The twenty-seven scholarly pieces that make-up Religion in Los Angeles: Religious Activism, Innovation, and Diversity in the Global City are a valuable contribution to what appears to be a growing body of literature examining the relationship between cities and their religious components. In 2021 Routledge produced The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Cities; Bloomsbury published Religion in the Global City in 2017, and just recently announced a twenty-five volume series titled “Christians in the City: Studies in Contemporary Global Christianity,” one volume of which will also address Los Angeles.
As a resident of LA, I welcomed the publication of Religion in Los Angeles because few have attempted to provide an overview of the diversity of religion in the city, past and present. Moving through the chapters, one gets a taste of the overwhelming scale of the subject: for a metropolis as young as Los Angeles, there is a seemingly endless array of ethnic and religious groups. Editors Richard Flory and Diane Winston do an admirable job of mustering a collection of articles that reflect a bit of that reality. I would have liked to have seen some discussion of the adoption of practices from Eastern and New Age movements such as astrology and yoga—especially by young, white Angelenos—and there is also no mention of the key evangelical figure Henrietta Mears. However, gaps are inevitable in a book that does not try to be comprehensive. The goal was rather to “provide rich examples that illustrate the range of religious and spiritual innovation that creative religious entrepreneurs have developed as they have worked in Los Angeles” (7). Taken together, the primary impression left by the essays is that Los Angeles is indeed special for its propensity, past and present, to foster religious creativity and boundary-pushing individuals and institutions. Stand-out chapters include chapter 2, on how the fundamentalist institution the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA) was funded in its early days; chapter 8, which tells the story of “one of the most shocking events of the twentieth-century American Church: the forced dispensation from vows by 350 women religious” (121); and chapter 14, about Los Angeles Jews’ receptivity to Buddhist and Hindu traditions that are well-represented in the city.
A more robust introduction would have served the volume well. The editors provide some history of Los Angeles and its place in the American imagination. However, it would have been helpful to have a couple of graphs at hand: for example, one to chart population growth by decade, and perhaps a pie chart or two to provide snapshots of the changing religious make-up of the city (in, e.g., 1890, 1930, 1960, and 1990). The introduction also does not situate this volume within the scholarly literature on religion in Los Angeles, and no bibliography for further reading is included in the book. The book grew out of a series of working seminars, held between 2012 and 2015, at the University of Southern California, and the majority of authors are academics at Southern California universities who take a sociological approach, though anthropological and historical methods are represented as well. There are indications that the project was perhaps short-changed a bit as it was concluded. The editing could have been sharper and some chapters have too much jargon.
In their chapter about the role that conceptions of Los Angeles play in the work of a large charitable organization called the Dream Center, Richard Flory and Bradly Nabors observe that “‘place’ has been underdeveloped as a significant methodological and theoretical tool in sociological studies of religion” (141). I agree and think this is the kind of book that will contribute to a better understanding of the ways in which the particularities of a place contribute to and shape the religious life of its citizens.
Stephanie L. Derrick is an independent scholar.
Stephanie Derrick
Date Of Review:
January 19, 2023