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Reflections on Regionalism and U.S. Religious History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Bret E. Carroll
Affiliation:
Associate professor in the Department of History at CaliforniaState University, Stanislaus

Extract

The concept of region has been perhaps the most important in the historical study of religious geography in the United States. Its centrality is due at least in part to its having been proposed as an organizing principle at the inception of that field in its modern form by historian Edwin Scott Gaustad and geographer Wilbur Zelinsky about four decades ago. But the concept has been, and remains, highly problematic. This brief essay first explores the development and problematization of regionalism in U.S. religious history, and then offers potential new bases for its continuing vitality.

Type
Special Section: Regionalism and Christian History
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2002

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References

1. Gaustad, Edwin Scott, Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1962);Google ScholarZelinsky, Wilbur, “An Approach to the Religious Geography of the United States: Patterns of Church Membership in 1952,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 51 (1961): 139–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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33. Ibid., 301.

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35. Barlow, Philip, “Time, Space, Motion, and Faith: Shifting Patterns in American Religious Geography“ (unpublished paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Church History, Washington, D.C., January 1999), 15. The problem of pluralism is magnified by the expansion of American religious diversity to include nonwestern religions since the revision of immigration laws in 1965; this development suggests that the standard regional schema, proposed before that crucially transformative year and based entirely on Christian groups (counting Mormonism for present purposes as a Christian group) may require substantial modification.Google Scholar

36. Newman, William M. and Halvorson, Peter L., Atlas of American Religion: The Denominational Era, 1776–1990 (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira, 2000), 30, 36.Google ScholarI have expressed my own concerns about the future of U.S. religious regionalism in Carroll, Bret E., The Routledge Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Routledge, 2000), 131.Google Scholar

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38. Stump, Roger W., who emphasized quantitative approaches to American religious regions during the 1980s, has recently made a similar qualitative shift in his own study of the geography of religion in Boundaries of Faith: Geographical Perspectives on Religious Fundamentalism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).Google Scholar

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