In this regional study, Michael C. McKenzie uses Methodism to explore the role of place in religious history. McKenzie notes that “no institutional religion has ever dominated the Pacific Northwest,” and he explains this absence by the climate, topography, and settlement patterns of the region. In this telling, neither missionaries nor ministers fundamentally shaped the religious climate in Oregon and Washington. Rather, “the rugged land had made the rules that really mattered,” and place trumped human agency (181). This is why the Methodists, despite their dominance from Ithaca to Iowa, failed in Oregon Country. Godly zeal drove these religious pioneers, but it was the immutable laws of geography that threw the Methodists from their horses.
Beginning with the famous missionary Jason Lee, McKenzie explores how the overland trip and strange new land destroyed Methodists’ zeal. Lee never healed from the physical rigors en route, and the religious apathy of local whites and Natives led him to depression. McKenzie employs theories about stress, worldview, and decision-making to argue that Lee was undone by the experience. Indeed, Lee built his mission in Salem because he was “triggered by the landscape” (49). This is unnecessarily speculative, but McKenzie's point is correct: folks abandoned their faith – or felt abandoned by it – on that unforgiving trail.
Broadening his scope, McKenzie examines why Lee's coreligionists likewise failed in the following decades. Drawing from the literature on migration and religious change, McKenzie notes that pioneers faced two obstacles. First, they had to break ties with their religious communities back east; second, they had to build new ones out west. McKenzie summarizes this deftly: “thus, migrations lessen religious involvement at both ends of the trip” (65). Furthermore, Methodist migrants to Oregon and Washington were more likely to adapt to the (ir)religious practices of the locals, rather than the other way around.
McKenzie next explains how Oregon and Washington were settled. The east side of the Cascade Mountains is as dry as West Texas, which channeled settlers to the few farmable river valleys. Only heavy tech investments and extensive acreage could yield profits, which pushed small farms out, keeping populations low. The west side of the Cascades have rivers and rainfall aplenty, but only the Puget Trough and Willamette Valley were flat enough to fit large cities. Hence, both sides of the Cascades hosted tiny, scattered rural populations dominated by the exploding cities of the Gilded Age. The Methodists’ wheelhouse had always been the rural middle class of the Northern countryside – à la Ohio and New England – but Oregon and Washington would never look like that.
McKenzie explains Methodism's failure in the region's cities too. Flooded by immigrants, the metropoli of early Washington and Oregon grew faster than most cities back east. Indeed, one in four Pacific Northwesterners in 1900 were foreign-born, a number comparable to New York. Plus, these immigrants were from a wider range of countries than eastern migrants, including large numbers of Chinese, Japanese, and Scandinavians. Some immigrants, especially the Scandinavians, wore their state Lutheranism loosely and were happy to forgo church altogether in their new homeland. Oppositely, the Russian Germans tenaciously kept their faith as a marker of cultural and linguistic identity. Likewise, Roman Catholicism served as a shield and rallying point for some immigrant communities. Methodists would struggle with these audiences.
Some of McKenzie's best insights center on the religious geography of late nineteenth-century Tacoma, Portland, and Seattle. Methodists were moving up the class ladder, pushing for respectability, and abandoning sectarianism. But, forfeiting any role in solving the urban problems of the Gilded Age, they abandoned the city's poor to the Catholics and the charity of industrial capitalism. McKenzie sees this larger process as dramatized spatially by the new churches of the late-nineteenth century Pacific Northwest. The first Methodist churches were built down by the water, but as the urban centers grew, and grew dense with the immigrant poor, Methodists wanted out. Within a decade or three, these churches had all relocated up into the steep bourgeois hills that surrounded the waterfront. McKenzie terms this “Methodist flight,” which captures the changing nature of Methodism (126).
It is fitting that McKenzie concludes his study by connecting Pacific Northwestern Methodism to the national context. This helps locate the movement, but it also serves to undermine his argument about the importance of geography to religiosity. In the Gilded Age, divisions of class and culture separated American churches from the immigrant poor in both Seattle and Boston. Likewise, religious surveys since 2000 find numbers in New England as low as Oregon and Washington. Scholars have historical explanations for these facts that hold nationally, and so it is strange that McKenzie insists on a uniquely regional explanation. Methodist failure in Oregon and Washington is not a story about place, but chronology – namely, how spiritual fervor and popular relevance can be lost over time.
Another problem for McKenzie's analysis is regionalism itself. While region can be a useful frame for scholars to bracket their studies, the category itself is suspect. The I-5 strip from Eugene northward and the Columbian Plateau have vastly different religious characters. But, by choosing to treat Oregon and Washington as a distinct region, McKenzie has errantly made Bellevue and Kennewick part of the same religious place. This is ironic, since McKenzie is otherwise so sensitive to the distinct bioregions and climate diversity within the two states!
These are heavy criticisms to lay on a book that is so thoroughly researched and analytically helpful. McKenzie should be recommended for writing workhorse scholarship, a close study of a denomination's regional history – and one that is especially valuable because of how understudied the Pacific Northwest is. And, McKenzie has brought a wide range of various disciplines to the task, giving scholars new tools.
One errata: in both the bibliography and footnotes, Robert Boyd's The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774–1874 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999) is inaccurately credited to Daniel Boxberger, who actually wrote a book review of Boyd's work in the JAH 88.1 in June 2001 (237, 282).
McKenzie's study explains why Methodism never took root in the Pacific Northwest, and why all the churches of the East struggled to impact Oregon and Washington. In fine and spritely prose, McKenzie has written a fitting eulogy for a great American church that could not stick the landing out west. His attention to detail and knack at finding eye-catching quotes from the sources ensures that his book will be well worth mining for future insights into Methodism and the religious culture of the nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest.
