A Country Strange and Far

The title of Michael McKenzie’s book, A Country Strange and Far: The Methodist Church in the Pacific Northwest, 1834-1918, suggests a work written with a narrow focus for a particular audience of scholars. In truth, this is a book that speaks to a wide spectrum of approaches, questions, and focuses within the fields of religious studies, geography, and history. Why did the Methodist Church at the height of its success in the United States fail in what would become Oregon and Washington? To answer this question, McKenzie puts the particular history of the Methodist Church in conversation with the geographical and environmental realities of the region, as well as with the peoples who inhabited the region. As McKenzie sees it, “Methodism had the bad luck to throw itself at a region whose voice simply would not be ignored” (227).

In many ways, this book is in conversation with the definitive history of religion in the Pacific Northwest, Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None Zone (edited by Patricia O’Connell Killen and Mark Silk, AltaMira Press, 2004). In the introduction to this book, Killen and Silk ponder why the Pacific Northwest has among the lowest religious adherence levels in the US, suggesting, among other reasons, that the region’s geography overwhelmed the resources of institutional religions while distracting potential members away from churches with its beauty and grandeur. McKenzie takes the insight offered by Killen and Silk and, by means of a focused case study of the Methodist Church in the Northwest, effectively explores the connection between the environment and low religious adherence.

Geography is the prime factor for Methodism’s lack of success in the region. For McKenzie, it begins with the geography of the West as a whole. Exploring the lackluster accomplishments of the region’s first Methodist missionary, Jason Lee, McKenzie blames the relentless grind of his trip across the plains and through the mountains in the company of rough frontiersmen. Lee arrived in Oregon overwhelmed and confused. This confusion led Lee to make bad decisions about the location of the first Methodist mission and compromised his interactions with Indigenous peoples of the area. McKenzie argues that European-American pioneers experienced similar traumatic mental and emotional dislocations as they journeyed across the continent, losing their previous social-religious networks of kin and friends, along with their beliefs in the face of physical hardships, death, and terror of the unknown. As McKenzie argues: “Because of this weakening of their previous worldviews, immigrants were open to new ways of looking at themselves, each other, and God” (61).

This argument speaks to larger discussions of why the American West, and the Pacific Northwest specifically, has historically had lower religious adherence: old ways of being were not transported wholesale into the region. Rather, they were fractured and depleted, made irrelevant by the experience of new and overwhelming environments. Without the structure of migration and the promise of security offered by, for instance, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, an example of perhaps the largest religiously motivated immigration to the American west, these largely Protestant immigrants lost their interest in and ties to institutional religion.

According to McKernzie, geography also played a part in creating a largely urban region, with residents clustering in the small habitable areas of the western valleys of Oregon and Washington. This required the Methodists to do something the church’s missionary structure, based on the small towns of the Northeast, was ill-equipped for: missionizing urban populations. Notable also is the book’s discussion of how the dry environment of the eastern parts of Oregon and Washington shaped the farming and religious life of Euro-American inhabitants. It was logistically impossible to maintain the small-town church model in an environment that either forced farmers back to the western parts of the states or to spread out so far that community was hard to create. At every turn, it seems the Methodist Church—and by extension, institutional religion in general—was defeated by the environment and its effects on the worldviews and experiences of its inhabitants.

Although the book is focused on a relatively short amount of time—less than one hundred years—it convincingly answers in much greater detail than has been offered before how the land and environment of the Pacific Northwest prevented the successful anchoring of institutional forms of religion. There were too many literal and mental obstacles to overcome. And yet the region today remains alive with spiritual interest. While the book does not seek to explore why this is, it perhaps offers us some clues. We see the building up of a diverse bank of religious ideas, beliefs, and practices from various Indigenous groups, ethnic Catholicisms and Protestantisms, and forms of Asian religious expression. We see an openness to alternative forms of spirituality and meaning-making, as well as a consistent engagement with the natural surroundings of the region. All of these factors lead, perhaps, to today’s population, which is less interested in institutional religious expressions and more interested in personal spiritual journeys that are often anchored in encounters with nature.

This book is a welcome addition to the literature on religion in the Pacific Northwest, as well as the intersection of religion and geography. It is written in an engaging and accessible style that makes it usable for undergraduate courses in religious studies, American history, and geography.

Susanna Morrill is an associate professor of religious studies at Lewis & Clark College.

Susanna Morrill

Date Of Review:

March 28, 2024