Everyday Las Vegas: Local Life in a Tourist Town

Religion in Sin City

C H A P T E R EIGHT 188 R eligion may be the last thing that comes to mind when people think about Las Vegas. Jud Wilhite, a pastor at a large local nondenominational church, recalled his attempt to convince a Virginia woman that churches actually do exist in the city. After he told her what he does for a living, she replied confidently: “No, you aren’t. There are no churches in Las Vegas.” According to Wilhite, “Her certainty was absolute. . . . Her perception of the church just could not make room for Vegas.”1 Other clergymen echo this experience. Local Imam Quadir Nassif said: “When we talk to Muslims around the country, they don’t believe us that there are Muslims in Las Vegas.” Orthodox priest Father Kent Sharp, Catholic priest Father Frank Green, and Jewish rabbi Josef Rothschild each has been asked if they have slot machines in their parish halls or synagogues. The stereotype is strong enough to prompt countering jokes. Father Green offered: “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, especially if you go to confession,” while Rabbi Rothschild provided the more sarcastic: “Yeah, if you get a Torah, Torah, Torah, then the Ark opens up.” In reality, faith is an important part of life for many residents in this town known for sin. While all the religious leaders I spoke with acknowledged the Sin City image, they also explained that the religious community was large, diverse, and growing. Some, like Orthodox rabbi Levi Behar, treat the paradox with humor. He told me how he responds when people ask what it’s like to live in Southern Nevada: “I tell them that Las Vegas is the most religious place on earth. There are more people praying here than anywhere in the world, more than in Jerusalem. And here, when you’re at a table and need a certain number or a certain hand, you really mean it.” In a more serious tone, Dr. Melvin Roberts, who leads a Baptist church in West Las Vegas, eloquently stated: “In Las Vegas, God is not dead. From the Latter-day Saints to the Pentecostals to the Baptists to the independent interdenominational churches, God is alive and well in the worship life of his people.” In this chapter I explore what this worship life looks like. Religion in Sin City Religion in Sin City 189 As with each sense-of-place theme I have presented so far, religion has its own local cliché: “There are more churches per capita in Las Vegas than in any city in the country.” Such an assertion is probably just another Las Vegas myth, especially given the city’s recent growth. Furthermore, the numbers— from published relocation guides or national religious censuses—that could be used to verify it are suspect. But, true or not, the saying suggests something about the personality of this place. Perhaps the church myth is necessary for locals to, as Catholic bishop Daniel Walsh put it, “counter the image . . . projected in the media that (Las Vegas) is Sin City.” (Such a view conforms with the more general assertion discussed in earlier chapters that some Las Vegans see their city as a normal place.) According to Frank Beckwith—a Baylor University professor of philosophy and church studies who grew up in Las Vegas—the myth may have originated in the need of Las Vegans to feel secure with the popular image of their place: “Perhaps [Las Vegas] needs more forgiveness, so there are more churches.”2 More than anything, however, the claim of so many churches illustrates the dual nature of Las Vegas that is my central thesis. The worship life in Las Vegas is comparable to that of any other city in the country in some ways, but in other ways it is different. I will focus mainly on the uniqueness. By understanding that experience, I hope to highlight more clues to discovering the sense of local place in this unique city. In order to study the influence of belief systems on the personality of “Sin City” and the impact of the city’s culture on the lives of believers, I interviewed twenty-seven members of the clergy across the spectrum of faith traditions in Southern Nevada, using a sampling strategy to gain access to viewpoints from each type of creed. Following the lead of other religious scholars, I classified faith traditions represented in the region into major groups— based on social characteristics of belief systems and how they...