The Secular Northwest: Religion and Irreligion in Everyday Postwar Life by Tina Block (review)

During World War II, the population of Washington State increased dramatically as the United States mobilized to fight a war on two fronts. Many of the newcomers had migrated from the American South, bringing with them their regionally distinctive evangelical churches. Newly arrived pastors anticipated not only serving other uprooted Southerners but also winning converts among the native-born population. Here, they were sharply disappointed for Washingtonians proved impervious to their efforts. In Fort Worth, Texas, the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary responded by introducing classes aimed specifically at assisting clergymen in the arduous work of proselytizing Northwesterners. One church leader advised missionaries to approach the region as if it were comparable to "China, India, or Africa."

Southerners thus discovered the place that is analysed so deftly by historian Tina Block in The Secular Northwest: Religion and Irreligion in Everyday Postwar Life. Mid-century Washington and British Columbia, Block explains, stood apart in their relative indifference to organized religion and their greater acceptance of alternatives to mainstream spiritual practices in North America. Focusing on the 1950s through the 1970s, Block dissects the ways in which the primarily white inhabitants of the binational region fashioned a distinctive relationship to organized religion and a distinctive universe of belief and unbelief. The Secular Northwest provides humane, nuanced, and engaging treatment of the region's spiritual views and practices.

Block draws upon a rich assortment of printed and archival materials, quantitative data, and oral interviews. She is properly cautious in using statistics regarding religious attitudes and affiliations and makes judicious use of work by other scholars of religion in the English-speaking world. The Secular Northwest opens with a chapter on how church authorities understood the "problem" of a seemingly indifferent population. Mainstream ministers largely blamed the Northwest's detachment from organized religion on its "frontier conditions," particularly the demanding extractive economy and the predominance of the views of that economy's working-class males. Block does not fully reject this explanation of British Columbia's and Washington's secularity, but she qualifies and updates it considerably. After 1940, the Northwest economy and population diversified substantially. Yet even as frontier-like conditions receded, regional levels of unbelief actually increased.

In the book's other five chapters, Block patiently and lucidly explains the "lived religion" of more or less ordinary, non-Indigenous people. Sensitive to how religious practices and sentiments changed over time, for example, she notes that the Northwest's relative detachment from organized religion anticipated and reinforced the "global dechristianization" of the 1960s. Block is also attuned to how gender and class influenced religious experiences. For instance, she observes that Northwest women initially tended to accept the general expectation that they would become more involved with churches than would their husbands, brothers, and sons. Yet, in their own way and time, many Northwest women too drifted away from organized religion, frequently in response to the sexism they experienced in mainstream churches.

Block argues persuasively that for both women and men "being secular" was not "simply a default position." Her sources, especially the forty-some people she interviewed, express specific criticisms of, and resentments towards, organized religion. Some of the dissatisfied still consider themselves "faithful" or Christian, but they have pursued their spiritual beliefs in other venues. For example, some demonstrate a preference for worshipping Nature outdoors over worshipping God in church. Others became atheists, even though publicly admitting to such beliefs seemed quite risky. In at least one respect, frontier-like conditions continued to encourage secularism. The post-war Northwest grew briskly due to movement from other parts of North America. In many cases, this latter-day overland migration appeared to liberate individuals from the prying eyes of family and neighbours "back east." Newcomers often believed they had arrived in "an open, unconstrained, and antiauthoritarian place" and so felt empowered to make decisions about religious affiliation and practice that diverged from norms held elsewhere. Their choices signified more than empty pews on...