian heritage within the context of American history and a 100+ page resource guide of primary and secondary sources related to the nearly 300 communal and utopian groups Kopp’s study unearthed.  Why Oregon?  The book offers a reasonable argument for its exceptionalism: Acknowledging that colonists, immigrants and citizens have long envisioned America, its frontier and other domestic locations as chosen, sanctified spaces for perfected communities, Kopp writes that most attempts to recreate Eden in America were transitory and often unassociated with a specific location in the nation.  In Oregon, however, the formation of utopian communities that consciously aligned their aims with the landscape has continued unabated since the earliest settlers arrived.  Kopp’s book fills a regional gap left by two books on British Columbian utopian societies and two classic (outdated) studies of communal groups in California and Washington.  The numerous similarities beg for a comparison, but this is not it. 

The volume’s first half provides a thematic and roughly chronological narrative of conceptions of utopia throughout Oregon’s history.  Kopp defines “utopian heritage” broadly to include pioneer journals and government posters depicting Oregon as a new Garden of Eden, as well as religious communes, farming cooperatives and intentional living communities.  Brief commentary on historical patterns and types of experimentation links the series of relatively independent organizational histories.  Kopp observes how the search for Eden changed in response to national events—the Civil War, the Great Depression, world wars and the social revolutions of the 1960s.  The book argues that Oregon’s natural landscape and welcoming political and cultural environment drew people at nearly every moment in the country’s history.   Kopp concludes his narrative by stepping beyond pioneers, cooperatives and communal groups to consider “utopian undertakings” found within city planning and modern literature.

After summarizing the Christian origins of Eden and utopia, the study largely forgets about religion.  The choice to describe Holy Rollers and Rajneeshpuram as cults indicates how this American Studies scholar treats concepts of religion.  A few groups are monolithically religious but religion does not generally play a role in the seemingly secular category of utopian communes.  Religiosity was rarely discussed and no groups were analyzed as or in the context of new religious movements. 

The volume’s greatest contribution, and the reason I want to share this book with parties interested in religion in the American West, rests in its glorious appendix.  Kopp is a librarian and here his work shines.  In addition to a bibliography of general academic works, the appendix catalogues hundreds of communes and cooperatives.  The listings provide basic data for each group (location (often street addresses), founding date, website and cross-references to communal living directories) and an extensive list of additional sources, including archives, newspaper and magazine articles, masters and doctoral theses, videos, pamphlets, oral histories, collections of photography and art, legal documents, etc.  The inclusion of secondary material may guide researchers to more productive paths and provide useful contacts.  Entries range from 12 pages to a few lines.  My only frustration was not knowing the size of the communities or their current status. 

Kopp’s inclusive study stops short of including the post-World War II formation of suburbs as a fulfillment of the American Dream.  In perhaps the only noticeable value judgment in the book, he argues that the materialistic, competitive drive of suburbia bars it from his study.  However, rhetoric of 1950s America resembled the hopeful language of many pioneering, utopian communes.  Like Kopp’s other groups, suburbs are widespread in but not particular to Oregon.  These “façades of utopianism” share numerous characteristics with earlier communities: a defined vision of perfected life, faith that determined efforts could build that dream and tensions between “reality and the dream of Eden.”  The absence of this discussion relates to my main disappointment with the book.  Kopp offers abundant examples of groups and individuals that corroborate his proposed thesis, but fails to press his argument beyond the introduction.  This may have been intentional since Kopp designed the book as a resource for scholars to excavate utopia.  I say, go to it.  

Editors’ note: Have you read this book? What do you think about it? Join the conversation and leave your thoughts in the comments! If you have a suggestion for a future book of the month, or if you would like to review a book for the book of the month series, please contact us. Next month, Sarah Imhoff reviews Bryan Edward Stone’s The Chosen Folks: Jews on the Frontiers of Texas (University of Texas Press, 2010).