Getting Religion: New Themes for the Study of the American West

Either out of personal discomfort with the subject, or because they believe it largely unimportant to their research, historians of the U.S. West have rarely focused significant attention on religion. I want to challenge this exclusion by proposing two of the ways in which attention to religion might challenge and enrich familiar narratives of Western history. First, religious identities must be recognized as foundational in the formation and maintenance of boundaries within and among diverse Western communities—boundaries that are crucial for making sense of the cultural geography of the region and that have helped shape conflicts over land and water resources. Second, understanding Western states and sub-regions as “imagined communities” requires us to historicize assertions of both secular and religious identities in defining both region and sub-regions. This perspective allows us to see the neglect of religion in the historiography as one dimension of a broader effort to define the West in largely non-religious terms—an effort continually contested by the multiple religious communities that thrive throughout the region.