Religion & Public Life
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How region influences religion in America

The Pacific region is a place of 'fluid identities' dominated by no single denomination

By Bruce T. Murray
Author, Religious Liberty in America: The First Amendment in Historical and Contemporary Perspective

Examining clichés
“The degree to which religion and ethnicity are coupled is increasingly tenuous in the post-ethnic world.” — David Machacek

California, on the far side of the “Left Coast,” is easy to mock: Author Carey McWilliams called California the “great exception” of the United States; historian Sydney Ahlstrom said California is “America exaggerated”; and Wallace Stegner quipped that “California is like the rest of the United States, only more so.”

“All of this suggests that California is at the front lines of what happening in the country,” said Wade Clark Roof, a professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “A lot of people say that is not a good thing, and what happens in California will corrupt the rest of the country.”

Roof, along with David Machacek and Mark Silk of Trinity College, spoke at a conference on religion and region, hosted by the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion and Public Life, Dec. 7-8, 2005, at the Karpeles Manuscript Library in Santa Barbara. Roof and Silk co-edited the book, Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Region: Fluid Identities. Machacek is a contributing author.

“The project as a whole was designed to see if there is any truth to these clichés, or if there is anything more substantial about how regions function in the way of religion,” Silk said.

The clear answer is “yes”: The nation varies considerably from one region to another when it comes to Americans’ views toward religion and politics, religious affiliation or lack thereof.

“Region is important in understanding religion in the United States,” Silk said. “There is a kind of process where certain regional styles get taken up by the public at large.”

But the traditional bond between religion and culture that one might find in the Northeast is coming unglued in the Pacific region – which for the purpose of “Fluid Identities” project consisted of California, Nevada and Hawaii.

“The degree to which religion and ethnicity are coupled is increasingly tenuous in the post-ethnic world, where religion and ethnicity don’t necessarily go together,” Machacek said. “There is much more emphasis on the voluntariness of religion: People chose to emphasize certain elements of their identity and de-emphasize others.”

Insiders and outsiders
“In California, mainline Protestantism seems to have largely dispersed into a sea of tolerant personalized California dreaming.” — Mark Silk

Unlike New England, which from early colonial times to the early 19th century maintained official church establishments, states in the Pacific region never had such establishments in their modern histories. The struggle that Catholics underwent to gain their place in society in Protestant New England never happened on the West Coast, where Catholicism is woven into the region’s history dating back to the Spanish missionary days.

With immigration and rapid demographic change so much a part of life in the region, the concept of “insider/outsider” doesn’t operate quite the same way as elsewhere in the country.

“Religious pluralism is a part of history of this place, and it came into being as a result of demographics and not a movement against an establishment to win one’s right to be here,” Roof said. “From 1849 to present – and 150 years is not a very long time – this state has moved at a record pace in terms of people moving here from around the world, particularly after the 1965 immigration law. Nevada is affected in much same way by people moving there from across the country.”

Machacek said religious and cultural landscape of California can best be described as “post-ethnic” or “trans-cultural”; or, like the title of the book, “Fluid Identities.”

“Since there is not a religious establishment against which the newcomer groups have to position themselves, they are positioned in a dynamic and fluid milieu characterized by innovation and mobility – people moving in and out of groups; people who have multiple dimensions of identity. Individuals may simultaneously identify with multiple cultures; they may simultaneously identify with multiple religions,” Machacek said. “It is this kind of environment that makes it difficult to talk about newcomers in insider/outsider terms.”

The massive influx of Catholics from Mexico and the rest of Latin America into the region is having a profound effect on both the culture of the region and on Catholicism itself, which is increasingly becoming “Latinized” and thus differentiated from the Irish, Italian and European Catholicism of the East Coast.

“One can speak realistically about the de-Europeanization of religion,” Machacek said. “When you cross from one coast to another, you literally get more culturally distant from Western European traditions. And that is where profound changes to be found.”

Machacek described the Pacific region is a “global cultural marketplace,” in which the success of religious groups is determined less by adherence to tradition and more by their ability to capture audiences. Southern California has seen a proliferation of “niche churches” – churches that don’t strive to be universal, but target specific demographics. For example, the Mosaic churches, led by the Rev. Erwin Raphael McManus, cater to young, upwardly mobile, multicultural Angelinos. Other such lifestyle congregations cater to gays and lesbians, young families and even surfers.

On the West Coast, Christian conservatives and evangelicals sometimes think and behave like “outsiders,” but they are also important players on the scene, and they are effective at making their voices known: John MacArthur of Sun Valley’s Grace Community Church is a frequent TV pundit and spokesman for a literal "scripturalist" interpretation of the Bible; Trinity Broadcasting Network broadcasts across the globe from its base in Costa Mesa, Calif., and southern California is home to the world famous Crystal Cathedral and the Saddleback megachurch.

On the other hand, Southern California is a beacon of “liberal evangelism” emanating from Fuller Theological Seminary, one of the nation’s largest seminaries, which prepares pastors for Protestant churches of all stripes. The nearby All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena has made news recently for its liberal political stance.

By numbers alone, mainline Protestants might be the closest to “outsider” status in California, representing only 5 percent of the population. “In California, mainline Protestantism seems to have largely dispersed into a sea of tolerant personalized California dreaming,” Mark Silk said. “This is really telling about the region as a whole.”

Spiritual but not religious

In the Pacific region, 47 percent of the people surveyed for the Religion by Region series are unaffiliated with a church or congregation. But that does not necessarily mean those people are not religious in some form or another, said Tamar Frankiel, a professor of comparative religion and another contributor to “Fluid Identities.” The thousands of yoga centers throughout the region are one example of this. The popularity of Buddhism and Cabala is another. And one need not adhere to one teaching exclusively, at the expense of another.

The mantra for the region is “personalism,” Frankiel said, “the idea that whatever works for you personally is OK, and learning to look inward for your own spiritual direction.”

A popular outgrowth of this idea is “spiritual coaching,” by which people hire personal coaches for spiritual exercise and metaphysical empowerment. “People are taking a sports model and applying it to spiritual life, then taking something from the spiritual and metaphysical realms and using it for personal empowerment,” Frankiel said.

A personalized approach to Christianity is exemplified in the best-selling book, “The Purpose Driven Life,” written by California megachurch pastor Rick Warren, who speaks of “spiritual workouts,” “spiritual fitness” and the various ways to find one’s path in life through Jesus Christ.

Mix and match

According to Religion by Region data, 75 percent of the people in the Pacific region claim to have an identifiable religion, but only 53 percent have membership in a religious organization. This leaves a difference of 22 percent between actual membership and claimed religious affiliation.

Why? Wade Clark Roof said the discrepancy accounts for people who identify with or have an affinity with some kind of religious group, but they aren’t actually members of a congregation – for example, people who say they are Catholic, but don’t go to church. This discrepancy is bigger in the Pacific region than any other region in the country.

“There are a lot of weak religious identities in the Pacific region – people who are nominally affiliated with a religion, but not formal members,” Roof said. “There is so much psychological mobility when we ask about religious adherence.”

Religion in the Pacific region can be mix and match, like being Catholic and a Cabala enthusiast (i.e. Madonna), or being a Jewish student of Zen Buddhism.

“California has a style of religious exploration of seeking and putting together one’s own spiritual thing,” Silk said.

In the previous century, Americans from the East Coast who settled in California brought their ethno-religious identities with them. These identities have since broken down.

“There was a certain style of religious pluralism which was formed in the crucible of New York and the mid-Atlantic states, where religion was something you brought with you and you had a religious identity,” Silk said. “This is a very mid-Atlantic way of looking at the world organized around ethnic and religious communities.”

The lack of a traditional religious “center” in California can have negative effects in such a radically diverse environment. “In California, you see a thinning out of a center that once upon a time would have acted as a bridge between the religiously indifferent and religiously overcommitted,” Silk said. “When you lose that center, then you get a kind of polarization in society.”

Other significant Pacific Region facts:

  • California has the largest number of interracial and interfaith marriages in the nation.
    “The family dynamics don’t fit in with the Normal Rockwell picture of the American family,” Roof said.
    (See the 1948 case, Perez v. Sharp, in which the California Supreme Court struck down an 1872 statute banning interracial marriages.)

  • Nevada has both the largest divorced population and the largest singles population in the region.
The Pacific Northwest

In the 2004 election exit polls, “moral values” scored low in the Pacific Northwest except among white evangelical voters in the region. Correspondingly, the Pacific Northwest is the least religiously affiliated part of the country. It is no coincidence that Oregon is the only state in the union that permits physician- assisted suicide, Mark Silk said.

But because Oregonians don’t go to church in large numbers doesn’t necessarily mean they are less spiritual or ethical. On the issue of assisted suicide, Oregon residents generally do not take a utilitarian view – the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

“Oregonians who favor assisted suicide tend to talk about it in terms of natural processes. They talk about it being a part of the natural order that does not involve some kind of artificial life support,” Silk said. “By traditional religious standards, some might say Oregonians are a bunch of moral slackers. But that’s not really the case.”

The civil religion of the Pacific Northwest incorporates an environmental ethos, “a kind of gospel of biodiversity,” Silk said. “It is important to understand this ethos in the Pacific Northwest if one wants to understand the public culture of the region.”

With “naturalism” and environmentalism the prevailing “religion” in the Northwest, Christian evangelicals think of themselves as the counterculture of the region.

The Northeast

Catholics are the overwhelming majority in the Northeast, where Protestants once dominated in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Therefore, Catholics in New England still have a sense of being a minority because they had to fight for their place in a society steeped in the anti-Catholicism that came out of the Protestant Reformation.

As Catholic immigrants radically changed the demographics of the region in the late 19th century and early 20th century, in order to avoid conflict, religion became more privatized among the different ethnic and sectarian groups.

“One of the solutions to the situation was to separate the Catholic world and the Protestant world. There was a kind of gentlemen’s agreement not to ‘do’ religion in public,” Silk said.

So when Democratic presidential candidate and Vermonter Howard Dean said he wasn’t comfortable talking about religion on stump, that was a true reflection of his own “cultural milieu,” as Dean might term it.

“That is a cultural style that is not very well understood in the rest of the country. People said this person doesn’t care about religion, and that may have been true about Dean, but that is not the case with Kerry; that is not true at all. By all accounts he is a faithful Catholic, but in terms of doing it as a part of his political life, no,” Silk said.

Flip-flopping and fighting

The post-Civil War ethno-religious identity in the United States consisted of white Protestant Republicans in the North and white Protestants Democrats in the South. (Jews and Catholics traditionally vote Democratic.)

“By and large you could read those ethno-religious identities as expressions of groups rather than theology. These were communities of people who felt their interests could be represented by voting one way or another. It wasn’t really about religion. This is still around, and it is still important,” Silk said

The post-Civil War political order began to shift with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and many disaffected white Southerners began to vote for Republicans. The Republicanization of the South was finally solidified in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan.

White evangelicals now form the heart of Republican Party in the South in the same way the labor unions became the engines of the Democratic Party in the industrialized North in the 1930s.

The “Southern Crossroads” region, which includes Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri, has large numbers of both Evangelicals and Catholics. Although these were all “red states” in the 2004 presidential election, there is considerable political division within the states. For example, Louisiana, a state with a high Catholic population, also has a Catholic and Democratic senator, Mary Landrieu, who only narrowly won the seat in 1996 against Republican Woody Jenkins, who contested the election.

People in the Southern Crossroads are prone to fighting, both politically and physically, which makes the region interesting to study, Silk said.

Study topics
  1. Who are the latest are newcomers, and how will they negotiate their place in the Pacific region?
  2. How do Muslims negotiate their place in a post-Sept. 11 America?
  3. How are religious groups represented in textbooks?
  4. As depicted in films, who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?
  5. How do newcomer groups organize and structure their religious organizations? What innovations do they bring? And how do established groups respond?
  6. How are new groups assimilating or not assimilating? What elements of the “old” culture are kept, and what new ones are adopted?
  7. Comparing relations in multicultural cities: Why is Los Angeles not like Paris, which recently suffered devastating riots?
  8. How are niche religious organizations casting themselves in the community? How do they market themselves, and what demographics do they target?