PROLOGUE

Placing Oneself in the West

It was a Sunday in the 1980s. My wife and I were taking a brief weekend vacation in the vicinity of Point Reyes on the coast north of San Francisco. As committed Christians from well before our marriage, attending Christian worship had long been a part of our discipleship. Nonetheless, on this Sunday, we did not seek out a local congregation to join in worship. As Protestants, we believed--and still do--that the Christian church is fundamentally a gathering of God's people; any time or place where believers gather, worship may be offered. So, Joan and I worshipped in the living room of the cottage where we were staying. We were Presbyterians at the time, but we did not see our denominational affiliation as restrictive for Christian worship. The Episcopal Book of Common Prayer offered us a suitable order, so we alternated in reading aloud the various prayers and passages from the Bible.

After a light breakfast following our worship service, we went driving along the coast. Meandering with the road, we eventually parked at a headland viewpoint; the landscape was partially shrouded in fog. Parked next to us was a sports car whose bright red color drew our attention. As we looked, we became intrigued by the car's occupant. His back propped against the door and his feet extended across the front seats, he was engrossed in reading a Bible.

It struck us then how belief, ritual, and place were curiously related for the two of us and our neighbor in the sports car that Sunday morning. The three of us took our religion seriously enough to engage in acts of piety, yet our forms were, in another sense, "informal" in that they were privatized. No gathering with believers beyond oneself and one's family. Moreover, no gathering in a special building set apart for corporate worship. Our sacred spaces that day--cottage living room and sports car seat--were mundane thresholds to the fog, sea, and windswept rocks and hills of the northern California coast. Yet while we were drawn into the natural landscape, it was not home. Joan, I, and the sports car driver were neither farmers nor fisherfolk, hippie communalists, nor yuppie entrepreneurs. We were but weekend tourists from the nearby metropolitan world. Our lives were indelibly urban and (post)modern--geographically and socially mobile yet linked by webs of profession, information, and consumption to a self-validating global system of technique that simultaneously ordered and disordered ways of life.

Yet for all our urbanity, there existed that Sunday morning an intimate encounter with place that eludes expression, as the fog and spray and wind and light are elusive even in memory. Our religion and that place--the headland parking lot, fog giving way to sunlight, Bible reading in the sports car and living room worship service fresh in our experience--invested each with the other. In other words, I became more conscious that day than I had ever been before that religious experience can be "placed."

Place is a human construct of experience and perception in and about a particular setting as small as a room or as large as a region. It is the differentiation of space based on physical sensation and social and cultural interaction with that space.¹ It is, as geographer J. Nicholas Entrikin notes, "a condition of human experience" that is "in between" an objective and subjective perspective, since as "agents in the world we are always 'in place,' much as we are always 'in culture.'"² Life takes place, and thus place powerfully conditions human experience, albeit mostly in an unacknowledged, taken-for-granted way. Placing ourselves is a way we creatively adapt to the materiality of existence.³ And as "history takes place," so, observes D.W. Meinig, "places are created by history."⁴ An historical approach to a given place is less about natural landscape than about continuities and developments in the sociocultural landscape.⁵

The U.S. West has provided me with my most salient experiences of place. Of the West’s many many places, I am familiar with three subregions. I now reside in a small town in the Missouri River basin, in the prairie borderland to the northern Great Plains ("Siouxland", as the residents call it; the name was apparently coined by native author Frederick Manfred). My earliest sense of the West, though, was in the Southwest. Tucson was my home during my middle and high school years. The arid landscape and climate were distinctive, and they became a part of me imaginatively. The sociocultural landscape that I was attuned to, however, was an urban-suburban one, middle class and Anglo American. My sense of the West expanded after my family moved to San Francisco the summer before I became a senior in high school. Without forsaking my love for the saguaro or the desert mountains, I quickly embraced the stillness and shade of the redwood and the swirling silence of the coastal fog. While I was a resident of San Francisco itself for only a year and a half, my summer job between high school and college took me through many of the districts of the city. Its neighborhoods became familiar enough for me to be able to associate visual images as well as emotions with them. Unlike my Tucson experience, in school in San Francisco I encountered ethnic and racial diversity as normal. In Berkeley, my experience of cosmopolitanism was extended. My first girlfriend was "ABC" (American-born Chinese); I can still remember the awkwardness I felt when I met her parents, an awkwardness that I intuitively knew was due to more than generational differences. A mystique of China joined with that of Mexico on the margins of my growing self-consciousness about culture.

Most Euro-American residents of the metaregion we call the West have been, like myself, town or city dwellers. Despite the myth of western individualism and freedom, the dominant social experience of westerners, especially in the twentieth century, has been urban-suburban. Further, at least some of us have experienced the metropolitan West while being people of religious commitment. This book arises out of the conjunction of my topophilia and my search for a useable past.⁶

In light of my own experience as an urbanized westerner of religious commitment, I became curious about the history of Protestantism in the American West. Was it, as one might be led to believe by much of the mystique and the historiography of the West, a case of "no there there"? Alternatively, was it merely an undifferentiated extension of eastern U.S. religion, as one might suppose from much of the historiography of American religion?

Toward a Useable History of Religion in the Urban West

The work that follows has helped me begin to emplace some of the relevant past, but it has also highlighted ongoing historiographic questions and challenges. This book demonstrates, I hope, the possibilities for conjoining the perspectives of the "new western history" with a "new religious history." The former, which has emerged particularly in the last two decades, seeks to decenter the historiography of the West from an older notion of "frontier," which has all too often privileged white American male "pioneers" on the move.⁷ The "f-word" has survived the onslaught, mostly because it is still a useful term for discussing sociocultural boundaries in flux.⁸ The new historiographical consensus stresses historical process within the larger region. Still, where the boundaries of the West lie remains contested.⁹ What makes the West a region? There are multiple answers to this. For purposes of historical study, perhaps the simplest answer is that the West is a conjunction of place (the metaregion west of the Mississippi River, mostly arid) and specifiable historical processes (mostly since the political independence of the U.S. in 1776).¹⁰

Conceiving the history of the U.S. West as regional history is not new, but it is near the core of the new western history.¹¹ Regional historical analysis is a way of recognizing that society and culture within the boundaries of the U.S. varies over time not only in relation to religion, race, ethnicity, class, and gender, but also in how such elements meet and develop in the particularity of place. Regional consciousness is a historical product of the senses of place among a region’s residents--"interior regionalism"--and also the characterization of that same region by those outside it--"exterior regionalism."¹² A region’s boundaries are more or less permeable, diffuse, and multivalent. They also shift due to historical process.¹³ Further, any given region is embedded in a nexus of larger and smaller locales.¹⁴ Despite such problematics, the basic analytical insight which a nuanced concept of region provides to historians is that, in the words of Belden C. Lane, "meaningful experience is always 'placed' experience."¹⁵ As historians of the U.S. refine, modify, and even challenge older depictions of American national consensus and unity, the concept of sociocultural region provides a flexible yet resilient tool, along with others, to reevaluate the historical "oneness" of the U.S. in the light of American "manyness."¹⁶

There are parallels between the new western history and a new American religious history. Historians of the American West have had to get beyond expansionist triumphalism, pioneer hagiography, and myopia in regard to race, ethnicity, class, and gender. Similarly, historians of American religion have had to move beyond denominational or theological triumphalism, clerical hagiography, and a myopia about race, ethnicity, class, and gender.¹⁷

However, the conjoining of the fields of western and religious history has been largely accidental to date. In the new western historiography, it more often than not seems that only Native Americans, Roman Catholic missionaries, and Latter-Day Saints had any religious life and thought worth taking seriously.¹⁸ In the new religious historiography, the situation is reminiscent of the response of presidential candidate Al Smith: when asked in 1928 what he thought his appeal was west of the Mississippi, he answered, "What states are west of the Mississippi?"¹⁹ While the "manyness" of the American religious experience has come more to the fore in much of the new history, the regional dimension to this diversity remains skewed to the East. American religious historians tend to assume that a thorough understanding of New England Puritans, southern and northern evangelicals, and, more lately, eastern-based urban Catholicism and African American Protestantism, adequately explains religious development for the entire U.S. In effect, the religious experience of the Greater Northeast in particular, and the East in general, has maintained its privileged place in the new religious history, while in the new western history religion has been kept at the periphery, in part by contending central narratives for the region.

Nevertheless, the basis for a history of religion in the West is beginning to be laid. Within the last two decades several calls have been made by western and religious historians for a more intentional and systematic exploration of religious experience in the region. A number of recent works supply important pieces toward a critical story of religion in the American West.²⁰ It is my hope that this book will be another another piece.

Of Stereographs and Parameters

This study resembles a stereograph from the early twentieth century. On the one hand, it amounts to a snapshot of but one group of people at one historical moment in one location. It is a critical case study of anglophone Protestants in the San Francisco Bay area during the Progressive era. On the other hand, it is a doubled picture, providing a three-dimensionality to a complex regional community. It deals with the breadth and depth of Anglo Protestant life and thought in a historical conjuncture of peculiar regional and national significance.

Why these particular parameters?

The urban character of the trans-Mississippi West has been noted by a number of historians.²¹ The very sparseness of settlement throughout most of the region has accentuated the role of cities and towns in organizing and dominating their hinterlands and connecting the region to the nation and beyond. By 1890 the West was urbanizing at a rate greater than the U.S. as a whole.²²

The San Francisco Bay area has been a key metropolitan region of the West from the mid-nineteenth century. It is a locale especially rich in historical sources and significance for the urban West and for an urbanizing nation and world. Chief among the sources for the book that follows are regionally-based denominational weeklies. Housed in the archives and libraries of Bay area Protestant institutions, these denominational periodicals provide a window into the life and thought of a complex religious culture self-consciously "placed" in the urban West Coast in the latter half of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth century.²³

The sociocultural mystique of the San Francisco region also makes it compelling for a study bringing to bear the new western and the new religious histories. Its mystique was born of the metropolitan area’s geographic setting and its social formation during the Gold Rush.²⁴ The 1906 earthquake and fire that destroyed San Francisco's core became another element to the mystique. Since World War II and what has been termed the Second Gold Rush, modern media have disseminated additional images for the diffuse, often inchoate popular identification of the Bay area.²⁵ Beatniks and flowerchildren, student free speech and psychadelic drugs, feminism and gay power, Black and Grey Panthers, yuppies and Toyotas, Silicon Valley and hot tubs, brie and chardonnay, sushi and jogging; such contesting images are evocative of being on the edge--not just the geographical edge of a continent, but the sociocultural edge of sophisticated change, of the new, of the future.²⁶

Nor does the contemporary Bay area mystique lack a significant religious thread. It is suggestive of new adaptations of traditional North American religion, of countercultural "consciousness reformation," and of the unprecendented strength and appeal of non-western religions. Since the 1960s, various "new" religious groups and movements have centered in the metropolitan San Francisco region or have been a salient cultural presence. Christian World Liberation Front, Jews for Jesus, the Salvadoran Sanctuary movement, the Metropolitan Community Church, the Unification Church, Hare Krishna, Yoga, Zen Buddhism, Transcendental Meditation, est, Synanon, the Church of Scientology, and the People's Temple differ from each other in religious purpose, belief, and practice, but they have all contributed to a popular association of the Bay area with religious ferment and unconventionality.²⁷

To a significant extent, this contemporary religious mystique is sustained by critical study. The Bay area belongs to a Pacific Coast region described by sociologist Roger W. Stump as one where "denominational affiliation is diverse, rates of church membership are low, and mainline religion has little cultural impact."²⁸ Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge point out that this regional secularity in formal religious commitment and in the public sphere has led to "the rise of novel religions, not the dawn of secular society."²⁹ Perhaps most intriguing are the findings of a 1983 poll of Bay area citizens. Close to a third of the adult population of the metropolitan region attend some church or organized spiritual service weekly, and roughly half pray or meditate daily. These proportions are in keeping with national percentages. However, once one moves from measuring self-claimed religious attendance and practice to measuring conventional religious affiliation, the Bay area differentiates itself. The thirty-five percent of the regional population that belongs to a church or synogogue is roughly half that of the national average; of Bay area adults who say that they pray, thirty-five percent do not identify with an organized religious or spiritual group; this is five times the national percentage. Formal commitment to religious community, it seems, is far less significant to the great majority of Bay area residents than individualized and even privatized belief and practice. Moreover, within the region there is a subregionalization of religion. The residents of the East Bay's Alameda County are the most religious, while those of the North Bay's Marin County are the least. People who label themselves "evangelical" or "fundamentalist" are most likely to live in the East or South Bay, while people in San Francisco and Marin Counties are the most likely to have tried Yoga, Transcendental Meditation, Zen, or est. In sum, the contemporary Bay area is, peculiarly, a religiously "unconnected" region embedded within the larger religiously unconnected Pacific Coast.³⁰ Has this always been the case, and if so, what effects has this unconnectedness had on particular religious communities and, in turn, what effects have particular religious communities had on the metropolitan region?

Unfortunately, there is little historiography on religion in other western cities to draw on for comparison to the San Francisco Bay area. The leading cities of the West in the twentieth century have received scant attention from historians interested in religion, with two partial exceptions. First, Salt Lake City would seem to be poised to benefit from the maturing of Mormon historiography. Indeed, historians of the Latter-day Saints are perhaps the one group of historians best placed for helping us to explore more intentionally the social and cultural role of religion in an urbanizing West. Second, religious developments in metropolitan Los Angeles have received some attention, though these studies have not been set, for the most part, in relation to the new western history.³¹ How religiously typical or atypical has the San Francisco Bay area been among western urban areas? This book can only raise the question by examining one case.

Further, within the historiography of the San Francisco region, there are only what amount to fragments of a critical religious history of any given religious community, let alone any synthesis that would provide a framework for comparing one community of belief with another. The work which follows supports the claim that the religious "unconnectedness" of metropolitan San Francisco is not merely a post-World War II phenomenon. This was demonstrably so for the Anglo-American Protestant community, and in multiple ways, as will be shown. However, the regional life and thought of Roman Catholicism and Judaism, not to mention a host of other religious groups, are too understudied at present to be able to provide more than hints of a transreligious picture.³²

In what ways did anglophone Protestants in Salt Lake City place themselves within their local social and natural landscapes? Euro-American Roman Catholics in Albuquerque? Latino Catholics in San Francisco? Latino pentecostals in Tucson? African American Protestants in Richmond, California? Seventh-Day Adventists in Angwin and Loma Linda, California? Theosophists in Point Loma, California? Baptists in McMinnville, Oregon? Jews in Arizona? Chinese American Protestants in Washington? The Native American Church in Los Angeles? Buddhists in San Francisco? Mennonites in Kansas? Norwegian Lutherans in the Dakotas? Reformed Church in America workers and congregations among Apaches in New Mexico and Oklahoma? Mormons in Hawai`i? Russian Orthodox in Alaska? The list is open ended. Diverse religious communities have always been present in the West; only a few have received extended critical attention. In a given local religious community, what changes in a sense of place have occured over time? Between local religious communities, what similarities and differences in a sense of place have there been? If the West has been a distinctive region in myth and historical experience, has religion been one important and heretofore neglected medium through which that distinctiveness has been concretized? If nothing else, this particular study will, I hope, give a piquancy to the remaining task of placing religious communities in the West.

Beyond the personal familiarity and the readily available primary sources mentioned earlier, why the concentration on anglophone Protestants in this work?³³ They were those who constituted a religious group rooted in or acculturated to what could be termed historically the U.S. core culture of British- and Northern European-derived life and thought. Anglophone Protestantism was inseparable from this core culture.³⁴ A denominational Protestantism had grown from diverse roots in the religious ferment of sixteenth- through eighteenth-century England and Scotland. By 1900, this denominationally-articulated community included Baptists, Congregationalists, Disciples, Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Friends, as well as other smaller groups, including some non-Anglo ones that partially or fully acculturated. To the extent that Lutherans, Reformed, and other European Protestant groups saw themselves as literal as well as figurative foreigners in a strange land, they were usually considered "outsiders" culturally if not altogether theologically. African, Asian, and Hispanic American Protestants were, for the most part, viewed as immature pupils or marginalized dependents. Roman Catholics, Latter-day Saints, Christian Scientists, Adventists, Unitarians, and other "unevangelical denominations" were lumped together as beyond the pale.³⁵

Given the plethora of anglophone Protestant denominations, what makes them a discrete religious community? Protestant denominations in the U.S. have functioned something like a canopy, as Martin Marty has observed, with "a top for protection, but open sides for free access and egress." The denominations have been loose structures of theological, sociocultural, and organizational tradition which have provided ties distinct enough at the local level to afford religious identity to individuals, yet diffuse and flexible enough to develop in and with a modernizing society.³⁶

These denominations were enmeshed in a larger network and ethos of their own making. By 1900, a still-potent nineteenth-century synthesis of "common sense" biblicism, Christocentric religious experience, moralistic activism, and millennially-charged belief in the divine purposes of America was being modified by newer concepts such as evolution, organicism, and historicism.³⁷ Furthermore, an important aspiration of the Protestant community was to shape a "Christian America." Throughout most of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Protestantism in general aspired to be the moral custodian of the nation.³⁸ The specifics of this ideal could vary, and the anglophone Protestants of the Greater Northeast were more optimistically millennial than most co-religionists in the South, but the close association of Protestant religion with public mores and American civilization was commonplace.³⁹

It is when this diffuse Protestant ideal of moral custodianship is "placed" in the locale of the U.S. West that the potential significance of this study’s focus can be most readily glimpsed. There is a growing body of work that is making clear that, with exceptions, the American West was problematic for the custodial assumptions of anglophone Protestants. Historians such as Eldon G. Ernst, Ferenc M. Szasz, Sandra Sizer Frankiel, and Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp are on the right track.⁴⁰ The present work explores further the character and limits of Protestant "unestablishment" in the urban West of the Progressive era.

One final point regarding the parameter of the anglophone Protestant community. This study is an attempt to provide what Elliott West calls looking at things "from the inside out." Certainly it is important to "consider western history from the top down and the bottom up," but examining things from inside out is also important, for, as he says, "people act according to how they see things around them." Understanding anglophone Protestantism, in the San Francisco Bay area or anywhere else, entails going beyond a chronicle of institutional activity. James Bratt has suggested a set of questions about religious groups that complement West's point and specify questions which have undergirded this particular work. What are the structures--theological, cultural, social--which enable a group to persist as a distinct group? What is a group's "foreign policy"? That is, who are its friends and its enemies, and what are the strategies and discourses used toward accomodating, persuading, or rejecting other groups? And finally, what is the "felt quality of life" in the group for an insider?⁴¹

Why the Progressive era? Nationally, it was a relatively unique time of major social and cultural shifts.⁴² More specifically, it was a period of accelerating and intensifying modernization as the nation was being integrated into the modern world system.⁴³ Between roughly 1900 and 1920, America made the transition from an entrepreneurial industrial order and a producer ethos to a corporate public order and a consumer ethos. Moreover, by 1920 a majority of Americans lived in cities. Not only was the U.S. becoming an urban society during the Progressive era, but also cities themselves were being transformed. What could be called the Victorian industrial city centered in the downtown was ending by 1920. Well before then, the elements of a post-industrial society and culture, corporate and metropolitan in overall character, were being constructed, reflected in a significant degree through a widespread reform impulse associated with the era's name. These broad changes varied in their local development; in fact, Richard Jensen has shrewdly observed that "Regional history can become the story of differential modernization."⁴⁴

The Progressive era in the San Francisco metropolitan region has additional distinctiveness. The overt reach of U.S. political and economic power into the Greater Pacific Basin around 1900 indicated that the U.S. West in general, and the San Francisco Bay area in particular, were being drawn significantly closer to the core of the world system. Further, two regional events etched the early twentieth century in the collective memory of area's inhabitants: the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915. One of the major themes of this book-- the "bent toward modernization" of the anglophone Protestant community of the San Francisco region in the early twentieth century--has emerged, then, out of the Progressive era focus of the study.

In brief, the book develops as follows. Chapter 1 sets the stage. Protestant denominations centered in the Greater Northeast established a Bay area religious community in the nineteenth century centered primarily around congregational life, seminaries and colleges, and regional religious periodicals. However, the urban society of the region was decisively molded by the Gold Rush and not by Anglo American Protestantism. At the beginning of the twentieth century the region remained the preeminent economic and cultural center of the Pacific Coast, with both a significant foreign-born population and a distinctive labor union movement in San Francisco itself. In early 1906 the anglophone Protestant community was self-conscious about its low numbers in proportion to the general population, despite the proliferation of religious structures and the community's participation in regional boosterism. Chapter 2 explores the material, emotional, and theological impact of the 1906 earthquake and fire on Bay area Protestantism. Chapters 3 and 4 consider the major areas in of religious life which Caucasian anglophone Protestants shared--domestic piety, gender roles, youth work and Sunday school, corporate worship, church architecture, mission support groups, church federation--and the ways in which these areas reflected both broader and regional contexts of social and cultural modernization. Chapter 5 examines revivalism and theology in the regional religious community and shows that there was a regional "bent" toward intellectual modernization. Chapter 6 analyzes the custodial ideal of the local Protestant community and the articulation of a multivalent social Christianity. Chapter 7 details how the regional religious community became caught up in local crusades against graft, Japanese school segregation, the brothel, and the saloon. Chapter 8 is concerned with the ironic culmination of Protestant crusading surrounding the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915. As the region was drawn into the Great War, a distinct era of regional anglophone Protestant life came to a close, and long-term religious and cultural aspirations for the region remained largely frustrated. Unlike their co-religionists in the Greater Northeast and in the Los Angeles region, Bay area Protestants did not face a "cultural disestablishment" by the end of the Progressive era; they had been relative "outsiders" from virtually the beginning of Anglo American conquest and settlement of the region. The Epilogue offers reflections on how the religious history of the U.S. takes on a different hue when viewed from the Golden Gate rather than from Plymouth Rock.

ENDNOTES

See Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, reprint of 1974 ed. with a new preface), and idem, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977).

²J. Nicholas Entrikin, The Betweeness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 1, 5.

³ Yi-Fu Tuan, "Place and Culture: Analeptic for Individuality and the World’s Indifference," in Mapping American Culture, eds. Wayne Franklin and Michael Steiner (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 27-49.

⁴D.W. Meinig, "The Continuous Shaping of America: A Prospectus for Geographers and Historians," American Historical Review 83 (1978): 1205.

⁵See the title essay in John Brinckerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 148-162 and Wallace Stegner, "The Sense of Place," in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (New York: Random House, 1992), 199-206.

⁶ Topophilia has been coined by cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan from two Greek words, topos (place) and philia (love); see Tuan, Topophilia, 4.

⁷The pivotal historiographical statement of the new western history is Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991). In addition, see William Cronan, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds., Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992) and Clyde A. Milner II, ed., A New Significance: Re-envisioning the History of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) . At present, there are three literary pillars which especially exemplify the new western history: Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987); Richard White, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); and Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Connor, and Martha Sandweiss, eds., The Oxford History of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

⁸That the stridency of the new western history against frontier is diminishing is apparent in the essays by Richard White and Patricia Nelson Limerick in The Frontier in American Culture, ed. James R. Grossman (Chicago and Berkeley: Newberry Library and University of California Press, 1994). Two cogent examples of the continued viability of frontier are Kerwin Lee Klein, "Reclaiming the ‘F’ Word, Or Being and Becoming Postwestern," Pacific Historical Review 65 (1996): 179-215 and David M. Wrobel, "Beyond the Frontier-Region Dichotomy," Pacific Historical Review 65 (1996): 401-429.

⁹See Walter Nugent, "Where is the American West?: Report on a Survey," Montana: The Magazine of Western History 42 (Summer 1992): 2-23; and David M. Emmons, "Constructed Province: History and the Making of the Last American West" and "A Roundtable: Six Responses to 'Constructed Province' and a Final Statement by the Author," Western Historical Quarterly 25 (1994): 437-486.

¹⁰For this basic definition see, for example, Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest, 26; Michael P. Malone, "Beyond the Last Frontier: Toward a New Approach to Western American History," in Trails, 148; Martin Ridge, "The American West: From Frontier to Region," New Mexico Historical Review 64 (1989): 140; White, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own", 3-4; Clyde A. Milner II, "Introduction: America Only More So," in The Oxford History of the American West, 5-6.

¹¹Michael Steiner, "From Frontier to Region: Frederick Jackson Turner and the New Western History," Pacific Historical Review 64 (1995): 479-501.

¹²Wrobel, "Beyond the Frontier-Region Dichotomy," 409.

¹³For example, James H. Madison points out how the solidification of regional consciousness about the trans-Mississippi West in the early twentieth century was accompanied by the creation of a "new" region: the Midwest. Madison, "Diverging Trails: Why the Midwest is Not the West," in Frontier and Region: Essays in Honor of Martin Ridge, eds. Robert C. Ritchie and Paul Andrew Hutton (San Marino: The Huntington Library Press and Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 46.

¹⁴David Wrobel and Michael C. Steiner, editors of Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), p. 11, suggest that the subregional realities of the trans-Mississippi West are a way of moving beyond "the mythic West of the frontier paradigm and the geographically bounded West of recent revisionism."

¹⁵Belden C. Lane, Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), 5.

¹⁶Catherine L. Albanese, America: Religions and Religion (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1981), 13-15 is my source for the "oneness" and "manyness" metaphor. Recent discussions of American exceptionalism highlight the problematics of nation-centered historiography. See Ian Tyrrell, "American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History," American Historical Review 96 (1991): 1031-1055 and Michael Kammen, "The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration," American Quarterly 45 (1993): 1-43. An excellent recent introduction to regional studies is Clarence Mondale, "Concepts and Trends in Regional Studies," American Studies International 27 (April 1989): 13-37. The final chapter of David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) is a stimulating overview of the regional persistence of the four British folkways he examines. Three important recent works are Edward L. Ayers, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Steven Nissenbaum, and Peter S. Onuf, All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Glen E. Lich, ed., Regional Studies: The Interplay of Land and People (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1992); and Michael Bradshaw, Regions and Regionalism in the United States (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988). Two slightly older works have especially influenced my thinking: Raymond D. Gastil, Cultural Regions of the United States (Seattle: University of Washington, 1975) and Joel Garreau, The Nine Nations of North America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981).

¹⁷Important calls, suggestions, and overviews for a new American religious history in the last twenty years have included Eldon G. Ernst, "American Religious History from a Pacific Coast Perspective," in Religion and Society in the American West: Historical Essays, eds. Carl Guarneri and David Alvarez (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), 3-39; Jon Butler, "The Future of American Religious History: Prospectus, Agenda, Transatlantic Problematique," William & Mary Quarterly 42 (1985): 167-183; Leonard I. Sweet, "'Ringmasters,' 'Blind Elephant Feelers,' and 'Mules': The Texbook Literature of American Religious History," in Critical Review of Books in Religion 1988 (N.p.: Journal of the American Academy of Religion and Journal of Biblical Literature, 1988): 89-118; James D. Bratt, "A New Narrative for American Religious History?" Fides et Historia 23 (Fall 1991): 19-30; Robert A. Orsi, George Marsden, David W. Wills, and Colleen McDannell, "Forum: The Decade Ahead in Scholarship," Religion and American Culture 3 (Winter 1993): 1-28; Thomas A. Tweed, "Introduction: Narrating U.S. Religious History," in Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed. idem (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1-23; and Harry S. Stout and Robert M. Taylor, Jr., "Studies of Religion in American Society: The State of the Art" and Anne C. Loveland, "Later Stages of the Recovery of American Religious History" in New Directions in American Religious History, eds. Harry S. Stout and D.G. Hart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 15-47, 487-502.

¹⁸See Ferenc Morton Szasz, "The Clergy and the Myth of the American West," Church History 59 (1990): 497-506 for insight on the secularist bias that informs the core of the mythic West.

¹⁹The Smith anecdote comes from Robert A. Divine, T.H. Breen, George M. Frederickson, and R. Hal Williams, America: Past and Present, 3d ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 2: 763, as cited in Patricia Nelson Limerick, "The Case of the Premature Departure: The Trans-Mississippi West and American History Textbooks," Journal of American History 78 (1992): 1388, 1380.

²⁰The closest thing at present to a guide to the history of religion in the West is Richard W. Etulain, comp., Religion in the Twentieth-Century American West: A Bibliography (Albuquerque, NM: Center for the American West, 1991). For discursive overviews of or ruminations on the subject, see the various religious articles in Enyclopedia of the American West, eds. Alan Axelrod and Charles Phillips (New York: Macmillan, 1996), e.g., Douglas Firth Anderson, "frontier evangelists" and "Protestants"; Ferenc M. Szasz and Margaret Connell Szasz, "Religion and Spirituality," in Oxford History of the American West, 359-391; and Patricia Nelson Limerick, "Believing in the American West," in The West: An Illustrated History, Geoffrey C. Ward (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 207-213. Incisive challenges to the eastern-dominated paradigm of American religious historiography are Ernst, "American Religious History from a Pacific Coast Perspective" and Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, "Eastward Ho! American Religion from the Perspective of the Pacific Rim," in Retelling U.S. Religious History, 127-148. See also Sandra Sizer Frankiel, "California and the Southwest," in Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience, 3: 1509-1523 and D. Michael Quinn, "Religion in the American West," in Under an Open Sky, 145-166.

²¹For important discussions of cities and the U.S. West, see Donald W. Meinig, "American Wests: Preface to a Geographical Interpretation," in Re-reading Cultural Geography, eds. Kenneth Foote, Peter J. Hugill, Kent Mathewson, and Jonathan M. Smith (Austin: University of Texas, 1994), 111-138; Bradford Luckingham, "The Urban Dimension of Western History," in Historians and the American West, ed. Michael P. Malone (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 323-343; Lawrence H. Larsen, "Frontier Urbanization," in American Frontier and Western Issues: A Historiographical Review, ed. Roger L. Nichols (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1986), 69-88; and, especially for post-1940 urban developments, Carl Abbott, "The Metropolitan Region: Western Cities in the New Urban Era," in The Twentieth-Century West: Historical Interpretations, eds. Gerald D. Nash and Richard W. Etulain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 71-98 and idem, The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993).

²²Walter Nugent, "The People of the West since 1890," in The Twentieth-Century West, 37.

²³For an overview history of one of these weeklies, see Douglas Firth Anderson, "Pacific," in Popular Religious Magazines of the United States, eds. P. Mark Fackler and Charles H. Lippy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 373-380.

²⁴See Gunther Barth, Instant Cities: Urbanization and the Rise of San Francisco and Denver (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975) and Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

²⁵Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

²⁶Glenna Matthews, "Forging a Cosmopolitan Civic Culture: The Regional Identity of San Francisco and Northern California," in Many Wests, 211-234, provides a helpful entre into the Bay area’s regional consciousness. On San Francisco's mystique, see Fred Davis, "The San Francisco Mystique" and Howard S. Becker and Irving Louis Horowitz, "The Culture of Civility," both in Culture and Civility in San Francisco, ed. Howard S. Becker (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1971), 152-162, 4-19. For examples of the mystique of the Bay area, see Cyra McFadden, The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County (New York: New American Library, 1976); "S.F. is best-rounded city for human needs, study says," Oakland Tribune, 28 January 1985, B-8; "Call us different, but don't call us odd: Berkeley battling its image problem," Oakland Tribune, 30 November 1986, B-1, 7; Frank Viviano and Sharon Silva, "The New San Francisco," San Francisco Focus 33 (September 1986): 64-75; Miriam Horn, "Berkeley: the young radicals are now middle-aged and middle-class, yet the '60s ethic endures," U.S. News & World Report, 18 December 1989, 59, 62. For recent examples of and perspectives on the overlap of the Bay area mystique with that of California, see Michael Reese and Jennifer Foote, "California: American Dream, American Nightmare," Newsweek, 31 July 1989, 23-29; Clara Germani, "Keep That California Dream," Christian Science Monitor, 28 October 1991, 14; Richard Rodriguez, "Edge of the Sea," video essay broadcast on MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, 10 May 1993, transcript published by Strictly Business, Overland Park, KS, pp.12-13; Stryker McGuire and Andrew Murr, "California in the Rearview Mirror," Newsweek, 19 July 1993, 24-25.

²⁷On the religious scene in the Bay area since 1960, the following works provide overviews, focused study, and/or bibliographic entres: Ernst, "American Religious History from a Pacific Coast Perspective," 3-39; idem with Douglas Firth Anderson, Pilgrim Progression: The Protestant Experience in California (Santa Barbara, CA: Fithian Press, 1993), Chapter 6; Donald Heinz, "Jesus in Berkeley" (Ph.D. diss., Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, 1976); Charles Y. Glock and Robert N. Bellah, The New Religious Consciousness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); Robert Wuthnow, The Consciousness Reformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); Harlan Douglas Anthony Stelmach, "The Cult of Liberation: The Berkeley Free Church and the Radical Church Movement, 1967-1972" (Ph.D. diss., Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, 1977); Jacob Needleman and George Baker, eds., Understanding the New Religions (New York: Seabury, 1978); Charles Y. Glock and Robert Wuthnow, "Departures from Conventional Religion: The Nominally Religious, the Nonreligious, and the Alternatively Religious," in The Religious Dimension: New Directions in Quantitative Research, ed. Robert Wuthnow (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 47-68; Michael Lawrence, "James A. Pike, Bishop and Iconoclast" (Ph.D. diss., Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, 1989); Diane Choquette, comp., New Religious Movements in the United States and Canada: A Critical Assessment and Annotated Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985).

²⁸Roger W. Stump, "Regional Variations in the Determinants of Religious Participation," Review of Religious Research 27 (1986): 213; see also idem, "Regional Divergence in Religious Affiliation in the United States," Sociological Analysis 45 (1984): 283-299 and idem, "Regional Migration and Religious Commitment in the United States," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 23 (1984): 292-303. For other recent explorations that establish empirical western, Californian, or Bay area distinctives in twentieth-century American religion, see Donald E. Miller, Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millennium (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Phillip E. Hammond, Religion and Personal Autonomy: The Third Disestablishment in America (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992); William M. Newman and Peter L. Halvorson, "Religion and Regional Culture: Patterns of Concentration and Change Among American Religious Denominations, 1952-1980," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 23 (1984): 304-315; Rodney Stark, William Sims Bainbridge, and Daniel P. Doyle, "Cults of America: A Reconnaissance in Space and Time," Sociological Analysis 40 (1979): 347-359; James R. Shortridge, "A New Regionalization of American Religion," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 16 (1977): 143-153; and idem, "Patterns of Religion in the United States," Geographical Review 66 (1976): 420-434.

²⁹Rodney Stark and Willliam Sims Bainbridge, "Secularization and Cult Formation in the Jazz Age," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 20 (1981): 363; see also idem and Lori Kent, "Cult Membership in the Roaring Twenties: Assessing Local Receptivity," Sociological Analysis 42 (1981): 137-162.

³⁰The 1983 survey of Bay area religion was sponsored by the San Francisco Examiner and appeared as part of an Examiner series by Don Lattin et al., "What We Believe," 28 March-3 April 1983. "What We Believe" was reprinted as a separate twelve-page tabloid, in which the survey material appears on p. 2; Rodney Stark is quoted on the same page about the religious "unconnectedness" of the West Coast. See also Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), especially Table 4.1, pp. 71-73, in which the rate of church membership in various American metropolitan areas are ranked; western areas, including San Francisco-Oakland, predominate in the bottom twenty-five, i.e., those urban areas with the lowest church affiliation rate.

³¹A convenient review of the literature on religion in Los Angeles is provided by Michael E. Engh, "‘A Multiplicity and Diversity of Faiths’: Religion’s Impact on Los Angeles and the Urban West, 1890-1940," Western Historical Quarterly 28 (1997): 463-492.

³²The significant historiographic literature directly or indirectly illuminating Bay area Roman Catholicism includes John Bernard McGloin, Eloquent Indian: The Life of James Bouchard, California Jesuit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1949); idem, Jesuits by the Golden Gate: The Society of Jesus in San Francisco, 1849-1969 (San Francisco: University of San Francisco, 1972); James P. Gaffey, Citizen of No Mean City: Archbishop Patrick Riordan of San Francisco (Wilmington, DE: Consortium, 1976); Joseph S. Brusher, Consecrated Thunderbolt: Father Yorke of San Francisco (Hawthorne, N.J.: Joseph F. Wagner, 1973); R.A. Burchell, The San Francisco Irish, 1848-1880 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Dino Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco: The Immigrant Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982); Jeffrey M. Burns, "Building the Best: A History of Catholic Parish Life in the Pacific States, 1850-1980," in The American Catholic Parish: A History from 1850 to the Present. Vol. 2: Pacific States, Intermountain West, Midwest, ed. Jay P. Dolan (New York: Paulist Press, 1987); and idem, "?Que es esto? The Transformation of St. Peter's Parish, San Francisco, 1913-1990," in American Congregations. Vol. 1: Portraits of Twelve Religious Communities, eds. James P. Wind and James W. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 396-463. On Bay area Judaism, three significant works are Irena Narell, Our City: The Jews of San Francisco (San Diego: Howell-North Books, 1981); Fred Rosenbaum, Architects of Reform: Congregational and Community Leadership, Emanu-El of San Francisco, 1849-1980 (Berkeley: Western Jewish History Center, 1980); and idem, Free to Choose: The Making of a Jewish Community in the American West; The Jews of Oakland, California from the Gold Rush to the Present Day (Berkeley: Judah L. Magnes Memorial Museum, 1976).

³³What modifiers to use with Protestant for the subject group of this study is problematic, given Protestantism’s inherent plurality. Evangelicalism would not be entirely satisfactory even for the early and mid-nineteenth century; it is even less so by 1900. Mainline Protestantism invidiously privileges the subject group, and it also marginalizes smaller and/or newer groups. Euro American Protestantism misleads by glossing over the process of acculturation non-Anglo groups underwent. The preferable, although not perfect, modifiers are Anglo Ameican and anglophone. Anglo American Protestantism underlines the cultural basis undergirding the community, but it could be seen as suggesting firmer racial/ethnic boundaries than was in fact the case, and the term becomes cumbersome with prolonged usage. Anglophone stresses first language, thus implying the core Anglo culture while allowing for the inclusion of acculturated non-Anglo groups; it masks racial realities, though. To minimize the tedium of always modifying Protestant with Anglo American or anglophone, I will often use Protestant without a modifier. Readers, though, need to remember that the Protestants who are the focus of this study are defined by their adherence to and participation in a white, northern European religious culture.

³⁴On this core culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Fischer, Albion's Seed. Noting the existence of a historical core culture for the U.S. should not be taken to imply that counterhegemonic cultures have not existed and contested and modified the core culture. For a lengthier discussion of Protestantism in general as a religious movement and its relation to California's history, see Ernst with Anderson, Pilgrim Progression, pp. 11-48. That Protestants were, and are, important in American religious life and thought is undeniable. That Anglo Protestants have tended to see themselves as the whole story, or, more invidiously, as the only important part of the story, is what must be and is being challenged in American religious historiography. Those of us who study Protestantism seek to be sensitive to the actual historical diversity of American religion. Yet, as "frontier" should not be thrown out with the bathwater of the "frontier thesis" by the new western history, neither should Protestantism be thrown out with the bathwater of Protestant hegemony by the new religous history. Rather, while groups other than Protestants certainly need to be studied, anglophone Protestantism itself also needs historical re-examination and re-interpretation. Eldon G. Ernst, in "Beyond the Protestant Era in American Religious Historiography," in In the Great Tradition: In Honor of Winthrop S. Hudson, eds., Joseph D. Ban and Paul R. Dekar (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1982), 123-145 and in Without Help or Hindrance: Religious Identity in American Culture, 2d ed. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987) offers a stimulating critique of eastern anglophone Protestant hegemony in U.S. religious historiography.

³⁵The importance of self-attributed as well as ascribed "insider" and "outsider" status for the American religious experience is helpfully explored by R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). The division into "evangelical" and "unevangelical" groups is made by Robert Baird, a member of the Anglo-American Protestant community, in his Religion in the United States of America (New York: Arno Press, 1969, reprint of 1844 Glasgow edition).

³⁶Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion. Vol. 1: The Irony of It All, 1893-1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 152; Robert Bruce Mullin, "Denominations as Bilingual Communities," in Reimagining Denominationalism: Interpretive Essays, eds. Robert Bruce Mullin and Russell E. Richey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 162-176. The case Nathan O. Hatch makes about the audience-driven and theologically pluralist character of pre-1865 Protestantism in his The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) is also pertinent to understanding the character of denominationalism.

³⁷Mark A. Noll, "Common Sense Traditions and American Evangelical Thought," American Quarterly 37 (1985): 216-238; George M. Marsden, "Everyone One's Own Interpreter?: The Bible, Science, and Authority in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America" and Grant Wacker, "The Demise of Biblical Civilization," in The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, eds. Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 79-100, 121-138; D.H. Meyer, The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the National Ethic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972); James H. Moorhead, "Between Progress and Apocalypse: A Reassessment of Millennialism in American Religious Thought, 1800-1880," Journal of American History 71 (1984): 524-542 and "The Erosion of Postmillennialism in American Religious Thought, 1865-1925," Church History 53 (1984): 61-77; and Grant Wacker, "The Holy Spirit and the Spirit of the Age in American Protestantism, 1880-1910," Journal of American History 72 (1985): 45-62.

³⁸Robert T. Handy, A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). I have borrowed the image of "moral custodianship" from Grant Wacker, "Uneasy in Zion: Evangelicals in Postmodern Society," in Evangelicalism and Modern America, ed. George Marsden (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1984), 22-24.

³⁹By the Greater Northeast, I mean that section of the U.S. south of Canada, generally north of the Potomac and Ohio Rivers, and east of the Great Plains; see Raymond D. Gastil, Cultural Regions of the United States (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975).

⁴⁰Ferenc Morton Szasz, The Protestant Clergy in the Great Plains and Mountain West, 1865-1915 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 211 (see also idem and Margaret Connell Szasz, "Religion and Spirituality" in Oxford History of the American West, eds. Milner, O'Connor, and Sandweiss, 359-391); Ernst, "American Religious History from a Pacific Coast Perspective," 13; Sandra Sizer Frankiel, California's Spiritual Frontiers: Religious Alternatives in Anglo-Protestantism, 1850-1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Religion and Society in Frontier California (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 5. Earlier work of mine that is consonant with the data and interpretations of the foregoing are Douglas Firth Anderson, "'Give Up Strong Drink, Seek Religion, Go To Work, and Become a Man': The Rev. William Taylor and Gold Rush San Francisco," unpublished paper delivered at the American Academy of Religion, Western Region Annual Meeting, Stanford University, 26 March 1982; idem, "San Francisco Evangelicalism, Regional Religious Identity, and the Revivalism of D.L. Moody," reprint of a 1983 article in Protestantism and Regionalism, ed. Martin E. Marty (Munich, Ger.: K.G. Saur, 1992), 178-200; idem, "'We Have Here a Different Civilization': Protestant Identity in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1906-1909," Western Historical Quarterly 23 (1992): 199-221; idem, "Modernization and Theological Conservatism in the Far West: The Controversy Over Thomas F. Day, 1907-1912," Fides et Historia 24 (Summer 1992): 76-90; idem, "'A True Revival of Religion': Protestants and the San Francisco Graft Prosecutions, 1906-1909," Religion and American Culture 4 (1994): 25-49; and Ernst with Anderson, Pilgrim Progression.

⁴¹Elliott West, "A Longer, Grimmer, but More Interesting Story," in Trails, 108, 109; Bratt, "A New Narrative for American Religious History?" 25-27.

⁴²The literature on the Progressive era is large and growing. Four recent overviews and entres to the historiography of the era are Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick, Progressivism (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1983); John Milton Cooper, Jr., Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900-1920 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990); Richard L. McCormick, Public Life in Industrial America, 1877-1917, The New American History Series, rev. & exp. (Washington: American Historical Association, 1997); and Lynn Dumenil, "The Progressive Era through the 1920s" in Encyclopedia of American Social History, eds. Mary Kupiec Cayton, Elliott J. Gorn, and Peter W. Williams (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1993), 1: 173-188.

⁴³For the concept of the modern world system, i.e., a capitalist world economy, dynamic and interdependent, with shifting core and periphery regions, see Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System 1: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974), 347-357; idem, "Patterns and Prospectives of the Capitalist World-Economy," "Three Instances of Hegemony in the History of the Capitalist World-Economy," and "The Quality of Life in Different Social Systems: The Model and the Reality," essays in his collection The Politics of the World-Economy: The States, the Movements, and the Civilizations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 13-26, 37-46, 147-158. Historian William G. Robbins, in William G. Robbins, "Western History: A Dialectic on the Modern Condition," Western Historical Quarterly 20 (1989): 429-449 and idem, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), is persuasive in applying the world system concept to the U.S. West. My major divergence from the Wallerstein thesis, as adapted by Robbins, is that capitalism is not the most fundamental thing that drives the interdependence of the world. Rather, following Jacques Ellul, in, for example, his The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage Books, 1964) and The New Demons, trans. C. Edward Hopkin (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), the tendency to routinize and rationalize all realms of life as an expression of human autonomy and control--"technique"--is what links the world economy, the nation-state, and technology, and capitalist, socialist, and postmodern ideologies--the "sacreds" of the twentieth century. Finally, in conjunction with a modified world systems theory, a theory of modernization is useful. Modernization posits a continuum between an ideal traditional and ideal modern society and culture. So long as the process of modernization is understood as relative and as inextricable from the process of traditionalization, the concept allows for a nuanced analysis of sociocultural continuity and change. See Richard D. Brown, Modernization: the Transformation of American Life, 1600-1865 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1976), 3-22; Melvin L. Adelman, "Modernization Theory and Its Critics," in Encyclopedia of American Social History, 1: 347-358; and Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 5, 136.

⁴⁴Richard Jensen, "On Modernizing Frederick Jackson Turner: The Historiography of Regionalism," Western Historical Quarterly 11 (1980): 322.