Taking the West Seriously in American Religious History

Traditionally, the story of American religious history has begun along the eastern seaboard with British colonists – Puritans, Pilgrims, Anglicans and Catholics. While more recent scholarship has expanded the narrative, adding Native Americans and Africans to the story and locating starting points in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, the main narrative has changed little. It remains focused geographically on the eastern seaboard and reserves the bulk of the story for white Protestants. The West, in this story, is an afterthought that becomes relevant only as white Protestants move westward. I argue that taking the West seriously as a part of American religion revises the starting point of the story, expands the cast of characters, and reshapes the themes of the narrative. This story of American religious history emanates from New Spain and enters what we now know as the United States from the south and the southwest. The main characters are not British Protestants, but rather Spanish Catholics and the African and Native peoples who interact with them. The rise and fall of Protestant hegemony remains a key component of the narrative, but from the very beginning the story of interracial and interreligious encounter is also a crucial motif. Finally, integrating the West into the story from the beginning allows historians of American religion a comparative perspective that deepens our understanding of people and events included in the traditional narrative.