On America’s Pacific shore, many religious currents meet
Jul 14th 2016, 13:49
BY ERASMUS AND H.G. | SEATTLE
IF YOU like to deal in broad generalisations about American religion, you probably see the north-east as a heartland of liberal or mainline Protestantism, and the South as the home of old-time evangelicals. Certain cities like Chicago and Pittsburgh abound with blue-collar Catholics, and the West coast is...what exactly? In the minds of many people (especially those who don’t live there) it is a region where all the cultural and religious straitjackets of places further east have been discarded, and spiritual seekers can dabble in whatever mixture they choose of new-age practices, Buddhism-lite, or no faith at all.
At least this much is true. The three American cities with the highest proportion of religiously unaffiliated residents are all on the Pacific coast: Portland, Oregon (with 42%) followed by Seattle and San Francisco (33% each). But the real story of faith in the American West is more interesting and paradoxical, as a book by Todd Kerstetter, a professor of history at Texas Christian University, shows. As he explains in “Inspiration and Innovation”, the Pacific coast has been a place of religious competition at least since the 18th and 19th century when Spanish Catholic missions (pictured, above) and Russian Orthodox ones vied for the souls of the indigenous people.
As the second world war gave way to the cold war, he notes, California developed a booming aerospace sector and drew in millions of newcomers whose religous instincts were conservative. But theirs was also a world that revered innovation and technology. This mixture spawned the drive-in church, the megachurch and more recently the online church. Buddhism has certainly been an important influence on the Pacific coast, but not solely the slightly faddish version embraced in bohemian literature and the movie world. Migrants from Japan, China, Vietnam, South Korea and Sri Lanka have been that faith’s principal bearers, making Los Angeles the only city in the world where all the main forms of Buddhism flourish.
The net result has been to turn the Pacific coast into a place where rather conservative and traditional forms of religion co-exist and occasionally commingle with new-fangled ones. Where religion is traditionalist in its doctrine, it is innovative in its style. One such case is the Saddleback Church in southern California, founded in 1980 by Pastor Rick Warren, with just one family. It claims to have baptised 42,000 people but it avoided acquiring a permanent building (migrating instead between schools, recreation halls, restaurants and theatres) until its weekly attendance topped 10,000. On the other hand, even when religion is highly experimental and blurs the doctrinal contours, it continues to draw selectively on older texts, teachings and symbols.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2016/07/religion-and-american-west-coast
