Religion in the Modern American West

Ferenc Morton Szasz, professor of history at the University of New Mexico, writes that, after three decades of teaching intellectual history, he considers “religion” one of the three “overarching themes” in American culture. Lamenting what he sees as its neglect by historians of western history, he further states that “a secular interpretation of regional history is a lie about the West” and “ignores a central component of the human experience, the historical locus of both personal and social vision.” Viewing the modern American West as a participant in all national religious trends, Szasz focuses his analysis on how westerners “bent these trends along their own trajectories.” As a result, Religion in the Modern American West moves toward correcting the “lie,” as the author deftly weaves the story of religion into the wider social and cultural context of the twentieth-century American West. Focusing on the last hundred years and on territory west of the hundredth meridian, Szasz divides his analysis into three overlapping time periods. In part 1 (1890s to the 1920s) he examines the contributions and influences of organized religions and their sectarian rivalry in building churches, schools, hospitals, orphanages, and local welfare systems. Protestants, Catholics, and Jews coexisted alongside Mormon Utah with all groups working toward serving the spiritual, moral, educational, and sometimes physical needs of their populations. In part 2 (1920s to the 1960s) Szasz describes “round one” of the “extensive religio-cultural public controversy over ‘national values,’ the most intense discussion of this type since the era of the Civil War.” Protestant groups splintered into liberal and conservative congregations in response to the fundamentalist-modernist controversies of the early part of the twentieth century, while Catholics and Jews found themselves targets of revived nativist sentiments and the resurgent activity of the Ku Klux Klan in a number of western states. World War II and the postwar boom thrust western churches and clerics into unprecedented roles of leadership in their burgeoning cities

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